BJP criticizes Goa's Catholic Church on its political stand

IANS via Yahoo News ^ | May 30, 2007

[siunevada]

Panaji, May 30 (IANS) Goa's Catholic Church, which claims the allegiance of about a quarter of the local population, has been criticized by the Bharatiya Janata Party for its suggestions to the state's voters in the run-up to the June 2 assembly polls.

The church has advised the people of Goa to think about their future, Goa's environment and 'not consider candidates who are communal, who use the government machinery to threaten people and people who defect from one party to another for the love of money.'

BJP leader M Venkaiah Naidu has criticized the local church's stand against communal candidates. Naidu argued that religious institutes and people should focus on religious discourses or work for social transformation, leaving politics to people in public life.

Incidentally, in the past, the BJP had found the church's anti-corruption stance favourable to it when it seemed to go against the saffron party's main rival in Goa, the Congress.

Goa's complex ethnic mix has an estimated 65 percent Hindu population comprising different castes and some migrant communities as well. Christians, mainly Catholics, make up a quarter of the population and could play a major role in swinging the results in parts of the state.

This time round, the BJP, making a desperate bid for power, has been focussing on a two-pronged strategy to dent the Catholic support, which has traditionally gone to Congress politicians.

The BJP has been supporting prominent Catholic, or other, non-BJP candidates in areas where it has no hold of its own. It has also been successfully playing on middle-class Catholic fears of corrupt Congress politicians ruining Goa's charm by allegedly being hand in glove with the real estate lobby.

'Save Goa' slogans have been surfacing this election, heightened by the playing-up of the issue by the media.

Some church priests have been criticised for blatantly promoting certain politicians. Father Maverick Fernandes of the church's Council for Social Justice and Peace said political lobbying by priests, before, during, or after mass, is taboo.

Block voting has taken place depending on the threat perception of minority communities here. However, the reality is that caste factors within Catholicism, regional influences in different parts of the tiny state and opportunism among politicians from the community also play a key role in deciding trends in voting.

[siunevada]

From Wiki:

The BJP is a religious conservative political organisation. It sees itself as rising to the defence of indigenous culture, and Indian religious systems which include Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism and Buddhism. To many Hindu nationalists, Bharat is a Hindu Rashtra, literally a Hindu nation.

According to BJP, this definition does not exclude Muslims, Christians. Hindu Rashtra is portrayed as cultural nationalism and Hinduism as the entire complex system of culture, history, faith and worship that have evolved in India over the past 5,000 years. In the political language of Hindu nationalists, all the peoples of India, their cultures and heritage are "Hindu," which literally means "inhabitant of the land of the river Sindhu," the modern-day Indus.

While the draft manifestation of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (The organization that spawned the BJP) mentions the "Hindu Rashtra", the BJP has historically raised objections to this view. The party's chief objective is the "building up of India as a modern, progressive and enlightened nation" which draws inspiration from India's ancient Hindu culture and values. The key theorist of the party, K. Upadhyaya, authored the publication titled Integral Humanism which laid down the foundations for this view. According to Upadhyaya, the so-called "monarch" and "state" are the dharma and the chiti (genius) of society. He asserted that the very source of meaning in Indian society is the concept of "national identity". The BJP stresses the importance of integrating the four ends of human life in accordance with Hindu scripture ie, kama (gratification), artha (wealth), dharma (faith), and moksha (spiritual release).

The BJP has been accused of being a xenophobic and fascist organization by its opponents. Its supporters, on the other hand, argue that it is no more than a conservative, nationally-oriented party which does not wish to polarise the country on communal (religious) grounds. These accusations are largely regarded as a smear campaign against the BJP by left-wing pundits. In addition, accusations of "fascism" in BJP the Hindutva movement coming from the left wing parties and western academics such as Christoffe Jaffrelot have been criticized by former professor of political philosophy and Times of India commentator Jyotirmaya Sharma as a "simplistic transference [that] has done great injustice to our knowledge of Hindu nationalist politics".

[MimirsWell]

True this is an opportunistic comment by Naidu but seriously, I think India needs a thorough insulation between the state and the ‘church’(meaning all religious groups).