An Unholy Trinity

Once upon a time, the church and the crown used to be the primary power centers in most societies. Over time, modern forms of government replaced monarchies, and the mass media emerged as an additional power center.

The church, ruling political leadership, and media are the trinity mentioned in the title. Sometimes, they are at loggerheads because they derive their power from and cater to somewhat different constituencies, but when it comes to a common cause, they work together like a well-oiled machine.

This post is about the Christian Church, President Barack Obama, and the New York Times backscratching in an Indian context and spans a ten-month window from May 2014 to February 2015.

May 2014

A Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led alliance came to power in India with a decisive mandate.

Most opposition parties, of which the Indian National Congress (INC) is the foremost, paint the BJP as communal and position themselves as secular.

Since 2013, the effectiveness of the opposition’s unending drumbeat about a communal BJP had started drying up in India.

To compensate, the INC defames the BJP government in international forums and strives to embarrass it ahead of events where India will be in the international spotlight.

December 2014

A fire broke out in a church in Delhi. There were no injuries, and the cause of the fire was unclear. Some days later, in a separate incident, a stone pelter shattered a church windowpane.

Three other vandalism/arson/burglary incidents involving churches and a Christian school occurred during January and February 2015.

All incidents occurred in Delhi, and the Indian and the international media widely reported them.

Were these incidents the result of reduced religious tolerance among Delhiites months into a BJP central government, or engineered, either by the opposition or the BJP, before and after Obama visited Delhi in January 2015, or stray or copycat acts of social miscreants that received disproportionate media coverage? You take your pick.

The opposition cobbled these incidents into an anti-BJP religious intolerance narrative.

It might sound oxymoronic, but despite a century-long history of religious riots, Indians are inherently a tolerant people.

With a poverty-ridden and densely-packed population of mind-boggling social and sectarian diversity, India has a conducive environment for routine daily life incidents, altercations, and social mischief to snowball into sectarian street violence. It does not help that Indian political analysts, parties, and media slice the Indian electorate by caste and creed and pander accordingly (more in the end notes).

Counterintuitively, at least in the case of India, religious disturbances are not a valid and reliable indicator of religious intolerance (a future blog post).

Compared with the typical communal flare-up in India, the Delhi incidents were of the garden variety, assuming they had a communal angle. But enough ammunition for the Church to attack an unfriendly BJP government.

For ten years before the BJP’s 2014 victory, non-Hindus were prominent drivers of the Indian government, including Sonia Gandhi, a Roman Catholic, widely perceived, at the time, as a de facto prime minister. With this political establishment in power, the Church’s conversion enterprise had a free hand in India, home to the largest heathen population in the world.

The Christian population of India is under five percent. This single-digit penetration and the existence of a large, poor, uneducated population make India the Church’s favorite hunting ground. Its largest target market.

With an unaccommodating BJP in the saddle, what would the Church do?

Obviously, the Church, tentacled in the highest echelons of governments and media worldwide, would exert its influence, in all possible ways, to protect its turf.

January 2015

During his visit to India, Obama tactfully lectured India about religious intolerance.

After Obama returned home, he was blunter when he said that acts of religious intolerance in India would have shocked Mahatma Gandhi.

Obama is decent, informed, and intelligent. In this capacity, I would not expect him to accuse India on Indian soil of all things religious intolerance. How could his conscience allow him when he has firsthand experienced intense religious prejudice at home?

I attribute Obama’s intolerance hyperbole to his office being overly accommodating, maybe beholden to the Christian Church when the religious interests of the Church outside, not within, the United States were at stake.

Also, in this case, Obama’s enablers knew they could rely on the enthusiastic and steadfast support of the sizable Islamist-leftist bloc within India. And galvanize this bloc to do more.

The end of the month (January) brought some more ammunition for the Church when about 100 tribal Christians converted to Hinduism at a ceremony in Bengal.

February 2015

On February 7, 2015, a New York Times editorial chastised Prime Minister Narendra Modi for remaining silent regarding religious intolerance in India.

The Times supported its intolerance charge by noting arson attacks on two churches in Delhi and “mass” conversions to Hinduism of about 200 Muslims and up to 100 Christians.

Professionally managed integrated communication campaigns ensure that communication from different parts/sources within an entity or network is consistent and sequentially reinforced.

Accordingly, in its conclusion, the Times editorial quoted from Obama’s January 2015 speech in India: “India will succeed so long as it is not splintered along the lines of religious faith.”

The largest religious conversion machinery in the world operates in India. Even Christ, who sanctioned conversion by declaring that the only way to God and Heaven is through him, would have been appalled by the predatory and pecuniary Christian evangelism practiced in India.

Despite the Christian conversion gangs making merry in India, the New York Times, the most pompous of the holier-than-thou media, had the gall to run with some scattered conversions to Hinduism and a couple of arson incidents.

I do not recall the credentials of the editorial board members of the Times at the time. I assume the board members were very accomplished. And intelligent enough to know that their intolerance editorial was too flimsy to publish. Wait!  Propriety be damned. You go with whatever little you can put together when you are backscratching. 😉

Beneath the Surface

The example herein is of a hand-in-glove trio furthering their interests by maligning an Indian Government, which was and is anathema to them. This example is of a public campaign executed with professional polish.

I leave it to you to chew on how the underbelly of this trinity operates.

 

Notes and More

I have used the term church to represent a general religious organization or a Christian place of worship and “the Church” and “Christian Church” as umbrella terms for an assumed collectivity of major Christian church organizations and Christian lobbies worldwide. This assumption is reasonable in the context of this post.

The Church is a pale shadow of what it was in its heyday but still exerts considerable influence. An entity with fading power is more likely to abuse its power than an entity with its power intact.

BJP’s opposition strives for caste-based fracturing of the Hindu majority to grab a sizable chunk of this vote and combine it with overwhelming support from religious minorities to ride to power. In the run-up to elections, the BJP broaches sensitive socio-cultural issues to accentuate sectarian differences for consolidating its Hindu base. Its opposition loses from a sectarian divide leading into an election because Hindus could coalesce for the BJP. However, post elections, if the BJP comes to power, the opposition parties have the motive to welcome and even encourage communal discord. For, they stand vindicated. More so if they cannot present a credible governance alternative.

Religious violence in India has a long history. India became independent amid a horrific communal bloodbath, and the partition of British India created a permanent structural Hindu-Muslim divide in the subcontinent.

Religious street strife in India is mostly confined to the Hindu-Muslim dyad.

A head of state must be full of himself/herself or be under tremendous pressure to talk down a country publicly while being hosted there. That Obama, a Democrat, did what he did is indicative of the power of the Christian lobby.

For centuries, some Indians have helped outsiders subjugate their fellow Indians. DNA does not change. A sitting US president talking down to India while visiting India should offend all Indians, regardless of political stripe. But Digvijay Singh, a prominent INC functionary, publicly thanked Obama on social media for highlighting religious intolerance in India.

I am not a subscriber or regular reader of the New York Times.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-31015760

https://www.firstpost.com/india/crying-wolf-the-narrative-of-the-delhi-church-attacks-flies-in-the-face-of-facts-2101105.html

https://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/religious-intolerance-in-india-would-have-shocked-mahatma-gandhi-barack-obama/

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/07/opinion/modis-dangerous-silence.html