Christians and the Political landscape in India | John Dayal

We don’t matter in numbers, but did we did even try set the discourse

There will possibly be at least 15 Christians in the Lok Sabha’s 543 members elected in the 2024 General elections.

At 2.3 % of the national population, the Christian MPs will be about 2.7% of the newly constituted Lok Sabha, the Lower House of Parliament.

They could even be a little more, because not every name can be identified easily by religion. Some don’t identify themselves as belonging to a religion - even if their given names give away their identity.

Some hide their identity, including Dalits who follow Christ and who contest from the 15% constituencies reserved by law for Scheduled Cases. The law says those who contest from scheduled cast reserved seats have to be Hindus, Sikhs or Buddhists. Muslims and Christians from the scheduled caste or Dalit communities do not qualify. The Supreme Court has rejected challenges to this crazy law which introduces religion in a democratic and secular election. But sometimes the law is an ass.

On a pro-rata basis, Christians have a comparatively larger presence in the Lok Sabha, a higher percentage than the Muslims, or the Sikhs. But other than in Kerala, their representation from other states is in ones and twos. MPs have come from Meghalaya, Manipur, Mizoram, Nagaland, Arunachal. In the mainland, the states which have never had a Christian MP are Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal, Uttarakhand, Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Delhi.

Muslims are variously estimated at 15 to 20% of the population, and exist in sizeable numbers in every state barring Goa and two or three of the North-eastern States. They could have had some 81 of more seats, about the same as Dalits who are guaranteed 15% reserved seats by the Constitution. But there will be only 24 Muslims MPs in the Lok Sabha, all of them on the I.N.D.I.A benches. Most come from the Congress, Trinamool Congress and the Samajwadi Party, but there is a sprinkling from the Communist parties and the DMK. Not one Muslim MP will sit on the Treasury benches. The BJP did not give a single seat to a Muslim, at least not a winning seat. In UP, chief minister Aditya Nath has long held the BJP does not need Muslim support even if they are 20% in his state; the BJP would win on the strength of the 80% Hindus. Every BJP leader agreed with him.

The Sikhs are close to 2% of the population, electorally concentrated in Punjab, are arguably the most vocal political group in the country, the physical proximity to Delhi given them an added clout in mass demonstrations and assertion.  There is a smattering of Sikhs resettled in the Terai region of Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, and in Delhi, apart from some migrants in major towns. But the occasional lonely non-Punjab MP has come only from Uttarakhand [Menaka Gandhi], Delhi or Bengal. But in Punjab, they are nominated by almost every party, the Sikh majority Akali Dal, BJP, Congress, Aam Aadmi Party and occasionally the Communist parties.

Communities get representation in Parliament if they are seen as a winning margin in some constituencies, or constitute a political pressure group with regional and national parties. This is the most visible with Sikhs of the Punjab, who have a political party of their own, but are also powerful in other general political parties, all of whom nominate some Sikhs as their candidates. Muslims too occasionally have their own political parties in some states, but bank heavily on their clout and goodwill with regional and national parties, such as the Congress, the Trinamul Congress in West Bengal and the DMK in Tamil Nadu.

The Christian community in caught in a vice, unable to set up their own parties in any state — other than one or two in Kerala or in the micro-States of the north east in which have a near absolute majority in the tiny populations — and are also unable to exercise any clout with major national and regional parties.  

Almost every segment of the church and community can be faulted for this sorry state of affairs. The major political parties, including the Congress, do not incubate Christian leaders in regions where they do not exist in very large numbers. They focus only in states where pockets of concentration of the community exist, such as they do in a cluster of districts in Kerala, and in some of the North east areas.

A look over the map in the last fifty years brings this out in sharp and tragic lucidity. Maharashtra with several metropolitan areas, Tamil Nadu, Andhra, UP with several education towns which Christians helped create, and Punjab with a massive Dalit Christian presence in the Amritsar-Gurdaspur region offered themselves as places Christian political leadership could have been incubated. The Congress failed to do so. As did every other single party. The tribal regions of the central Indian states of Orissa, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh never allowed grassroots leadership to flourish, banking on those from the Hindu, or “Indic†faith including the nature-worshipping groups.

The story is a little better in Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra, Telengana and Bengal, but only marginally so. Christian leadership in the southern states has emerged from gross roots movements of the people living on the coast, from trade unions, and from movements against colonialism, corporate and crony capitalism, protection of natural resources, the ethnic or linguistic agitations. The large Andhra chief minister YSR Reddy is hailed as one such leader. Goa has a little longer list though its Christian population numbers just 25%, a vital number of them in southern parts of the state.

