• Valson Thampu

The foremost issue in India today is not the pollution of the environment, but the corruption of the human. If not convinced, do recall how the 2024 general elections played out and, in particular, the tone and tenor of the parliamentary debate following the address of the President to the joint session. If there are true patriots still left among us, they would be alarmed as to where we are headed as a democratic polity. Parliament is supposed to be the ‘temple’ of our democracy. Look, how we conduct ourselves in this temple!

References are made to the garba griha of the Ayodhya Ram Temple leaking generously, undercutting the fervour and fanfare with which the temple was built and showcased. Bad enough; but it’s small change compared to how the human garba griha -its augustness and dignity- of the parliament is leaking.  Democracy, we say, is government of, by, and for the people. But, that doesn’t prevent our politicians from poisoning the well of our shared life as Indians, ‘for the sake of our democracy’. It is as if people’s interests are best served by corrupting their humanity. We are ‘social’ animals. Remove the ‘social’ from the description; and we are left only with the ‘animal’ part of it. That is what politics of hate achieves; it shreds our social fabric and reduces us to political animals.

It is high time we faced the macabre truth staring us in the face. Our way of practising democracy mocks our essence as humans. Imagine a school debate in progress. Imagine speakers, even as they are straining and struggling to deliver themselves of the burden of their songs, being booed and jeered from start to finish! What would we have said of such a ritual! Rowdyism? Incivility? Yet, something similar, if enacted in the Lok Sabha, passes the muster as if that is all we deserve or need to be capable of. Either way it is a slur on us human beings.

The all-important question is: Why? Why does it happen like this. If people behave on the streets like this, we will deem them public nuisance. Why are we apathetic to this worrisome sign of ill-health in our political culture? Well, I can think only of one explanation: we are losing our high sense of being human. Shakespeare lamented that shame had fled from among human beings and found its refuge among animals! Maybe, that is an extreme way of putting it; but still there is something about his lament that makes us reluctant to dismiss it as wholly fanciful.

‘Shame’ involves a recognition of something inviolable-and-imperiled about the essence of being human. As it happens, everything worthwhile is also fragile; the reason we need to be vigilant stewards of whatever we cherish. Especially, of the worth and dignity of being human. Yet, this is also something in respect of which humankind has had, all along, a dubious track-record. There is a perverse streak in human nature which makes us vandalize the worth of our fellow human beings and, in doing so, foul our worth as well. The foremost expressions of this at the collective level are conquest and slavery. On the individual level it is hate and calumny. Especially, gloating about its hellbroth.

The substance of humankind’s spiritual heritage is the history of God’s intervention against the manifold expressions of this satanic streak. Love is the lynchpin of that intervention. Love is the grammar of worth. We ascribe worth to what we love. And we defend the worth of what, and who, we love. Conversely, we condone or relish stratagems to denigrate the worth of those we hate. The Cross of Jesus Christ stands at the meeting point of the tendency to corrupt and destroy worth on the one hand, and the divine keenness to protect the worth thus endangered, and to restore it whenever and wherever it is ruined. ‘Transformation’ is its single-word definition. The goal of transformation is the restoration of worth; not just the worth ruined, but also the worth that there ought ideally to be.

The proof that we are thus transformed and restored in worth is that we respect and protect the worth of others. The hallmark of the transformed is that they are impelled by an irresistible motivation to honour the worth of the whole of God’s creation. The practical idea in recognizing God as the Creator is that every form of life, from the inanimate to the human, has inviolable worth. Worth recognizes worth. Worship is, and ought to be, a celebration of worth. It is the rhapsody of worth-ship. Belief in the Creator God is fiercely incompatible with divisive politics: ecclesial or secular.

We have erred in understanding the godly, redemptive scope of evangelism. It is not to convert others and to swell our ranks that we are mandated. We are mandated to spread a culture of love, code-named in the Christian lingo as the Kingdom of God. God is love. So, the Kingdom of God, unlike the kingdoms of man, is the Kingdom of love. The quintessential goal of Christian mission is to establish the Kingdom of God among the kingdoms of man; substituting hate with love. This alone can heal and restore Indian democracy to health and wholeness. Giving effect to politics of this order should be deemed the foremost patriotic duty today.

We have a grand parliament building complemented with state-of-the-art technology. The infrastructure impresses; but the soul is missing. Imbuing inanimate structures with soul is a spiritual task. Unless the spirit of love animates the temple of our democracy, all we may expect from it is the prolongation of the sort of hate-spewing political face-offs that partisan political camp followers valorize, if only because they know no better.

Indian democracy needs two pillars. One is in place: world-class parliamentary real estate. It needs to be enlivened with the second: politics of love, without which the crippling contrast will continue to aggravate between the mammoth body of the parliament and its minuscule soul, which, by the way, was the asymmetry that brought down the Tower of Babel.