Sandip Roy - VHP plays big bully in Bastar missionary schools
I went to a Jesuit missionary school. We called the priests
“Father”. We called the other male teachers “Sir”. And the women “Miss”. As a
boy I was less alarmed by the bleeding man on the crucifix as by the pictures
of Jesus and Mary where you could see their glowing hearts through their robes.
It looked like some kind of scary open-heart surgery to me. We did learn to
rattle off the Lord’s Prayer – Our Father who art in heaven – without ever
really thinking about the meaning of what we were saying. But we did not go to
Catechism classes, we sang patriotic Bengali songs during the drill display and
the priests lent us not Bibles but sci-fi books and westerns.
No one that I
knew in my class converted to Christianity. And we did Saraswati Puja at home
and at every examination I carried with me a small paper twist with dried
flowers from that puja. As a goddess exclusively devoted to learning, she
remained unquestionably the first port of call when it came to divine help
during trigonometry. To this day I remember both the Lord’s Prayer and the
Saraswati-mantra by heart.
If a Vishwa Hindu Parishad had shown up and demanded we
install Saraswati images in our school and insisted we call the teachers
“Pracharya” or “Up-pracharya” or Guruji or Sir (hardly a very “Hindu” word,
that one) we would have been more bewildered than upset. But in Bastar the VHP
and missionaries who run 22 schools in a tribal district have been locked in
negotiations over exactly those kind of issues. They have also demanded no Santa Claus distribute sweets to the
children during Christmas.
It’s obviously not really about what you call teachers. Or
Santa Claus. Or Ma Saraswati either. It’s all about power play. The missionaries
are accused of converting poor tribals. The VHP has been trying to ramp up its
re-conversion “Ghar Vapasi” programmes. These latest measures are just warning
shots that are part of that larger battle. It was apparently triggered by the
alarm raised when the Bishop of Jagdalpur said a missionary school should be
established with every church in the region.
The issue around conversion and missionaries especially in
tribal areas is a complicated and tricky one. A missionary-run school in tribal
Bastar is not the same as the missionary-run school in middle-class Calcutta . Interfaith
minister Philip Goldberg, author of American Veda: How Indian
Spirituality Changed the West writes about the shady practices of zealots who
target the poor and illiterate sometimes offering free treatment in return for
conversion or dressing in orange robes to look like swamis. They are, he says
“like door-to-door salesmen racking up commissions” and sounding more like
“snake-oil hucksters of legend than servants of Christ” devoted to serving “the
least of these.”
But to respond to the misdeeds of some missionaries by
heavy-handedly trying to introduce Hindu symbols into a missionary school is
merely a way of flexing muscle to let them know who is Big Boss. Saraswati is
not being installed as a Goddess of Learning but as a watchdog in the guise of
Goddess, a muscular assertion that this is a Hindu country and they had better
watch their step. What next? A demand for Saraswati in a madarsah? A
missionary-run school is run by a religious order and parents who put their
children into such a school are well aware of it. That’s just as true for the
Catholic missionary schools as it is for the ones run by the Ramakrishna
Mission.
As for the schools in Bastar who knows if Saraswati is even
prominent in the pantheon of these tribal communities whose children go to
these schools? The priests are called Father because it is part of their
religious practice and the VHP must think very little of the intelligence of
the average child if they regard this as a source of great confusion to
impressionable minds. “We asked the missionaries what was the meaning of
father? Father means pita. We have only one father, how can we address a
teacher as father?”says Suresh Yadav of the VHP. However Saraswati
can be called Mata because “matayen aur behanen we say before any
address.” I have known families where the children have gone to my
missionary-run alma mater for generations. I have never heard of anyone
confused about the difference between the Father Bouche and Father Bruylants in
school and the real father at home.
The Vishwa Hindu Parishad is of course welcome to start or
fund its own schools complete with Saraswati images and Pracharyas. One wonders
how it would react to outsiders telling it what pictures to hang on its walls.
Some would be happy if the government banned missionary schools altogether
except there are plenty of schools in India affiliated to Hindu religious
orders as well and what's sauce for the goose will become sauce for the gander
as well. This particular skirmish sounds more ridiculous than ominous.
The VHP is happy to make outlandish attention-grabbing demands to stay in the
media limelight and its Praveen Togadia has butted heads with Narendra Modi in the
past. But the church in Bastar cannot just dismiss the VHP’s fulminations as
hot air. Sometimes hot air can have fiery consequences. It remembers the how
missionary Graham Stainesand his sons were burned to death in
their station wagon in Keonhjhar, Odisha by a gang led by a Bajrang Dal
activist.
A Saraswati image in a Bastar school is a long distance away
from a burning station wagon in Odisa. But when bullying enters a school’s
syllabus, in the name of protecting the children, it should worry us all.
