Scaling up Christian participation in Indian elections

Christians suffer from a lack of robust work history as party functionaries, a credible record of mainstream public service.

Updated: August 27, 2024 11:52 AM GMT

By the end of this year, people in four Indian states — Jammu and Kashmir, Jharkhand, Haryana, and Maharashtra — will elect their new governments. Although Christians do not dominate these states, the elections present an opportunity to scale up good practices that enhance Christian political participation in the 2024 national polls.

Christian political participation in India has historically been woefully inadequate. However, in the latest national elections, some 20 parliamentarians were Christians, forming 3 percent of the 543 members elected to the national parliament. This is promising for a population constituting 2.3 percent of India’s 1.4 billion people, but it is not necessarily a testament to larger overall Christian political participation nationwide.Most Christian parliamentarians won their constituencies from traditional Christian-majority or strong-hold states in northeast and southern India. They were public figures or political leaders who contested the election as part of a broader opposition alliance, the INDIA bloc, led by the Congress Party against the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), led by the Hindu-oriented Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).Their parties nominated them for a particular constituency based on their winnability and tactical sectarian alliances that characterize Indian politics. Their success was not necessarily because of Christian votes, nor did it demonstrate the prioritization of Christian welfare.By contrast, Christians constitute a marginal one percent or less in the rest of India’s vast geography — northern, western, and central India, which is home to more than half of Indians — where they do not figure in the calculus of political parties.Dolphy D’Souza, president of Bombay Catholic Sabha (BCS), says no political party fielded a Christian member to contest seats in any of Maharashtra’s 48 parliamentary constituencies. This is despite the western Indian state having certain politically decisive Catholic pockets, although Christians constitute less than one percent of the state’s estimated 129 million people.D’Souza, who has been working to boost Christian political participation in Mumbai, says Christians “lack a robust work history as party functionaries, a credible record of mainstream public service and visibility to win seats.”Christian party members were also realistic about their poor experience and did not file nomination applications. He said they need to start from and win at lower levels, like city corporation elections, and build their experience and visibility to help parties consider them for higher levels of office.

“Moreover, Christians lack money to contest elections. Party funds are inadequate, and community financial support is poor, partly because Christians lack the resource levels required to back Christian candidates. Wealthy Christians place investment in charity over politics, which is seen as a dirty business,” he said.By contrast, Christians won two of the 14 parliamentary seats in Jharkhand state. They won the seats as part of the tribal-dominated Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) and Congress Alliance, which won five seats reserved for tribal people.Indian Christians tend to be apathetic about political involvement, although no official national data is available on Christian voter turnout in India’s secret ballot system. A pointer to this apathy is the call by most bishops every election season to urge their people to vote. For instance, in the last national elections, an archbishop in western India had to urge his Catholics not to undertake a Marian pilgrimage on polling day but to vote. And this is no isolated instance of apathy!There were also other barriers to voting. “Across India and in Mumbai, many minorities, including Christians, who had voted consistently in the past, found their names deliberately or accidentally removed from the electoral lists and could not vote in the 2024 parliamentary polls,” D’Souza says.”This requires citizens to check electoral lists till the end to ensure inclusion,” he adds.

Christian and other minority community voting patterns were also complex, according to studies.Sanjay Kumar, who headed a survey by the New Delhi-based Center for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), said data showed that religious minorities veered towards non-BJP movements because of the party’s anti-minority positions.

The post-poll Lokniti-CSDS survey 2024 collected responses from 19,663 people, including 440 Christians, 2517 Muslims, and 590 Sikhs.The survey said that all religious minorities did not vote traditionally as a block based on their religious identities. “About 32 percent of Christians, 65 percent Muslims and 32 percent Sikhs voted for the India Bloc that opposed the BJP-led NDA alliance,” Kumar said.However, “28 percent of Christians, 10 percent of Muslims, and 11 percent of Sikhs voted for the NDA alliance,” rendering Christians the largest religious minority to support the NDA.According to observers, the Christian community’s electoral choices largely swung between the need to protect constitutional and minority rights and a more politically pragmatic accommodation with the incumbent regime — an age-old practice.The community’s widespread belief that ‘politics is dirty,’ and prayer a panacea for all ills; its socio-cultural, charitable and faith-based engagement within siloed Christian institutions; religious jingoism and clericalism obstruct a structural understanding of socio-economic and political concerns and readiness to participate in principled transformative politics, including as elected officials and informed responsible voters.But gradual change is discernible. Promoting values of inclusive, transformative politics among Christians, collaborating with mainstream practitioners to advocate for and ensure the provision of public goods and services, especially for marginalized groups, and increasing awareness of the right to informed political participation are examples of strategies deployed in Jharkhand and Mumbai by Christian and non-Christian civil society in partnership with each other and with local government.Ratan Tirkey, a former member of the Jharkhand government’s Tribe Advisory Council, says, “More Christian candidates with credible public service work must run in our upcoming assembly elections.””This is a constitutional right but is also aligned with Christ’s teachings and life of public stewardship to restore dignity and justice to all peoples,” he adds.In Jharkhand, where 13 of 23 districts are tribal-dominated, “we are striving to forge a united tribal identity beyond religious affiliation and protect tribal culture.”Their efforts include joint celebration of festivals and more inclusive coverage for tribal people in all available services. Following demands from tribal people, the state government in 2020 passed a resolution proposing that the federal government recognize the tribals’ Sarna religion that follows unique tribal practices of nature worship. Such federal recognition would enable tribal people to mark their separate religious identity in census records, eliminating the current system of marking their religious identity under any six major listed religions in India or under the category ‘others’.“This move was widely supported by non-Christian and Christian tribals, including the Archdiocese of Ranchi,” says Tirkey.He said they have been holding awareness programs with local government support on the constitutional and political rights of tribal peoples, which led to the JMM-Congress Alliance winning five tribal-reserved seats, two of which were Christian.“We want more, and a surge in voters, including Christians, in the upcoming state assembly elections — beyond an estimated 50 percent Christian voter turn-out in the 2024 national elections,” he says.D’Souza also noted an increased Christian voter turnout in Mumbai. In the 2024 national elections, it was about 70 percent, up from 20 percent in 2019.D’Souza partnered with Vote for Democracy and sixty civil society and community networks. They undertook pre-poll door-to-door campaigns, voter education, and registered names in voter lists for all citizens across BCS units in Mumbai parishes in close coordination with the Maharashtra State Election Commission.They also ran forty awareness programs on informed choice that highlighted issues afflicting India and the need to defend the constitution and democracy proactively and served as polling agents on election day.He added that these efforts “guided voters to polling booths across the city on Election Day. Today, our enrolment and voter awareness campaigns are surging forward to achieve 100 percent voter turnout” when Maharashtra elects a new government by the end of this year.*Dr. Jean D’Cunha worked with UN Women in senior technical and management positions worldwide and was a senior global advisor on international migration and decent work before she retired in 2024. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official editorial position of UCA News.