Minority Report: Strategies for secular survival in a majoritarian world

For some time now, a group known as the Catholic-Christian Secular Forum (CSF) has, ironically enough, been a matter of concern for some Indian Catholics who see themselves as secular. The reasons for this concern are numerous and this column does not intend to discuss the problems that the CSF poses; there will be plenty of time for that, especially since the CSF does not look like it is going away. While flagging the CSF as a concern for Indian Catholics committed to crafting a secular society in the face of rising religious extremism in the country, this column will only highlight that one of the central problems with the CSF lies in the manner in which it seeks to build up the idea of the Church in India being a persecuted church.

There can be no doubt that like the Muslim communities in India, Christians too are being persecuted by segments of both State and society. However, while this may be a problem, it is not the full picture, and we need to bear this fact in mind, as we combat, and combat stiffly, this persecution. The problem with the CSF lies in the fact that, just like segments of Muslims and Hindus in the country, they seek to create a minority complex among Christians in India. Nothing can be more detrimental to the creation of a secular spirit than the creation of a minority complex, since this complex engenders a siege mentality within the group. Once cultivated sufficiently, we are unable to see social relations except in terms of ‘us’ versus ‘them’. Every action is read as being an action of ‘them’ against ‘us’. Most importantly, the creation of this siege mentality ensures that internal questions of democratic reform are suffocated to allow the dominant forces within these groups to run the show without brooking any argument.

To this extent then, Fr. Thomas Sequeira, who recently stepped down as the deputy secretary general of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India (CBCI) had it right when he is reported to have said that Christians in India should not entertain a minority complex. Unfortunately however, after this sage bit of advice his argument seems to have capsized into the sea of majoritarianism that constitutes the dominant political thought in our country today. Fr. Sequeira went on to suggest that while the Christians should not entertain a minority complex, but they should nevertheless “consider their minority status as an invitation to join the majority community for the nation building.”

Let us exclude for the moment the fact that the word ‘nation’ has a specific history and meaning, and assume that what Fr. Sequeira did in fact mean, was ‘country-building’. Indeed, in other parts of the interview Fr. Sequeira uses the word country, in the same context as he earlier used ‘nation’. Even if we exclude this possibility, we are still left with the problematic equation that Fr. Sequeira has drawn up, one in which the relationship is between one minority, the Christians, and one majority, the Hindus. Erased completely from this equation are the other groups outside of Hinduism, such as the heterogeneous Muslim communities, as well as the minorities within Hinduism.

This formulation of the equation unfortunately, may not be the result of a minor error. On the contrary it is reflective of a larger position within the tendency of the leadership of the Catholic Church in India to see itself. It sees itself as largely in conversation with the Hindu majority, the Muslim (and other) groups either falling as a second-rate priority or none at all. We need merely look at the manner in which Fr. Sequeira reportedly illustrated the argument he was making. He suggested that his native state of Goa was a good example to show how people in villages, and especially in the panchayats, think beyond religious consideration to work together for the common good, resolving issues of electricity, water and urbanization. Given the manner in which in a number of cases Muslim communities in Goa have been targeted by panchayats, it is difficult to believe that Fr. Sequeira was thinking of the happy interaction between all kinds of Goans, and not just Catholics and Hindus in happy dialogue.

An interaction with those Catholic religious engaged in dialogue with Muslim communities in India, will reveal the kind of frustration that they experience as a result of a failure to find any support from their religious communities. As it turns out, a good number of Catholics (religious and lay alike) do in fact see the Muslims as a part of the problem, rather than as victims of a complex problem. Allow me to suggest that the reasons they may see the Muslims as the problem, is not only because of the upper-caste positions that the hierarchy  and lay-leaders of the Church often adopt, if not actually being drawn from these caste locations, but also as a result of the uncritical adoption of Indian nationalist rhetoric.

