By John Dayal
New Delhi, August 3, 2021: Cardinal Oswald Gracias is a respected leader of the Catholic Church, who since his inclusion in the 8-member group the Holy Father created to advise him on global affairs, is well known across national boundaries and continents.
In many ways, he is, with the papal nuncio in New Delhi, the chief adviser to the head of the church on matters concerning Asia and concerning India in particular.
Therefore, he needs to choose his words with great care and circumspection when confronted by the media or put into a situation to comment on areas of life which are not his domain of specialisation. The complexity of Indian politics, the deviousness of the Sangh Parivar in the nine decades of its existence, is not something the senior cardinal has faced in his long and distinguished career.
It is because of this that he finds himself embarrassed when giving TV interviews to channels such as Republic TV in the past, and to others whose motives are so clear to everyone else in the country.
If several bishops in Kerala, across denominations, are so deeply immersed in the politics of that state, the dear cardinal is an innocent lamb thrown to the wolves of New Delhi and Mumbai, his home base. The one glaring outgrowth of this is to be pleasant to the rulers at all costs.
The argument perhaps is that he has to protect the interests of the Church and its institutions which are such a visible presence in the country. His advisers and perhaps his own instincts have perhaps told him that no price is too high to pay to safeguard the Church and its properties. Above all, it is not for him to give clean chits to governments and rulers.
The resulting disaster is for all to see. It makes the good cardinal a subject of criticism, even ridicule, in civil society and in a large section of the Church.
Like the prime minister of India, the cardinal has not gone to Manipur, specially to Churachandpur, nor has he met any of the Kukis who were raped and paraded naked, and if they were fortune, killed. I have met the victim survivors in their refugee camps, seen their tears, and heard their stories from their mouths.
The cardinal could at least have spoken to the Archbishop of Imphal who is categorical in his assessment that while the Meiteis, as a plains living people, attacked the hill-living tribes of Kukis and Zo, they also automatically waged a war on the Christian community in the state.
Every Kuki alive is a Christian, howsoever complex and multilayered his identity may otherwise be. And now they are being demonized by the Meiteis, aided and abetted by the state government and the national government as infiltrators and narco terrorists.
Even the Supreme Court has slammed the lack of governance and urgency, defining the investigation carried out by the Manipur police in relation to the ethnic violence as “lethargic.”
The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India of which Cardinal Gracias has often been president, must issue a categorical statement that Christians, among them Catholics, have been the victims of the state supported violence against Kuki Zo tribes of Manipur.
This will be the only way to rectify the damage done by the cardinal’s statement which was not based on the facts and truths of the ground situation of Imphal valley and the hills of Churachandpur and other districts which are home to the Kuki Zo, each one of them a Christian, who now face a humanitarian crisis of untold magnitude in their refugee camps.