A bishop’s Islamophobia

Julio Ribeiro

I did not expect a Christian clergyman of high rank to suffer from Islamophobia. Mar Joseph Kallarangatt, the Syrian Catholic bishop of Palai in Kerala, made an astounding statement a month or two ago. He said Muslim fundamentalists were out to convert Christian and non-Muslim (obviously referring to Hindu) girls by using drugs to first numb their cognitive powers! He called it ‘drug jihad’. Did he get the idea from Adityanath? Only the bishop can tell!

The trigger for this ridiculous statement, which caused a flutter in Kerala, was the elopement of a Christian girl, presumably from his Diocese of Palai with a local Muslim boy. The couple may have joined the ISIS in Syria, but that has not been established.

The Chief Minister of Kerala, Pinarayi Vijayan, termed the bishop’s statement in a church sermon as ‘unfortunate’. The CM further said statistics did not justify the bishop’s averment that Muslim extremists were using drugs on girls of other religious persuasions in order to convert them. Muslims form 26 per cent of the state’s population but accounted for 34.47 per cent of those arrested for offences under the narcotics Act.

Christians, with a percentage of around 18 in the total population, accounted for 15.73 per cent of such arrests. Hindus, who make up half of the state’s population, were involved in 49.8 per cent of drug offences. Statistics further showed that only six of the hundred Malayalees who joined the ISIS were non-Muslims and one of the six joined directly from a gulf country when employed there. The bishop had no real cause for panic. Perhaps, the girl was from a prominent family of his diocese! That could have set him off. But surely one solitary case should not have sounded the alarm bells.

I am not surprised that the good bishop reacted in a manner that no bishop in Mumbai would. The culture in Kerala is distinctively more conservative. I took my wife and daughters (they were in school those days) to Kerala in 1975. The Diocese of Palai, if I am not mistaken, includes Idukki, the town that boasts of the biggest circular dam in Asia, if not in the world. We camped for the night at Idukki. It was a Saturday. I enquired from the CRPF Company Commander if there was a Catholic church nearby. One of the jawans turned out to be a co-religionist and offered to guide us to the church. But he did not stop there.

Very officiously (and unknown to me) he had gone that very evening and met the priest in charge and informed him that his DIGP would be present next morning for service. My wife and daughters sat next to me in the pew as they always did in Mumbai and in Hyderabad, where I was then posted. Before the service began, the priest came marching down the aisle towards me and I quietly cursed the jawan for drawing attention of the congregation towards me and my family.

But the priest was not interested in my rank or in welcoming me to his parish. He was bent on separating what God had put together in holy matrimony. He ordered me to sit with the men on the pew on the opposite side of the aisle. It was then that I noticed that the men all sat in one row and women on the opposite side!

It reminded me of Muslim weddings in Mumbai, where men and women were strictly segregated. A correction — my friend Gulam Vahanvathy’s daughter married a Sikh boy. The reception was a relaxed affair with Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and Christians exchanging greetings, irrespective of age and gender, and of course without thought of religious affiliation or caste. And thinking of it, my racing friends, Farroukh and Ikbal, also had their children’s wedding receptions totally desegregated. If they had it otherwise I would have been surprised.

Just like the good bishop of Palai, Mar Joseph, will not be able to desegregate men and women in churches under his jurisdiction, my conservative Muslim friends in Mumbai will have to keep them apart at their children’s wedding receptions. But as regards young men and women of different faiths and castes falling in love that is bound to happen in a heterogeneous society. Neither a bishop nor an authoritarian father can stop the ‘desire of the moth for the star, of the night for the morrow’. And it is not drug use that propels their attraction to each other.

‘Love jihad’ is a slogan invented for political gain. Since the bishop is not a politician, he should not have used it. Muslim men who marry Hindu or Christian women are not guided by the zest to convert. It is only after ‘love’ chips in that they realise that they are bound by their Islamic practice to insist on the spouse’s conversion if the marriage is to be solemnised in a ‘nikah’ ceremony. Similar was the position of the Catholic church, also an Abrahamic religion like Islam. Fortunately, and wisely, the church has dropped that requirement. In my own family, interfaith marriages have been performed under the Special Marriages Act by the Registrar of Marriages, or through rituals prescribed by both religious dispensations.

Islamophobia was latent in our land till the a subtle hate campaign against the ‘other’ was unleashed seven years ago. The depredations of jihadi terrorism led to a tolerant Hindu community becoming less so. The country needs to craft a strategy to counter jihadi extremism but the answer does not lie in Islamophobia that condemns all followers of the religion to a uniformed object of hate!

And, in any event, a Christian bishop should have nothing to do with any form of hate.