The Ghazi and the Bhatcar: Islamicism and the perils of bridging the secular divide

This week I crave your indulgence to continue with a discussion this column began last week. The column posed a challenge to the division that Eduardo Faleiro and a number of others were seeking to effect; the division between the secular and the religious. However the division they sought to effect was not one in the ‘secular’ sphere, but in fact in the religious. Taking the logic of secularism to absurd levels, they argued that priests being ‘religious’ ought to ideally restrict themselves to apostolic work, and not deal with issues of property. As with most arguments for secularism in Christian societies, this argument too was being pushed to allow for the eventual take over of Church properties by dominant private interests within the fold of the Church. It seems that the argument was being made precisely by secularized Catholics; i.e. those who are not believers anymore, but merely cultural Catholics, that is to say, Christmas, Easter and feast-day Catholics. These individuals tend to have political ambitions (not necessarily linked to electoral politics), and have upper-caste, upper-class backgrounds. It is for this reason, that I found Teotonio De Souza’s employing of the ‘subaltern’ argument in his column in the Herald hugely amusing. If anything, the move by Faleiro and the others represents the move by groups who having benefited from the economic and social consolidation provided by the Church (as a social institution), now wish to harness the economic (and social) power of Church properties for other purposes. If there is any group that is not making the argument for the release of the management of Church properties into lay hands entirely, it is in fact the Catholic subaltern classes, who would stand to benefit from the communal management of properties (though it needs to be maintained that more energy needs to be given to systematizing the forms of management).

But this concern need not engage us here today. What I would like to engage with is this whole divide between the secular and the spiritual. Why is it that the world (led by the Western power centers and media) fear and denounce the Islamicist movements through much of the world? To be sure, the tendencies that some of these movements display towards forms of violence is one major reason. There is the debatable suppression of the rights of women, and the politics of democracy. However, in my opinion, the eventual reason for this fear of the Islamicist movements is their refusal to separate the religious or the spiritual from the material. Islam, they say, provides a structure for our entire life, not just our ‘religious’, or for our ‘private’. It preaches a whole way of life that we are not willing to throw away, for the doubtful pleasures of westernized (read capitalist) forms of social (and political) life.

It is the rejection of the division of life into this binary, and the subsequent attendant divisions that shape contemporary political and social life, that causes the fear with which Islamicists movements are responded to. In their book Culture and the State, speaking in a different context, the authors David Llyod and Paul Thomas suggest that this fear is based on the recognition that when these binaries are challenged and overcome, the entire edifice of contemporary liberal bourgeois democracy will come crashing down. In the course of their argument they quote Rousseau who observed in his Essay on the Origin of Languages, that ‘to keep subjects apart; …is the first maxim of contemporary politics.’ This keeping apart, is managed by the whole process of representative democracy (a system which we Goans are having a particularly troublesome time right now). However, this keeping apart can only be done within a larger intellectual environment where conjoined spheres of life are kept apart. Thus, the division of life into the material, and the religious; and subsequently the division of individuals across boundaries such as nations, constituencies, wards. All of these are based on imaginary lines drawn across realities where people would otherwise be vibrantly engaging. The result of these imaginary lines is a transfer of our political power to higher beings who are expected to represent us. We alienate our political power to these individuals who are expected to operate for us. In doing so, our lives lose some of the reality that would otherwise be invested in it. Like members of a film-viewing audience, (remember that watching a film always requires first that we recognize, for however short a time, that what is happening on screen is, or was, real), we believe that the real world of politics, is out there, in the halls of parliament, in the closed council and cabinet meetings, not in our lives and daily decisions. The result of the system is that we are forced to believe in our lack of capacity to challenge the system. In the words of Robert Wokler ‘we have been numbed and made passive, displaced from the centre of cultural life and herded into the pits and mews. Transformed from agents of what we do into witnesses of what happens to us, we are, in the modern world, turned into a hushed audience and taught deference and timidity.’

The intellectual origins of Islamicist movements across the globe have recognized this fundamental scam that has been played on us. They recognized it just as Llyod and Thomas argue the early radical worker’s and Jacobin movements recognized this scam and opposed it. This intellectual move represents such a challenge to the contemporary global political order that it must be crushed, ridiculed and dismissed. And this is exactly what is happening. To this extent, the actions of Faleiro and the others are actions along this line of liberal politics. They seek to extend and maintain the order built on the separation of one life into different spheres. There would be some of you that would read this column as an indictment of the evil of Mr. Eduardo Faleiro. This column is least concerned with such an indictment. Very often, despite what we think of ourselves and our intellectual abilities, we are merely unconscious tools of larger systemic movements in the world. I seek to only highlight the possible systemic moves that Mr. Faleiro and the others are enabling.

