Giving to God what is due unto Him

The Curious Case of Mr. Umashankar, IAS

JOHN DAYAL

A day before, and a day after Republic Day, the Presidents of India and the United States of America reminded the Government and People of India  just how important  Freedom of Faith was to the health of democracy in the country.

As Mr. Obama said, “Our freedom of religion is written into our founding documents.  It’s part of America’s very first amendment.  Your Article 25 says that all people are “equally entitled to freedom of conscience and the right freely to profess, practice and propagate religion.… Every person has the right to practice their faith how they choose, or to practice no faith at all, and to do so free of persecution and fear and discrimination.”

The celebratory week would not pass before Article 25 and the promise of the Constitution would be out to test in Tamil Nadu in the curious case of Mr. C Umashankar. He is an officer of the Tamil Nadu cadre of the Indian Administrative Series – the most powerful branch of the civil services -- and is accused of preaching and propagating his religion in public. The state is governed by the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, an old friend of the Prime Minister, Mr. Modi, and of his Bharatiya Janata Party.

Mr. Umashankar was born in the Dalit community, and is an ardent speaker in meetings organised by church groups in his home state. He is a Christian.

He has been served a notice to stop his activities, and runs the risk of police action under India’s own blasphemy laws for disturbing the peace, and for converting people ti Christianity. The state does not have laws against conversions, and no one has said he is using force and fraudulent  methods in his church work.. Civil society has not missed the irony that the officer  is being hounded by a state government which thinks nothing of idolizing a convicted political personality, former chief minister Ms. J Jayalalitha, or supporting religious leaders with a criminal past.

His case poses some crucial questions concerning his rights as a citizen of India, the limits of the code of conduct for a government servant or a government person under the law, which includes people like ministers and public functionaries drawing their salaries from the Consolidated fund of India, and on the definition of proselytizing, conversions and issues like public order

Umashankar has every right to profess his faith as a Christian, new or old. He has every right to profess, practice and propagate it in his personal time even if he is a government servant. Most Indians if a certain age would have seen photographs of presidents and prime ministers – from the first President, Dr. Rajendra Prasad to the current one, Mr. Pranab Mukherjee -- going to temples bare bodied, and in public, not private, audience under the glare of television lights.  So have prime ministers from Mr. Gulzari Lal Nanda to Mr. Narendra Modi been seen professing their religion in public, giving religious statements, and because they are on national TV while praising their own relgion and its past, they are also propagating it to all those who can hear and see them.

Most police stations and many government offices have idols, calendars and pictures, garlanded and often with incense sticks burning before them, in police stations, government offices, court compounds. A very large percentage of government officials, all the way to the Supreme court, sport religious symbols publicly on their bodies. There are Vinayaka temples inside court campuses. Saraswati pooja is performed in the court.

Umashankar, by all evidence, has never mixed his official and individual identities. There has been no fault found in his official conduct. He believes in his faith, his divinity, his Holy book. He has also taken an oath to protect the condition as an officer of the union of India in an All-India civil service. The charge is that he is converting. He is not a pastor or priest. He is a preacher. If someone asks him to pray for healing, he does so. He does not claim he is a god man. This is a matter of faith. This is not creating a law and order problem. He is not a charlatan, a magic man or a voodoo  or magic medicine seller. He is not a quack. And on the issue of law and order, it is the fundamentalist Hindutva activists who are the ones who are really guilty, who are creating the law and order crisis. One would wonder why the state government and the local police are not taking action against them. It remains to be seen how this case will play out in courts and administrative tribunals.

But is Mr. Modi listening?

Raj Dharma in 2015  -- President Pranab Mukherjee imparts Mr. Narendra Modi a lesson in development and its relationship with Freedom of Faith and Human rights. So does a visitor

JOHN DAYAL

Mr. Narendra Modi, India’s larger than life Prime Minister, has a huge ego. The people of Gujarat have known that for much of the new Century when he was their Chief Minister. The nation has got to know of this after he took office in May 2014. They had a closer look at the man when he went to the United States and spoke at Madison Gardens hall. But the closest look of all was when he shook hands at Rashtrapati Bhawan with visiting US President Barak Obama,  or “my friend Barack with whom I do gup-shup [make small talk]” as he prefers to call the first Afro-American in White House.

