Some years ago, the Catholic Bishops Conference of India decided to observe the Sunday following the Independence Day of our country (August 15), as ‘Justice Sunday.’That was certainly a significant decision. In the past, Justice Sunday (thanks to the then Justice and Peace Commission of the CBCI) focused on a theme for the day with a well-prepared liturgy and other content, which was sent out to all Dioceses in the country. Sadly, over the years this day has gradually slipped into the background and even into oblivion! Today, hardly anyone speaks about it, there is very little reference made to the Sunday and even if there is, in most cases, they are merely cosmetic exercises or tokenism!
 
This year, Sunday August 18 was ‘observed’ by the Church in India as ‘Justice Sunday’. It was a fitting day for the Church in India to tell the country and the world that their only motivation is the person and message of Jesus Christ; that an authentic disciple of Jesus has no choice today, but to live the joy of the Gospels without compromise – to bear witness only to Justice and Truth! The country today is burning with injustices! Unfortunately, a sizeable section opts to remain in one’s comfort zone- through a silence which is complicit! This certainly does not speak well for the Church in India and particularly for its leadership! The mandate to take a stand for truth and against every form of injustice, comes directly from Jesus. Pope Francis has been reiterating this non-negotiable consistently!

Today, the ordinary citizen of India- particularly, the Dalits, the Adivasis, the minorities and the marginalised, women and children, the poor and the unemployed, the vulnerable and the excluded – have to face a whole range of injustices. True, the Church in the past has done creditable work among these sections of society, especially in the fields of education and health care. Today a paradigm shift is needed in how we “do charity!” In his social Encyclical Letter ‘Caritas in Veritate’ (July 2009), Pope Benedict XVI emphatically states, “Charity in truth, to which Jesus Christ bore witness by his earthly life and especially by his death and resurrection, is the principal driving force behind the authentic development of every person and of all humanity. Love — caritas — is an extraordinary force which leads people to opt for courageous and generous engagement in the field of justice and peace.”

On August 5, the Government abrogated Article 370 and 35 A with regard to Kashmir. This was done in  a totally unconstitutional and insensitive manner. There have been several protests against this dastardly deed. A team of well- known intellectuals visited Kashmir on a fact-finding mission, in the days after the abrogation of Article 370 and released a hard-hitting report ‘Kashmir Caged’ on August 14 in New Delhi. In their conclusions they say, “The whole of Kashmir is, at the moment, a prison, under military control. The decisions taken by the Modi Government on J&K are immoral, unconstitutional and illegal. The means being adopted by the Modi Government to hold Kashmiris captive and suppress potential protests are also immoral, unconstitutional, and illegal”. On August 24, a delegation of the opposition parties who flew in to assess the ground realities were turned back from the Srinagar airport itself! One of the best  IAS officers of the country , Kannan Gopinathan  sent in his resignation on 21 August to the Government, saying that he wants to speak freely about “the virtual emergency, that has been imposed on the people of Jammu and Kashmir”  Almost four weeks after the abrogation of special status to Kashmir, the people there still live under mass imprisonment, with their human rights suspended or greatly curtailed. Without doubt, the Government will soon denotify the special status provided to other areas of the country,  particularly in the North-East,depriving them of their legitimate rights and identities!
 
A few weeks earlier, the Government brought in ‘The Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act – UAPA 2019 (Amendment Act)’ which clearly infringes on the fundamental rights of citizens. The amendments allow the Centre to designate individuals as terrorists and to seize their properties They are blatantly violative of the fundamental right to reputation and dignity which is a facet of the right to life and personal liberty guaranteed under Article 21 of the Constitution.
 
Harassments, intimidation and threats to human rights defenders, media personnel, intellectuals and other activists who have the courage to take a stand for truth and justice, continue with frightening regularity. Fr Stan Swamy and other front-line defenders from Jharkhand, those arrested after being falsely implicated in the Bhima Koregaon violence and several others. Freedom of speech and expression, the right to dissent is almost a thing of the past in an extremely autocratic atmosphere. Strangely enough, the prayer intention of Pope Francis for July 2019 was ‘for those who administer justice work with integrity, and that the injustice present in the world may not have the last word’. The ignominy heaped on women and children of our country continues unabated! Millions of our children are still deprived of their childhood! From farmers to sewage workers; from those who receive unjust wages to the unemployed – the vicious circle of poverty and injustice is hardly addressed!

The country has never been so corrupt. Law makers are bought to cross from one party to another –we have seen this happen in Karnataka, Goa and Sikkim. The CBI and the Enforcement Directorate will not investigate into corrupt acts and major scams like the Rafael deal, those who have made windfall profits from demonetisation and those who toe the line of the current ruling dispensation. The Judiciary which is meant to be totally independent, impartial, objective and just, is hardly doing itself proud! A Madras High Court judge who in a judgement spews venom on the Christians; whereas, a Bombay High Court judge has the audacity to question why books like ‘War and Peace’ are kept by a person. Even on the Kashmir question , the Supreme Court has delayed the hearing for an inordinate period! Constitutional bodies in the country have today been totally destroyed of just made impotent!
 