Every intellectual move is fraught with the possibilities of its corruption when translated into reality. The Islamicist organizations across the globe are no exception. A large number are caught within the trap of parochialism, patriarchy, and other suffocating value systems. Nevertheless in challenging the boundaries that have been erected in our lives they fulfill their historical role, and for that we should thank them.

(Published in the Gomantak Times 4 Nov 2009)

* Bhatcar - literally the owner of a bhat or orchard, hence landlord.

La Vie en rose: Why the material is mystical

Some months ago, the current Commissioner of NRG Affairs, Mr. Eduardo Faleiro inaugurated a debate over the matter of the management of Church properties in Goa. Initially it appeared that a suggestion was being made that the State take over the management of Church properties, or at the very least have a say, supervisory control over this properties. Howls of indignant protest followed, most pointing out that to suggest that the State have such a power would be like setting the cat among the pigeons. These objections pointed out that the State machinery itself has ruthlessly presided over the sale of common properties impoverishing the common man in the State, and such an institution is likely to only complicate matters further. In light of this rather robust response, Mr. Faleiro presented a document to the Archbishop that suggested internal reform and vigilance.

Among the many suggestions, there was one that particularly caught my eye, especially because it seemed to one that had purchase in some of the meetings organized by Mr. Faleiro. The suggestion reads “Administrative committees, duly constituted, may be truly empowered, so that lay persons feel really responsible for the administration, as the Church are Christ's faithful and the assets of the Church are their assets. Administration of the ecclesiastical assets should be their domain mainly. If this happens, priests will be left free for what is their proper field, viz. apostolate”. An interesting suggestion is being made here, that priests have really no business administering property, since property is a material good and priests have committed themselves to the spiritual. As such, leave property to be managed by those in the secular and material world. A version of ‘To Caesar that what is Caesar’s, and to God…’

Superficially the argument makes eminent sense. It extends one of the principles of secularism, of separating the Church/religion/spirituality from the State/secular/material life. Unfortunately however, this logic works well only if restricted to the secular world, it does not work at all if one does not admit of this distinction between the material and the secular. On the contrary to apply this logic to the operations of a religion, would ensure that religion ceases to have any meaning at all. The mistaken assumption of Faleiro and the secularists is that religion is about ritual and the spiritual, and it has no connection to the material. Making this assumption, they can extend the principle of secularism as they do. However, religion admits of no distinction between the spiritual and the material. On the contrary, religion is about precisely how to guide one’s material life, and as such has everything to do with the material. It is not as if Catholic culture does not admit members of the laity to be models to be emulated. On the contrary, there are a number of such examples, and priests more often than not, operate in parishes across the world in active participation with lay individuals who are identified (either by them or by social consensus) as significant members of the community. However, Catholic culture nevertheless gives the priest, one trained in the scripture, thought and tradition of the church, a preeminent place in guiding the community in its life. And because there is no such thing as a purely spiritual life, and life is lived out in a material world, this pastoral guidance necessarily extends to how we must mould our material life.

However Faleiro’s suggestion is troubling not only because it turns the idea of religion on its head. His suggestion is troubling because it perpetuates other deeply disturbing, though admittedly popular, distinctions. This distinction is between that of the public and the private. One of the reasons for the early continental European separation of Church from the State, was not because these republicans were necessarily averse to Christianity. On the contrary, their public culture continued to echo Western Christian tradition. The separation was necessary because the Church, as a human institution, was closely tied to the feudal order that the bourgeois republicans were seeking to destroy. These liberals also forged the distinction between the public domain and the private. In the private you could continue with your religious (and other traditions), and in the public they cultivated the religion of the State. Feminists for a few decades now have pointed out the problems with this distinction, pointing out that this distinction serves only to blind the eyes of State justice to abuses that go on in realms that are marked out as private. Just as there is no distinction between the material and the spiritual therefore, there is no distinction between the public and the private. Echoing the phrase ‘the personal is political’, popularized by the feminists in this context, will make the overlap between Faleiro’s suggestion and this larger ‘secular’ tradition strikingly clear. [As an aside, I should mention that this proximity between the spiritual and the feminist argument should make some in the clerical hierarchy sit up, take off their bigoted blinkers, take notice, and start thinking!]

