Mr. Narendra Modi, His Government, the BJP and the Sangh Parivar -- the Shared Thread

A DIVISION OF LABOUR

JOHN DAYAL

The good news is that with the Prime Minister, Mr. Modi, there is no subterfuge, no deception, no mirages created with mirrors. You get what you see. Or what you want to see, as in the case of the Gujarati Non Resident Indians gathered in Madison Square Gardens in new York during his visit to the United Nations and the United States in September last year.

This transparency is also the case with the leaders and foot soldiers of the Sangh Parivar, that very interesting and rapidly expanding First Family fathered by the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh and consisting of such vigorous siblings as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram and the Bajrang Dal. In recent times, scores of new groups have been born to this Parivar with names ranging from various Sene to the Hindu Jagriti Manch and others researching the ancient sciences of the Rashtra. They make no bones of the findings of their researches. Everyone in India is a Hindu; in fact everyone in many parts of the world is a Hindu. If not, they are aliens, therefore anti nationals, if not traitors.

The Christians, specially in villages, hamlets in Dalit “bastis” and Tribal areas, who have been target of conversions to Hinduism, politely called Ghar Wapsi, the Hindi for “Home-Coming”  -- Hindi sort of camouflages and sanitizes the violence, coercion and hate inherent in the phenomenon -- have known it for several decades. Now Muslims are increasingly getting a taste of this pill, sugar-coated last year by the promise they can enter a caste of their choice, perhaps even that of the twice born Brahmin, instead of being relegated to that the Dalit, once called Untouchable.

Mr. Modi has never hidden the fact that he has been a member of the RSS since his childhood, and spent almost all of his adult life as a Pracharak, the teacher-evangelist who leads the indoctrination of young men, barring the years he held Constitutional office as the Chief Minister of the State of Gujarat and now, the Prime Minister of India.

A delegation of Christian leaders from Delhi saw the real man when they called on the Mr. Modi, at his official residence, 7 Race Course Road, on 24^th December 2014 to greet him a day which for them, as for billions of others in the world, was a day of good tidings and great joy,  though he had rechristened it Good Governance Day on which government officers and some ministers worked hard to spread his message.  This Christmas visit had been the practice when Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee was the Prime Minister at the head of the first National Democratic Alliance, though in his case, the greeting was also very personal as it was also his birthday. The practice continued in the decade that Dr. Manmohan Singh held office as the Prime Minister leading the United Progressive Alliance.

Those present in that meeting hall narrate what followed, and in great detail, though perhaps in whispers and with a sense of disbelief. Mr. Modi accepted the bouquet flowers, as he did another from a family and a third group, posed for photographs – mercifully no “Selfies’ as had happened with senior TV and print journalists at his Meet-the-Press earlier last month – and then made it clear the meeting was over. At this time, a few lay members of the delegation told the Prime Minister they were deeply concerned at the violent and coercive targetting of the Christian community, specially in rural areas of Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh, the “Ghar Wapsi” programmes of the Sangh Parivar that were disturbing the peace across the country. The Prime Minister, they said, could break his silence and reassure the community. His voice would perhaps end this impunity and persecution.

Mr. Modi turned, and ordered the cameras to be turned off – the Prime Ministerial functions are routinely video-graphed by official cameramen. We have just paraphrased versions of an acerbic diatribe that followed. Mr. Modi said the Christian community was making a mountain of a molehill. It was educated, had great access to the media and to international advocacy agencies that blew events out of proportion. He could not take cognisance of every small event, or speak on it.  His focus was on development. Even as the delegation sought to assure him the community was all for the development of their motherland, Mr. Modi said with deliberate coldness “Your compulsions are different. You may not be able to stand with me.”  He did not clarify his remark in any detail.

But his party men have made it quote clear that anyone who is not volubly supportive of the Prime Minister and his alliterative agenda of development is against the national interest, and therefore, by implication, a bit of an anti-national, if not a traitor. This definition puts a strain, not just on religious minorities, but also on Dalits and Tribals seeking the protection of their rights, their land and their resources. It also pushes into a corner civil society and sections of the majority community if they oppose the excesses of the Sangh Parivar, specially its maverick groups. These include the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram, the Bajrang Dal and a score or more new “senas” and Manch that have sprouted specially in the North and Central region of the country and are the main engines of the aggressive Ghar Wapsi targetting the poorest sections of the Muslim and Christian communities in small towns and villages.