Minorities are on the backfoot as never before! Lynchings continue as the ‘new normal’. Muslims and Christians are at receiving end of hate and violence. Every effort is being made to ensure   majoritarianism and ultimately to impose the ‘hindutva’ agenda on the nation. So, the Prime Minister speaks about family planning, bringing in a national anti-conversion law, makes Parliament to abolish the ‘triple talaq’, wants to curb foreign funds to certain NGOs. All part of a well- calculated strategy! For the very first time, the UN observed August 22 as the ‘International Day Commemorating the Victims of Acts of Violence Based on Religion or Belief’. In India today, there are thousands who are being persecuted because of their religious beliefs. The Himachal Pradesh Government recently passed an ‘anti-conversion’ law and if the grapevine is to be believed then the Central Government will do so too, as soon as possible.
 
The economy is in shambles. It has never been so bad in the country. The poor have become poorer; recession is at an all-time high! On August 26 the Reserve Bank of India  agreed to a transfer of Rs 1.76 lakh crore from its surplus to the Central Government! This is unprecedented! It augurs ill for the future of the Indian economy!  At the end of August, when the Government released the data of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for the quarter April- June 2019 it showed  a growth of just 5%. It was the slowest pace of growth of the Indian economy in over six years! The Indian rupee has fallen to an all -time low; today there are no ‘bhakts’ or ‘chamchas’  who have the courage to tweet about this  horrendous reality, as they so brazenly did, during the time of Manmohan Sigh and the UPA Government when the economy was far better!  Hundreds of thousands of workers from the auto and other industries have been laid off. Demonetisation has contributed greatly to the economic downfall of the country. It is poor and ordinary  casual workers who suffer the most in such a scenario – since their purchasing power  is drastically eroded! Nobody seems to have the guts to make this serious reality the main issue of the country today!
 
The recent torrential rains, floods and landslides in several parts of Western India: Kerala, Goa, Maharashtra and Gujarat – have rendered thousands homeless, destroyed our precious ecosystems in this area. Eight years ago, on 31 August 2011, ‘The Gadgil Commission’, (an environmental research commission named after its chairman Madhav Gadgil), submitted its report to the Government of India. The Commission made far -reaching recommendations on the ecosystems of the Western Ghats. Neither the politicians nor the corporate sector have taken the report seriously. Valuable natural resources continue to be plundered at will, the ecosystems are denuded and the environment destroyed!
 
The Church too seems have paid lip-service to what Pope Francis says in ‘Laudato Si’- “caring for ecosystems demands far-sightedness, since no one looking for quick and easy profit is truly interested in their preservation. But the cost of the damage caused by such selfish lack of concern is much greater than the economic benefits to be obtained. Where certain species are destroyed or seriously harmed, the values involved are incalculable. We can be silent witnesses to terrible injustices if we think that we can obtain significant benefits by making the rest of humanity, present and future, pay the extremely high costs of environmental deterioration (#36)”. The Narmada Dam is a symbol of all that is unjust in our country today – and most would not care if some thousands of Adivasis lose their lives when the gates of the dam are opened.
 
The draft Indian Forest (Amendment) Bill of 2019, circulated in March this year, will also become a reality soon. It aims at re-establishing state power over forests at the cost of rights granted to the forest dwelling tribals and other forest dwellers under the Forest Rights Act of 2006 (FRA). It is a clever ploy to derecognise the indigenous people of our country.
 
The ‘National Register of Citizens’ in Assam was published on August 31.Over 19 lakh(19,06,657) persons were left out. Though these have been given a window of opportunity to prove their citizenship over a period of ten months – it is so obvious that Muslims ( apparently illegally staying in India from Bangla Desh) are being  targeted in this exercise! West Bengal is bound to be the next port of call and the way the Government treats refugees like the Rohingyas goes against the grain and spirit of a country which in essence is inclusive and diverse. The draft of the ‘New Education Policy’ is an insidious way towards the nationalisation of education.
 
