JOHN
DAYAL
Three
parallel strands of India’s cultural history have merged in recent times into a
lethal phenomenon that has been termed “Love Jihad”, which has not only
obtruded into the personal lives of young men and women of Hindu, Muslim, Sikh
and Christian religious communities, but has put to grave risk individual
security and community peace.
A
attitude to Muslims that verges on Islamaphobia, a pathological hatred for conversions
to Christianity – both seen as disturbing the demographic equation in India
to overwhelm the Hindu majority take the
traditional national culture of feudalism and patriarchy to a new and explosive
level. The current crisis in the Middle east and on the borders with Pakistan
in Jammu and Kashmir provide the trigger, as it were, to the short fuse.
The
Indo-Gangetic plans of North India are the main sites of this confrontation but
its repercussions have been seen deep in the states of southern India, and the
Indian and south Asian diaspora in the United Kingdom and the United states of
America.
Political
encouragement and patronage to lumpen and criminal moral vigilante groups,
administrative and police impunity have led to targetted violence, a wave of
hate campaigns, a polarized landscape, and deeply traumatised young couples who
have dared, and sometimes married across religious borders. The media has taken
sides, the Hindi language newspapers and
television news channels exhibiting
majoritarian bigotry. Civil society ahs found itself outnumbered.
The
church, willy nilly, has found itself dragged into this unsavoury situation.
Senior episcopal and lay leadership of
both Catholic and protestant denominations have so far not been audible in
the defence of what, at the end of the day, are issues of human rights
guaranteed under the Indian Constitution
and the Charter of the United Nations.
Leading
the charge is the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh and its many interesting daughter
organisations, whose numbers are increasing by the day. Deriving great
political mileage out of this social confrontation is the Bharatiya Janata
party led nationally by Prime Minister, Mr. Narendra Modi, which is now
consolidating its stranglehold on the administrative structure with victories
in several important states legislatures after capturing power in New Delhi in
May, this year when results of the federal general elections were announced.
The
matter of the Church, first. The recent outpouring of support for the
“development” agenda of Mr. Narendra Modi, by several leaders of the Catholic
and Protestant churches may possibly stave off the immediate attention of the dreaded Intelligence Bureau and the Ministry
of Home affairs, but it is not likely to reduce the deep and seemingly
abiding distrust the Indian political
and social system has of what is popularly called the “Missionaries”. Nor will
it mitigate the hate that is now erupting in India against religious
minorities.
Interestingly,
those of us in civil society who have
Christian names and some of us who profess the faith too, repeatedly have the
Sangh acolytes remind us that it is the
Church that began, with a little help
from the Kerala High court, which raised
the issue of Love Jihad in God’s Own Country.
Professor Madhu Poornima Kishwar, a co-founder of feminist journalism in the country and self confessed fan and hagiographer of Mr.
Narendra Modi, recently reminded us of this in a newspaper article.
Wrote Ms. Kishwar: But
“Love-jihad” has very little to do with “love”. It is more a trap than a
romantic liaison. That is why it is causing upset not just among
Hindus but also among Sikhs and Christians. It’s causing angst not just in
various states of India but also in other countries. For instance, the
Commission for Social Harmony and Vigilance of the Kerala Catholics Bishops
Conference also published a report highlighting the criminal conduct of love
jihadists. It said, “There were 2868 female victims of “love jihad” in Kerala
from 2006 to 2009.” The situation must have been grave enough if the then chief
minister of Kerala, VS Achuthanandan, belonging to the Communist Party Marxist
alleged conversion of non-Muslim girls to Islam under pretext of love marriage
as part of an effort to make Kerala a Muslim majority state. The Kerala
state police inquiry into this phenomenon concluded that “there are reasons to
suspect “concentrated attempts” to persuade girls to convert to Islam after
they fall in love with Muslim boys. Since the demographic profile in certain
districts of Kerala, Bengal etc has changed dramatically in recent decades, it
lends credence to this charge.
“The matter went right up
to the Kerala High Court. On December 10, 2009, Justice Sankaran ruled
that there were indications of forceful conversion under the garb of love in
the state with the blessings of certain political outfits. He asked the
government to consider enacting a law to prohibit such “deceptive” acts.