No one seems willing to point out, or admit, that while conversions of a religious nature are an exercise in free will and constitutional rights of freedom of conscience, be it from Christianity to Hinduism, Islam to Hinduism, Sikhism to Hinduism or vice versa, Ghar Wapsi is a political process carried out by powerful exponents of religious nationalism. It does not even have the legitimacy of freedom of political expression, which can make many a senior leader switch from the Congress to the BJP.

On the eve of the Republic Day visit of the United States President, Mr. Barak Obama, there have been statements by the President of the Bharatiya Janata Party, Mr. Amit Shah, freshly exonerated of charges of multiple murders in Gujarat, that the Ghar Wapsi campaign does not have the support of the party or the government. There have also been stories planted in a pliant television and print media that Mr. Modi is annoyed at the Ghar Wapsi events as they hurt India’s image, and therefore his project to invite foreign investments.

But this could be little more than eyewash. Many years ago, the eminent jurist, Mr.  A. G. Noorani, wrote a book “A Division of Labour” in which he meticulously documented evidence and arguments to prove that the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh and its daughter-groups such as the VHP worked in tandem, their cadres, programmes and grassroots work merging seamlessly in  targetting various sectors and peoples.  The Ghar Wapsi, and similar programmes, are led by senior members of the Sangh and the BJP, including such luminaries as Adityanath, the head of the Gorakhpur Math, and the lead speaker of the BJP in Parliament on issues of religion and culture.  Defending Ghar Wapsi as “natural” and calling for a national law against conversions are former BJP president and currently union minister, Mr. Venkiah Naidu,  Finance Minister, Mr. Arun Jaitely, and several other of their colleagues in New Delhi and the state capitals. Official spokesmen of the party routinely wage a daily battle on satellite news channels denouncing “missionaries” and linking development with an end to what they say is a missionary effort to change the demography of the nation. The violence by their non-state associates, well documented by the media, has been severe, involving active participation of local civil and police authorities. The impunity is total. The government’s silence is loud.

There is also reason to question the model of development that has been presented. All too much data has been adduced since the May 26, 2014 swearing in of Mr. Modi as chief minister. His campaign had harped on what he had “done” in Gujarat in almost two and a half terms as Chief minister. But as friends and foes have pointed out, other than assisting crony capitalists, the growth model did precious little to improve the state’s status which continues to be one of the worst in the country, and the world, on social indices such as child health, infant mortality and other norms that people internationally take as inseparable from economic growth.

Translated to the national scale, this growth model is seeing the death of the process that protected the rights of the working class, the Tribals, and the protection of India’s precious forest cover, and the environment in general. Land acquisition reforms, as they are ironically called, will make it easy for the state to grab tribal lands not just for highways, but also to be given away to industries, including the piratical mining sector with its history of pillage and rapine of virgin forests. And this is just the beginning.

The Church in India, and globally, is committed to a preferential option for the poor. As, indeed, it is bound by faith to give witness to the Word. Both are impossible to practice if there is no courage to challenge the forces that seek to circumscribe, control and even stop this twin process, by force if required.

The leadership of the Church, and of other religious minorities, need to fathom how they respond to this challenge, and engage with the lunatic fringe, the ruling political party, and the head of the government, Prime Minister Narendra Modi. It is not going to be an easy task.

Responding to Mr. Narendra Modi

Handling Mr. Modi

JOHN DAYAL

It was not the Christmas response a delegation of Christian leaders from Delhi were expecting when they called on the Prime Minister, Mr. Narendra Modi, at his residence on 24^th December 2014 to greet him a day which for them, as for  billions of others in the world, was a day of good tidings and great joy.  This was the practice when Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee was the Prime Minister at the head of the first National Democratic Alliance, and continued in the decade that Dr. Manmohan Singh held office as the Prime Minister leading the United Progressive Alliance.