The cameras focused on Mr. Modi’s blue-grey pinstripe formal suit. It was patently a bespoke piece of apparel. The close up lens then showed the world that the pin-stripes were his full name “narendradamodardasmodi” in capital letters woven in golden thread into the woolen warp and weft. Investigative journalism traced it to an artisan mill in the United Kingdom, and a bespoke tailor in London’s Seville Row. The estimated cost was placed at more than 10,000 Pound Sterling, or in Indian rupee terms, at least 10 Lakh.

But this is not about expensive suits. Mr. Modi has a taste for good things, turbans, writing instruments and studded watches worthy of the pockets and wrists of some of his billionaire friends. And he has right to wear them if he as declared them to the Income tax department, the government, and the Election Commission. Even some reporters and editors wear such stuff. As indeed do most – but not all – politicians and even clerics of most religions.

In fact, this is not about his arrogance either, or that he administers India through a powerful Prime Minister’s Office that has made the Cabinet system of Constitutional governance all but redundant. Or that he does not like to be told that there is something that he, his government, his political party or the cadres of his old group, the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh have done wrong.

But suit and watches notwithstanding, in two days around Republic Day, the powerful Mr. Modi got two extraordinary lessons in Raj Dharma that even the great Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee, the prime minister those days, could not really give him in 2002.

Mr. Modi was politely reminded in rather sharp language that India’s religious minorities, particularly, were uncomfortable, and their plight would seriously impact the promise of development on which he rode to power last years.

United States President Barack Obama hogged the international headlines with his “Town hall” speech in New Delhi, as he concluded his three day visit to India for its Republic Day, with a rather sharp lesson on what makes a country great – not economic progress or military might, but the unity of the people brought about by a shared destiny, the hope of progress in the most marginalised, and the sense of security among its religious minorities.

But it was the Indian President, the 79-year old soft-spoken Mr. Pranab Mukherjee, who from a State platform, delivered a homily that is the strongest caution yet on the threat posed to the unity and progress of India from the religious nationalism of the RSS. Mr. Mukherjee did not name the RSS, or its many associates in the Sangh Parivar family, but his address to the nation on the eve of Republic Day on 26^th January – which marks the promulgation of the Constitution in 1950 – dwelt at some length on the issue.

President Mukherjee in his address said “In an international environment where so many countries are sinking into the morass of theocratic violence … We have always reposed our trust in faith-equality where every faith is equal before the law and every culture blends into another to create a positive dynamic.  The violence of the tongue cuts and wounds people's hearts. The Indian Constitution is the holy book of democracy. It is a lodestar for the socio-economic transformation of an India whose civilization has celebrated pluralism, advocated tolerance and promoted goodwill between diverse communities. These values, however, need to be preserved with utmost care and vigilance.”

Mr. Mukherjee touched a point that has worried many among even those who voted for Mr. Modi hoping he would bring abut a change from the corruption and economic coma in which the country had found itself in the last years of the Congress regime led by Prime Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh. This was the increasing cacophony of many in the BJP, including some Ministers and Members of Parliament, who were supporting a demand that India mark itself out as a Hindu Rashtra or Nation, and stop appeasing Muslims, and Christians, both seen as enemies of the nation and the majority community. And some among them were quite stridently asking that the Constitution be scrapped and replaced by a more “nationalistic” one rooted not in western concepts but in India’s Hindu tradition.

Industrialists, bankers and businessmen hoping that the new regime would be able to attract international investors and partners, specially from the United States, found the response turning tepid, despite Mr. Modi’s much touted visits to Washington, new York, Beijing and Tokyo. Investors were hesitant not just because economic reforms were not taking place at the speed that had been promised, but the country’s human rights environment had, if anything, sharply deteriorated.

