Columns: Fifth Column

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India Today, February 22, 1999
Feb 22, 1999

FIFTH COLUMN
Evil That Men Can Undo

Don't attack the church Mr Singhal. Match its charitable work.

By Tavleen Singh

It's called the Pavement Club because its only members are Mumbai's streetchildren. It is attached to a small church in a grubby back lane and this past week I had the privilege to witness what happens every Friday when the club meets. It was one of the more moving experiences of my life to see the most dispossessed, most forsaken of India's children being allowed for at least one afternoon into the warmth and comfort of a room with a roof on it. And to be provided their only chance in the whole week to get a glimpse of what childhood is meant to be. They sang, they danced, they played with toys and left after being given the only square meal they get in seven days.

Some of the children were so small they could barely toddle. But already they had been put on the streets to earn their living by parents too poor, too illiterate and too hardened by the misery of their own lives to do anything else. The church in which the Pavement Club meets is so much the only home they have ever known that when in a drawing class they were asked to draw a house, the children drew the church. "We felt so foolish," a volunteer told me, "to have asked them to draw a house. We hadn't realised that they didn't know what a house was."

Just as they don't know what it is to have a proper family, two square meals a day, a school to go to or even the right to dream, as many do, that they will "grow up and become Amitabh Bachchan". The only love, and I repeat this deliberately, the only caring, the only brief glimpse of childhood these children have ever known is what they get every Friday afternoon in the stained-glass filtered sunlight of this small church.

Which is probably why my stomach turned even more than usual when I read in the following morning's newspapers that Ashok Singhal, the VHP's loudest loudmouth, had told a meeting of Hindutva's warriors in Ahmedabad that more Hindus had become Christians since Independence than in all the years of British rule. "This poses a danger to the culture and religion of the Hindus," he is reported to have said.

What culture Mr Singhal? What religion? If instead of utterly useless dharam sansads (religious parliaments) to discuss how to attack a tiny minority community, a dharam sansad is held to discuss what Hindu religious organisations could and should do to help poor and deprived Indians then -- and only then -- could we begin to start talking about culture and religion. A country in which the average child is denied that most fundamental of rights, the right to childhood, should think twice before it talks about such grand ideas as culture and religion. Especially when its religious organisations spend more time breeding thugs like the Bajrang Dal than doing anything to help children who have nobody to help them.

The irony is it would be so easy for the various organisations that gather under the umbrella of Hindutva to do a million times more than what the church does. The mother of the Sangh Parivar, the mighty RSS, organises thousands of shakhas (meetings) every morning in India's towns and villages. It gathers together children, sometimes as deprived as the members of the Pavement Club, and teaches them the virtues of patriotism and outdated systems of exercise and martial arts. Would it be so hard for them to be fed after their morning exertions? Would it be so hard for every shakha to also run a small school for those children who have no other schools to go to?

The VHP's dharam sansad in Ahmedabad began with the demand that the Government pass a "harsh law" to ban the activities of Christian groups and prevent the flow of foreign funds to them. It also asked for a white paper on "anti-India conspiracies".

If only, ah if only, there was one halfway intelligent human being among the sort of people who attend these gatherings, he would have got up and said that if there are anti-India conspiracies then it is for the Government to deal with them. More significantly, he may have pointed out to the Hindutva warriors that instead of demanding a ban on the activities of the church, they may make more of a difference if they tried to emulate some of these activities. Emulate for instance the compassion that is required to set up even one small Pavement Club.

Imagine the difference a million Pavement Clubs could make. We wouldn't have to face the daily horror of seeing India's children scrabbling through the garbage heaps of our cities. We are almost the only country left where this kind of abhorrent sight still exists. What makes it even more repugnant is that our religious organisations seem so much more capable of spreading hatred and venom than compassion and knowledge.

When this whole campaign against Christians started, the prime minister asked for a national debate on conversions. It was a silly idea. Because every human being has the right to convert to whichever religion he wants. But what about a national debate on why our religious organisations are so incapable of doing the sort of good things that usually compensate for the trouble religion brings in its wake? What about a national debate on why they show such a worrying absence of compassion?

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