What ails and troubles the Christian community in India, its population status at about 2.3% of India’s 1.30 billion, the second largest religious minority after the Muslims?
The about 3 crore Christians seem not to matter, politically, socially or economically. They are almost invisible but for the spires of ancient churches in old Portuguese, Dutch, French or British towns, and peering out of the foliage in verdant Kerala, where it has a 2 millennia history and tradition.
Small as a percentage, it is a sizeable number as a body count, comparable to the population of many small European, South American and Asia-Pacific nations.
Within the country, it is numerically just a little bigger than the Sikhs, who from their redoubt in the Punjab and sizable populations in Delhi, Haryana, Uttarakhand and Rajasthan, exercise what some would say is a more than commensurate influence on national politics.
It does not change much if one also adds to the figure those who call themselves Believers or Kristu Bhakts, who follow Christ, but for various reasons — fear being just one of these — prefer not to be listed as Christians in official documentation. This is a sort of an underground church community which could be compared with that in China where it faces far greater persecution.
It is also a community of unknown dynamics.
But this is not about them, the Believers, Bhakts, Krypto Christian or whatever else people, specially politicians and writers, call them, often with derision. This is about those listed by the Registrar General of India, the Census Commissioner, as Christians.
They are possibly the most integrated with their Hindu neighbours, with whom they may have lived from a century or so to half a millennium, and one to two thousand years as in Kerala and parts of Tamil Nadu. This is much more than the presence of other faiths in India, with the exception of Buddhism and Jainism.
And yet it is made to feel the most alienated in most parts of the country.
The government looks on the Christian church as its main target for its harsh FCRA regimes. It makes no bones but that it doubts their loyalties and patriotism. It freezes bank accounts of church-based NGOs and animation groups seemingly at will to starve empowerment programmes into silence.
Governments at the Centre and in the States have abused the Emergency-era foreign contributions law to harass, punish and humiliate Nuns, priests and pastors who are the visible face of the community.
Elsewhere, and specially in the northern and central Indian states, Religious personnel are arrested on fictitious and fabricated charges. Ministers and sundry politicians are on record saying they are checking the “conversion” activities of the church. More often than not, the police and the bureaucracy weigh in on the side of the Sangh activists.
After NGOs, Church-run educational Institutions often face the wrath of annoyed or angry government, or politicians. The trigger can be anything, from some high-up’s child not given admission, or a daughter not employed as a teacher.
Even the AAP government had found it fit to harass schools, in the National Capital Territory that it rules. Arvind Kejriwal’s education ministry targeted the popular Mount Carmel institutions till the Supreme Court smashed their ministerial arrogance, telling them governments could not erode freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution.
In the more blatant BJP governments that ruled states of Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh for a straight fifteen years till very recently, schools were told to install idols, priest principals told they would not be called Fathers.
Though the government has consistently refused to set up an enquiry or committee on the pattern of the Justice Rajender Sachar probe, some light on the community is shed by National Sample Survey and other research reports.
The average Christian is under-educated, and under-employed.
The percentage of unemployed youth among Christians is the highest, the latest statistics have shown.
Many Christians in Orissa villages, among others, often live in the huts much like the ones their ancestors may have made a hundred years ago.
The Christians of Punjab have seen upper caste toughies grab canal land allotted to them.
Converts from former untouchable castes face humiliation in the north in its worst form, but also in the south. Caste transcends religion.
Christians have been lynched by Gau Rakshaks. Jharkhand was the erring state.
I have heard of Christian women who have worked as manual scavengers in the
Punjab.
The backdrop of the elections offers an opportunity to the community leadership – both the cleric hierarchy, and the political or social one, to take stock.
They must consult with the community, cutting across Rites and denominations as well as caste distinctions and geographies.
Armed with data, facts and figures, they must together negotiate with the political and governance apparatus not for trivial issues as a free Christmas meal or even canvassing for a church favourite to be given a token office, but for substantive and penetrating gains.
The Christian presence in politics and governance must increase substantially. Christians must increase their potential as employment providers, and not just as job seekers. And Christians must be present increasingly in higher education. It may surprise many, but as a percentage, the Christian presence has declined sharply in recent decades at all levels.
And the community needs to build up an intellectual cadre that can help guide it to a more secure and fecund future.
(John Dayal is an author, Editor, occasional documentary film maker and activist.)