The so called Ghar Wapsi, or Home coming, that the Sangh Parivar had launched soon after the general elections to forcibly convert Dalit and Tribal Christians and Muslims to Hinduism had been put on hold for the week ahead of President Obama’s State visit, but it was never in doubt that it, and violence targetting religious groups, would be resumed. And so it did, a day after Mr. Obama left India. Recent data shows almost 150 recorded cases of violence against Christians last year, and several in recent days. The violence against Muslims is feared to be several times more.

The hate campaign has, meanwhile, been whipped into a frenzy with inspired leaks from the government that the Muslim population has soared in the 2011 population. [Indian Currents covered in an earlier issue]. The official desegregated data of religious populations is among the last to be made public, but there is always an argument that the Muslims breed at a rate that would make them overtake the Hindu population within the 21st Century. The leaked data does show that there is an increase in the Muslim population. Even though the growth rate of the Muslim population has slowed from 29% to 24% between 1991 and 2001, it is still higher than the national average of 18% for the decade. According to reports in the Times of India, the most rapid rise in the share of Muslims in the total population was witnessed in Assam, which borders Bangladesh from where large numbers of Muslims are said to have infiltrated in recent decades.

It is not just fringe elements or political mavericks who suggest solutions that would be deemed anti-democratic even in military dictatorships – including disenfranchisement of religious groups, or asking Hindu women to produce ten or even more children to maintain a demographic superiority. There is a raging controversy now on a series of media advertisements by the national government that has illustrations of the illustrated Preamble of the Constitution without two crucial words “Secular” and “socialist”. These words were not there in the document that was signed on 26^th January 1950, but were introduced in an amendment passed by parliament in the 1970s. Many of the social legislation that was passed in the closing decades of the last century, including employment for rural poor, and scholarships for Muslim youth in particular, were born of those two words.

The noted lawyer and currently Union Minister for Information technology, Mr. Ravi Shankar Prasad, is among those who seem to endorse the debate on this issue. In a way, this is in line with the argument that had been advanced when Mr. Vajpayee was the Prime Minister at the head of the first National Democratic Alliance of the BJP, that the Constitution needed a comprehensive review. In the event, the Justice Venkatachelliah commission he had appointed did not suggest deletion of the words Secular and Socialism even if they had been adopted by parliament in the years if the State of Emergency.

The talk in the highest quarter that the Constitution is better off without socialism and secularism has understandably sent shock waves among the rural poor, Tribals, Dalits, as well as Muslims and Christians. There is therefore a growing demand that the Modi government heed the President Mukherjee’s caution and stop political discourse becoming a competition in hysteria that is abhorrent to traditional ethos and Constitutional values.  In the words of the United Christian Forum for Human Rights president, Dr. Michael Williams, “It is significant that the Hon’ble President of India has stressed the sanctity of the Constitution.  He is concerned at what he sees happening in India – the hate campaigns, the coercion and the violence against religious minorities,  Dalits, Tribals and women.”

President Barack Obama’s parting, and cutting, remarks are evidence that the world is watching India as it stakes its claim to be a member of  the elite global economic and strategic clubs. As Mr. Obama said, “Our nations are strongest when we see that we are all God’s children -- all equal in His eyes and worthy of His love… Our freedom of religion is written into our founding documents.  It’s part of America’s very first amendment.  Your Article 25 says that all people are “equally entitled to freedom of conscience and the right freely to profess, practice and propagate religion.”  In both our countries -- in all countries -- upholding this fundamental freedom is the responsibility of government, but it's also the responsibility of every person. … Every person has the right to practice their faith how they choose, or to practice no faith at all, and to do so free of persecution and fear and discrimination.”

The issue of targetted hate and even targetted government action against minorities is illustrated in the curious case of Mr. C Umashankar, an officer of the Tamil Nadu cadre of the Indian Administrative Series – the most powerful branch of the civil services -- who is accused of preaching and propagating his religion in public. Tamil Nadu is ruled by the all India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, AIADMK, an ally of Mr. Modi.

Mr. Umashankar, according to information, was born in the Dalit community, and is an ardent speaker in meetings organised by church groups in his home state.

