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)

Learnings from the Peoples’ Tribunal: Common Property, Communidades, Temples and Churches

A critique leveled against this column last week, when it entered into the debate on the ‘Political Economy of the Church’ was that it ignored the issue of the lands and properties controlled by the temple committees in the State. It was pointed out, that the temple committee’s in the State are like the Church, also custodians of vast properties, that are effectively held privately, under the ridiculous proposition that they are private temples, and hence in that sense family properties.

To respond to this issue, we need to address a fundamental myth about communal institutions in Goa, be they the Communidades or the Temple Trusts in the State. Since perspective, or the position from which we understand the issue, is also important, let us adopt the perspective of those who are edged out of the whole equation, be it Communidade or Temple; the tribal communities of Goa.

In the course of the recently held Peoples’ Tribunal for the Restoration of Tribal Homelands, the institution of the Communidade emerged as a major location of conflict with regard to the livelihood rights of the tribal groups of Goa. In a large number of cases before the tribunal, it turned out that despite have Portuguese-era documents that attested to their rights in the land, the names of tribals in possession of, and husbanding properties, were not present in the Survey Records dating from the 1960s (that is under the Indian dispensation). In some cases, illiteracy has resulted in some people having no documents at all to prove their presence on the land. The result is that they are by and large unable to avail of any government service related to the land, since they have to get a No Objection Certificate (NOC) from the Communidade office. The Communidade in most places (both New Conquests and Old Conquests, and the majority of the stories came from the New Conquests) is run by dominant caste groups, who either dissuade them from pursuing the matter, or tell them to buzz off. In any case, the Communidade officials do not cooperate with the tribals to establish the fact that they have in fact been tenants of the Communidade, and are thus entitled to the rights that come with such a fact. As a result, when these Communidade lands are sold by the Communidade or acquired by the State, the tribal communities who are either wholly or substantially dependent on land have no stake in the process or benefit from the sale.

The case of temple properties is somewhat similar. The temples are claimed as family temples by a handful of upper-caste groups and vast properties cornered by these groups, while the tribals, to whom the deity originally belonged and who tend the properties of the temple, are reduced to persons who are merely tolerated. Once more rights are denied in pretty much the same way as in the case of the Communidades.

How did this situation come to be? The situation it should be noted is universal. In almost every society that makes a transition – through colonialism – to a capitalist society with written rules, the less resourceful groups get pushed out. They get pushed out because the colonizer does not speak with them to ascertain their rights in the whole process. It is the dominant group that represents the working of the social system and the rights of various groups. In this process, they either outrightly exclude marginal groups, or underplay the rights that they had in the working of the system.

In Goa thus far we have been treated to the myth that the communidades are composed of gãocars who are members of the ‘founding families’ of the village. This story should hold as much water in today’s world as the idea of ‘old families’. All families are as old as the other, what we mean when we say ‘old family’ is that the family has been powerful for a long time. Similarly ‘founding families’ are those clans/ caste groups who were dominant in the village at the time. The rest of the village groups, were subservient to these dominant groups, but definitely not without traditional rights. It was these rights that got excluded at the time of the framing of the Foral of Afonso Mexia in the early 1500’s and formed the basis of the Communidade system.

Much later in time, the Portuguese realised the need to regulate the Temples and formulated the Lei de Mazanias. Once more, upper caste groups were able to take control of the process and through relying on the already established myth of ‘founding families’, and the fact that they were literate and able to manipulate records, argue that the temples (and their properties) were family temples.

The release from Portuguese rule should have ideally led to a release from the mistakes of the Portuguese (feudal) past into the socialistic future we were promised. However this was not to be. As mentioned above, the Survey of the 1960’s has in fact made life even more difficult for Goa’s tribal groups, since their Portuguese era land documents, held valid under the Portuguese are no longer recognized by judicial authorities. Even worse, the possibly liberative recognition by the Portuguese State embodied in the Code of the Communidades, that the village lands were not owned by the State, but were the property of the village, was not recognized by the Indian State. Liberation from the point of view of the Goan tribal then, has yet to come.

What is the solution to this problem? Tribal activists argue that the answer lies in the recognition of their right of private property over the lands that they were tenants to, or rely on. My personal position stems from a recognition of the situation that in fact existed prior to the Portuguese arrival, a system that was de facto in place over large parts of Goa, until the capitalist expansion began hardly 3 decades ago. There can be no private ownership of land. Land does not exist to be owned. Land is the property of the village in which every member of the village (gãocar or not) has an equal right to benefit from. Land unused by a family, returns to the village pool, to be re-allotted elsewhere. This is not a utopian system, it exists in the North-east protected under the very same Special Status provisions of the Indian Constitution that are desired by some for Goa.

This argument is NOT an argument against private property. It is an argument in favour of a tendency toward equal access to land, and against the notion of ownership of land, while respecting the right to occupy land. It is also an argument that privileges democratic control over resources (like land) that are already seen as common property.

To return to the issue of the Church and property, we must recognize that the contemporary Church has taken some steps toward democratizing the operation of local Churches, and access to its resources. Caste based confraternities and fabricas have been done away with, at least on paper, and the operation of the local Church opened up to all caste groups. What is required now is to push for these on-paper-reforms to be equitably enforced (without animosity to formerly dominant caste-groups). This is an example that Goan temples riven with inter-caste disputes would do well to adopt.

