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 26th 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
26th 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.
------------
