Valson Thampu

At the time of writing this, Prime Minister Modi is reported as intending to visit the Sacred Heart Cathedral in New Delhi on the occasion of Easter. It is a welcome gesture of good will. On the face of it, there is no occasion better than Easter to undertake it.
The Christian community is spiritually mandated to be hospitable. No prejudice of any kind should hinder the duty to practise hospitality. To be hospitable is to welcome the other without preconditions. But it is also basic to hospitality that the host, not less than the guest, be free to be true to himself. Insincerity corrupts hospitality. One aspect of such insincerity is that those who do not believe in hospitality presume on it as a ploy to push covert intentions. For hospitality to be genuine, the guest and the host must share the spirit of hospitality, even as they differ from each other as individuals. The hospitality of ‘birds of the same feather flocking together’ is spurious. Taking advantage of anyone’s hospitality as an image make-over exercise belittles hospitality. The social elite going into the midst of the poor and the destitute is an example of this.
The spiritual purpose of hospitality is to overcome alienation. A spiritual community contradicts and consigns itself to futility by being excluded from its life-world. Alienation is the universal disease of humanity. Healing individuals and people-groups of alienation, and reconciling them to each other, is God’s prime agenda. Hospitality is one of the means to attain that end.
Why has Prime Minister Modi chosen Easter to make this visit? If we know anything about him, it is this that he makes his moves purposively, and chooses occasions with utmost attention to symbolic nuances. Modi is familiar with the significant events in the life of Jesus Christ. My readers would remember, even if they remember nothing else of this kind, Modi’s enacting the feet-washing ceremony. It is not unlikely that he, like Swami Vivekananda before him, derives inspiration, howsoever fitfully, from Jesus Christ. Gandhiji is a clear example to prove that one doesn’t have to be a crypto-Christian to do so. It suffices to have a sense of the destiny of a people. As yet it is uncertain if Modi is as sincere as Vivekananda in this respect. Time will prove. Fortunately, the wait won’t be long.
The question uppermost in my mind throughout last night, as I lay in bed mulling over the aforesaid media announcement, did not pertain to Modi’s motives. I am no one to divine anyone’s covert intentions. My thoughts centered on how the Cathedral authorities would handle the occasion. Will they practice hospitality as spiritually responsible hosts, or will they don the garb of courtiers and fall short of the spirituality of hospitality?
With what impressions would Modi have returned from the Easter visit to the Cathedral? Would he have concluded that for Christians Jesus is a side-show, and that their heart is with the mystique of worldly power? Or, would he have realized that the devotion that Christians profess for Jesus is sincere and supreme?
Here’s something that those who deal with Modi, especially the religious class, would do well to mind. I have it from the authority of Sheshadri Chari, the former national spokesperson of the BJP, whose understanding of Modi I value. Modi is razor-sharp in seeing through people. He does not retain the same team for more than three years. Because, by then he would have learned whatever was worth learning from them. He would then turn to newer persons and resources. I don’t have to argue that such a person is sure to size you up without the slightest margin for sentimentality. Once he forms an opinion, it sticks like sin. That was why I spent the night in anxious rumination.
Uncharitable as it might sound, it still needs to be said that religious functionaries tend to play to the gallery. Even ordinarily folks do so in the religious sphere. The way a man prays at home is certainly not the way he prays in public. And, if the public occasion accommodates a VVIP, even the slender margin for God-consciousness, obtained otherwise, evaporates. Prayer becomes a performance. Everything about religion is at risk of distortion in the public domain. So, I couldn’t help asking myself: was the message of the Resurrection muted or articulated on the occasion, mesmerised by the magic of Modi?
Arguably, the most unforgettable invocation of the metaphor of Resurrection in the political context of India happened on the eve of our independence. ‘Now the soul of a nation long-suppressed’, said Nehru, ‘finds utterance’. That’s a fairly accurate description of resurrection. The soul of India, as Gandhiji knew well, pulsated in the poor and the down-trodden. Freedom comes with the mandate to wipe the tears from the eyes of every Indian; especially the least and the lost. India cannot resurrect itself till the last Indian is resurrected. Anthyodaya is secular resurrection.
Jesus is good news to the poor. The tombs of their earthly existence in misery and degradation can open. It is God’s will that they do. Castes and persons that have languished in the dungeon of bondage for centuries must emerge from their death-like existence into a new light, reminiscent of the prophetic significance of Jesus’s birth: ‘those who sat in darkness have seen a great light!’ Easter signals light breaking out of the very heart of darkness. It is indeed the resurrection of hope for the hopeless.
Let me couch this in a metaphor dear to Modi. Is the glass half empty or half full for the daridranarayans of India? The very question reeks of cruelty. For millions of them there never was any glass. The Good News is that that question will not stay buried in the maws of history. It will resurrect. Will Modi be the man to roll away the imposing stone at the tomb of their death-like existence? Glib as he is to claim the 140 crores Indians as his, would he include the degraded underclass of India in ‘my people’?
Easter, above all, signals a new beginning. Would the Sangh Parivar jettison the baggage of hostility based on Pitr Bhoomi and Punya Bhoomi -the Savarkar-Golwalkar heritage- and see all Indians as ‘brothers and sisters’ as I grew up affirming every day in school, thanks to the pledge in vogue then? That indeed is the core Easter Question that cannot be kept at bay with occasional serenades of good will or olive branches of avuncular tokenism.