One such possible example can be gleaned from the article reporting Fr. Sequeira’s observations. The article reported that Fr. Sequeira suggested that Christians have to work to remove the perception among certain sections of Indians that the Church indulges in conversion works. His suggestion was that what the Church was in fact engaged in was an attempt “to strengthen our country.” Fr. Sequeira is not wrong in making this suggestion. Owing to developments in missiology since the early twentieth century, there has been a genuine attempt by the Catholic Church to engage not merely in conversion, but in standing witness to Christ by ameliorating the condition of those in need of aid. Thus in the words of Pierre Charles S.J., one of the foundational missiologists of our time “you may entertain the secret hope that your educational effort may produce religious results, but you should not make that hope the primary motive of your enterprise...” To do so, Fr. Charles suggested, would leave the missionary in a morally rather unpleasant position.

 

This could be what Fr. Sequeira was referring to when he refers to the work of the Church in India as developmental, and not as conversion work. However, at the end of the day, we must recognize that the Church is founded on carrying the faith to others and thus welcomes (after due diligence and examination) persons into its flock. Thus while the church may be engaged in strengthening the country, its premise must continue to be hoping for gains to its cult. To skirt around this issue is to agree to the Indian nationalist position, built on Hindu minoritarianism, that conversions are unacceptable, as they pose a threat to nationalism and the majoritarian idea of the Indian community imagined as ideally Hindu.

Fr. Sequeira however emphasized that “[R]ecent cases of Christian persecutions have not discouraged the Church to carry on with its work among the poor and the deprived” suggesting therefore, that the Church embraces persecution, rather than shies from it. If such be the case then, it would behove the CSF and other Christian groups to understand that the persecution that various minority groups in India are witness to is not reason to retreat into minoritarianism, but on the contrary a reason to expand into the realms of the secular, contesting the right of a majority to dictate terms in a democracy.

(A version of this post was first published in the Gomantak Times  20 June 2012)

Post Christian dilemmas: Looking Christ talking Caesar

On the fourth of February, the Archbishop Emeritus Raul Gonsalves released a book authored by Fr. Desmond de Souza on the social teachings of the Church. Titled ‘The Concerned Face of the Church’, the Catholic Association of Goa, under whose aegis the book was released, invited John Dayal, a nationally recognized Catholic activist to deliver the key-note address. Dayal began his address by pointing to a rather disturbing observation. He pointed out that the Catholic Church in India has educated a number of Indians, rich and poor, contributing immensely to the rising of this nation. However, when Christian religious are murdered, raped and harassed, when Christians are attacked and their property destroyed, one does not hear a single voice of protest from any of these non-Catholic educated. Perhaps Dayal overstated him case while making this broad claim. Surely there has been at least one, if not a handful of Hindu voices that have joined their voice to the chorus of Christian protests. There was an element of an ‘Us’ vs. ‘Them’ through the course of Dayal’s address that was deeply problematic, bordering on what some would call communal. However, if one does not make the broad sweep that Dayal did, but look at the issue more broadly, he does have a point. Why is it that it is the very people who have been educated by educational institutions of the Church are very often the ones instigating hatred for the Indian non-Hindu?

Dayal had an answer for this dilemma, and his answer credited the fact that we, ‘the Church’, were seen by these recipients of Christian caritas as service-providers. In the minds of the vast majority of this country, non-Catholic and Catholic, these Christian educational institutions were seen merely as service-providers. The recipients of Catholic education had received education yes, but they had also paid a fee for their education; the debt, as they saw it therefore, was discharged. Connecting with the theme of the book that was being released, the social teachings of the Church; in his analysis of the problem, Dayal argued that we ought to take the Christian understanding of the word service more seriously. Christian service was not merely a commodity that was up for sale, but an overflowing of caritas, a virtue that combined love and charity, a sentiment that he argued was uniquely Christian.

There were a couple of things however that Dayal did not do in his analysis of a genuine problem. First, he did not question the complicity that the Catholic Church in India has developed with nationalism. Much Catholic education is equally twined with the cause of making India the nation great, rather than focusing solely on developing the spiritual character of the student. As Christ told us so many millennia ago, one cannot serve both Caesar and God. In the moment of truth, one has to choose between the two. Secondly, Dayal did not ask the caste question. He did not ask how the fact that the overwhelming majority of students of Christian educational institutions are in fact persons from upper/ dominant caste groups, and how these people have a sense of entitlement impacts on the situation. They see themselves as natural leaders, born to rule the nation, and as such expect to be catered to. This is their right. This column will not explore the second question; it has expended much space on this question, and thus will look at the first.