He has been served a notice to stop his activities, and runs the risk of police action under India’s own blasphemy laws. Civil society has not missed the irony that the officer  is being hounded by a state government which thinks nothing of idolizing a convicted political personality, former chief minister Ms. J Jayalalitha, or supporting religious leaders with a criminal past.

His case poses some crucial questions concerning his rights as a citizen of India, the limits of the code of conduct for a government servant or a government person under the law, which includes people like ministers and public functionaries drawing their salaries from the Consolidated fund of India, and on the definition of proselytizing, conversions and issues like public order

Umashankar has every right to profess his faith as a Christian, new or old. He has every right to profess, practice and propagate it in his personal time even if he is a government servant. Most Indians if a certain age would have seen photographs of presidents and prime ministers – from the first President, Dr. Rajendra Prasad to the current one, Mr. Pranab Mukherjee -- going to temples bare bodied, and in public, not private, audience under the glare of television lights.  So have prime ministers from Mr. Gulzari Lal Nanda to Mr. Narendra Modi been seen professing their relgion in public, giving religious statements, and because they are on national TV while praising their own relgion and its past, they are also propagating it to all those who can hear and see them.

Most police stations and many government offices have idols, calendars and pictures, garlanded and often with incense sticks burning before them, in police stations, government offices, court compounds. A very large percentage of government officials, all the way to the Supreme court, sport religious symbols publicly on their bodies. Justice Chandru, retired judge of Madras high court, wrote that while it may very well be correct to expect civil servants to not publicly propagate a religion, the practice of Indian secularism has never meant strong separation from religion. There are Vinayaka temples inside court campuses. Saraswati pooja is performed in the court. Some Muslim judges go for prayers during working hours on Fridays. There is a separate place for Muslims to pray in high court campus. The government funds the Kailash trip and Haj. And a non-Hindu can't be made chairman of HR & CE board. If none of these is a problem then why should Umashankar's preaching be one, asks Justice Chandru and wonders if such things get noticed only when the concerned person is from a minority community . When the government has no consistent policy on religious issues, nor does it have specific conduct rules, denying the right to preach or propagate a particular religion is not correct. 

Umashankar, by all evidence, has never mixed his official and individual identities. There has been no fault found in his official conduct. He believes in his faith, his divinity, his Holy book. He has also taken an oath to protect the condition as an officer of the union of India in an All-India civil service. The charge is that he is converting. He is not a pastor or priest. He is a preacher. If someone asks him to pray for healing, he does so. He does not claim he is a god man. This is a matter of faith, not justiciable. This is not creating a law and order problem. He is not a charlatan, a magic man or a voodoo  or magic medicine seller. He is not a quack. And on the issue of law and order, it is the fundamentalist Hindutva activists who are the ones who are really guilty, who are creating the law and order crisis. One would wonder why the state government and the local police are not taking action against them. It remains to be seen how this case will play out in courts and administrative tribunals in coming days.

Remedies against communalism, and steps to strengthen secularism, would have to be found within the country. It will not do for the west, and specially the United States, to presume they can arm-twist India to improve its human rights record. This can be counter-productive, feeding into the paranoia of the Sangh Parivar in the short run.

But a continuing international dialogue on Human rights is a good thing.  With China, the US has integrated tis dialogue in the dialogue on economic cooperation and trade. There has been a move by Members of the Democratic party in the US Congress – their lower house of Parliament – to introduce such a content in the economic discourse with India.  The resolution Number 417 was introduced on 18 November 2013, but is yet to collect the required number of signatures to make it effective.

The resolution calls for religious freedom and related human rights to be included in the United States-India Strategic Dialogue and for such issues to be raised directly with federal and state Indian government officials. It refers to the 2002 anti Muslim violence in Gujarat and says the state government has not adequately pursued justice for the victims of religious violence in 2002 and expresses concern regarding reports about the complicity of local officials.

