Opinion In PM Modi’s Easter visit to a cathedral in Delhi, an outreach to Kerala

So, why this calibrated Easter visit to the Sacred Heart Cathedral in New Delhi? My memory goes back to 2014, the year he assumed the reins of India. All colleges, including Christian ones, were instructed to function on Christmas day in order to celebrate Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s birthday as “good governance day”. He could not have been unaware of hurting Christian sentiments thereby. Very likely, Modi has come a long way since then. I would think so; given how prompt and perceptive he is in learning from experiences.

When Alexander Graham Bell was asked to explain what the telephone was like he took a metaphoric turn. It is like a dachshund dog with its tail in Dublin and head in London. When the tail is yanked in Dublin, the head barks in London. I see Modi’s Easter gesture as a telephonic event of the dachshund variety. Its tail is in Delhi, but its head is in Kerala. It is read best in light of his pronouncement in the wake of BJP’s gains in the Northeast in the recent assembly elections that the BJP will come to power in Kerala. It is no secret that the party attaches extreme importance to enlarging its footprint in “god’s own country”.

Key to making any progress in this direction is wooing the Christian community, which comprises about 18 per cent of the Kerala population. Efforts to align at least a section of the Muslim community in the state to the BJP via co-opting Abdullakutty came a cropper. The central leadership of the party has concluded that courting the Muslim community is a bus ride to nowhere. The alternative is to get the Kerala Christian community on its side. To that end, feverish behind-the-scene efforts have been afoot for a while now. The party sees much encouragement in this regard, given that a large number of bishops, Christian charismatic leaders, para-church organisations and institutions are mired in corruption. Enforcement Directorate investigations on K P Yohannan, Paul Dinakaran, Bishop Dharma Raj, the moderator of the Church of South India, among others, came and went, leaving the Damocles’ swords hanging over their heads. The Syro-Malabar rite of the Catholic Church, the most numerous and richest church in Kerala, is in dire straits with its supreme leader in serious legal tangles. Corrupt religious leaders are easy pickings for political harvesters. Corruption is a political goldmine from which a political party can gain in two ways. It can posture itself as a principled eradicator of corruption. It can also use the very same thing to coerce individuals of significance to toe the party line. This two-pronged strategy underlies going after the corrupt in the Christian community.

Sticks, however, can be counterproductive without carrots — sticks for the corrupt, and carrots for those who deem them God’s servants. Moreover, a ruler stands to gain from tokenisms of this kind. Nothing is more helpful in improvising the impression that the ruler, being religious or pious, can be expected to act justly. This helps to dissipate the anxiety that is bound to arise when religious leaders are proceeded against, according to the law of the land. The rank and file of Christians are brainwashed from birth onwards that their leaders are anointed by God and that it is sacrilegious to treat them like ordinary folks, no matter what they do.

Be that as it may, the question to ask is this: Will Modi’s present conciliatory gesture bring in electoral dividends, especially in Kerala, where they are most coveted? The answer is an emphatic affirmative. Here’s why I think so. The Kerala Christian community is going through a period of unprecedented disorientation and demoralisation. Shocking episodes of priestly and episcopal crime and corruption have hit them like a series of sledge-hammer blows. The Kerala wing of the Indian National Congress, which has been traditionally the mainstay of Kerala Christians, is in visible disarray. The CPM too has touched an all-time low in the wake of the gold-smuggling cases and the slew of salacious revelations in its wake. A religious and political vacuum plagues Keralites like never before.

Add to that the strong pull that the mystique of power and political momentum that Modi has generated. He is nonpareil in the political annals of our country in the art of gaining from contradictions and impossibilities. Those who criticise Modi for being inconsistent overlook his genius. The tremor of ultimate power is not unleashed by acting consistently and rationally. The aura of invincibility is achieved only by acting irrationally and profiting from it. I will not be surprised if future historians recognise demonetisation as the watershed moment in “the India of our dreams” morphing into Modi’s New India.

It takes very little to mesmerise religious leaders, especially of the Christian community. As L K Advani said in another context: Ask them to bend, and they will crawl. So, while dealing with them, Modi runs no risk of being asked: Are we to believe that the Sangh has renounced its ideological dogma that Christians and Muslims should be ineligible for equal citizenship?

The writer was principal of St Stephen’s College, Delhi