The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India has strongly contested RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat’s recent statements claiming that India is a Hindu Rashtra, calling them misleading and deceptive.
In a press release issued from the CBCI Centre in New Delhi on Monday, October 10, the bishops’ conference responded to media reports from November 9 that quoted Bhagwat saying ‘Bharat is a Hindu Rashtra. It doesn’t contradict the Constitution’ and claiming that everyone in India follows Indian culture, making nobody ‘non-Hindu’.
The CBCI categorically denied the suggestion that Indian Christians are also Hindu. “Indian Christians are proud Indians and proudly ‘Bharateeya’ but not Hindu,” the conference stated.
The organisation cited a Supreme Court judgment dated March 11, 2016, in Writ Petition (Civil) No. 203/2015, which rejected the plea for using names like ‘Hindustan’ and ‘Hind’ for India.
“CBCI refutes the statement that India is a ‘Hindu Rashtra’. We also deprecate all such nefarious attempts to convert India into a ‘Hindu Rashtra’,” the statement read. The conference asserted that India “is and will always remain a ‘SOVEREIGN SOCIALIST SECULAR DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC’.”
The bishops called upon every Indian, especially Christians, to take all constitutional measures to protect the present Constitutional character of India.
To substantiate its concerns, the CBCI referred to the Justice Venugopal Commission report, which the government had constituted to enquire into the 1982 Kanyakumari communal violence against Christians.
The commission’s report stated: ‘The RSS (Rastriya Swayamsevak Sangh) adopts a militant and aggressive attitude and sets itself up as the champion of what it considers to be the rights of Hindus against minorities. It has taken upon itself to teach the minorities their place and if they are not willing to learn their place, to teach them a lesson.’
The report detailed the RSS methodology for provoking communal violence, which includes rousing communal feelings by propaganda that Christians are not loyal citizens, spreading fear about minority population growth, infiltrating into administration, training young people in weapons use, and spreading rumours to deepen communal cleavage.
The CBCI also drew attention to the August 2024 issue of RSS-affiliated magazine Panchjanya, which stated: ‘In the form of caste, the Indian society understood one simple thing – betraying one’s caste was betrayal of the nation.’
Reading this alongside Bhagwat’s statement that ‘there is no need to eradicate caste’, and the rule in Manu Smriti that ‘only one work did the Lord ordain for Shudras, viz to ungrudgingly serve the other three social orders’, the CBCI said these statements clearly pointed to Bhagwat’s intentions.
The conference expressed concern about the lowering of economic inequality in India to pre-independence levels due to the misuse of contract labour systems by government and private sectors, exploitative working hours, and huge differences in minimum wage calculations.
The CBCI concluded by affirming that Christians in India have made significant contributions to the nation’s freedom struggle and ongoing nation-building efforts, and will continue to do so.