The world observed Hiroshima (6 August) and Nagasaki (August 9) Days recently; the world saying “never again” to nuclearization and to the possibility of another holocaust. For the Indian Government it does not matter – a scandalous amount of money is spent today on buying sophisticated arms and ammunition and in the nuclearization programme. This is certainly a gross act of injustice when millions of people of the country do not have the basic necessities of life
 
Many Catholic religious congregations in India today fail to exercise the mandate which their General Chapters so gloriously pontificate! Those religious within the Congregation who try to stand up for truth and justice are side-lined, denigrated by their own suspended and even dismissed (as we saw in the case of Sr Lucy Kalapura recently)
 
Early in June this year, speaking to a summit of Pan-American judges Pope Francis said,
“We are living at a historical stage of change in which the soul of our peoples is at stake, a time of crisis in which there is the paradox: on the one hand, phenomenal normative development, on the other side a deterioration in the effective enjoyment of globally consecrated rights;”“the injustice and the lack of tangible and concrete opportunities behind such analyses [made] by people that are incapable of putting themselves in the feet—I do not say the shoes, because in many cases people do not have them—is a form of generating violence, silently, but in the end violence.” “We only remember and recognize this [injustice] when some people make noise on the streets,” but then “they are rapidly categorized as dangerous or troublemakers in an effort to silence them. There is not democracy when there is hunger, there is not development when there is poverty, there is not justice when there is inequality”
 
The challenge to the Church in India today is to  visibly and tangibly accompany the poor and other victims of injustices! Jesus has mandated this : it is fundamental to Christian discipleship! Pope Francis spares no efforts to ensure it! We are called to realise the prophetic vision of Amos, “let justice roll!”

 (The author is a human rights and peace activist/writer. Contact:cedricprakash@gmail.com)

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It was not a structured “formal dialogue”, but the Archbishop was persuaded to meet them after a long chain of violent events, with several intermediaries including a US-based Christian scholar who claimed he was doing a doctoral research study on inter religious dialogue. The man did not explain why the talk was fixed with the RSS chief, and not with the several Shankaracharyas and heads of various sects and “mutts” in India, or even with the Ramakrishna Mission with whom the church had, through its interfaith dialogue commissions, been regularly in touch then, as it is now.

The Archbishop insisted that the talk be held in his headquarters, and not at the RSS offices, or even a “neutral” place. He also chose a delegation of clergy, women and some laypersons, I among them, to join the meeting.  I was even more reluctant than the Archbishop. In a lifetime in journalism – now 46 years and counting – I had covered scores, if not hundreds, of riots targeted at Muslims, and the one against Sikhs in 1984, had read every single judicial enquiry report, and seen first hand Sangh “shivirs”, training camps and shakhas in various states of India, including Delhi. As most reporters of that time did, we had also gone through the founding texts of the RSS, including “A bunch of Thoughts”, and “We, our Nationhood Defined”. And most of the “parchas”, booklets, pamphlets and handbills that we could collect in the riot hit areas. I am sure the police and the Intelligence Bureau would have sackfuls of these in their archives. 

The so-called meeting was the disaster it had been anticipated to be by the Archbishop. Mr. Modi uttered very few words, but Mr. Sudarshan was articulate in his opposition to Hindus being converted to Christianity, which he implied was not at their own volition, but by some fraud or trick being played by Christian priests. He wanted the Church to stop conversions immediately. Archbishop Alan tried to explain to him the theological underpinning of conversion, a change of heart and mind-set. I do not think Mr. Sudarshan was listening. He said no one converts as a matter of choice, or of free will, a concept of which he was perhaps ignorant. One of the women in our delegation, a social worker and communications expert from Nagpur, and an official of the Church of North India, told Mr. Sudarshan that she was the daughter of a Hindu family, upper caste at that, a post graduate, and had converted to Christianity without anyone forcing her to do so. Mr. Sudarshan was not expecting this retort, and from a woman at that. He kept quiet. That was also the end of the meeting. 

It was also the only time in my life I have been in a “meeting” or a “dialogue” with the RSS, though I routinely attend meetings with almost all political parties, including the Bharatiya Janata Party, and count many religious heads, including prominent Hindus, among my friends. I meet them frequently, alone, in groups, and in formal “dialogue” settings.  

There may be individuals, possibly those seeking some political opportunity, who may have met RSS leaders in the almost two decades since then, and of course those living in Nagpur who run into the Sangh leadership in the city which is their headquarters, but to my knowledge, there have been only two major group meetings between Christian religious leaders and the Sangh leadership of any senior rank. There are many genuine and self styled Christian Bishops, and others, including former Supreme court judges, who routinely meet BJP leaders, and a few who even subscribe to the BJP ideology. But they remain in a very small minority. 

One of the women in our (Chritistian) delegation, a social worker and communications expert from Nagpur, and an official of the Church of North India, told Mr. Sudarshan that she was the daughter of a Hindu family, upper caste at that, a post graduate, and had converted to Christianity without anyone forcing her to do so. Mr. Sudarshan was not expecting this retort, and from a woman at that. He kept quiet.

