Diplomacy and politics in PM Narendra Modi meeting the Pope

This is the first meeting between an Indian prime minister and the Pope in more than two decades (Image: Twitter/@narendramodi)

After a gap of 20 years, an Indian Prime Minister met with the Pope, the head of the Roman Catholic Church, the world’s largest religious community, on October 30.

When then Prime Minister AB Vajpayee visited the Holy See to meet Pope John Paul II in 2000, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had 180 Lok Sabha members in Parliament, and the party was still a few months away from forming the first government in Goa.

The ground political reality and electoral mooring in India have changed significantly since then. The BJP has crossed the half way mark in terms of Lok Sabha seats comfortably in the last two general elections, and the party has formed governments in many states, where the Christian population is in double digit, except in Kerala.

The very fact remains that there was neither a papal visit to India or an Indian Prime Minister meeting the Pope coincided with the BJP’s phenomenal electoral rise in many states in the last two decades.

Also, except in the 1970’s and the last two decades of this century, every decade since Independence has either the Pope visiting India or an Indian Prime Minister getting an audience with the head of the Roman Catholic church in the Vatican.

This should put some more perspective when it comes to its overly touted domestic electoral importance of Prime Minister Narendra Modi meeting Pope Francis, a 20-minute scheduled meeting stretching into an hour-plus talk.

That said there is still a very important optics associated with the meeting between Modi and Pope Francis that is dutifully reflected in the reactions of the Catholic Bishops in India, home to the second-largest Roman Catholic community in Asia. The bishops were elated, hopeful, and found the meeting as a milestone-event.

A great deal of enthusiasm comes from the regions where the Catholic Church is more institutionalised, and enjoys an elitist socio-economic clout than in regions where it is more known for missionary works.

Take the example of Kerala. The Catholics form about 60 percent of the Christian population in the state, and they have a sizeable presence in nine out of its 14 districts. According to the 2011 Census, the Christian population in Kerala was 18.38 percent.

The Catholic Church leadership has moved away from the usual pattern of putting complaints of ‘attack against their clergy’ in different parts of India, which anyway is not so common in the states where they enjoy socio-economic clout.

When you are in the game of power, peeves don’t take you beyond a point. Of course, these issues come on and off. But they don’t create a political buzz the way it used to be as issues of more immediate anxieties take the centre stage to get debated, and enraged upon.

As far as emotive issues go, many church leaders talk about ‘love jihad’ — the attempt by Muslim men marrying Christian girls with an aim of religious conversion — than any other issue in the state. Then comes the issue of asymmetry in distributing minority scholarships, which is now a subject of a legal battle.

In the politics of anxiety, which is minority vs minority, the discourses has changed. Incidentally, it is not centred on the majority politics as we understand it in north of Vindhyas, and the BJP stands to benefit from the new churn in the minority-politics in Kerala in the long run.

The church is uneasy about the continuing clout of the Indian Union Muslim League (IUML) in the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF). Traditionally, the Congress enjoyed the support of the Christians and the Muslims, and in recent times the Communist Party of India (Marxist) has added substantial minority votes to its kitty, at the same time enjoying the support of the Hindu core vote.

The once hushed talks about the Kerala always having an IUML education minister when the Congress was in power is out in the open as both the Christians and the Muslims own sizeable educational institutions in the state.

It is not that the Roman Catholic Church or the non-uniform Christian community alone will deliver Kerala to the BJP on a platter.

For any electoral breakthrough of significance in the state, the BJP needs to ensure it gets a critical mass of the Hindu votes, and the party also needs to have leaders who can bring in votes. But the BJP is taking heart from the fact that if others things are right, getting substantial Christian votes might not be something which is impossible.

For that optics play its part. But this time around, the optics is the realm of converting things into something tangible in some time.

Jayanth Jacob is a foreign policy commentator who covered the ministry of external affairs for more than two decades. Twitter: @jayanthjacob.

Views are personal and do not represent the stand of this publication.