One of the reasons I seek to articulate this critique, is because this separation that is being pushed will have a perilous impact on public life. What it will result in, is the further reduction of religion to ritual. Most of us, already thoroughly secularized in our thinking, even if we consider ourselves devout, understand religion to be ritual. Ritual in religion is however, animated by a spirit that makes meaning of it all. When that spirit is divorced, ritual is emptied out, becoming what secularists and atheists hold it to be ‘empty ritual’. The danger of empty religious ritual is that it becomes a kind of a communal marker that is then pandered to, building up the foundations of communal tensions in multicultural societies. Shorn of the mystical element that gives it meaning, and in fact allows us to transcend narrow social markers, ritual becomes the basis for marking difference. We can already see this operating in the Indian polity. ‘Hinduism’ is emptied out of the ethical values it contains to become Hindutva, an empty shell of symbols and rituals that are believed to represent a community. Islam is similarly emptied of its ethical values to become the political agenda of the jihadi. Similarly Christianity. The State panders to these symbols, only exacerbating the problem, when in fact the ethical practitioners of these faith traditions would, in daily life, normally transcend these barriers.

This particular suggestion that Faleiro makes therefore, has multiple problems for which it must be firmly ignored. The larger point however, is of the problem with this binary ‘secular’ logic; that has more followers than just Mr. Faleiro. It is a logic that is so built of partitions that it fails to allow us to lead holistic lives where we can see the connections between each other. It is a logic that builds solutions on partitions, rather than transcending the divisions that are created or may exist. If the feminists suggested so many decades ago that the personal is political, may I now suggest that indeed, the material is mystical?

(Published in the Gomantak Times, 29 Oct 2009)

Closing the Doors to Democracy, Opening them to Tyranny: Responding to the Thomas-Faleiro Arguments – Part 2

In the initial part of this phased response, I had suggested that the Thomas-Faleiro argument represented both an opening up and a closure. The argument operates to prise open domains, currently under the traditional leadership of the Catholic communities, to the State. In this concluding portion of the response, I would like to suggest that the opening up is especially dangerous for the simultaneous closures that such a move would result in.

Allowing us to see this closure as a movement akin to suffocation, we should not forget that the suggestion for a State law regulating Church properties first emerged in the distinctly hostile (towards religious minorities) State of Madhya Pradesh, and Kerala where the Church has a major clout through its moral power in political history.

The initial attempts in these states now seem to have led to a nation-wide attempt to regulate the management of Church assets. This move is dangerous for a number of reasons. First, it repeats the primary mistake of the Indian polity, which is to see people as comprising essentially of monolithic religious groups, Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, Christians. Nothing could be further from the truth, since these communities are fractured by class, caste, language and many other factors. In the case of the Catholics, for sure there is no such thing as a uniform Indian Catholic. In Goa, despite our best beliefs, the Church is in reality fractured along lines of caste, class and language. While the erasure of these differences is necessary if a State is to create a monolithic ‘community’ over which it will legislate a uniform law, this action not only lays the ground for the communalism that this country suffers from, but also for the suppression of marginal and subaltern voices within these ‘communities’. The creation of the monolithic identity, leads to a closing of spaces for internal dissent and reform within these ‘communities’, empowering conservative tendencies within them. Take a look at the Muslims in the country, where progressively over time, the space for internal dissent and reform has been quashed given that conservative clerical groups are recognized as leaders of the community. Within the Catholic faith, it would in fact be the Clerical hierarchy that would see eye-to-eye with the Indian State (and its minions) on the matter of consolidating the community (even as it would oppose any control over its functioning). The former are congenitally blinded to this complex social reality, since they are committed to the spiritual fiction of being one united (and Catholic) Church. And yet this is not social reality, which is marked by numerous dissensions and divisions.

There is without doubt a need for greater transparency and accountability in the management of Church properties. I also agree that this management must be in conformance with Constitutional principles. The issue on which I differ however is that of the means of implementing this agenda. It is precisely because of its colonial heritage that Goa has a social and cultural infrastructure that allows for the radical realization of democracy through decentralization. The Portuguese structured colonial power in Goa through the recognition of the powers of villages to regulate village economies. The Church followed a similar pattern, leading to each village contributing its properties to erect and maintain the village church, establishing a trust, the Fabrica, to control these properties. Like the Communidades however, these Fabricas too were by and large controlled by the gãocars, village elites, often from the dominant families and castes of the village. When one speaks of Church property today therefore, one refers to not just property of the Bishop (as representative head of the Diocese) but properties of a plethora of individual churches who hold these properties as autonomous owners.

