Catholic diocesan priests from across the country were meeting at Old Goa this week for a conference. On the opening day of this conference, Bishop Udumala Bala, the Patron of the National Conference of Diocesan Priests of India (CDPI) said that the priests ‘are proud to be Indians and also to be Christians. We love our mother land and the Church in India’.
When Catholic priests in this country have to announce their love for India it means that we are living at a time when verbal statements of one’s nationalism are given more importance than one’s way of life. We are living in a time when raising slogans are taken as proof of one’s nationalism. Through the decades since Independence there has been no need for any community to claim in words their love for the country. They did it by their way of life, by their deeds that were there for all to see. But now there are questions being raised, questions that require not just deeds but also verbal answers asserting one’s nationalism.
This is not the first time in recent weeks that the Catholic Church in the country has had to open up on its nationalism and the challenges it faces in this respect. Just last month, at the plenary of the Catholic Bishops Conference of India (CBCI), where Archbishop Filipe Neri Ferrao of Goa and Daman was elected as Vice President of the body, the bishops had identified three key challenges facing the Church in India. They were listed as narrow culture-based interpretation of nationalism, lack of clarity on the government’s stand on intolerance amid growing fundamentalism, and increasing saffronisation of education.
At that meeting, Cardinal Baselios Cleemis, the president of the CBCI had said that the pastoral plan of the Church, he made it a point to stress that it was not a political agenda, would be to look at the country from a faith point of view. He stressed that it was ‘not a fundamentalist approach but keeping an open mind to build the nation that has been in existence for thousands of years and which has a population of diverse faiths, culture, ethnicity and language’. The CBCI, at that plenary meeting, had stressed that the growing tendency of fundamentalism in India has to be stopped as it is against the nature of Indian tradition.
Practising a faith or adhering to certain beliefs other than what the majority in India practices and believes does not make one less nationalistic. Religion has got nothing to do with nationalism, especially not in a secular country. It is unfortunate that we live in times where people are being watched for the slightest of mistakes, or for disagreements with the majority view, and are then branded anti-national. Expressing one’s dissent on any topic or any issue is not being anti-national. India is a secular nation with a long history of tolerance, a peaceful country that has been even envied for its diverse realities and cultures. India has remained so for centuries and should continue to so remain. There should be no place for fundamentalism in the country, nor should a citizen’s nationalism be determined on what he or she states.