Addressing the first question requires us to return to take a look at some of the other persons who spoke at the release of the book. The voice the author, Fr. de Souza, in particular stood out. Fr. de Souza indicated that for a long time the teachings of Christ discordant with the status-quo were torn off from the teachings of the Church and cast into a waste-bin. From this waste-bin they were found by Karl Marx and reintroduced into the world as an emancipatory agenda for the masses. If the Church can be held guilty of having abandoned one facet of the teachings of Christ, then the Marxists were guilty of ignoring the other facet, that which stayed in the books. After the II Vatican Council, there was in some quarters an unhealthy over-dependence on these Marxian principles to interpret the Christian mission. It was this imbalance that could be credited with having robbed the Christian service of the element of mission.

There is another link with this story however that must be told, and this is the manner in which the understanding of mission itself had changed for some time before the II Vatican Council. Moving away from the more orthodox view that the Christian mission was about the conversion of souls; inspired by the work of Gustav Warneck a Protestant theologian, the Church adopted the plantio principle. This principle understood "Christian Mission" to mean "the totality of an action which is aimed at planting and organizing the Christian Church among non-Christians." In addition, this principle called for 'a systematic spreading of the visible Church through deep-rooted measures which would lead to the emergence of local clergies and hierarchies in the Missions'. For most of the Anglo-American and German Protestant mission theoreticians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the goal of the Mission therefore was the establishment of independent local Churches. The stress therefore was not on the catechumenate, but rather activities which would lead to the organization of an indigenous clergy, a task which would not be thought of without education and the school.

Catholicism’s own foray into this principle came via the efforts of Fr. Pierre Charles S.J. who pointed out that 'One may reply that because the goal of the mission is to convert pagans, we establish schools in order to bring about conversion and to entice to our missionary enterprise those who would otherwise not come to us and listen to us in our churches. But this answer would rather be grotesque. The goal of the mission is not only to convert the unbelievers; it is also to sustain and ameliorate the converts....If you teach arithmetic, it is your duty to make sure that your pupils also comprehend [and utilize] it; otherwise do not teach it....The religious objective simply disappears and is superseded by a humanitarian goal. You may entertain the secret hope that your educational effort may produce religious results, but you should not make that hope the primary motive of your enterprise...'

Caught up in the anti-colonialist and nationalist fervor of those times, these efforts received Papal blessing even before the II Vatican Council. As we can see however, both from the quote from Fr. Charles as well as from Dayal’s reflections, the religious objective of mission (that is not merely restricted to conversion, but Christian witnessing) came to be superseded by the humanitarian goal, that in turn, with the materialist emphasis since the Vatican Council has been cannibalized by the human goal, namely nationalism. Inspired by such ideas, the works of great Catholic educationists in India, such as Fr. Heras S.J., was to produce not just good souls, but great Indians. Indeed the Xavier’s College in Bombay was indeed the location of nationalist struggle as the efforts of these priests worked to convince Goan students then of their Indian, not Portuguese identity (which is not to suggest that their Portuguese identity was any more real than their sub-continental one).

In sum, the problem that Dr. Dayal raised must seriously address fundamental questions that get occluded when we uncritically embrace the more materialist interpretations of the social teachings of the Church. In the face of aggressive nationalism these questions may not be easy to address, but we stand the greater risk of falling into uncritical minoritarianism if we fail in this regard.

(Most of the quotations in this text are from  Omenka, Nicholas Ibeawuchi. 1989. The School in the Service of Evangelization: The Catholic Educational Impact in Eastern Nigeria, 1886-1950. BRILL.)

(A version of this post was first published on the Gomantak Times dtd 8 Feb 2012)