Religion is not merely a disciplining of the soul, but a disciplining of material practices as well. The Bishop exerts therefore a disciplining control over these Fabricas and their material transactions. To manage these affairs, the Catholic diocese in Goa has already got in place a management system that allows for decentralized control. This management system is regulated by a written (and published) Code. This Code refers to the provisions of Canon Law and shares in spirit and procedures the form of State Law. We should remember that Canon Law and State Law both have common roots in Roman law and are siblings in many aspects. The bases on which they depart, are the sources of power that ensure their continuity. The power for one is the power of the State, the other that of the Tradition and moral weight of the Catholic Church. A significant feature of the current code that governs the Fabricas is to liberate these bodies from the control that dominant castes in the villages had in the days of the Portuguese. The properties of village churches is now returned to the spirit of early times, and held by the community of the faithful together, represented by the local Parish Council. Nothing could be closer to the spirit of the Constitutional values of equality, accountability and transparency.

As should be obvious by now, a realization of the Thomas-Faleiro formula would ensure a closure at all of the levels above, laying the foundation for greater communalism, encourage conservative leadership, and smooth over the nuances of local history and in this process close the plural legal spaces that exist at the Catholic grass-roots, allowing for vesting of absolute power in the State. Absolute power as we know, corrupts absolutely.

Rather than this route therefore, what we require now is, in the presence of the Code, located within a venerable body of Canon law; the engineering of a grass-roots constitutionalism that will allow members of the parish to demand and realise greater accountability. Grass-roots constitutionalism being the fomenting and realization of Constitutional values within grassroots institutions. In short, while we need a reform of the management of Church properties, we should be clear that it is one that strengthens the laity, not the hierarchy and the State at the expense of laity. To pose again the question asked at the presentation of the Thomas-Faleiro argument, whose property are we saving, and from whom?

There are many of us in Goa who have pledged our strength to the movement for greater decentralization and democratization of power in the State. This battle with the State is necessarily part of one within Society as well. It cannot be therefore, that we argue for greater decentralization on the one hand (an opening up), and argue for centralization (a closure) on the other. Such an argument is logically fallacious, socially disastrous and opens the doors to tyranny of the State.

Thomas and Faleiro would do better to engineer their movement toward a strengthening of, rather than the closure of proto-democratic decentralized spaces that they are attempting. Their actions are in fact the result of out-dated legal understandings of society, designed further the imperial interests of the Indian State (and its beneficiary class) at the risk of doing great damage to the health of the Constitutional experiment that is our Republic. No, the Thomas-Faleiro proposals as they stand are not in the best interest of the average lay Catholic and should be opposed by any sensible mind, Catholic or otherwise.

(Published in the Herald, Opinionated, 4 Sept 2009)

Splitting open the Goose that lays the Golden Eggs: Responding to the Thomas-Faleiro Arguments - I

Some weeks ago, Eduardo Faleiro roped in the former Justice K. T. Thomas to create the context for a demand for State law to supervise management of Church properties. This two part response to what I call the Thomas-Faleiro argument seeks to complicate the uni-dimensional vision of Justice Thomas, suggest the real reasons for their arguments and argue, invoking the idea of legal pluralism, that what we need is not more institutions and law, but an effective spread of grass-roots constitutionalism.

As with any mechanism, there are at least two ways to engage with the law. One is the method of the mechanic. She will be able to repair a machine, but may possibly be hard-pressed to introduce innovations, or contribute to a further evolution of the mechanism. The engineer on the other hand, is able to resolve this latter lack, intervening in the operation of the mechanism to introduce innovations and also predict the kind of impacts that such innovations would possibly have. In the case of the law, this distinction between the mechanic and the engineer is represented through the distinction between the lawyer and the sociologically-sensitive jurist. The argument of the former Justice K. T. Thomas on the need for a law regulating the assets of Christian Churches in India, represents that of the mechanic. It is the view of a mechanic of the law because it looks merely at the dry letter of the law, ill-illumined by an understanding of juristic notions of ‘Law’ as well as socio-legal realities. It is with this recognition that I would like to delve into a response to the Honourable Justice’s thoughts as well as those of the leader of the enterprise, Eduardo Faleiro. (And let us dispense with the fiction that this initiative was led by the AICU)

The thoughts of Justice K. T. Thomas as expressed in the text of his lecture represent both an opening and a closure. The opening that he presents is that for the Indian State. What Thomas and Faleiro seek to do is to extend the power, and the control of the Indian state over properties of the Church. This opening, I will argue, is potentially tyrannical, since it would lead to a closing of democratic spaces of dissent and control, as well as lead to an impoverishment of our notion of what Law, legality and legal spaces mean. In this sense, the closing that the Faleiro-Thomas maneuver represents is the closing of the multiple legal spaces that exist outside of the legal structures of the State, a closing of the democratic option.

