The Continuing Tension
The Continuing Tension
The Gandhi-Azariah-Pickett meeting, the subsequent controversy, and further statements from Gandhi on conversion exacerbated the suspicion of many Indian Christians (and other religious minorities) that modern organized or what Professor Romila Thapar has called `syndicated' Hinduism was becoming too closely associated with nationalism. As the Guardian (Madras) argued by early 1940:
the Christian community and its leaders ... now know that the fundamental rights of religious freedom and action cannot be safely left in the hands of Gandhiji or his communal followers ... that this nationalism is really disguised communalism, anxious for preserving the Hindu majority and supremacy in India.... This is how [Gandhiji's] attitude and utterances are being interpreted by minorities in India who cannot be blamed on the ground of lack of nationalism in face [sic] of the unfolding apocalypse of his communalism.159
Azariah himself never directly accused Gandhi of masking Hindu communalism under the cloak of nationalism. But he did criticize Indian nationalists more generally for trying to marginalize Indian Christians from national life by virtue of their religion. Azariah responded to the charge that Indian Christians were somehow inherently unpatriotic in his 1936 speech to the Bezwada Town Congress Committee. After speaking of the ways Christianity had succeeded in helping the depressed classes, Azariah asked:
Later, in January 1938, Azariah exhorted Christians in the Dornakal diocese `heartily to cooperate ... in all measures meant for the welfare of the nation, and particularly of the underprivileged' initiated by the Congress government elected in the Madras province under provisions of the new constitution of the Government of India Act of 1935. But he also called upon Congress leaders to respect the religious liberties of Christians in the interest of national unity.161 While welcoming Congress gov ernment programs against drinking, rural indebtedness, and illiteracy, he noted that such reforms had been in the forefront of missionary policy for many years. `Now that the Government itself is earnestly pushing these national services,' Azariah said, we (Christians) ought to throw ourselves into these tasks with more zest so that our ministry may reach not only Christians but others also.' Support of such Congress initiatives was an expression of the Indian Christian's civic commitment:
Azariah urged Dornakal's clergymen to take the lead in training an intelligent electorate' capable of placing the national interest above narrow self-interest of family, denomination, and caste. You must lead your people to elect not men of their family and clan, but men of undoubted ability, absolute rectitude and genuine public spirit,' he instructed his clergy.
Just a year later, Azariah reported that in many out of the way places [of his Dornakal diocese] ... well-to-do Congress members had paid the fouranna [party] membership fee for Christians and enrolled them as members - often without their knowledge and consent. 3,500 were said to have been made members in one area in this way and three whole villages in an- other.'I64 This news amused more than irritated him; but he was very serious in his calls to Christians and non-Christians alike to be honest, broadminded, and noncommunal in their politics. Indeed, Indian Christians would withdraw support for the currently elected Congress Legislature in Madras, Azariah warned, if the Congress Party proved to be corrupt or identified too closely with the narrow interests of Hinduism.
The bishop criticized the author of `certain articles in the Harijan' for identifying nationalism too closely with Hinduism:
Invoking the memory of Queen Victoria's 1858 proclamation on religious toleration - `rightly referred to as the Magna Charta of the Indian peoples' - Azariah argued against preferential treatment of any one religion or its followers by civil authorities. The decoupling of confessional from political allegiances would be a prerequisite for gaining the cooperation of all Indian communities in the nationalist enterprise. He challenged Gandhi's many insinuations that, by converting from Hinduism, Indian Christians had betrayed their native heritage and forfeited their legitimacy as nationalists:
Azariah rejected Gandhi's view that all religions are merely different paths to the same truth. The bishop believed that Gandhi was really legiti mizing his own newly aggressive and hegemonic relativism under the cloak of religious tolerance. A man whose power and influence was tied to such an orthodoxy could ultimately admit no place for Christian missionaries or conversion. Although Gandhi may not have threatened to legislate against conversion in his face-to-face meeting with Azariah, he challenged Azariah's general right as an Indian to be an evangelist during the interview and in his many criticisms of Christian missionary activity.
Azariah publicly opposed this author's conclusion that Congress could not be trusted to represent Indian Christians, and he noted with pride that some Congressites elected to the Madras Legislature were in fact Indian Christians. He continued to hope that, by stressing common national interests over selfish communal interests, Hindus and Christians could work to make joint electorates a future possibility. In this respect, Azariah continued to support Gandhi's broad nationalist mandate. Advocates of separate electorates argued that Indian Christian leaders like Azariah had `not taken realities of life into account,' or considered the `full implications and dangerous consequences'168 of merging Indian Christians into a general electorate. But Azariah never abandoned his visionary public campaign for a politics that transcended the zero-sum game of competition between minorities seeking to gain advantages at the expense of other groups.
