It is clear that the issue will not be allowed to die and be buried. The gathering clamour that the High Court cancel the bail it gave to the bishop of Jalandhar, up north in the Punjab, be cancelled is but one indication of it. The church is shaken, the Vatican is alert, we are told. It is not every day that a bishop is arrested on such a charge as rape. Many protestant bishops have been arrested on allegations of corruption, and are out on bail from courts. Sometimes the charges are proved, and the bishop resigns. Often they are not proved, or proved to be malicious and concocted by people ranging from and sharks to insiders whose ambitions may have been thwarted. The dubious consolation that Asa Ram, once the spiritual guide of the current prime minister of India, is in jail after being held a serial rapist, is little consolation either to the community or the religious hierarchy.
In Indian law, as often held by the Apex Court, bail is the norm, and unless there is overwhelming evidence that the person may harm the complainant or threaten witnesses into silence or alter evidence in some way, courts may well allow the bail to continue. Many persons, including senior politicians and the occasional junior minister, have won their temporary freedom from courts by way of bail. Franco Mullakal may well quote overwhelming precedence.
Some time ago, with the heavy movement of Indian priests, especially from Kerala and the Konkan coast, to Australia and the western hemisphere, several Western diplomats had discretely sounded me on the moral health of the church. This was their polite way of asking about the sexual mores of male clergy, not just Catholic by the way, and if government, the community and, above all, the church hierarchy were alive to the issue at all. A few Indians were among the clergy arrested specially in the US. They had been tried, sentenced and deported after their terms in prison were over. Back home, they sort of vanished from public gaze, quietly to places in small parishes with no public duty. I do not know if they have been monitored to see they stay on the straight and narrow part.
The West was worried, but I could truthfully tell them that pedophilia was not an issue in the Indian church, or in religious establishments of even other faiths. Some Indian men clergy could, however, be faulted for their preference to alcohol, and to women. Alcoholism is an issue in many dioceses, and also among protestant groups. Even in regions where home-made alcoholic brew is a cultural practice. I drink, and do not assume moral high ground on this issue, but I do mention it because many clergymen have had to take medical help, and at least one friend has died of it. I could also tell the Western diplomats that Christian women have engined a change in the church’s attitude and now there is a Gender Code in place in the Catholic church. It is not perfect, neither is it implemented rigorously, but it exists. That is more than one can say of most institutions in India.
I was not fully right, I now see in hindsight. The codes are ineffective because rules have not been made to implement them, nor early warning systems set in place, personnel not trained and above all, the higher hierarchy not pressured for a change in attitude. Not just the men. But also, the women, the Mothers Superior, the Novice mistresses who are de facto in-loco-parentis to aspiring nuns.
I now recall several cases where novices and fully trained nuns complained about erring male priest aspirants, and sometimes priests, misbehaving with them. A very senior sister, a lawyer, told me “these young men think they have become lords the moment they are ordained as priests.” This was in a diocese in the Chhota Nagpur tribal region.
Once a nun complained there was a camera in their bathroom. The man was identified but not punished. Mother superior, Bishop and Archbishop collectively thought it would bring a bad name to the church. The man is safe.
But more serious, in the long term, is the charge made against the Christian Brothers who run very famous schools in north India and the North East. A woman in a detailed #MeToo #MeTooIndiapost accused two members of a congregation working in Shillong, of sexually abusing her when she was a student. She writes, “Three years ago, at the age of 37, I finally decided that I needed professional help and found a wonderful counsellor. Through the months of counselling, there is one session that stands out for me, where I felt literally like someone lifted this huge boulder lodged in my chest that was there since I was 5 years old. What she said to me at that session was that as a child, from a broken family, an economically poor background, left to my own defences, I made the ‘ideal profile’ of victim for a sexual predator.”
Christian schools are the most sought after by parents in India irrespective of the faith the families practice. Millions of students study in Christian schools from metropolitan cities to small village clusters.
The community must now cry #MeToo. Let us seek of the church — all denominations — to set up a gender justice tribunal and listen to the victims so the guilty can be identified, dealt with, and the victims, counselled, sought forgiveness from, and rehabilitated in the church with honour, if such is what they want. The law of the land is sufficient for the guilty.
What my fear, if I can call it that, is that a government inimical to the faith may set up an official tribunal on this issue which would launch a witch-hunt and kangaroo courts, as we have seen in the case of the anti-conversion laws, where every local goon is police, judge and jury, and in its final form, in the ‘Gau rakshak mode.”
(John Dayal is an author, Editor, occasional documentary film maker and activist. He lives in New Delhi)