This reporter was  not an eye witness, but those who were narrate what followed, and  in great detail, though perhaps in whispers and  with a sense of disbelief. Mr. Modi accepted the bouquet, as he did another from a family and a third group, posed for photographs – mercifully no “Selfies’ as had happened with senior TV and print journalists at his Meet-the-Press earlier last month – and then made it clear the meeting was over. At this time, a few lay members of the delegation told the Prime Minister  they were deeply concerned at the violent and coercive targetting of the Christian community, specially in  rural areas of Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh, the Ghar Wapsi programmes of the Sangh Parivar that were disturbing the peace across the country. The Prime Minister, they said, could break his silence and reassure the community. His voice would perhaps end this impunity and persecution.

Mr. Modi turned, and ordered the cameras to be turned off – the Prime Ministerial functions are routinely video-graphed by official cameramen. We have just paraphrased versions of an acerbic diatribe that followed. Mr. Modi, in affect,  said the Christian community was making a mountain of a molehill. It was educated, had great access to the media and to international advocacy agencies which blew events out of proportion. He could not take cognisance of every small event, or speak on it.  His focus was on development. Even as the delegation sought to assure him the community was all for the development of their motherland, Mr. Modi said with deliberate coldness “Your compulsions ar different. You may not be able to stand with me.”  He did not clarify his remark in any detail.

But his party men have made it quote clear that anyone who is not volubly supportive of the Prime Minister and his alliterative agenda of development is against the national interest, and therefore, by implication, a bit of an anti-national, if not a traitor. This definition puts a strain, not just on religious minorities, but also on Dalits and Tribals seeking the protection of their rights, their land and their resources. It also pushes into a corner civil society and sections of the majority community if they oppose the  excesses of the Sangh Parivar, specially its maverick groups. These include the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram, the Bajrang Dal and a score or more new “senas” and Manch that have sprouted specially in the North and Central region of the country and are the main engines of the aggressive Ghar Wapsi targetting the poorest sections of the Muslim and Christian communities in small towns and villages.

On the eve of the Republic Day visit of the United States President, Mr. Barak Obama, there have been statements by the President of the Bharatiya Janata Party, Mr. Amit Shah, freshly exonerated of charges of multiple murders in Gujarat, that the Ghar Wapsi campaign does not have the support of the party or the government. There have also been stories planted in a pliant television and print media that Mr. Modi is annoyed at the Ghar Wapsi events as they hurt India’s image, and therefore his project to invite  foreign investments.

But this could be little more than eyewash. Many years ago, the eminent jurist, Mr.  A. G. Noorani, wrote a book “A Division of Labour” in which he meticulously documented evidence and arguments to prove that the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh and its daughter-groups such as the VHP worked in tandem, their cadres, programmes and grassroots work merging seamlessly in  targetting various sectors and peoples.  The Ghar Wapsi, and similar programmes, are led by senior members of the Sangh and the BJP, including such luminaries as Adityanath, the head of the Gorakhpur Math, and the lead speaker of the BJP in Parliament on issues of religion and culture.  Defending Ghar Wapsi as “natural” and calling for a national law against conversions are former BJP president and currently union minister, Mr. Venkiah Naidu, and several other of his colleagues in New Delhi and the state capitals. Official spokesmen of the party routinely wage a daily battle on satellite news channels denouncing “missionaries” and linking development with an end to what they say is a missionary effort to change the demography of the nation.

The leadership of the Church, and of other religious minorities, need to fathom how they respond to this challenge, and engage with the lunatic fringe, the ruling political party, and the head of the government, Prime Minister Narendra Modi. It is not going to be an easy task.

Targetting Democracy and its Freedoms

It is not freedoms of Expression and Faith that are under threat; the Constitution of India and Democracy are the targets

JOHN DAYAL

There is an element or irony, which has not gone entirely unnoticed, in the Prime Minister, Mr. Narendra Modi, announcing that what the world knows as Christmas will henceforth will be celebrated in India as “Good Governance Day”, with a slew of activities in honour of  the first Bharatiya Janata Party prime minister who  was in office between 21998 and 2004. After a ten-year interlude of rule by the Congress under Mrs. Sonia Gandhi, Mr. Modi won a mandate for the second BJP government in New Delhi.

