Two of my favourite characters in contemporary political life are Sonia
Gandhi and Jyoti Basu. I have never known two greater hypocrites in my
life. I do not know Soniaji. Nor do I know what her religion is. All I know
is that she was born of Italian parents who are practising Catholics. From
that I presume that Sonia is also a Catholic and if she remains a
practicing Catholic, I will have the highest regard for her. I would
respect her all the more if she regularly attends Sunday mass and takes her
communion. And it might even improve her spiritual rating if she
occasionally does some confession.
I would any day respect more an honest practicing Christian than a
hypocritical Hindu. There should be no hypocrisy in our political life as
there should be none of it in our daily life. That is why I deeply resent
Sonia's going to Tirupati to visit the Balaji temple. One should not treat
Balaji as a tourist attraction. His image is not there to be gawked at by
Sonia to show how secular she is. If this is a vote-catching gimmick, I can
only say it is a despicable one.
Sonia has fallen in my estimation. There have been quite a few notable
nationalist Christians in India of impeccable credentials and nobody
expected them to visit Balaji or to go to Vishwanath temple in Benaras to
prove their credentials. I can think of one of them close to my own family,
Joachim Alva, who was Uncle Joachim to us. His nationalism was above
questioning (though, to put the record straight, it was not popular with
his co-religionists of the time, but let that go). Nobody ever expected him
to visit temples to prove what a true nationalist he was. And he was one of
the finest nationalist Christians that I know of, as was his wife Violet.
My earnest request to Sonia therefore is: stay away from temples. Let the
pagan Hindus go there. Don't get converted, remain a good Christian. And
stop fooling. I will any day vote for you if you are a Christian. I will
not vote for you if you resort to gimmicks.
Having said that, let me quote the first two paragraphs from an article in
the Calcutta-based The Statesman, which is a sworn enemy of the Bharatiya
Janata Party (BJP). The article appears on the editorial page (January 30)
and its author is Saubhik Chakrabarti, an assistant editor of the paper, so
therefore, quite respectable. Chakrabarti writes: "Some years back, in
Dahanu, Maharashtra, there was a controversy over the activities of
Christian missionaries. Certain political parties propounded the theory
that the local church was the avante garde of a conspiracy hatched in the
West. After Dangs, Suratkal and Nasik, it would be natural to assume that
politicians who raised the bogey of dastardly Western designs in Dahanu
came from the Hindu Right. Apologies for breaking this comfortable
assumption – the guilty were the secular Left. Some days back lumpen
elements answering to a certain political allegiance burnt a woman alive.
After Manoharpur, Orissa, one may be tempted to think of the Bajrang Dal.
Apologies again – the brutal reprisal in 24 South Parganas, West Bengal,
was carried out by CPI goons."
The goons, no doubt with the blessings of secular comrade Jyoti Basu, burnt
a woman alive. Was there so much as a look from our secular English media?
Were there angry editorials condemning the burning in broad daylight? Did
Communist comrades rush to the miserable woman's help? After all, she was
only a woman, wasn't she? And fair game for goons belonging to Basu's
party.
I don't remember Basu expressing his outrage over the incident. Nor do I
remember any protests from anyone. Not from our good President, not from
our kind prime minister, not from our noble bishops. Home Minister L K
Advani did not apologise for what happened in West Bengal. And,
importantly, nobody criticised the Central Government either. And nobody
fasted.
The story did not merit even a paragraph on the front page. So much for the
humanism of the English press. There were no photographs in the English
press; nobody interviewed the woman's relatives. The story died on the
vine. The foreign press couldn't care less. So what's new?
I don't want to refer here to the hundreds of people killed by Communist
Party of India (Marxist) cadres not only during their earlier Naxal avatar,
but even in the last two or three years in Bihar. Talking about them would
be raking past history. And who cares? After all, CPM cadres only kill
obdurate landlords, don't they? What if they are killed most brutally? What
is wrong with that?
The Revolution sanctions killing, doesn't it? B T Ranadive is no longer
around. He would have been the best man to answer the question. As we all
know – and we don't even have to read the history of the Soviet Union –
killing is perfectly in order in communist theology.
Our sense of outrage is very selective.
Or ponder over the following statements. "Protestant evangelists are wolves
who seek to prey upon the fold." Who made this statement? Some Vishwa Hindu
Parishad (VHP) character? Or the Shankaracharya of Sringeri math? Or was it
Dara Singh?
Sorry, they were uttered by Pope John Paul II in Brazil and Mexico
respectively. The Pope did not want a Protestant Christian sect to encroach
on his spiritual territory. That is sacrilege. But it is only for a
Protestant sect to encroach upon tribal religion. That is spreading the
'good word'.
Some people have an excellent sense of humour.
All this is not to suggest that what happened in Orissa is excusable. It is
not. It can never be. It deserves to be condemned in the strongest possible
terms. And when Dara Singh is arrested, let him be torn limb by limb and
thrown to the wolves. He is a common murderer and worse, he has brought
shame upon all Hindus.
We do not need either to compare the torching of a missionary and his two
young sons with the torching of a woman in 24 South Parganas. Only, we need
to keep that in mind. Hindus did not torch the missionary. A nitwit did.
And goodness knows, there has been an outpouring of anguish in the English
press. It has been made to seem that all Hindus were responsible for the
killing.
But there has been a condemnation of Hinduism such as one never witnessed
before. Let it be said here and now: Hindus have many shabby things to
answer for, including the treatment of Dalits, widows, unwanted female
babies and a hundred other things. Nobody is holding a brief for those
aspects of Hinduism, which stand self-condemned. But does that justify
conversion?
The nation is evenly divided, if we take into account a Taylor Sofres Mode
survey conducted for The Hindustan Times. The attack against the BJP has
been so vicious that nobody dares defend it. Even my favourite columnist, V
N Narayanan of The Hindustan Times is scared. He writes: "For the umpteenth
time since I began writing this column –55 months ago to be exact –I am
resisting the temptation to be contemporaneous. I see a sinister pattern
and a lot of artificiality in the media's reporting on the current wave of
attacks on Christians and verbal attacks of everybody on the attackers. I
feel like getting worked up and then ennui sets in..." That is the face of
fear. The editor of a leading paper dare not speak his mind, lest he is
accused of being a communalist, fascist and so on.
Our secularists in the English media have much to answer for. By constantly
deriding all those they do not agree with, they have driven people to
extremism.
If anybody can be charged with fathering the Bajrang Dal, credit must go to
the Congress and CPM and our eloquent band of secularists with their hate
campaign. No hell is too hot for them.
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M V Kamath, veteran journalist, takes on all corners
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