The recent outpouring of support for the “development” agenda of the
Prime Minister, Mr. Narendra Modi, by several leaders of the Catholic
and Protestant churches may possibly stave off the immediate attention
of the dreaded Intelligence Bureau and the Ministry of Home affairs, but
it is not likely to reduce the deep and seemingly abiding distrust the
Indian political and social system has of what is popularly called the
“Missionaries”. Nor will it mitigate the hate that is now erupting in
India against religious minorities.
Missionaries was a term once used in the Indian subcontinent to
describe clergy, religious and social workers who came in various
periods over three centuries from Italy, Spain, France, the United
Kingdom and later from the United States. They set up schools and
hospitals, and mission stations, in the hills, plains and deep forests
of much of the Indian land mass.
The coming of foreign, and almost entirely White, religious personnel
stopped soon after World War II, but there was still a sizable number in
the country at Independence. In 1993 there were just 1,923, and by
2001, it had come to just a little more than half of that, at 1100
registered foreign missionaries in India. We have no official data for
2013-14, but estimates vary from 200 to 500, some of them Indian
nationals. Most of them have lived in India for periods ranging from 20
years to 60 years.
This is far removed from the image that the Sangh Parivar, and the
government, paints of a land teeming with western missionaries. But
since the 1960s, it is impossible for any priest or Nun to get a
“Religious Visa” to India, and many who come here on tourist visas have
to sign papers at Indian consulates that they will not indulge in any
religious activity in India. Only rarely is a visa given to Tele
Evangelists for “Crusades” or mass prayers.
But it will not be entirely correct to suggest that it is just the
Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh and its political face the Bharatiya Janata
Party that oppose mission work on grounds of ideology and relgion. The
larger Indian political leadership, both in the Congress and in other
parties including those emerging from the socialist movement of Mr. Ram
Manohar Lohia of North India have seen the community as an appendage of
the British Raj. The leader of the Freedom struggle, Mohandas Karamchand
Gandhi, already called a Mahatma and later formally named the Father of
the Nation, had serious doubts about missionaries. E. Stanley Jones,
Stanley Jones in is book The Christ of the Indian Road, records an
encounter with Gandhi who he asked “though you quote the words of Christ
often, why is it that you appear to so adamantly reject becoming his
follower?” Gandhi’s reply was clear: “Oh, I don’t reject your Christ. I
love your Christ. It is just that so many of you Christians are so
unlike your Christ”.Gandhi’s statement moulded the political discourse
in Independent India.
The Constitution of India promulgated in 1950 nonetheless gave
Christians the right not just to profess and practice their faith, but
also to propagate it, with some law givers stressing that propagation of
faith was integral to the religion. But among the first acts of the
government was to withdraw affirmative action from untouchable groups
other than those professing the Hindu faith. The issue has agitated the
community ever since.
The absolute ban on freedom of faith of this 16 to 20 per cent of the
population was ostensibly to prevent their walking into Christianity, or
rarely, into Islam.
The bane of the Christian community has been the anti-conversion laws,
ironically called Freedom of Religion Acts which brought the State
firmly into a process that was otherwise between a person and his
conscience. Six states have these laws on board, another has enacted but
not yet implemented it. The BJP has said in its election campaign it
intends to make this a national law. Governmental permissions and severe
penalties are the cutting edge of these laws. Political parties,
barring perhaps the Marxists, and even the Supreme Court of India tend
to agree to the need to the anti conversion laws. The United Nations
Human Rights Council, European Union and international freedom of faith
organisations have called them a grave violation of the UN Charter on
fundamental human rights.
The premise that no one converts unless he is being lured, cheated or
coerced into Christianity – or Islam – is now a major political slogan
in the Bharatiya Janata party’s mission to control every regional
government after coming to power in New Delhi in May 2014. And it is
targetted as much against Muslims and it is against the Christian
community.
The Muslim community has been the object of suspicion after the
Partition of India in 1947, which saw unprecedented violence, that has
left an unspoken but virulent Islamophobia in Indian society. The recent
acts of terror in India have deepened this chasm between the
communities.
This officially sanctioned suspicion, and from it the political hate,
underpins the current campaigns by the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh and
its subsidiaries which target both the Christian and the Muslim
communities, specially in north and Central India.
A new dimension has been added this year in the electoral rhetoric of
the BJP in its very successful run up to the General elections earlier
this year, and elections to the legislative assemblies of several states
in north and west India. This is a campaign to evoke fears in the
highly patriarchal feudal societies in rural India that the security and
sexual purity of their women is being threatened by young Muslim and
Christian men.
It began innocently enough in Kerala with the state High court asking
the police of there was a design in several cases of inter-community
marriages, in which the men were almost always Muslim. The police could
not find any design and the matter seemed to have ended, till now when
it erupted in far away north India. But now, the police are on the side
of local political thugs, and both seem acting under the patronage and
protection of powerful leaders in New Delhi.
Love Jihad, as it is called, has been presented as a grand design in
which Hindu young women are seduced by Muslim in Christian men, lured
into marriage, and the converted in a conspiracy to alter the
demographic profile of “Hindu” India.
The result has been the hounding of young men, and the humiliation of
young Hindu women in areas as distant from each as Meerut in Uttar
Pradesh and Bhopal in Madhya Pradesh. In Madhya Pradesh, the district
police chief “annulled” the marriage of a Christian man and a Hindu
woman under pressure of a Hindutva mob.
The governments of the states, and more than that, the federal
government in New Delhi headed by the Prime Minister, Mr. Narendra Modi,
have maintained an intriguing silence, with no official condemnation of
this criminal intimidation of young couples in love. This has led civil
society groups to believe that the hate campaign has the blessings of
the ruling dispensation in the country. The inaction of the superior
courts and the national Human Rights commissions in failing to take
cognisance of these extra-judicial intrusions into the personal life of
citizens compounds the crisis.