There are similar, reports coming from certain districts of Bengal, Karnataka,
Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. This is happening on mass scale in a much more
sinister form in Bangladesh and Pakistan where young Hindu and Sikh women are
brazenly abducted with full support of the state authorities. These
forced conversions are an important reason why the population of Hindus has
sunk dramatically in both these countries.
“The Akal Takht, the
highest temporal seat of Sikhism, has taken a serious view of reports that Sikh
girls in England and America are falling victim to 'love jihad' by Pakistani
youth seducing non-Muslim girls for converting them to Islam and using them in
jihadi activities. Some of these girls were later dumped by their husbands
in Pakistan, where the in-laws have been using them as domestic slaves.”
No one, as far as I know, has asked the
Kerala High court or the church if they have gathered statistics to estimate
how many Malayalee Christian girls have married Hindus in the same period, or
have committed suicide, important data for a scientific analysis of the
situation. The same goes for the Sikh hierarchy,
and the Hindu religious leaders. Data is the best weapon in the hands of Truth.
Perhaps someone should file a Public Interest Litigation in the Kerala High
court or the Supreme Curt of India to settle this matter one way or the other.
The other option is for the Government of India to set up a judicial commission
to investigate this so that the government can issue a White Paper and settle
the matter once and for all. It could just be a fancy of some creative imagination, much like the slogan “We
five, with our 25 progeny”, which was
used so effectively in an earlier
general elevation to allege that every Muslim man ahs four wives, and
five children from every wife. Someone in a Chennai-based “Think Tank” wrote a
massive book to propagate this these.
Returning to the Christians, Missionaries was
a term once used in the Indian subcontinent to describe clergy, religious
and social workers who came in various
periods over three centuries from Italy, Spain, France, the United Kingdom and
later from the United States. They set up schools and hospitals, and mission
stations, in the hills, plains and deep forests of much of the Indian land
mass.
But it will not be entirely correct to
suggest that it is just the Rashtriya
Swayamsewak Sangh and its political face the Bharatiya Janata Party that
oppose mission work on grounds of
ideology and relgion. The larger Indian political leadership, both in the
Congress and in other parties including
those emerging from the socialist movement of Mr. Ram Manohar Lohia of North India have seen the community as an
appendage of the British Raj. The leader
of the Freedom struggle, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, already called a Mahatma and
later formally named the Father of the
Nation, had serious doubts about missionaries.
E. Stanley Jones, Stanley Jones in is book The Christ of the
Indian Road, records an encounter with Gandhi who he asked “though you quote the words of Christ often, why is it that you
appear to so adamantly reject becoming his follower?” Gandhi’s reply was clear: “Oh, I don’t reject your Christ. I love your
Christ. It is just that so many of you Christians are so unlike your Christ”. Gandhi’s
statement molded the political discourse
in Independent India.
As Frontline magazine paraphrased
back in 1999, in 1954, the governments of Madhya Pradesh
and Madhya Bharat (a region that was later incorporated into the former)
appointed official committees to investigate the activities of Christian
missionaries. The reports of both committees were published in 1956, although
it was the first report that sparked a nationwide debate on minority rights
under the framework of the Constitution, which had come into force in 1950.
Called the Christian Missionaries Activities Inquiry Committee, it was headed
by M. Bhawani Shankar Niyogi, a retired Chief Justice of the High Court of
Judicature, Nagpur.
Restrictions had been imposed on
the entry of missionaries by the erstwhile rulers of the feudal states of
Raigarh, Udaipur, Jashpur and Surguja, with the support of the colonial
Government. When the merger of these states into Madhya Pradesh did not bring
the expected freedoms and the ban on missionary work continued, Christian
organisations complained to the Government. Representations were made to the
Government accusing missionaries of effecting conversions through fraud and
inducements, and the complainants included several persons and organisations,
such as the ex-rulers of the feudal states (the former Raja of Surguja was
particularly active on this issue), local government officials, the Rashtriya Swayamsewak
Sangh (RSS) and the Arya Samaj.
The committee's findings included unsubstantiated assertions, such as
conversions were made by material inducements and false promises. Another
finding was that "missions are in some places used to serve
extra-religious ends". A later commentator pointed out that
"extra-religious activities" included agricultural and village
development projects. Some other statements in the report were that "as conversion
muddles the convert's sense of unity and solidarity with his society, there is
a danger of his loyalty to his country and state being undermined"; the
Christian had a supranational loyalty to Christ and the strategy of the
missionaries was "to detach the Indian Christian from his nation";
and schools, hospitals and orphanages were used as means to facilitate
conversions. The report noted that the actual project of the missionaries was
to "revive Christendom for re-establishing Western supremacy", and "...to
create Christian minority pockets with a view to disrupting the solidarity of
non-Christian societies."
