• Ponmala

Indians were awaiting the results of the general elections with bated breath. Would Modi surge to 400 plus seats riding on the Ayodhya Temple wave? If Modi had achieved that dream of his, it would have sounded the death knell for Indian democracy. Happily, the BJP did not even get an absolute majority. The Hindutva brigade lost no time in doing some serious soul searching. The RSS chief Mohan Bhagat said: “We have a tradition of going by consensus. Instead, one section of the society was pitted against the other. No one cared about the social divisions being created due to the kinds of things that were being said. The way the two sides attacked each other… the Sang was dragged into this and lies were spread using technology. How can the country proceed like this? The opposition is not an opponent; rather, it is holding the mirror to a side, and that must be deliberated upon.” Why did he keep quiet during the ten long years when all these had played out? If these wrongdoings had helped the BJP to romp home with a thumping majority, he would not have uttered a word on them.
Bhagat’s words have fallen on deaf ears. A wounded Modi is acting with greater vengeance. The new set of criminal laws that were passed in the previous parliament after getting 146 opposition MPs suspended have already been given the green signal for implementation by the newly installed government. In the previous parliament, the Congress was denied the post of the Leader of the Opposition on the pretext of a technicality. The new Modi government has continued with that attitude by breaking a long standing tradition to deny Suresh Kodikunnel the post of the pro-tem speaker, which should have been his as someone elected more often than the others to the Lok Sabha. All key ministers of the previous cabinet have retained their posts, including the minister for human resources, under whom question paper leaks have become endemic.
Modi has a state level counterpart in Shri Pinarayi Vijayan, the Chief Minister of Kerala. In fact, both had joined hands to make Kerala a Congress-free state. Sending 18 candidates of the Congress-led alliance to the parliament, the election results dashed those hopes. Furthermore, the results appeared to harbinger the replacement of the Communists by the BJP in Kerala: The BJP won a parliamentary seat for the first time in Kerala, coming first in 11 assembly constituencies and second in 18 constituencies at the expense of the Communists, who won only one seat. The fear that Kerala will sooner than later become Communist-free has gripped the Reds, and they are now openly blaming their beloved ‘captain’ Pinarayi Vijayan’s dictatorial style for it. But why did they keep quiet during the eight years he corrupted their party?
While the nation was in the thick of a struggle to stave off the capture of Indian democracy by fascist ideologies, the Syro-Malabar Church was mustering all the forces under its command to ward off the threat posed to its ecclesiastical authority by the priests and faithful of Ernakulam-Angamaly Archdiocese. Its Permanent Synod headed for Rome to garner Vatican’s support to excommunicate any and every priest or believer who refused to comply with the uniform mode of celebrating the Holy Mass. The Pope took a hands-off approach on the matter. He advised the prelates to put unity over uniformity, but left it to their choice. The Pontiff was wary of intruding into the powers of a sui juris (autonomous) Church.
That stand of the Pope was all that the Synod needed to wield the whip of excommunication against the priests and believers of Ernakulam-Angamaly Archdiocese. It issued a circular that decreed that anyone who refused to comply with the stipulation of the Synod Mass by 3 July 2024 would be expelled from the Church. Such was the ardor of the Permanent Synod to punish disobedience that the circular escaped to the public even before the full synod got wind of it. The priests and laity of the archdiocese refuse to be intimidated by the threat of excommunication. To save its face, the Synod will have to stick to its stand and dispatch orders of communication in batches. That prospect unnerved the five bishops who hail from Ernakulam-Angamaly Archdiocese. Accusing the Synod of having taken recourse to questionable methods to arrive at such a consequential decision without arriving at genuine consensus, they wrote a letter of dissent to the Major Archbishop and released it to the public. Here too one is wont to ask why these bishops did not raise their voice against those questionable methods and lack of genuine consensus until matters came to such a pass.
When the Pharisees accused the disciples of breaking the Sabbath by picking ears of corn, Jesus could have washed his hands of it saying, “The Sabbath is your domain; do with them as you like.” Instead, Jesus acted as a pastor, and said, “The Sabbath was made for the good of man; man was not made for the Sabbath.” Like Jesus, the Pope needs to rise to the occasion and make a pastoral intervention.
All the three issues discussed above beg a common question: Why this dearth of prophetic voices?