The resolution also calls on Gujarat and other Indian states with anti-conversion laws to repeal such legislation and ensure freedom to practice, propagate, and profess religion as enshrined in the Indian constitution. It urges all political parties and religious organizations to publicly oppose the exploitation of religious differences and denounce harassment and violence against religious minorities. An important suggestion is the establishment of an impartial body of interfaith religious leaders, human rights advocates, legal experts, and government officials to discuss and recommend actions to promote religious tolerance and understanding. 

There is no indication that the US or India referred to this resolution in the bilateral talks this Republic Day. But they are part of the civil society discourse. And a major target of the Sangh Parivar trolls in social media.

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On Nuns and Priests

The Challenge is in the soil of India

JOHN DAYAL

 Nine years ago, in 2006, I wrote a Public Note, by way to a statement to the media and to the law leadership in India when the Bar Council of India moved the Supreme Court of India, opposing the admission of Catholic consecrated women and men practicing as lawyers in various courts of law. As many others, among them Hindu and Muslim jurists, I too was shocked at the  approach and perhaps even implied bigotry in that organisation managing the professional aspects of  lawyering.  The matter had been adequately settled in the Bombay High Court many years ago when it upheld the marked difference between the vocation of a priest and a nun and their specialized secular profession.  The matter was later upheld once again in the Kerala High Court.

I asked :“If the Bar Council feels it still needs to agitate the matter in the highest court of the land, it will have to explain itself to the common man. What does it oppose – the entry of highly committed rand deeply religious activists with a social conscience seeking legal redress for the common man, the poor and the marginalized, demanding equity in law, and providing a voice to the meek? Is it opposed to low cost and free legal aid available to gender victims, to Dalits and the starving. Does it not like commitment and excellence?

“Theologically and under legal definitions, the vocation of a religious is very different from his or her professional career. A priest or nun, after years of theological, philosophical and spiritual training – apart from secular studies – makes a commitment, even a covenant, with God to serve his people to the end of their lives, making sacrifices most humans would not. Many of these priests serve in parishes in religious duties. Many others train as teachers, social workers, doctors, scientists, and even motor mechanics and serve their local brothers and sisters. If the Bar Council is making a difference between professionals – the Advocate Act bars even law degree holders in a full time job in industry or education from practicing in courts – it needs to remembered that when nuns and priests are employed in the university or hospitals,  they get full salaries as given to their secular colleagues. It is another matter that most of them deposit this salary with their congregations.  Therefore nuns and priests are not employees of a church organisation or of a bishop or superior. Nuns and priests, who are lawyers, whether in Mumbai, Allahabad, Lucknow, Calcutta or Delhi, have done a tremendous job in legal aid and civil society. This I can vouch for by my personal and long experience in long years or working with them. They must be accepted as lawyers and allowed to practice in court in the defence of the poor.”

I have not always been a practicing Catholic, spending  as an avowedly Left-wing writer and activist almost my entire youth and two thirds of my professional life as an investigating journalist, Editor and documentary film maker reporting on political, economic and development issues relating to farmers, labour, religious minorities, Tribals, Dalits and others forced to live on the margins of government and public consciousness in  the country, and other parts of the world.  This is an ideological battleground, and those witnessing it cannot remain untouched with the hidden and open violence against the poor and the weak, with the state complicit, and impunity rampant. This also gave me an opportunity to see the rawness of life at the grassroots, the victimization, and the terror.  It also helped understand the political economy, and the  lack of social interventions by civil society. Above all, it helped me see the nexus, collaboration and conspiracy between big capital, politicians, the bureaucracy and the criminal justice apparatus --  block level judicial officers all the way to the high courts and the   capricious lawyers – as it operates in real life.

The Church -- Catholic, protestant, evangelical, Pentecost -- was among the few organisations present at the grassroots, sometimes even where  the government instruments and personnel were absent,  such as in health and education,  and there was no civil society, no Non-Governmental Organisations, and in the early years, not a single  member of  any of the Sangh Parivar organisations. It was not that the church presence was always useful. Sometimes it was just one person, and while he or she could take a ill person to the nearest dispensary, there was little else  that was done, other than perhaps a basic evangelisation, and that too not in a  very enlightened manner. And sometimes, the church presence became just another part of the  formal structures, the church personnel doing the bidding of the local political and administrative bosses. In effect, they became little more than service providers.

