There seems but little doubt that the Government of India, egged on by the religious nationalism of the RSS, has decided to teach a lesson to the Christian community in India by singling out for posthumous criminalisation the global icon Saint Teresa, a Nobel laureate but perhaps more important, an Indian citizen given its highest national honour of Bharat Ratna.
This is obvious in the union government ordering an enquiry into every ashram run by the Teresa sisters of the Missionaries of Charity across the country caring to abandoned infants, unwed mothers, homeless women and the sick and dying.
An obedient mass media, terrified officials and political appointees in the Jharkhand state government’s women and child welfare departments have picked up a case of alleged exchange of a baby for adoption on illicit payment of money into a monstrous media storm. In the process, the government’s religious-nationalist supporters, the Hindutva groups as they are known, have accused Teresa’s Missionaries of Charities and indeed the entire church in India of forcible conversions to Christianity, massive trafficking in children and other crimes.
They have also resurrected a rejected chant of Vatican’s interference in Indian political affairs.
Teresa in particular, and the church in general, have been a thorn in the side of land mafias and others pressurising the governments to change environment and land laws to help transfer forest tracks to corporate groups and business houses. The missionaries’ work with the marginalized in education, health and empowerment has also made the tribals and Dalits stand up to usury and exploitation.
Leaders of the Church and the Christian community have called on state and union governments to stop this persecution, and act against groups and mobs that attack nuns, priests and Christian organisations. Nobody thinks the prime minister or the state governments will take any tangible action.
Although hundreds of pastors get beaten up every year and churches, especially home churches vandalised or just plain locked up as organizations such as the United Christian Forum, the EFI and the ADF testify in their annual reports of the last four years of the current regime, many would say that the Christian church and its institutions are almost unscathed compared to the Indian Muslims. And, in a macabre irony, they would be right.
Independent India is 71 years old, and the Republic with a written Constitution 68 years of age. Independence came at a heavy cost – perhaps 500,000 each of the Muslim and Hindu communities were slaughtered in the new-born nations of Pakistan and India. The Armed forces and civil militia joined in the mass murders, loot for the British India armed forces too were divided on lines of religion. Even if the deaths in the two world wars, and the gas chambers of Adolf Hitler were many times more, the mass migrations across the new, man drawn border in the west and the east, numbering in the tens of millions, the uprooting of the entire population of some districts and their transport to a future of uncertainty was unprecedented in history, and remains so.
Seven decades ought to be sufficient to heal old wounds. After all, with an intervening cold war of half a century, enemies have reconciled in Europe and the far east. Germany and Japan disowned their bloody past, the gas chambers, the cannibalism in conquered territories, the comfort girls, and are now economic and political giants, not just accepted but honored by West and East. Their people are now friends with former enemies as fellow human beings.
So why do Pakistan and India continue to be in a state of cold war, and why does it lead to an Islamophobia that poisons every facet of national life in India? Pakistan has worries of a different sort. The Kashmir issue, the four wars fought between the two nations leading to a division of Pakistan and the birth of Bangladesh, are results, but perhaps not the cause of the chasm between Hindu and Muslim. Not to acknowledge this will be to then not join in the imperative of finding a solution to communalism in India.
This writers’ own studies over half a century, and those of many others, tend to confirm the suspicion that hatred is carefully nurtured, and every occasion and excuse is found to keep the wounds bleeding. While all political parties are to an extent guilty of playing Muslims and Hindus against each other during elections, the main guilty is the pernicious ideology which, for want of a better coinage, is called Hindutva. It needs be remembered that Hindutva is older than the freedom struggle, perhaps older than the 92 years that the RSS has been around. It evolves in its own way from the Manu thesis of caste purity.
The common word for Dalits, Muslims and foreigners in north India used to be Malechhas, not entirely translatable into English. Suspicion, hate, and violence are built into that word. Very little effort has been made over the millennia to soften its impact. The RSS keeps the embers hot. It was created just for this purpose. The BJP, its political child, fans them into flame whenever an election in due. It is the party’s main electoral plank, its appeasement of its vote bank, the biggest in the world.
Narendra Modi, who has taken upon himself the task of being general and foot soldier rolled into one of the BJP-RSS election juggernaut, is in a perpetual electoral mode. His snarls, his grimaces, his dog whistles and often enough blatant targeting of Muslims, keeps the atmosphere surcharged. The lynch mobs are the hounds responding to the whistle.
The Supreme Court has directed Modi’s government to enact a law against lynchings. The government has enacted laws banning Triple Talaq, cow slaughter, and curtailing may right. It is, to that extent, a brave government which does not care for community angst when it is a question of a good law in its perception. Someone could bet with profit that the law against mobs lynching Muslims, Dalits, strangers is not coming before the elections.
(John Dayal is an author, Editor, occasional documentary film maker and activist).
