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The Rediff Special

Who did Father Thomas die for?

The Dumka outrage divided the Santhals and Christians of south Bihar where three priests -- Lawrence Kujur, Joseph Dungdung and Anup Induvar -- had been shot dead (in 1994, in Gumla) and an unconsecrated church on a disputed burial ground demolished by Oraon tribals (also Gumla, in 1996). Less than a month after the shaming of Christudas, a fourth Jesuit priest-scholar, A T Thomas was killed in Hazaribagh.

Unconfirmed reports from Bihar police show that one of Thomas's colleagues had been accused of evangelisation and brutalised like Christudas in a stronghold of the pro-BJP Janjati Raksha Samiti near Hazaribagh. But it is unclear which incident followed which and if one wasn't a replay of the other.

Father Thomas's murder is more mysterious. His headless, tortured, cigarette-burnt body was discovered in the jungles between Sirca and Chichi, 20 km from Hazaribagh, on October 27. He had been missing for three days from a field trip to Fatha for his post-graduate degree in sociology from Manila. He had worked six years in those parts among the dalits and was due back in the Philippines this January.

It is said that he came upon armed, 'uniformed' gangsters. The killers remain at large.

Who may they be? Church leaders are convinced that they aren't from the Left-wing guerrillas operating there. Catholic literature concedes the bloody rivalry between them, but asserts that their aim of uplifting dalits meshed with Thomas's own.

"Father Thomas," says Patna Vicar-General Father Matthew Uzhuthal, "was the best example of a liberation theologist."

That's hardly more innocuous given Bihar's class-caste cocktail. And it's a perilous admission considering that RSS ideologues, since the 1980s, have seen liberation theology -- an ideology spawned by poverty and oppression in Latin America, by such churchmen as Gustav Gutierrez and Paulo Freire -- as but another means to maximise Christianity.

Last month, Father Uzhuthal stressed that Thomas "was not a Communist", that the ideology "is not Left-leaning". That it is adopted to fight for the rights of the oppressed but is against the use of violence.

"The Church," he emphasised, "is not against individuals."

Just as surely, Devendra Swaroop Aggarwal, of the RSS think-tank, thought liberation theology is all that it is said not to be. And he was unshakeable from the position he took in a long essay he penned under an alias more than a decade ago.

"For the Church, it seems," he wrote then, "the liberation theology is nothing more than a strategy or politics of conversion."

He couldn't have known that Father Thomas died a non-combatant.

Ideologues like Devendra Swaroop are stuck in a groove cut by the Church itself, or at any rate by some Church writings, papers presented at ecumenical conferences and so on.

Nor has the history of Christianisation in this country been benign. Most missionary references to the Nagas as 'former headhunters' stings a woman Naga human rights activist: "So we didn't have any culture before, huh?" Sociologist Ashis Nandy says that "missionaries destroyed" much of what there was, anyhow. Yogendra Singh, another fine sociologist and an emeritus professor in the Jawaharlal Nehru University, shakes his head remembering some of the early ecclesiastical writings about Indians.

When the RSS's second chief, M S Golwalkar, wrote in his book Bunch of Thoughts, "Even St Paul, the great discipline of Christ, has said, as quoted by Lokmanya Tilak in his Gita Rahasya, 'How can it be a sin if by uttering falsehood I add to Your ( God's) glory?' And then adds, sharply, 'No wonder, the present Christian missionaries have made full use of that statement to further their nefarious designs.' ''

Who can convincingly deny his premise without denying the underpinning fact? Won't then hotheads fed on parboiled portions of these jump at the smallest provocation or await the main chance?

Certain Church leaders say to not dredge up Golwalkar for peace's sake. They say too that some of the BJP politicians find his writings embarrassing. Perhaps. But his influence on RSS seniors on critical issues hasn't diminished as much, and there is always a section within that cries to return to Golwalkar's ways. And such Hindutva essayists as Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel have inherited his animus for Paul. Who's to deal with that? How?

Let St Paul rest. Consider liberation theology, or rather, what's being made of it here. Freire, one of its articulators, came to India in early 1979. A commemorative booklet was produced.

In it, one questioner, head of an ecumenical service, quizzes Freire, almost rhetorically, about his new ideology: "Is it ( evangelism) possible at all in the whole process of liberation? When ( the Church) is dealing with the social, economic destinies of the people, it does so at a certain level without fulfilling one of the basic missions of trying to see that as many as possible come over and get baptised and so on. I don't want the Church to die like that."

Is the Church above the poor then? Who did Father Thomas die for? The poor, first, and the Church, second? Or, well..? What has Freire or anyone to say? What remains of any ideology whose ends are so fundamentally in dispute? May not they be subverted? Have they been? Is Devendra Swaroop of the RSS too far wrong then to distrust it?

Kind courtesy: Sunday magazine

'It is very insensitive'

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