But even in the 1970s in my travels in areas that were forested, or were populated by Tribals and Dalits, as they are now generally known, I would meet Catholic consecrated men – I would much rather call them Brothers, Religious Sisters or Nuns and Fathers – working deep in the hinterland, in the areas inhabited by the poorest of the poor.

And they were often working in politically and physically hostile areas long before the hoodlums of the Sangh Parivar sought to make these areas more inhospitable to anyone who challenged their divisive and hate-filled ideology. Even during the terrible days of the Emergency imposed by the then Prime Minister, Mrs. Indira Gandhi during 1975-1977, when  all voices were stifled and police and bureaucracy ruled as petty dictators in some banana republic, there were men and women  brining solace to the victims, if bit actually challenging the czars of the ruling structure. I do not know if any priest or Nun was arrested by the police those days. Perhaps not, but many surely would have been warned off, and told to stop their activities.

Many years later, I had another cathartic, even shattering experience that confirmed my oft-articulated  sentiment that  Catholic Nuns are ordinary women challenged to do extraordinary deeds, that they voluntarily identify themselves entirely with the fate of the poor and marginalised who are at risk of life, liberty or dignity. Some of these religious women for this with their lives. This was my visit to the small hut that Sister Valsa John of the Sisters of Charity of Jesus and Mary called home in a distant village in Pachaura, In Pakur in Dumka district of Jharkhand, and where she was brutally murdered in late at night on Tuesday, 15th November 2011. She had been attacked by a group of about 45 men armed with swords, axes and other weapons. Her head was nearly severed from her body. Some Maoist literature and a spade were left behind. The immediate suspicion was that she was killed for she had taken sides with the local Tribals in their long standing confrontation with the corporate sector mining the area for coal. Years later, the suspicions of a conspiracy remain in the public mind, and in mine.

Valsa’s death, the impunity of the state, has made me ask many questions of myself, the laity, other religious, and of course  of the Church hierarchy Why are these people honoured, often  in a token gesture, after their death by violence or  in God’s own time of old age, but never celebrated when they are alive, and why is their work  never really acknowledged unless it is in their role  as principals and teachers of popular “convent” schools and colleges in metropolitan cities. Above all, where would be the Catholic church in particular, but without its consecrated people, followed by the next question why despite a couple of hundred thousand trained and untrained pastors and bible teacher, the protestant and independent churches have not been able to get trained and committed people who are not mere employees, but the very soul of the social and evangelistic outreach of the faith.

The future of the Church in general, and its evangelistic and social outreach, beyond the homilies and the rituals, depends on its consecrated personnel. Of that there is no doubt in my mind. The Lay component of the church does not lack the zeal, nor the divine calling, to be use and help to his of her fellow human beings. Their limited potential of  this intervention despite their more intrinsic “dialogue of life”  with people of other religions and  social identities in the neighbourhood, is because of the nature of the  church in India and the demographic and economic, social and caste compulsions of the people. The membership of the church is largely Dalit, Tribal,  peasantry and what can be called the lower economic strata, or at best the lower middle class. There are very few people who can really be counted as economically well off, or rich, despite the high visibility of  some tokens of wealth, specially jewelry and large houses on small plots of land, that one gets to see on the western coast of India or in some urban pockets. The  issues of living an every day life of survival, trying to eke out a livelihood in an economically hostile ecology looms large on the common Christian. Add to it the vagaries of development in the areas which much of the Christian community lives in, the forested rural hinterland of central India, the plateau of south India, the Dalit hamlets and the mission compounds of north Indian states, there is little surprise that Christian youth find themselves sucked early into the rat race, with no tine to  cater to their evolving social consciousness. Outside Kerala, perhaps, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Nagaland, the Christian presence in trade unions, political parties and other mass organisations in small, and often all but non existent.

