EVENTS

A manifestation of social reaction

The Vishwa Hindu Parishad's challenge to Pope John Paul II's visit is a case of social reaction rising up in opposition to conservatism.

SUKUMAR MURALIDHARAN
in New Delhi

THE visit of the Roman Catholic pontiff to India was an occasion for the saffron brotherhood to assert its claim to prominence as the principal vehicle for the articulation of an entire religious community's aspirations. But the propagandist effort to drum up a modicum of popular endorsement simply failed to get off the ground. As the extremist fringe rapidly faded away from public attention, a new strain of moderate mendicancy in the service of Hindutva came to the fore.

The run-up to the papal visit saw a proliferation of bodies constituted with the specific charter of defending the Hindu faith. Among them was the Dharma Rakshana Sammelan, which managed to recruit a number of individuals of middling eminence to its cause, to endorse a statement decrying the "evangelisation of Asia". That this body managed to put out a number of advertisements in prime spots in the national print media pointed to a high level of motivation and financial sustenance from quarters yet unknown.

The Dharma Rakshana Sammelan may not have matched the crudity of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad's Giriraj Kishore, who denounced the Pope's arrival in India as something akin to a burglar's forced entry. But its hand-wringing expressions of anguish at continuing religious conversions under the aegis of the Church certainly did not seem any better conceived. Religious conversion, it argued, "is violence, pure and simple, particularly against the Hindu faith, which does not believe in conversion".

As a claim, this is quite remote from reality. The VHP, which it may be safely assumed, is the principal sponsor of the media advertisement which greeted the Pope in India, proudly declares its numerical achievements in conversions (or re-conversions as it is called, since every faith practised in India is considered alien to the original Hindu identity) in its annual publications. Further, religion is a personal choice and it is for those levelling the charge of violence to prove the fact of coercion or some form of illicit allurement to make it stick. Rather than the axiomatic violence of conversion, what is today evident is the surpassing brutality of the VHP's campaign to check the activities of Christian missionaries in India.

The right to practise, preach and propagate one's religion is guaranteed by the Constitution. There has been a ruling by the Supreme Court that conversions go beyond any legitimate construal of the term "propagation". But this is an ambiguous ruling. If restraints are to be imposed on these activities - whether of a legal or purely administrative nature - then the principle of symmetric treatment would necessitate similar curbs on the activities of the various godmen, spiritual healers and mystics that the country abounds in. Such powers, if institutionalised, could conceivably lead to a massive assault on fundamental freedoms.

Further, if there are grounds for legitimate grievances at the activities of Christian preachers, redress is available through legal processes. The Indian Penal Code has fairly strong provisions to deal with cases of offence to religious sentiments. Neither the VHP nor any of its affiliates will even consider this recourse for reasons which are fairly transparent - if the provisions of law are invoked against a minority community, there is equal if not greater reason to use them against the majority.

ANOTHER of the Sammelan's claims, about Mahatma Gandhi's opposition to religious conversions, is historically accurate. But what it fails to take cognizance of is the Mahatma's consistently expressed disdain for the activities that would today go under the name of "reconversion". The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi abound with deprecatory references to Shuddhi and Sanghatan - which were Hindu communalism's effort to win back Muslims and Christians to what they construed as the true national faith.

S. ARNEJA
Pope John Paul II paying homage at Rajghat, the samadhi of Mahatma Gandhi.

Much has been made, again, about the Christian missionaries' supposed tendency to run down the basic tenets of Hinduism as part of their effort to win souls over to their faith. This overlooks the historical fact that the challenge to Hindu beliefs has more often come from within its own ranks. As part of their ideological challenge to the caste system, great social reformers like Jyotiba Phule and B.R. Ambedkar frequently used the most derogatory terms in reference to the Hindu pantheon. But as Gandhi recognised, this was not a challenge that could not be met by responding in kind, but by confronting the iniquities of the system that provided a breeding ground for these resentments.

The VHP campaign finally is a manifestation of social reaction. Its fundamental procedure could be characterised in recently coined political terminology as one of "stigmatisation and emulation". A threat perception from an alien cultural influence is first fostered in the minds of the target population, who are then reclaimed by the supposedly indigenous religion through methods that in others' hands were decried as a mortal danger to the national culture.

Ever since it was founded in 1964, the VHP's strategy has been premised upon the emulation of the methods of medieval religious proselytisation. At its founding conference it was entrusted the tasks of "consolidation and strengthening of Hindu society", the "protection and dissemination of Hindu spiritual and ethical values" and the "establishment of links among Hindus living in different countries". The proposed method was to create an ecclesiastical order, complete with its own liturgy, scripture and institutional hierarchy. Individual priests manning shrines across the country were to be coopted into a network of VHP sponsorship. In another conscious reversion to the medieval model of religious organisations, VHP activists were designed as the lay order which would impart the necessary momentum for social consolidation along religious lines.

SINCE assuming the papacy in 1978, John Paul II has exerted a powerful political influence across the globe. A book which comes to the market on the tenth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, complete with heavy recommendations from America's arch-conservative Heritage Foundation, names him as one of six "heroes" who changed the course of the world through the years of the Cold War. The book allegedly "shatters the perception that the Soviet Union collapsed either by accident or from its own internal problems". Instead, it documents the exertions of the six heroic individuals - among them Ronald Reagan, Winston Churchill and Harry Truman - that contributed to this very happy denouement.

Yet paradoxically, John Paul II is also credited in some quarters with having depoliticised the Church. His memorable visit to Latin America in 1983, for instance, is best remembered for having turned the clock back on evolving notions of an activist Church. Paul VI's 1967 encyclical "Popularum Progressio" had laid out the circumstances in which the Church could act in support and sustenance of popular rebellions against oppression. Following this, the Latin American Bishops Conference at Medellin, Colombia, in 1968, had imparted a strong momentum to the principles and practice of Liberation Theology.

John Paul II firmly shut the door on Liberation Theology, confining his agenda to raising the profile of the Church within civil society. His notion of evangelisation is conservative and dogmatic. For political structures that are aligned with the forces that today dominate the global economy, it is palpably an unthreatening notion. The VHP's challenge to the Pope's visit, in this sense, is a case of social reaction rising up in opposition to conservatism. Being devoid of a marked ideological polarity, it is a challenge that was always unlikely to gain significant momentum.