Azariah's writings and speeches in the years before his death reveal, however, increasing distrust of the intentions of Gandhi and Congress in their bid for swaraj. While endorsing the general cause of India's freedom, Azariah asked in 1942 whether or not Christians (85 percent of whom, he estimated, came from the `slavery and degradation' of the depressed classes) might be deprived of liberty and fundamental material and religious rights by dominant caste Hindus in an independent India:
Earlier in the 1930s, Azariah had belittled the suggestion that Christians would face increased dangers in an independent India, especially when British Tories used such counsels of fear to argue against Indian constitutional reform.170 But towards the end of the decade, Azariah became concerned that the Indian church might suffer serious persecution in the future.
In a powerful sermon during the height of his controversy with Gandhi, the bishop summoned up the image of persecution of the late first-century church under the Emperor Domitian, who made universal recognition of the claims of the imperial cult a test of loyalty to the empire. In this atmosphere of antagonism between church and state, the early Christians had been accused of criminal disloyalty against the state, which was punishable by death. Azariah likened the plight of some churches in the twentieth century to that of late first-century churches in Asia Minor, though he recognized that the Indian church was threatened not so much by outright barbarism as by `subtle oppression and intolerant interference.'
I do not suggest that such a crisis has come in India, and probably it may never come because of the Indian genius for toleration, accommodation and sufferance.
Nevertheless, Azariah suggested that, sooner or later in India: Nationalism is apt to be identified with loyalty to the ancient religion of the land; and this identification might easily look with suspicion and disfavour on any religion which is not supposed to belong to the soil, and which, in addition, is pledged to propagate itself among all outside it.171
Persecution of Christians in an independent India was not unlikely, Azariah claimed in 1942, given the history of India herself. The Indian Christian has not forgotten the past,' Azariah wrote:
At the last meeting of the National Christian Council over which he presided in early 1944, Bishop Azariah forcefully expressed his conviction that Christians must have the right to preach and baptize in an independent India - not in order to gain political advantage (he once again condemned communal representation), but because the church can do no other in the light of the command of its Founder to preach the Gospel to every creature.' The NCC statement issued under his leadership further asserted:
Azariah never withdrew his broad support for the cause of Indian independence, but his growing concern over what he perceived as the threatening posture of Hindu nationalism, particularly vis-a-vis Christian missions to the untouchables, continued to strain his already tense relations with Gandhi, the Congress Party, and the independence movement as a whole. Azariah was among the leading Indian Christians who sought to identify his community's interests with those of an independent nation able to decide its own future without foreign interference. But his work among depressed class groups in Andhra also convinced him that many Indians preferred British rule to the prospect of a Congress-led independent government. At the 1942 Episcopal Synod, Azariah reported that the depressed classes felt they owed everything to the British and were afraid of Congress gaining contro1.174 His exposure to and fundamental sympathy for such subnational concerns, combined with his interest in safeguarding the future of Christian missionary work in independent India, prevented him from joining with unqualified enthusiasm in the movement for attaining national autonomy.
By the end of his life, Azariah felt `hand-tied, and lip-tied' by conflicting political loyalties and `hardly able to give expression to his real convictions.'175 Many Indian Christians were unpopular with Indian nationalists for not joining Congress. They were also unpopular with minority leaders - Depressed Class, Muslim, and even some Indian Christian - for not throwing themselves into the political struggle for community privileges through the operation of separate electorates. But Azariah and his followers believed, on the one hand, that freedom for India would not bring full freedom for Indian Christians and, on the other, that electoral and legislative battles for communal political advantage would exacerbate old conflicts and undermine the greater national good.
Like Azariah, most Indian Christians opposed the Congress decision to withdraw cooperation from Britain's war effort in August 1942 - but again with a sense of inner tension. The Indian Christian `is torn between two loyalties,' Azariah wrote. `He forbears taking sides. He can only pray that the British may understand his longings for his motherland and that his countrymen may understand his loyalty to his religion.'176 The travails of Indian Christianity in the late Raj are embodied in this image of an aging Azariah `hand-tied, and lip-tied' by conflicting loyalties in an increasingly hostile political environment in which he felt ever more unpopular and marginalized.