His agenda was Development, which needed not just economic growth but a ruthlessness in ensuring that there was no resistance to it. Nothing in the social and political structures in tribal villages, among the small peasantry and  the working class, that would thwart the engines of such development, big national capital, multinational corporations. And of that ephemeral thing called Foreign Direct Investment – an omnibus term that includes traders who  make a profit on borrowing money from the US at a 2 per cent interest and putting it in India at a 12 per cent rate, others who have laundered Indian money on which they avoided taxes and routed it back through havens such as Mauritius, and Indian businesses who settled the blue line in their  units abroad by investing their Dollars and Euros in their Indian companies for the same reason. The trouble with such FDI, of course, is that it goes back to foreign lands at the press of a computer key with the same speed with which it came in when the investor panics.

Many of the “reforms” to make this dream possible are on their way. Tribals are all but losing their lands to mining giants because villages could lose their veto. Trade unions,  all but defunct in the liberalisation programmes the Congress regime  in 2004-2014, now face annihilation. Land acquisition rules will make it convenient to force projects wherever it is profitable for the cronies.

But the dream is possibly running into problems not thought of in the rhetoric if the general elections. And there is opposition to the campaign to end what the BJP has called, with great derision,  “entitlements” of the common people. They may change the name of the Mahatma Gandhi National rural Employment Scheme and merge schemes named after Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi into umbrellas named after Bharatiya Janata party and Sangh stalwarts, but subsidies to farmers, rural landless, and urban poor are needed if the  50 per cent, in real time, in abject poverty are not to rise in a bloody revolution.

And this forces Mr. Modi to look for other agendas. He does not have to look far. Mr. Vajpayee’s legacy, and the Sangh Parivar’s  dreams, provide handy tracks on which the prime minister can tread.

The most dangerous of these is removing the roadblock of the current contents of the Indian Constitution, or at least those that are seen as a hindrance in the construction  or reconstruction of the India that was in the scriptures and stories of old. This is something the Sangh, and even the BJP, has always spoken about, rejecting the document signed by the Constituent Assembly and brought into force in 1950.  They call this document a relic of a colonial, and Christian, alien thesis which has no place in the Indian culture in which it has no roots.

The Constitution has sustained itself now for six and a half decades, but it remains a fragile document. The Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed that its basic features cannot be altered. But it permits amendments to bring it in tune with the times, and to cater to new situations. All Statutes must be relevant to the age. Constitutional provisions for sort of suspending fundamental rights by declaring a state of National Emergency have been used in times of the wars with China and Pakistan, specially in 1971.

But Mrs. Indira Gandhi in 1975 showed the Constitution could be suspended, so to say, even for political, partisan and personal reasons. After her election was upturned by the Allahabad high court fir using government machinery in her campaign, she declared a state of Emergency in June that year saying there was national anarchy and peoples groups were trying t overthrow the government. Till she revoked it and called for general elections in 1977, the Emergency saw the country ruled by extra-constitutional centres of authority.

Mr. Vajpayee too saw much in the Constitution that he wanted changed. His government never did have the majority in Parliament, specially the Lok Sabha, to implement his dream project, but he did start the process. The Commission to review the Constitution was set up by his government, chaired by former Chief Justice and former Chairman of the National Human Rights commission, Justice M N Venkatachelliah. Among the proposals before it was one by BJP leader and Vice President of India, Bhairon Singh Sekhawat who said the election process must be changed so that parliament and state legislatures had fixed terms for five years, all the elections were held on the same state, no-confidence motions had to be backed by an alternative “confidence motion”, and that the two Houses of Parliament would directly elect the Prime minister in case a party did not have a clear majority.

Mr. Venkatachelliah did not suggest anything so drastic, but he did call for electoral reforms as a matter of urgency.

Constitutional experts and the then Opposition party, the Congress, as well as the Left group, saw a greater conspiracy. They said a fixed term for elected representatives is an attempt to introduce a presidential form of government, which has been BJP's pet prescription for India's ills.  As India Today recorded, “The proposal to bring in an alternative formation along with a no-confidence motion had no takers in the 1998 debate, which Vajpayee lost by a vote.”

