ASHWIN KUMAR S G
No Hindus in Kerala have ever gone to other’s homes and have preached that your religious rituals are wrong and that ours are right. They have never said leave your “Allah” or “Jesus” behind, and come with us for the sake of crores, reservation and job. According to Article 28, it’s a fundamental right to propagate religion. But as like in the other fundamental rights, this one also has its limitations. As the wordings “your right to swing your arms ends just where other man’s nose begins” say, one’s fundamental rights end at other’s nose tips; that is, you have the right to spread your religion but you do not have the right to barge into other’s houses and distribute pamphlets maligning their religion and showing it in bad light. As India had been a confluence of different religions and sects, the makers of our Constitution put the fundamental right of religious propagation to let the religions propagate the good values in their religions, definitely, they would not have put this provision to aid religious conversions through maligning other religions.
Let’s look at a previous incident happened in North Paravoor, where the activists of an Islamic religious group belonging to the Salafi school named Wisdom distributed pamphlets in Hindu homes with the clear intention of maligning Hindu religion and painting the Hindu worship principle of idol worship in very bad light using objectionable words. This intrusion or poking nose to other’s cultural rights created a scuffle between them and the local RSS workers there, after which both were booked under the law. We should note what Kerala’s Chief Minister Honorable Pinarayi Vijayan informed the Kerala legislative assembly about the incident which happened on August 20,2017. He confirmed in the Assembly that the content of the pamphets which had been distributed in North Paravoor was aimed to ” critisize those who believe in polytheism and idol worship”.
Now coming back to the recent issue in Kodungalloor, here also, the Christian evengelists are accused of distributing allegedly offensive and objectionable pamphets maligning Hinduism. They have done hate speech, not inside any of their churches, their houses or in any other ‘private places’.But they choose to run a door to door campaign, aimed at lambasting Hinduism and its cultural principles and rituals. Shall we accept this?
Prima facie, the pastor and his other ‘unemployed’ young evengelists have conducted an act which is punishable under the Section 153(A) of the Indian Penal Code(IPC) which clearly states “words, either spoken or written, or by signs or by visible representations or otherwise, promotes or attempts to promote, on grounds of religion, race, place of birth, residence, language, caste or community or any other ground whatsoever,”, public disharmony or caste/religious hatred shall be punished with imprisonment upto 3 years or fine or with both.
But what happened here? Here it seems that a youth who protested, may be due to his scant knowledge about the laws, by manhandling the evangelist group has been solely made a scapegoat. While the so called “Conscious” society of Kerala let go of the Evangelists who are alleged of hate speech and mooting religious hatred!
Maybe the youth’s reaction has happened out of anger, a protest from the heart, against the intrusion into a culture, his religion in which he has been born and brought up. The act by the Christian evangelists here is no less grave than an act of exhibitionism which some perverts do. This one is definitely graver in the sense that it has been done arriving at Hindus’ homes, under the garb of the gospel.
More serious is the attitude some “FB animals” towards this issue. They have been making a charade of foul language against the youth through Facebook. There are many posts in FB, which portray the identity of this youth, restrict his behaviour to an organisational obligation adding to that pose death threat against him. Isn’t he a citizen of India entitled to the same fundamental rights as all of us? Aren’t these vitriolic attacks and death threats against him the things that should not be left unaddressed? These questions have a prime importance as the Hindu youth here is not the one who started this issue, the spark for that has been an unlawful activity, why a ‘deep conscious silence’ about that?
The Christian Evangelists here breached a harmonious coexistence and these type of people have been doing it for long, what is the course of action taken by the law in such incidents? Definitely, we cannot let go an unconstitutional(underlined) activity of maligning other religions under a cover-up of religious propagation. If a violent act can be booked by law, it shouldn’t let go the perpetrators of that violence.
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