India___________________________________________________________________________
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Nothing Gained
Hindu nationalists remain at the fore of a new coalition government,
and Christians remain uneasy about the future

By Anto Akkara

Atal Behari Vajpayee, the leader of a 24-party coalition dubbed the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), was sworn in on October 13 to begin his second term as Indian Prime Minister. The inauguration ceremony in New Delhi brought an official end to the nation’s complicated electoral process, which had taken up more than a month.

Indian Christians and secular groups had called for unified opposition to the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which is the single most powerful force within the new governing coalition. But their efforts proved unavailing, and the NDA captured a clear majority in the Lok Sabha—the lower house of the Indian parliament—by winning 298 out of 537 seats.

Given the antipathy that many Christians feel toward the BJP—which has turned a blind eye toward an orchestrated campaign of violence against Christians by Hindu nationalist zealots—the victorious return to power by a BJP-dominated coalition was hardly pleasant news for India’s small Christian minority. Christian leaders had made no secret of their hopes for a change in the government. After the schedule for the national elections was announced in July, both the Catholic bishops’ conference and the National Council of Churches in India—which represents 29 Protestant and Orthodox denominations—had issued guidelines to Christian voters, urging them to vote for “secular” parties.

Archbishop Alan Basil de Lastic, the president of the Catholic Bishops Conference of India (CBCI), did pay a formal visit to Vajpayee just before his inauguration, congratulating the BJP leader on his election and promising cooperation with the government. However, in Church circles many observers remain suspicious about what they see as the hidden agenda of the BJP: a determination to pursue a Hindutva (Hindu nationalist) policy. The BJP had toned down its Hindutva rhetoric during the electoral campaign, in order to retain support among the many smaller secular parties which had joined the NDA coalition. Many of those smaller parties are organized on a geographical basis, and their ability to win parliamentary races in key electoral regions was an essential element of the NDA success.

A hidden agenda?

While Prime Minister Vajpayee is generally seen as a moderate, and his government must continue to satisfy those smaller parties, the BJP remains the undisputed leader of the coalition. And within Vajpayee’s enormous 70-member cabinet, there is room for 46 ministers from the BJP. Each one of those BJP ministers will have some control over the machinery of government, and may use (or abuse) that control to propagate the Hindutva ideology.

“The BJP may not be able to run the government as it would like, due to pressures from its secular allies. However, we are worried about the prospect of subtle infiltration by the saffron parivar,” said Father Dominic Emmanuel, public-relations secretary for the Indian bishops’ conference. (The “saffron parivar” is a reference to the Hindu fundamentalist movement; saffron is their favored color, and parivar refers to a family.) He observed that Vajpayee’s previous coalition government—which took office in March 1998, and survived until a no-confidence vote in April 1999 forced the new elections—had been accused of filling key government posts with hard-core Hindu fundamentalists.

While congratulating Vajpayee on his assumption of the reins of government, the All India Catholic Union and the All India Christian Council issued a joint statement urging the prime minister “to curb fundamentalism” and reminding the BJP’s allies within the NDA of their duty “to assert secular values.” The statement further elaborated on that message by saying that the BJP’s alliance partners have “a particular responsibility” to ensure that “sensitive ministries are not allowed to infuse communal [that is, sectarian] sentiments into policy matters.”

Victory for moderates

After the electoral verdict dashed their hopes for a “secular” government, Christians could take some solace in the fact that Hindu nationalists had been unable to improve on their previous electoral successes. As Father Emmanuel put it, “The saving face of the election” was that it “had not been a victory for the right-wing BJP.”

The bishops’ spokesman pointed out that the BJP won just 182 parliamentary seats—exactly the same number that it had won in March 1998. Moreover, the BJP’s share of the overall vote actually dipped slightly, from 24.8 percent to 23.3 percent. This demonstrates, Father Emmanuel reasons, that the BJP’s ideology “has yet to be endorsed by the voters.”

It was not the BJP itself, then, but its secular allies and the regional parties within the NDA which produced the new electoral mandate. The regional parties gained 36 new seats in the new parliament, securing the voting majority for the NDA. Observing that many of those small parties had “strong secular credentials,” Father Emmanuel concludes that the election should be seen as an endorsement of Vajpayee’s moderation, and “a vote for BJP allies.”

“This is not a victory for BJP,” agreed Father Ambrose Pinto, SJ, the executive director of the Indian Social Institute in New Delhi. (The Jesuit-run social research center was heavily involved in the electoral campaign; in fact it has already been served with a notice that it must “show cause” to explain why it should not lose its license to receive foreign funding. That move by the new federal government came in response to the fact that the Indian Social Institute had rallied 40 non-profit organizations behind a “People’s Agenda”—a pre-election plea for voters not to support “fundamentalists”—that is, the BJP—in the September elections.)

Media observers also saw the election result as something less than a total victory for the BJP. An editorial in the Times of India described the verdict as an endorsement of “Vajpayee as an individual—and as the leader of a heterogeneous, ideologically diffuse alliance—-rather than of the principles of the BJP and its extended parivar.”