This in many ways also shows itself in the lack of political training, if not illiteracy, in the community, despite the thesis that those in some southern and north eastern states play an important role in the political processes of their regions. This is largely because they have  large concentrations of populations in limited areas or pockets. This stratification may give them  an enviable presence in the electoral politics of their districts, but still keeps them far away from influencing the national political discourse.

This political emasculation, if one can so definite it, makes the community very helpless in a  rapidly changing political and economic discourse which is marked by extremely right wing, casteist and communal political on the one hand and a development model propounded not just by the Bharatiya Janata party and the Prime Minister, Mr. Narendra Modi, but also by regional parties which govern various states specially those rich in natural resources such as Orissa. The recent legislative “economic reforms” that the government has brought in, many of them through ordinances as they could go through the Rajya Sabha where the BJP still does not have a majority of the vote,  make it easy for government to transfer tribal and forest lands for industry, risking not just the life and livelihood of the common people but the security if a very fragile ecology and a rapidly depleting forest cover. The only beneficiaries are crony capitalism.

Some would argue that even more critical predation is that of the mind, specially of the very young. The secular and tolerant fabric of society is sought to be changed by that old fascist trick of indoctrination of the pliant psyche and intellect, catching them young, so to speak.

The fact that the Sangh Parivar runs over 57,000 ideology based schools for children in villages across several states, and specially in areas populated by Tribals and the Dalits, groups once called Untoucbable, makes available a cadre of youth and their parents ready to do their bidding in unraveling the secular heritage of the country’s freedom struggle. The stage is being set for this. The government’s senior minister, Mr. Venkiah Naidu, a former president of the BJP, has called for a national law against religious conversions. These laws exist in six states, and have been passed by two more states but yet made cleared by the Governors. It is a matter of a few months before they too are brought into force. These laws have also led to some considerable violence against religious groups in the years they have been in force. United Nations Human Rights Special Rapporteurs for Religious Freedom have slammed these laws as infringing the basic rights of freedom of faith and belief, enunciated in the UN bill of Rights, and in fact, an important part of the Indian Constitution.

Other ministers have suggested an immediate enactment of a Common Civil Code, seemingly a good thing, but rooted in the unsubstantiated premise that Muslims can marry four wives at a time, are breeding too fast, and will outnumber the Hindus soon. The law will also impact on Christian personal laws and customs, particularly in rural populations where tradition and custom are the glue that holds their society together.

Mr. Modi’s minister for education, the former TV actor Mrs. Smriti Boman Irani, who has ordered a revision of text books, particularly of history, to incorporate more of ancient Indian traditions including references of Hindu sacred texts. Various important councils in the ministry are now chaired by luminaries wedded to the thesis that India is the fountainhead of all knowledge in the world. The BJP and the Minister hold Hindu sacred texts are the 5,000-year-old source of knowledge on such diverse subjects as plastic surgery, aviation, nuclear weaponry and genetic engineering. 

How are these to be questioned, and the trends reversed?  The church no longer runs the most educational institutions in the country,  with the RSS, the corporate sector, and the government which too is now almost entirely in control of the Sangh ideology have collectively overwhelmed whatever were the values that the Catholic and protestant schools sought to teach for almost a century and a half through much of the landmass, reaching deep into remote areas.

This massive education system, and the growing population of the rural and urban marginalised, therefore pose a tremendous, even an exciting, challenge to the church in general, and in particular to its fighting arm, the consecrated men and women. It remains to be seen if they will rise to the occasion as they have done in the past in the pioneering tradition of Saint Kuriakose Elias Chavara and Mother Euphrasia. There is the other nagging question if the lay community will be able to continue to give of its sons and daughters to the church in terms of local vocation. The focal points of such calling have always changed with the times, and new areas have emerged to help change the ethnic profile, but not the strength of character and tempo, of  those who seek a future in the service of the church and the people.

The growth of the church in India, and its ability to help change the welfare and human rights discourse in India to the advantage of the common people, is, I feel confident, safe in the hands of these brave and committed men and women.