Thanks to being educated largely by Statist theories, most of us are under the firm impression that law can be the product only of the State, and that the spaces of law are only those of the judiciary and the legislature. The fact is however, that our social condition is marked not by a legal monism, but by a legal pluralism. Law and legality abound in various social locations, and State law is just one among these legalities. The modern State has however, since its very inception, attempted to snuff out the life of these legal spaces and the legalities that they produce. Justice Thomas is not unaware of this when in discussing the case of the Church, he cites the Canon law that regulates the operation of the Church. There may be problems with this law, in that it tends to be hierarchical and outside of the realm of the common person, but this is not Justice Thomas’ main concern. This is not his concern since State law shares both these features. His intentions as already expressed above, are to get the operation of this law, and the Church, firmly placed under the law and sovereignty of the State.

To justify this extension of the powers of the State, Thomas suggests that no person or institution can be, or should be outside of the jurisdiction of the Constitution of the State. This is a valid point; constitutional values are the values that provide the bed-rock for governing public morality. Social values may choose to conflict with these constitutional values, but in the course of contestation, they must bow to constitutional values. And yet, Thomas, typically for a lawyer, fails to grasp a crucial distinction; that it is Constitutional values that must proliferate through the Republic of India, not necessarily the legal structures of the State. Such a (State) institution heavy approach, in fact subverts the Constitutional project, rather than enhances it.

Entrenched in his belief in State law Thomas suggests that judicial review is the best and only appropriate form of regulation of the use of Church property. This is, to be sure, a rather naïve suggestion, since it is common knowledge, both to social scientists who study the operation of the Indian judicial system, and the lay person, that the Indian judicial system is the in fact the forum of last resort for any party seeking to genuinely resolve a dispute. The Indian judicial system is in fact a forum utilized primarily by the ‘men with long pockets’; to maintain the status quo, to harass one’s opponent, and delay the eventual resolution of the dispute. In addition, we should recognize that disputes within the Church’s bodies, can already be taken up in a Court of law.

In support of his argument, Thomas refers to the Waqf Act where Muslim charitable properties are monitored by a Government appointed committee. A comparative anecdote in this regards would help us understand the situation a little more clearly. Some time last year, the Goan Muslim community was approached with the suggestion that they too adopt the Waqf (Islamic trust) model for properties held by their religious institutions. The suggestion was stiffly contested, and not only because the managers of these properties wanted to appropriate funds for themselves. On the contrary, there was once more the similar fear expressed of what would giving control to the Government mean for both the community and the institutions? This fear was, in my opinion, well placed. If the Government appoints persons to monitor the operation of Church or Waqf properties, what sort of people would it appoint? Experience suggests that they would appoint those members of the community who are willing to play ball with the political elites that control the Government. What these institutions do therefore, is to extend the power of political elites (like Faleiro and Thomas) over a ‘community’ and their properties. In the case of Goa, the implications of such a capture of power are more than obvious. Real-estate development has already become the primary economic resource for political elites in Goa. Where Church properties are being misappropriated today, the misappropriation in most cases is more diffused. Centralising control, as suggested by Thomas-Faleiro would allow for larger players to benefit, and cut out the small players who currently benefit, if at all. Are Thomas-Faleiro proposing a case of jumping ‘from the frying pan into the fire’?

More crucially though, to return to the idea with which I began this response, and to conclude this portion of the response, the suggestion to place Church properties under Governmental control represents not merely an opening up, but a prising open.. The Thomas-Faleiro argument is no well-intentioned selfless argument for the good of all concerned. It is the attempt of ‘secular’ elites firmly entwined with the State, attempting to break the control and power of the traditional elite within the Catholic Church and bring the Catholic community firmly under the imperial umbrella of the Indian State. Internal sovereignty has no other meaning other than this, the destruction of pluralism, in favour of the total control by the State. Further, it is not insignificant fact that both Faleiro and Thomas belong to this imperial national elite. In the following portion of this response, I will argue in what manner this prising-open for the State in fact represents an anti-democratic, totalitarian tendency, leading to the closure of pluralism in State and society.

(Published in the Herald, Opinionated, 3 Sep 2009)

Follow Part II of the essay on http://dervishnotes.blogspot.com/2009/09/closing-doors-to-democracy-opening-them.html