A month ago, news broke in the national press that
Lata Dhavalikar, the wife of Dipak Dhavalikar, State Factories and Boilers
Minister, had
exhorted all Hindus in the name of Indian culture to not send their wards to
convent schools. As many would remember, boycotting Christian educational
institutions was part of a longer list that Mrs. Dhavalikar urged Hindus to
adopt, including sporting tilaks and bindis, and greeting each other with ‘namaskar’. Mrs. Dhavalikar’s comments,
or rather hate speech, only seemed to fuel the already existing suspicion about
Christian educational institutions as promoting Western culture and even of
forcible conversion amongst a large number of Indians, not necessarily confined
to those who support the Hindu Right. However, by mid-April, a video
also started circulating of Piyush Goyal, Minster for State (Independent
Charge) for Power, Coal, and New and Renewable Energy. This was a video of a
keynote address delivered on 6 November, 2014 on the occasion of the 3rd
National Education Conference of Don Bosco Schools, at his alma mater, Don Bosco’s,
Matunga, Bombay.
The said keynote address has been available for
viewing on YouTube since 7 November, 2014. In brief, Goyal’s keynote address
can be seen as a testimony of the good intentions of Christian mission schools,
and hence it can be suggested that the video was circulated from April 2015 as
a counter to the wild allegations that were rampant on social media against
Christian educational institutions.
What is interesting about this keynote address by
Goyal is that it was largely a recollection of his school days some forty years
ago. He seemed to be transported back in time to the days when he was a school
boy and, as such, was giddy with excitement. In a sense it was like homecoming
for him. While Goyal’s keynote address raises many issues that are problematic,
it is also closest to a testimony by a person in the current government in
favor of Christian schools, asserting that they did not have an agenda limited
to forcibly converting Hindus and imposing Western culture on them.
Goyal first credited the immense role that his
teachers and the Salesian priests played in shaping his personality. He
stressed the values of forgiveness and patience that his teachers practiced.
Narrating an incident of indiscipline he was involved in, Goyal said that he
should have been rightly suspended or rusticated for a misdemeanor during a
school picnic. However, the principal of the school, Fr. Bonnie, did no such
thing. Rather, Fr. Bonnie told him where he went wrong, and “held his hand”.
Goyal, not being able to hold back his emotions, suggested that if he was not
given an opportunity to reform and was not counseled, then his life could have
gone down a different path altogether.
Another important point that Goyal made in his
keynote address is the values of secularism that are nourished in an
institution like Don Bosco’s. Goyal recollected that never in all the years
that he spent at Don Bosco’s was he or any other non-Christian student made to
“compulsorily” attend church. In fact, Goyal emphatically said that he had
attended church several times, but always “voluntarily”. It is this experience
that forms the basis of Goyal’s assertion that he learned true secularism in
the course of his schooling at Don Bosco’s from the Salesian priests.
The problem with Goyal’s assertion is that although
he may have experienced secularism in flesh and blood in his school, the party
that he belongs to has consistently made sure that the rights of the minoritized
groups in India are denied. The problem lies not so much in the fact that a
person who learnt secular ideals is part of a government that came to power on
the basis of Hindu majoritarianism, but
that secularism in India has always meant that the wishes and whims of the
majority become the ‘national’ norm that everybody must follow. Isn’t it
rather disturbing to note that
those non-Christians who have been educated through Christian institutions
never openly protest when Christians or their property – religious and other – are
attacked? November-December 2014 was also about the time when the attacks
on churches and the threats of ‘ghar wapasi’ had intensified, and any condemnation
of such acts from those within the present government came after a lot of delay.
Such are the limits of Goyal’s Don Bosco-created secularism. What this anecdote
thus actually indicates is not how Christian schools have boosted Indian
secularism, but how they have actually compromised with dominant norms of
Indian nationalism that produces the hegemony of the majority.
This is so because if one looks at some of the top
Christian schools and colleges in India, one realizes that these institutions have
been supremely elitist spaces, dedicated to nurturing the children of the rich
and the mighty. Though it is also true that a large number of children from the
marginalized sections have been served by Christian educational institutions, such
educational institutions have not managed to change the oppressive power
relations in India. Which is why when Goyal talks about his school upholding “merit”,
“fairness”, and “equal opportunity for all”, one wonders if the ideal of
charity and service or caritas embodied
by Christian educational institutions is really responding to the social
reality in India.
Goyal said that if Don Bosco’s took education to the
poorest of the poor, it was because it came from the heart and was not out of
“compulsion”. What he meant by it was that one could not be coerced into
reaching out to the poor and marginalized in the society. But the truth is that
in India, resources like education need to be compulsorily made available to
the marginalized and the oppressed, whether one likes it or not; whether it
comes from the heart or not.
This is an area, I think, where Christian
educational institutions need to give out of “compulsion”. In other words Christian
educational institutions have to specifically reach out to groups that are
oppressed due to caste, gender, and religion. I admit that this is happening in
many parts of India, but one does not see a systematic policy and its
implementation emerging from the Church leadership in India. Of late Christian
institutions have been needlessly demonized. If at all they need to be criticized,
it is because they have failed in their Christian duty to reach out to the
poorest of the poor. Christian institutions have not always worked against
oppressive structures, but
oftentimes have compromised with them.
So while Goyal’s testimony and his heartfelt
recollection of his schooling days need to be welcomed, it also should make us
ask what role Christian educational institutions played in past and what role
they should play in the future.
(First published in O Heraldo, dt: 13 May, 2015)
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