Mr. Modi has made it amply clear, if not in so many words then by other means, that he is very fond of a presidential system. Among his first few actions was to chose a cabinet of persons with little political strength on their own, his keeping all major decision-making powers to himself, his orders asking all Secretaries heading various central ministers to report to him directly and approach him when they wanted to him  bypassing their Ministers, and finally getting an Act of Parliament changed to get  a man of his choice as the head of the Prime Ministers Office. For all practical purposes, the concept of a Government run by a Council of Ministers with Cabinet responsibility is no longer operative. Mr. Modi is the Government of India.

He will, of course, not have his way right away, but he sure can try to bulldoze some important laws. The BJP has a clear, but bare, majority in the Lok Sabha and unless such groups as the All India Anna DMK of Tamil Nadu and the Biju Janata Dal of Orissa back him up together with the current partners in the NDA [The Trinamool Congress is now a strong enemy after the CBI targetting Ms. Mamta Banerjee and her cabinet colleagues in the multi billion rupees Sharada ponzy scam] even moving a major Constitutional amendment in the Lok Sabha will be impossible. He does not have the numbers.

In the Rajya Sabha, the combined opposition is twice as numerous as his BJP and allies. But the situation will change drastically in the net biennial elections, and in less than four years, the BJP may well be in an absolute majority.

What happens when Mr. Modi prepares for the 2019 general elections is anyone’s guess.

But meanwhile, despite his rather curious call for a “ten year moratorium” on caste and communal violence – not an end to such mayhem, just a postponement – he has maintained a resounding silence on voices from his huge army of supporters and  ideological colleagues that in affect call for a throwing away of the Constitution and all its basic values, speedily those relating to freedoms of relgion and belief, and in fact of citizenship. The Constitution’s first few sentences group the freedoms of Expression and relgion in one phrase.

There are now open calls for religious cleansing if Bharatavarsha. And  their shouts find an echo in the pronouncements of  Mr. Modi’s ministers. As Dr. Faisal Devji, Director of the Asian Studies Centre at the University of Oxford says, ”More interesting than the shifting balance of power between the BJP and its “family” of non-state Hindu organisations, however, might be the fact that Hindu nationalism has never possessed a theory of state. Unlike the vision of an Islamic state, for instance, with its distinctive if non-egalitarian constitutional structure, Hindu nationalism has no alternative political model, apart from an insistence on the dominance of majoritarian culture and concerns. And this is its triumph as much as tragedy, since the absence of a distinctive theory of state repeatedly casts Hindu nationalism back into a social movement, one that can only make claims on cultural and demographic rather than constitutional grounds.”

On 18^th December 2014, which is the official National Minorities Day, Mr. Rajeshwar Singh, the head of the Dharm Jagran Manch [Faith awakening forum] declared on national television news channels that the Manch had set a 2021 deadline to cleanse India of  the “alien Islam and Christianity”. Another group said Christians would not be allowed in the Himalayan regions, sacred to the Hindus. The hate speeches went viral on social media, and then in the major newspapers across the country.

The Indian government has so far not indicated if Mr. Rajeshwar Singh is being prosecuted under India’s strict laws against religious discord, used so far largely to target Christian pastors,  and in recent months, Muslim  youth active on Face Book who vent their anger against the State.

But members of the Union Council of Ministers, and official spokesmen of the Bharatiya Janata Party, BJP, which controls much of the Indian provincial governments, have been voluble in support of the Sangh Parivar. The Parivar is a very large and almost Omni-present family of Hindu militant organisations created by the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh in the past two decades, of which the Dharma Jagran Manch, the Bajrang Dal and the  powerful Vishwa Hindu Parishad are among the more prominent  groups with aggressive cadres.

Political analysts have said it would be erroneous to assume that under the government of Mr. Modi, the RSS has reoriented its goals. Each time the BJP assumes power, its ideologues get emboldened. Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee was in power in New Delhi when major attacks took place on Christians. Over 30 village churches were destroyed in Dangs in Gujarat on Christmas Eve in 1998. Australian leprosy worker Graham Staines and his sons were burnt alive in January 1999, and of a Catholic priest Fr George Kuzhikandam in Mathura, not too far from New Delhi, as he lay asleep in his church in June 2000. Christmas eve violence in 2007 in Kandhamal, Orissa, was a precursor of the 2008 pogrom, was when the BJP was in power in coalition government. Mr. Modi has made no bones of the fact that he was a leader of the RSS, and continues to profess its ideology.

