The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has recently initiated an intensive unprecedented outreach to the Christian community in India. This is quite a remarkable gesture for a party whose leaders have either remained silent or tacitly acquiesced in the propaganda war and even stray physical attacks by Hindu extremists against the country’s third-largest religious community mostly on the plea of forcible conversion. The decision to go out of its way to woo Indian Christians may well be prompted by both domestic electoral concerns as well as opinion in Western countries that dominate the G20, of which India assumed the leadership just a few months ago.
Last month, boosted by good performance in the state Assembly elections of regional parties, allied to the BJP in Christian-dominated Nagaland and Meghalaya, Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared that this busted the myth of the BJP being unacceptable to religious minorities. He went on to predict that, like in Northeastern states and BJP-ruled Goa, the party will also soon do well in Kerala which has the largest number of Christians among all states in the country and form an important vote bank. Earlier, at the BJP national executive meeting last year, the prime minister had urged leaders and workers of the party to send a ‘sneha sambad’ (message of love) to the minorities in Kerala, where it has done poorly in successive Assembly and parliamentary polls.
The wooing of Christians by the BJP has been gathering momentum since last Christmas when thousands of party workers in Kerala visited Christian homes bearing Christmas cakes and other gifts. In the national capital Delhi, President Draupadi Murmu attended a special service at the Sacred Heart Cathedral, the city’s most prominent church on Christmas Eve.
Last week, at Easter, it was Prime Minister Modi who made the extraordinary gesture of attending a special service at the Sacred Heart Cathedral and lighting a candle at the Statue of Resurrection. This is the first time that an Indian PM has attended a special Easter or Christmas service. Thousands of BJP workers in several states including Kerala and Delhi visited Christian homes with Easter greetings cards. Interestingly, the cards carried pictures of Jesus Christ and PM Modi.
The appeasement campaign by the prime minister and the BJP has reached a crescendo in the wake of a massive protest at Jantar Mantar in Delhi, less than two months ago, by members of the minority community and the clergy, against attacks in different parts of the country, mainly in BJP-ruled states against Christians and their places of worship. Significantly, the priest who presided over the Jantar Mantar protests was none other than Delhi Archbishop Anil Joseph Thomas Couto, who led the senior clergy greeting the prime minister on Easter at the Sacred Heart Cathedral and the night of the protests saw a candlelight vigil at the same church to mourn Christians martyred by Hindu extremists.
PM Modi’s dogged persistence in sending conciliatory messages to the Christian minority is motivated by both domestic and international concerns. With a crucial parliamentary poll just a year ahead, the prime minister wants to leave no stone unturned to ensure that even religious minorities, particularly Christians estranged by the BJP’s Hindutva politics, do not vote en bloc against the party. Having met success in the Northeast and Goa by tweaking, for instance, the BJP’s shrill anti-cow slaughter campaign in these states, the party is encouraged to repeat similar tactics in Kerala as well.
Indeed, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) which has been working in Kerala for long, without any visible political outcome for the BJP so far, is reportedly extra keen to make a breakthrough in the state and unlikely to oppose the prime minister’s wooing of the Christian community in the state. As a matter of fact, some Kerala bishops have already offered the olive branch to the BJP while senior Congress leader A K Antony’s son’s recent defection to the party is being touted as a propaganda coup. It remains to be seen however whether the BJP can actually get enough votes from the Christian community to grab seats in a state, till now dominated by the two political coalitions led by the Marxists and the Congress.
Apart from domestic electoral triggers, there is also an even more pressing motive for PM Modi to placate Indian Christians, particularly prominent members of the clergy. The prime minister has quite calculatedly moved in this direction over the last few years with his visit to the Vatican in October 2021 to meet the Pope, becoming the first member of the Sangh Parivar to do so. He is acutely aware that as many as 14 out of the 20 G20 countries are Christian and he would be hard-pressed if he were to look the other way at the harassment, and in some cases, outright persecution of the Indian Christians.
This is the reason why the Jantar Mantar protests, despite the ongoing outreach by the prime minister and the BJP on his instructions to Christians, were perceived by him as a major setback that needed to be rectified. So far, most members of the minority community, while appreciative of the fresh signals from the prime minister and his party, are wary of how genuine and permanent they were. They recall that less than a year into his first term, PM Modi had publicly warned to protect them after a string of attacks against churches, but this made little difference in the long run.
The writer is a Delhi-based political commentator. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the stand of this publication.
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