Fumbling opposition

On the other hand, BJP critics blame the opposition Congress Party—to which Christians and secularists had looked for a viable alternative to the NDA—for fumbling its chances to stop the BJP government from holding onto its position of power. It was the Congress Party which led India into its era of independence, and Congress has been the dominant political power through most of the history of Indian democracy. But now Father Pinto of the Indian Social Institute charged that the Congress Party had failed to live up to the expectations of its supporters, “due to its arrogance and overconfidence.”

The Congress Party campaign was led by Sonia Gandhi, the widow of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. Despite the bitter personal attack mounted by the NDA on Gandhi, based on the fact that she is a “foreigner” of Italian Catholic origin, the Congress Party leader was able to enter two different parliamentary contests and win both of them. (She is allowed by law to represent only one constituency, so she will have to vacate one of those seats.) The Congress Party also increased its share of the nationwide vote total, from 25 to 29 percent. However, because the BJP’s regional allies swung the balance in key electoral contests, this surge in overall popularity did not translate into victory. In fact, the number of parliamentary seats won by the Congress Party declined to a historic low: 112 seats, as opposed to 141 in the March 1988 elections.

This “disastrous performance” by the Congress Party could be traced to its failure to build its own alliances with the secular parties that opposed the BJP, according to A. J. Philip, the senior editor of the English-language daily Indian Express and a member of the Orthodox Marthoma Church. However strong a party may be, Philip explains, it cannot win an election in today’s India on its own, when its main opposition party has formed a coalition embracing dozens of allies.

Another factor in the failure of the Congress Party was its determination to advance Sonia Gandhi as its candidate to be prime minister, despite the controversy over her “foreigner” status. In fact, resistance to Gandhi within the party caused a rebellion, prompting some Congress members to join other, smaller parties for the elections. That split cost the party heavily; in the western Maharashtra state alone, the factions of what could have been a unified Congress Party combined for over 55 percent of the votes, but because those votes were evenly divided between the two groups, the BJP and its allies won 28 out of 48 seats, despite having only 33 percent of the popular vote.

Because the Congress Party failed to uphold the vision of a secular state, K. Rajaratnam, president of the National Council of Churches in India, concluded: “We have to now look forward to the regional parties to check the BJP from pursuing its divisive agenda.” Christians need to lobby hard with the regional parties in the NDA, he said, to keep the proponents of Hindutva on a short leash. The Hindustan Times, an English-language daily with a circulation of over 500,000 in New Delhi agreed, saying:

“The party [BJP] and its partners might have preferred a more secure majority but its absence is probably a blessing in disguise, for the advantage of an adequate but not substantial majority is that it will keep the hard-liners . . . in check.”

On the other hand John Dayal, national secretary of the All India Catholic Union, told this reporter that the regional parties propping up the BJP coalition are being “short-sighted” in their approach. For the sake of participation in the ruling coalition and thus increasing their hold on their fiefdoms, Dayal said, these regional parties have been “guilty of giving acceptability to BJP in many areas where the fascist party had no foothold in the 1996 elections.”

Violence unchecked

Dayal characterize the BJP as a “fascist” party because the group has never publicly renounced its partisan Hindu-nationalist platform. Rather, he pointed out, the BJP leadership agreed to a “moratorium on contentious issues” in order to keep the NDA coalition intact. That moratorium is scheduled to last for five years—until the next national elections. But the grave danger, as Dayal sees it, is that once the BJP establishes itself firmly in power, it will try to win an election of its own, and then implement the Hindutva agenda aggressively. “In the long run, the secular allies of the BJP are playing into its hands,” Dayal noted.

Meanwhile, Christian fears that Hindu zealots would renew their violent assaults in the wake of a BJP victory have been confirmed. As soon as the election results were posted, three Christians were arrested in the western Gujrath state—where the BJP controls the local government—on spurious charges of attempting “forcible conversions” of the natives and spreading the “false propaganda” of the Gospel.

Soon thereafter, a prayer meeting organized by the Philadelphia Fellowship Church in Dohad was disrupted by Hindu bigots, who stormed into the prayer hall and manhandled the leaders of the Protestant congregation. And in the neighboring Rajasthan state, Hindu fundamentalists threw stones at Father José Vayalil as he returned to his home after celebrating Mass. When the priest went to the nearest police station to complain, the mob followed him, recruiting new members along the way, so that he was forced to flee.

These incidents forced Archbishop de Lastic to shoot off a letter of protest to Prime Minister Vajpayee, just two days after he had made his visit to congratulate the new government leader. The archbishop alerted Vajpayee to the fact that “anti-social groups have already started harassing Christians.”

“If this malice is not checked now, the country may be led to even more tragedy than what was witnessed in Gujrath in December of last year and in Orissa this year,” cautioned the All India Catholic Union and the All India Christian Council in their statement on inauguration day.

Over 30 churches were burnt and several Christian institutions were attacked by Hindu fanatics last December in Gujrath alone. Then the Australian Baptist missionary Graham Stuart Staines and his two sons were burnt alive while sleeping in their jeep in January 1999, and a Catholic priest, Father Arul Doss, was shot and killed with arrows in August. Both of these incidents occurred in the eastern Orissa state.

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