RSS affiliated groups have launched a campaign to convert the poorer Christians and Muslims to Hinduism, a process they call Ghar Wapsi, or home coming under their argument that every Indian is actually a Hindu, and Christians and Muslims are those who have strayed, or have been bought over by missionaries. In turn, the Sangh groups have called for a war chest for the Ghar Wapsi, earmarking Rupees 500,000 for every Muslim they convert, and Rupees 200,000 for every Christian. The different rates are presumably because Muslims are felt to be more difficult to “persuade’ for a change of faith.

In the central Indian State of Chhattisgarh, where some months ago radical groups enacted villages banning the entry of essentially Christian pastors and religious services other than those of the Hindus, the focus is now on Catholic Schools. In its Bastar Tribal region, Christian schools, which are otherwise in great demand, need to install statues of the Hindu goddess of learning, Saraswati. And priests running these institutions can no longer be called “father’, but need to be called “Pracharya”, a teacher. Protestant pastors are now beaten up, home churches raided almost as a matter of routine, with the police looking on, or an active participant. Santa Claus, of course, has been proscribed. Needless to say, the State has been governed by the BJP for the past 12 years.

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.

The BJP’s response has been to suggest that the religious cleansing deadline needs to be seen in the context of fiery speeches by Muslim TV evangelists and western campaigns to spread Christianity. 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. 

Her officials passed orders earlier this month that Christmas Day will now be called “Good Governance Day” in honour of the birthday, not of Jesus, but of Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee, the first BJP Prime Minister who ruled from 1998 to 2004, and is now critically ill and has not been seen in public for several years. Academic institutions from junior schools to Universities were keep their doors open and organise social programmes for the students, supervised by the teachers. Christmas was not to be a holiday any more.

An outcry by Church and Civil Society, an acrimonious clash in Parliament where Mr. Modi still does not have a majority in the Upper House, Rajya Sabha, forced the government to dilute its order. Christmas remains a Holiday, but the “educational” programmes of declamations and other activities will also be held, with Principals and officials told to report to the government that they did indeed comply with the order.

Muslims and Christians feel they are being encircled in a vicious and tightening noose,  in the villages and small towns by Sangh cadres who have the police on their side, and nationally by the Federal and State governments who seem to endorse the hate campaigns and the violence.

But for Civil society, the threat is to the Constitution of India which ahs evolved as a great international democratic document that protects the subcontinent-sized country’s hundreds of cultures, languages, races and faith. All too many people in office and heading Sangh groups have  said  the Constitution is a British inheritance  that has no place in Hindu Rashtra, the Land of the Hindus.

Without a State of Emergency being declared, the Extra-Constitutional Centres of authority seem to be active.

The National Book of India

The National Book of India

John Dayal

There already is a National Book in India. It is the Constitution which gives it the Rule of Law..

I have read the Bhagwad Gita many times in its English translation by  the philoshper and second President of India Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, and hold it in high regard as I do the Holy Quran, the Zen Avesta, the Guru Granth Sahib and others, which I have read in parts over the years, also in their English translations. I wish I could have read in the wonderful languages they were written it. I studied  Hebrew for a couple of years, but that was not enough to be proficient enough to read the Talmudic texts in the original. Knowing Urdu is absolutely no help  in reading the Quran in its resonating Arabic.

As a Christian, the Bible is the book of my faith, and holy for me.

There should be respect given to all books of faith, and not just in India. But our Constitution is our national book because I believe that it distils all the good the various books of faith contain in themselves – the sacredness and dignity of the human person from the womb to the end, the equality of all people, fundamental freedoms.

I fear that the erosion of our Constitution is taking place right before our eyes. In the past one month, government ministers and non-state actors have articulated their vision of an India of the future, and subtle but perceptible changes have already been brought about towards goal of a mono-cultural India which remains at odds with its vivid variety. This is a testing of waters for a more direct assault in the future. It could be a matter of time,

Thank God India is a not a theocracy.  Theocracies have a nasty habit of not being very democratic, and eventually not very nurturing of the common citizen. We have seen this in our neighbourhood, and in many other parts of the world.