It is in Kerala that the Christian community finds itself today in the most perilous time in its long history in India, dating back in public memory to the times of the Apostles, one of whom, Thomas ‘the Doubter’ is believed to have landed on the western coast and travelled to what us today Chennai in Tamil Nadu, where he achieved martyrdom at the hands of the local power clique.

It constitutes about 18.4% — of the population according to the last census in 2011, or just under a fifth of the population, with Muslims counting at 26.6% or over a quarter of the population. Hindus constitute about one half of the total population. Though every religion exists in every part of the state, the Christians are concentrated in the central region of the state from the sea to the mountainous High Ranges of the Western Ghats. The Muslim mass is concentrated along its borders on the north. Hindus, who have strong ethnic, caste and economic groups, control the overall politics of the state, but both Christians and Muslims have the numerical strength to intervene in the political discourse and the allocation of resources.

It is argued that while the Christian community, divided sharply in denominations, caste, and class, has been losing ground in its clout with the Congress party which has been its historical ally, the Muslim community has been with tis increasing strength able to bargain better for resources from both the Congress and the currently ruling Left Front governments that have alternately wielded power in Kerala.

The community has a historical aversion to the Communists in the Left Front who had formed the first elected Marxist government in the world in the 1950s, but almost immediately antagonised the Church by a failed attempt to take over management of the privately held education sector. The Congress government at the Centre sacked the EMS Namboodiripad government in Trivandrum. The wound has never been healed in the state, though in New Delhi, the Congress finds the support of the Left parties essential in taking on the threat from the right-wing Hindu nationalist Bhartiya Janata Party of Prime minister Narendra Modi.

And herein lies the bind that has given the Christian community in Kerala a schizophrenic political headache, and brought it scorn from the Christian community in the rest of the country which faces a violent persecution at the hands of the BJP’s parental Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh in almost every state, and most strongly in its strongholds in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh.

The RSS, which has been working in Kerala for half a century, has made big strides among all castes and ethnic groups – it boasts it has the highest number of shakhas, or morning assemblies, in the state. Riding on this, the BJP has been chipping away at the votes of both the Marxists and the Congress.

BJP’s actor-candidate Suresh’s victory in the Trissur constituency did not surprise political observers. Nor did the fact that in state capital Thiruvananthapuram, the BJP gave. a scare to popular Congress MP and public intellectual Shashi Tharoor. Tharoor won by the skin of his teeth. He reportedly has told friends that it is the last election he has fought. If he does retire, the BJP is tipped to capture the seat from challenger Communist Party of India [Marxist], which currently governs the state.

The worrying data from Kerala for both Congress and the Marxists is that the BJP is number one in 11 Assembly segments (up from just 1/ 140 in 2019), number 2 in 9, and a close number 3 in 10 seats. (Source: Manorama/ The Wire). And what should worry the Congress is its decline among Christians, from 39 percent in 2019 to 25 percent in 2024.

The Congress and the Left Front may or may not take remedial steps, but it is a moot question if this development is in the interests of the Christian community, and will it help it in its welfare and economic development. 

Arguably, the Christian community, particularly the Catholic and other Oriental prelates, have allowed fear of Muslim dominance over state politics and resources, to shuffle them into the bosom of the BJP. Bishops of major denominations have made no bones over their anger with the Left Front government, which they accuse if favouring Muslims in devolution of resources. They share the concern of the BJP that Muslims - now economically much better off than they were before oil was discovered in the Muslim lands of the Middle east - also pose a demographic challenge in the state.

The Islamophobic shade over church eyes, many say, makes it blind to the very potent and unchallenged BJP control over the federal government will pose to the vey democratic and secular character of the country. The Constitution itself may be thrown out in favour of a document of the Hindu Rashtra dreamt of by the founders of the RSS and the BJP.  

This fear in the heart of the national electorate, in fact, is the main reason the BJP has been denied a majority in the general elections, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi has formed his third government not on his own strength, but with the support of two regional parties, the Telugu Desam of Telangana and the Janata Dal United of Bihar.

At present it seems church leadership sees its commitment only to its core constituency in Kerala, and guides it thought process accordingly. But many are apprehensive that unless it raises itself above this line of sight, and sees the “catholic’ or universal charge it has in all of India, it will paint itself into a political corner. The victims will be the Christians outside Kerala.

[Reproduced from Kairos 8 June 2024]