The coming of foreign, and almost entirely
White, religious personnel stopped soon after World War II, but there was still
a sizable number in the country at Independence. In
1993 there were just 1,923, and by 2001, it had come to just a little
more than half of that, at 1,100 registered foreign
missionaries in India. We have no official data for 2013-14, but estimates vary
from 200 to 500, some of them Indian nationals. Most of them have lived in
India for periods ranging from 20 years to 60 years.
This is far removed from the
image that the Sangh Parivar, and the government, paints of a land teeming with
western missionaries. But since
the 1960s, it is impossible for any priest or Nun to get a “Religious Visa” to
India, and many who come here on tourist visas have to sign papers at Indian
consulates that they will not indulge in any religious activity in India. Only
rarely is a visa given to Tele Evangelists for “Crusades” or mass prayers. This is the lasting fallout from the Justice Niyogi
report.
The Constitution
of India promulgated in 1950 nonetheless
gave Christians the right not just to profess and practice their faith, but
also to propagate it, with some law givers stressing that propagation of faith
was integral to the relgion. But among the first acts of the government was to withdraw affirmative action from
untouchable groups other than those professing the Hindu faith. The issue has
agitated the community ever since.
The absolute ban on freedom of faith of this 16 to 20 per cent of the population was
ostensibly to prevent their walking into Christianity, or rarely, into Islam.
The bane of the Christian community has been
the anti-conversion laws, ironically called Freedom of Relgion Acts and
thematically flowing from the Niyogi report, which brought the State firmly
into a process that was otherwise between a
person and his conscience. Six
states have these laws on board, another has enacted but not yet implemented
it. The
BJP has said in its election campaign it intends to make
this a national law. Governmental permissions and severe penalties are the cutting edge of these laws. Political
parties, barring perhaps the Marxists, and even the Supreme Court of India tend to agree to the need to the anti
conversion laws. The United nations Human Rights Council, European Union and
international freedom of faith organisations have called them a grave violation
of the UN Charter on fundamental human rights.
The premise that no one converts unless he is
being lured, cheated or coerced into
Christianity – or Islam – is now a major political slogan in the Bharatiya
Janata party’s mission to control every
regional government after coming to power in New Delhi in May 2014. And it is targetted as much against Muslims
and it is against the Christian community.
The Muslim community has been the object of
suspicion after the Partition of India in 1947, which saw unprecedented violence, that has left an
unspoken but virulent Islamaphobia in Indian society. The recent acts of terror
in India have deepened this chasm between the communities. It is easy in north
India, which houses the large Hindu population that had to flee west Punjab and
Sikh at partition, to remember the bloodshed at the hands of the Muslims in
what is now Pakistan. No one wants to remember
the almost equal number of Muslim men, women and children who were
massacred in North India, other women raped, abducted, trafficked. Those are the racial memories of the
survivors who are now Pakistanis.
This officially sanctioned suspicion, and
from it the political hate, underpins the current campaigns by the Rashtriya
Swayamsewak Sangh and its subsidiaries which target both the Christian and the
Muslim communities, specially in north
and Central India. Love Jihad has been presented as a conspiracy to alter the
demographic profile of “Hindu” India.
The hounding of young men, and the humiliation of young Hindu women in areas as
distant from each as Meerut in Uttar Pradesh and Bhopal in Madhya Pradesh, is
inevitable. In Madhya Pradesh, the district police chief “annulled” the
marriage of a Christian man and a Hindu woman under pressure of a Hindutva mob.
The governments of the states, and more than
that, the federal government in New Delhi headed by the Prime Minister, Mr.
Narendra Modi, have maintained an intriguing silence, with no official
condemnation of this criminal intimidation of young couples in love. This has
led civil society groups to believe that the hate campaign has the
blessings of the ruling
dispensation in the country. The inaction of the superior courts and the
national Human Rights commissions in failing to take cognisance of these extra-judicial intrusions into the personal life of citizens
compounds the crisis.