One of these two meetings was in Bhubaneswar-Cuttack in Orissa in the wake of the massive violence against Christians in the district of Kandhamal. Just to recall, more than 6,000 houses and more than 300 churches were destroyed in district wide arson in August 2008, following the assassination of Vishwa Hindu Parishad  leader Lakshmanananda Saraswati by Maoists in his ashram in the district. More than 120 Christians were murdered, and about 60,000 people had to flee into the nearby Sal forests to save their lives. The death toll would have been massive if the forests had not given them shelter. Tens of thousands remain in government camps because of continuous threats. The church helped rebuild their houses when the government arbitrarily shut down the camps. The other meeting was in a guise of a Christmas get together where Mr. Indresh Kumar, the senior RSS leader, was present.  He is apparently the point person for Sikhs, Muslims and Christians. This is not the occasion to dwell on his antecedents and his record at the hands of the National Investigations Agency. 

The so-called dialogue in Orissa saw the Sangh repeat its well-known arguments as it blamed the Christians for inviting the violence on them. At the end of the “talks”, the Sangh leaders went away saying they would decide on a statement. The statement never came. This is the way these dialogues end. 

The church loves dialogue. It is a tenet of the Catholic teachings. Various Popes and Congregations have propounded on the need for continuous dialogue. A special emphasis is dialogue for peace, against terrorism, and for the welfare of people. But it does not see dialogue as capitulation to evil, or violence, or to moral issues, which go against the values taught by Jesus Christ.  “Give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s” refers to governments, constitutional agencies, official and accepted structures as excising in democracies, and sometimes even in dictatorships. Many in the church still look askance at some of the actions of the Church during the rule of Adolf Hitler. 

The current talk of a possible dialogue is because of a report that the Sangh is setting up a Rashtriya Isai [Christian} Manch on the lines of its frontal organisations for Sikhs and Muslims. Both communities have rejected those organisations, which now remain mostly on paper with a few minority representatives heading them for the occasional show at election time. 

According to the Catholic media, the Church is on a wait-and-watch mode towards the RSS' plans to float the  Christian Manch. Cardinal Baselios Cleemis, the current president of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of India (CBCI) has said that he was yet to be convinced about the new outfit's actual objectives. The Cardinal is not unaware of the ideology of the Sangh.
                                             
Apart from the main objection to the ideology of the RSS, which is rooted in a Nazi-Fascist inspiration, and racist and religious hate against other faiths, there are several other reasons why I oppose any bilateral dialogue with a group whose short history of 90 years is so steeped in violence and bloodshed. 

The presence of Christians in India is historic, and they constitute an important strand that makes the composite culture of the south Asian landmass. Their contribution towards the evolution of a modern nation is also historic. But it is often forgotten in debate that their citizenship, as of other religious minorities, is cemented in the Constitution. They are not here on sufferance, or because they are “tolerated” by another group or political entity. 

As citizens of a constitutional state, they are answerable to other instruments of state, such as the courts, and parliament. How can they allow themselves to be judged by non–state actors such as the RSS?  

A dialogue with non-state actors effectively betrays the State, and the Constitution, and dilutes the rule of law. There can be no question of Muslims, Sikhs or Christians “buying” or negotiating collective or separate peace and security with the RSS. The Constituent assembly saw the creative dialogue required for rule of law and creation of a civil society in which people can live in peace and pursue development and happiness. 

Can Christians, or any other community, seek bilateral treaties with various groups in India?  This suggestion is fraught with serious consequences for the unity of the country. All communities have to live together, and this can happen only if they swear common allegiance to the Constitution and the rule of law. We shudder to think of a situation there two or more communities gang up against a third one. This has happened in some nations, which have been rent asunder in civil strife. 

What will be the Terms of Reference, TOR, of any dialogue? What will the Christian community seek in such a dialogue? That it be left alone? Or seek a certificate from the RSS that it is a good Christian community?  That it will give up all its unique activities, including speaking of Jesus Christ and will confine itself to mere closed-door rituals?  That it will run its schools and colleges and hospitals as mere social work or commercial establishments and not reach out to the poor, the Dalits and tribals, the marginalised people? 

What is the guarantee that any assurance by such non-state actors can be trusted? 

There is an ongoing dialogue of life between people of all groups. For Christians, this dialogue of life is 2,000 years old, beginning in Kerala and Tamil Nadu.  

This on-going dialogue between the peoples of all communities is why there is peace in the countryside in such a complex nation, unless fanatics such as of the RSS come and polarize the people. This dialogue, which brings unity in commerce, social needs and goodwill, and a common commitment to the rule of law, is permanent. This is the experience of all democracies across the world. 

Dialogue is good. We need to dialogue with other spiritual traditions. We need to dialogue with different Christian denominations. And in the Catholic Church, there must be a healthy dialogue between the laity, the religious, the hierarchy, and the clergy. This is essential for a healthy church. Let us begin with this essential dialogue. And let the RSS learn more about India and its constitution.

(The author is a journalist, occasional documentary film maker and social activist)

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