The Church, and India at 77 | John Dayal

Independence Day is a good time to remember opportunities lost and be ready for new ones that may come

August 15, 2024

Away from the contentious arithmetic of Church growth in the country since its independence in 1947 is the loaded question of how it has engaged with the Indian state in negotiating a protected niche not just for itself but for more robust religious freedom for people of all faiths.

India completes 77 years as a free nation and a sovereign people. Jawaharlal Nehru in his midnight speech on Aug. 15, 1947, spoke of “redeeming our tryst with destiny, not in full measure, but substantially.â€

Freedom has not just been in political terms, a delinking from colonialism, or in economy and culture. It has meant becoming comfortable in our own skin, as it has meant accepting we now have the strength to shape our destiny.

For Christians, independence has also shaped how we see religion, our own faith, and that of others and how we practice it.

Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity are part of universal creeds, each with billions in many countries on several continents. In their participation in the half-century-long freedom struggle that Mahatma Gandhi led against colonial rule, side by side with the majority Hindu community, they learned to separate love for the nation and a commitment to its freedom from the practice of their faith.

A stream of political Hinduism asserted its karmabhoomi (land of deeds) and its devbhoomi (land of god) within the country’s geography. Over the years, and especially in the last ten years, these ideological groups have sought to construct their political ambitions on such exclusivist and polarizing definitions. Targeted hate was inevitable, and often it led to violence.

In supreme irony, the elements that constructed nationalism on a foundation of religion had very little to show through participation in the freedom struggle or the raising of the republic with a written constitution that promised equality and a strong bill of rights.

Islam and Buddhism have evolved independently in India. Very few of the original Buddhist communities survive in India, other than in small enclaves in the Himalayan foothills, from Ladakh in the north to Arunachal Pradesh and Sikkim in the Northeast.

Tibetan Buddhists who followed the Dalai Lama into his Indian exile, fleeing communist China, now live as third-generation people in clusters in Himachal Pradesh, Delhi and Karnataka.

The “new†Indian Buddhist community in the country owes its genesis to Babasaheb Ambedkar’s adoption of Buddhism at Nagpur in 1956 as his protest against virulent caste prejudice in the country.

Hundreds of thousands of Dalits, as the former untouchable castes are now called, became Buddhists with him in the biggest voluntary mass conversion in subcontinental history. Tens of thousands of Dalits continue to convert to Buddhism every year across the country.

This community, which enjoys constitutional guarantees of representation in all walks of life, including parliament, continues to find creative ways to negotiate with the Indian state to strengthen those statutory guarantees.

Islam, unfortunately, has had to bear the brunt of history in independent India. Despite a bloody partition based on religion in 1947, a huge number of Muslims did not go to Pakistan, choosing to remain in what was their motherland.

They are about 15 percent of the population and constitute one of the largest Muslim communities in any part of the world, with a history going back to the times of the Prophet. But they are reviled and pilloried. Laws, illicit in themselves, have been weaponized against them.

Any act of terrorism or extremism in any part of the world is laid at their doorstep. Their dialogue with the state takes shape in fits and starts — through their elected representatives on the one hand and in the peaceful coexistence in which they live with the majority community.

The Christian community, despite its two-millennium history in the subcontinent, has a more complex relationship with the state and the people.

Outside of Kerala, which has had an endemic community, of diverse liturgical heritage, from the very early centuries of the Christian era, the religion is still largely seen appended first to the Portuguese colonial presence on the Malabar and Konkan coasts, and then to the larger East India Company and British Raj.

Lost in translation, therefore, has been the participation of Christians, particularly Catholics, in the long struggle against the Portuguese in Kerala and, more specifically, in Goa.

Collateral damage has been to the memory of Christian freedom fighters in the Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta Presidency areas. Even schools run by the Church across the country perhaps have no books documenting the work of these men and women.

In the Constituent Assembly, where Ambedkar had chaired the group writing the constitution, the Christian representatives, including Anglo Indians, were essentially bystanders. Hindu political stalwarts intervened to write into the constitution the critical and enabling phrase “right to profess, practice and propagate†on which is laid all the evangelical activity of every denomination of Christianity in India.

The later laws against conversions in 12 states have been further weaponized in the last ten years, but they have not been able to erase the basic right to “propagate†religion.

The Christian leadership, political as well as spiritual, can be said to have collectively failed to carry on a constructive conversation with the various structures that exist — political parties, communities, and the judicial processes in preventing further erosion of the statutory assurances of the republic.

In a way, the Church and the community have thrown themselves at the mercy of the ruling group, whichever it may be for the time being. Other than in Kerala, where it is dead set against the Marxist regime and the Marxist party, even when they are not in government, the Church has made common cause with the political party in power.

At times, this has been embarrassing to itself and to the community. It was so when the then-prime minister, Indira Gandhi, imposed an emergency in 1975, and it has been so in the last ten years.

The Church seems to build its defense by appealing to the powers to recognize the work its tens of thousands of educational institutions have done in the country. This is the absolute truth. However, identical work has been done by other communities, the corporate sector, and successive governments since 1947.

The dialogue has not been structured on the bedrock of the constitution, of rights, and the rule of law, the freedom struggle, and the dialogue of life through the centuries.

In honest fact, each denomination has been left to fight its battles. The Christian community has not always made common cause with the other religious communities in the country, some of whom, at various times, have suffered persecution in greater severity.

Political parties and governments, far wiser in the world’s ways, though with civilizational shortsightedness, have gleefully moved in to widen divides and isolate denominations and groups.

[The above article first appeared in UCA News and is reproduced here for educational and non commercial use]