Peter Ronald de Souza
The spate of attacks on churches in some states of India, even during the Christmas season of 2021, is not as disturbing to me as five other actions taken by the current political dispensation. The disruptions of Christian religious services during Christmas may be both worrying and troublesome, but the regime can explain them away as the work of lumpens who have acted on their own. The regime is therefore not responsible. Such acts of vandalism, they promise, will be dealt with by “the full force of the law”.
But the five actions that I find deeply distressing reveal to me a deeper malaise within our society. They deserve our collective consideration. The first is the incarceration and subsequent death of Stan Swamy, while still under custody as an undertrial under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. It is for me the ultimate diagnostic test of all that is wrong with Indian democracy.
If we wish to answer the question that is often asked by observers of constitutional democracy – “How is India doing?” – do not look at the Freedom House rankings, or the Economist Intelligence Unit indices, or even the sophisticated International IDEA State of Democracy analysis.
Just look at the treatment of Stan Swamy. All institutions failed him: the jail authorities, the doctors in the public hospitals, the National Investigation Agency that was expected to follow due process, the Supreme Court that has been tasked with guaranteeing and protecting human rights, and even the office of the President of India.
The treatment given to Stan Swamy reminded me of Draupadi’s attempted disrobing by Duhshasana before all the dharmic pundits at the assembly of worthies. They remained silent. They did not stop him. They looked down when she pleaded with them for justice. As in the case of the 84-year-old Swamy.
The second case is the repeated harassment of Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity. The charges against the Missionaries of Charity range from accusing the organisation with converting the vulnerable under their care to Christianity, to mistreating orphans, to being an agent of foreign powers. No evidence is given to support such accusations.
Only innuendo is used to damage their reputation, a tactic often used with devastating effect by this regime. (The Missionaries of Charity’s Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act registration, required to receive foreign donations for their charity work, was initially not renewed in late December 2021, but was subsequently restored following an outcry both within and outside the country.)
The same mindset that thought it acceptable to imprison Swamy, for working with tribals in Jharkhand, has regarded it as normal to harass the Missionaries of Charity, for working with destitute persons.
The wretched of the earth, to borrow the title of Franz Fanon’s celebrated book, are those with whom the Missionaries of Charity work. They are the mentally ill and disabled children, the abandoned elderly, the single mothers, the poor suffering from terminal illness and the abused women.
To see such work as going against national interests, requires a perversity of mind that one cannot even begin to fathom. And yet this perversity has today been normalized in the behaviour of the state and within the national discourse that it has initiated.
The Missionaries of Charity must be disciplined and delegitimised. And if in the process the wretched of the earth are unable to get even the little succour they are given by the Missionaries of Charity, because of disrupted work routines, then so be it. This is the price of living in a rule-governed modern state.
When one connects the two cases of Stan Swamy and the Missionaries of Charity with what appears, at first, to be an unrelated decision, the plan of the Goa government to locate a garbage dump that is planned to process 250 tonnes of daily garbage, a few hundred metres from the World Heritage site of the Churches of Old Goa, a pattern begins to emerge.
A political ideology begins to manifest itself according to which the “other” must be diminished, humiliated, made vulnerable to the authority and power of the “self”. India must be reimagined as belonging not to a plural India, not equally to all, but only to the dominant religious community. Others must accept that they are here on sufferance.
The pattern that emerges with these three cases gets reinforced by the announcement made by the present dispensation in 2014 that henceforth December 25, Christmas Day, would be regarded as “Good Governance Day” in India. This was not in honour of the birth of Jesus Christ but of the former Prime Minister and Bharatiya Janata Party/Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh stalwart Atal Bihari Vajpayee whose birthday is also December 25.
This decision too is seen as acceptable and reasonable. Good Governance Day, in the national imagination, then assumes primacy. The message given by this political dispensation is so different from that of an earlier time in India where important religious days were made into national holidays.
The idea then was to make the holy day of a particular community – and there were many such days – into a special day for the whole nation. Everyone was to regard them as special days. They became national holidays.
The fifth action, confirming that such a parochial mindset has taken over the national mind, which is to give supremacy to one narrative on India and simultaneously to diminish the other complementary narratives, was the decision to remove the Christian hymn Abide With Me from the repertoire of tunes played during the Beating of the Retreat on January 29 every year, at the end of the Republic Day celebrations in New Delhi.
It had been played for decades on January 29 and had, in the public expectation, become inseparable from the Retreat, a national favourite. It was also the much-loved hymn of Mahatma Gandhi. This Christian hymn, composed by a Scottish Anglican Henry Francis Lyte, has now been replaced with the mellifluous Aye Mere Watan ke Logo, written by Kavi Pradeep and sung first by Lata Mangeshkar in 1963 before President S Radhakrishnan and Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. The latter was moved to tears on hearing it, a beautiful tribute to the fallen soldiers of the 1962 war. Both tunes should have been part of the repertoire of tunes.
One accepts that music preferences change and therefore the repertoire must keep pace with the changing times. But to justify the decision as a policy adopted by the ceremonial department of the defence forces to replace the symbols of colonialism with Indian symbols, appears very weak, if not suspect.
Courtesy: Scroll. In