Under this circumstance, it does not appear as if greater governmental control will resolve anything. What is required is for either effecting changes in governance structure to make the institution more representative of village communities. And subsequently ensure that these institutional changes don’t remain on paper. This task requires a social movement not governmental control. If anything, we know that putting our faith in the government will result in more sale of common property for dubious ‘public purpose’ schemes.

(Published in the Gomantak Times 17th June 2009)

Church and Property: Locating the appropriate forum for debates

Starting in the Herald and spilling into the internet, a debate has been raging since the past couple of weeks on the issue of the ownership of land by the Church and issue of its accountability.

The issue is fairly straightforward, one with which there can be no real and material disagreement. The Church (the aggregate of individual parishes) is the owner of vast tracts of property in Goa, properties which, like that of Conego Souto Maior in Caranzalem (Taleigao) have been sold to real-estate developers, when in fact these properties were entrusted for the welfare of churches and chapels and the communities that benefited from this. How is one to create a climate of accountability within the Church, such that there can be transparent dealing in the Fabricas and Parish Councils in the diocese of Goa, and how can we prevent this land from being illegitimately alienated at the negative cost of the parishioners across the diocese of Goa.

The location of the debate, in the secular public space, provides for us an interesting starting point to contemplate the issue and examine the possible problems that emerge from such a space.

To begin with, it is significant that this debate is actually taking place in the secular public space. One would not find such a debate among say the Muslim communities in India taking place in public. If there were such a debate it would happen within the closed doors of the community’s discussion spaces. A perfect example would be the issue of women and veiling and their other rights. Muslim groups will very often say, that this is an internal matter, and indeed every effort it made to contain external discussion. That such a discussion about the Church is happening where it is therefore, is possibly indicative of a certain confidence that the Goan Catholic enjoys in his own centrality in the Goan universe. No place for the insecurity of the Indian Muslim for the Goan Catholic. This confidence however, is not perhaps one shared by other Catholic groups in India, the Mangalorean Catholic, or the Catholic communities in north India.

This self-confidence however is one that needs to be checked, given that the ‘dominance’ of the Goan Catholic, is really one of self-perception alone, devoid of any material basis for it. On the contrary, the growing majoritarianism both in Goa and the rest of India, would persuade us to be more circumspect in the manner in which we hold up institutions such as the Church, for review.

This is not to say that there is no cause for debate. There is indeed, and without doubt. The question is where is one to have it, or how, and why has this debate spilled into the secular public space. Some blame for this could definitely be laid at the door of the Church. Its monthly magazine Renovacão is largely perceived to be closed to matters that the hierarchy of the Church would not like to debate. Personal experience has also indicated that social groups –largely Catholic – that wished to debate this issue with the Archbishop received no response. In the absence then of an ‘internal’ space to debate and dialogue, where are the disgruntled to go but the secular public space?

In India however, the secular public space, is very often the site where the ambitions of the nationalist project highjack the genuine need for debate within a community. Take once again the example of the case of Muslim women. Once the debate reaches the secular public space, the debate quickly becomes one of saving Muslim women from Muslim men. A genuine concern for Muslim women being abandoned for the larger interest of ‘disciplining’ the Muslim man into being more ‘Indian’. The fact that veiling may not be the most pressing issue for Muslim women, or indeed their own priorities hardly figure in these debates.

When examining this debate regarding the ‘Political economy’ of the Church in Goa, one should examine the ideological location of those who have initiated this location. Does the mere fact of their bearing a Christian name shield them from operating as nationalists? From a quick review of the debate, it appears that those who initiated and sustained the debate, see the Church primarily as a hierarchical institution. What they don’t seem to see is the Church as a social institution; and this is perhaps because they stand outside of this institution in many respects.

Another possible reason, for what may be an analytical error, is a unreflexive replication of European models of understanding society. The strong tradition of anti-clericalism was popular in Portuguese-India as well. In Europe, and Portuguese-India, it may have had a place, given the nature of Church-State relations. However in the colonial context, and especially in post colonial times that this understanding of the Church blinds us to complex realities. The Church in the colony, is more than the hierarchy, it is in fact the social safety-net (the social world) for a large number of Catholics in Goa. Pull apart the structure of the Catholic Church in Goa, and a good number of Goan Catholics would flounder, given the absence of other institutions that knit disparate groups into a society. Impetuous and ill-conceived attacks on the Church could therefore, actually result in greater harm to the average Catholic, than the accountability that this debate seeks to engineer. The question then arises, do these initiators of the debate seek a disciplining of the hierarchical Church, or more accountable social systems operating for the greater good of the people? Are they working for a system in which they will cooperate and exist, or merely see it as the disciplining of a public institution? The question is directed not at the active consciousness of these individuals, but at their unconscious, where they are merely acting out their parts in a larger social project, i.e. nationalist consolidation of society.

Conducting debates such as that of the relationship between Church and property in a society fraught with other tensions is not easy. The answer does not lie in pushing the discussion entirely within the realm of the community, since this is the perfect way for the debate to be quashed, and dissidents silenced. Discussing these issues, and engaging in mud-slinging (as is the wont in any debate in Goa) is not the answer either, given that it leaves the field even more open to capture. The way forward therefore seems to be in the initiation of genuine discussion and debate initiated (no seized, and immediately) by the hierarchy of the diocese toward a resolution of a problem, that in truth has been kept of the back-burner for way too long.

(Published in the Gomantak Times 10 June 2009)