Christians celebrate Easter to commemorate Jesus Christ’s resurrection from the dead which provided believers with a "new birth into a living hope." This year in Kerala — the state with the highest Christian population in the country — a hopeful Bharatiya Janata Party used the occasion to work for its own political resurrection. Easter, culminating in 40 days of fasting, prayer, and penance by believers, has never assumed so much political gravitas as it has in Kerala this year. Continuing with the BJP’s ‘Easter diplomacy’, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is to meet Church leaders when he arrives for a two-day visit to Kerala today.
This Easter day on April 9 in Kerala opened not with the usual pious sermons but some sensational political opinions from the head of Kerala’s largest Catholic Church. In a newspaper interview, Cardinal George Alencherry, major archbishop of the Syro-Malabar Catholic Church, praised Modi as a good leader who has raised India’s global image and one who wouldn’t go for confrontation. He said Christians don’t feel insecure under the Modi government and that he didn’t know if they would if the BJP gets absolute power. The 79-year-old cardinal opined that because of the Congress’s wrong policies, the Christian community was no longer its vote bank and admitted to a growing affinity among Christians with the BJP.
Kerala’s numerically and financially powerful Catholic Church has always been politically articulate. Although it was at the vanguard of Kerala's anti-communist forces ever since it led the liberation struggle that ousted the first communist government of 1957, it has also mended fences with the Left of late. “Earlier they (communists) were against going to churches and temples. But now they encourage it,” said the cardinal with a chuckle during the interview.
The BJP, which has been wooing Kerala’s Christians for some time, responded with glee. Following its recent electoral gains in the Christian-dominated northeastern region, Modi said the BJP’s next target was Kerala where Christians form 18.38% of the population. Hours after the cardinal’s interview appeared, BJP leaders, including V. Muraleedharan, the Union minister of state for external affairs, made a beeline to various bishops paying Easter greetings. By evening, no less than the prime minister himself visited the Sacred Heart Cathedral Church in New Delhi. Later, Modi tweeted that he had the opportunity on the very special occasion of Easter to visit the cathedral and meet Christian spiritual leaders. An enthusiastic BJP state vice-president, A.N. Radhakrishnan, joined pilgrims on a three-kilometre trek to the famed St Thomas shrine atop a hill in Malayattoor, only to end it halfway as he was too exhausted. After this led to trolling on social media, a determined Radhakrishnan made the trek, once again, a week later along with John Barla, the Union minister for minority affairs, who also visited other Christian centres.
Six days after Easter came Vishu, the Hindu festival, and it was the turn of Christian priests to greet BJP leaders. The senior BJP leader in charge of Kerala, Prakash Javadekar, was present to receive the Syro-Malabar Church vicar-general, Varkey Attupurath, for breakfast at the residence of V.V. Rajesh, the BJP district president of Thiruvananthapuram. In Kottayam, Geevarghese Mar Yulios, a metropolitan bishop of the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church, attended a feast at the residence of the BJP central zone president, N. Hari. Sawar Dhanania, a BJP leader from West Bengal and chairman of the Rubber Board, accompanied the bishop.
The BJP’s first Easter gift had come three days before the festival. Anil K. Antony, the former Congress digital media coordinator in Kerala and the son of A.K. Antony, a Congress veteran and the former Union defence minister, joined the BJP on April 6 in New Delhi. The junior Antony had been distancing himself from the Congress ever since he criticised the recent BBC documentary on the Gujarat riots in January and slammed the party for revolving around the interests of one or two persons. Anil’s formal crossover took place even though he had initially dismissed such a possibility. The 37-year-old IT professional, who has a master’s degree from Stanford, had joined the Congress in 2017. Many observers felt that the operation was part of the BJP’s attempts to get closer to the Christians. Apart from being born Catholic, neither the son nor his 82-year-old father has had any religious connection. In fact, the senior Antony’s emergence as a popular leader during the 1970s was as a strong critic of the Church.
Even though Easter provided the latest occasion for the growing camaraderie between the BJP and the Christian Churches, their mutual relations have been warming up for some time now. The Syro-Malabar Church leaders’ fulminations that Muslims were indulging in ‘love jihad’ and ‘narco jihad’ to ‘entrap’ Christians in love affairs and drugs had endeared them to the sangh parivar. There has also been an increase in pro-BJP Christian online channels — dubbed ‘Chrisanghis’ — in Kerala, spewing Islamophobia in line with the global trend. The liaison’s latest round began when Joseph Pamplany, the archbishop of the Syro-Malabar Church’s Thalassery diocese, said that Kerala’s farmers would help the BJP get its first Parliament member from the state in 2024 if the Central government would raise the floor price of rubber to Rs 300 per kg. He was addressing a meeting of farmers from Kerala’s hill ranges dominated by Catholics.
This surprised Kerala as it was the first time that an archbishop had made such a statement. The ruling Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the Congress criticised it cautiously, not to overtly provoke the powerful Church. Some Christian leaders defended the archbishop, saying the Congress and the Left had failed to protect the farmers. Subsequently, a few Christian leaders from the Congress and the Kerala Congress announced their resignations and indicated that they would be moving towards the BJP. However, some critics inside the Church compared the archbishop’s mention of Rs 300 to the betrayal of Jesus by Judas in exchange for 30 silver coins in the run-up to Easter.
The Kerala Church’s olive branch to the BJP has, ironically, coincided with a federation of 80 Christian non-governmental organisations — the Samast Christi Samaj — protesting in New Delhi against escalating violence against Christians. According to the United Christian Front, an Indian NGO, Indian Christians faced 550 violent attacks in 2022, the highest ever. On April 14, the Union government informed the Supreme Court that the complaints of attacks against the Christians were exaggerated and intended to keep the pot boiling.
So what prompts the Kerala Church to sing a different tune? Many feel it has much to do with the ongoing criminal investigations into the alleged multi-crore scams inside the Syro-Malabar Church. On March 17, the Supreme Court refused to quash the criminal case against Alencherry over alleged irregularities in selling properties belonging to the Church.
M.G. Radhakrishnan, a senior journalist based in Thiruvananthapuram, has worked with various print and electronic media organisations