The Cross Vs The Sickle
- The Church is upset with the Left government for it wants to put a cap on fees in schools/colleges run by it. Muslims and Nairs also oppose this.
- The latest flare-up is over a CD for high school teachers, showing a bishop in poor light.
- The Church has asked the Left not to persecute Christians. This may impact the Left in the Lok Sabha polls.
- Christians constitute 19 per cent of Kerala's population. Muslims account for 27 per cent and Nairs make up 12.5 per cent.
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The latest irritant has been two CDs—The Wound and Typewriter—recently prepared as study material for high school teachers. The Wound shows a lamb run over by a car as the boy who tended it watches helplessly. The grief-stricken boy then sees a nonchalant bishop in the backseat of the car. The story presumably insinuates a binary of a callous bishop and the innocent boy/animal. According to the Church, the companion CD on sex education, Typewriter, contains porn as it shows a boy reading pornography. Interestingly, the government has been trying to introduce sex education in high schools, a move resisted by the Church.
In better times, the Church would have hardly taken notice of such material, but ties between the CPI(M) and Church being a tinderbox, even a minor insinuation can trigger a flare-up. M.A. Baby denied the education department authorised the CD and suspended two officials connected with it. Actually, Baby had been meeting bishops to try to atone for the 'sins' of omission or commission during the past three years of LDF rule. But the CD controversy has almost derailed the peace moves. Asked about the controversy, Cardinal Mar Varkey Vithayathil, pontiff of the Syro-Malabar church and president of the Catholic Conference of India, said, "It does not even deserve a response. I never thought such incidents will happen in the state. It is degradation in the state's culture."
The Church's move is likely to impact coastal constituencies—Thiruvananthapuram, Kollam, Alappuzha, Ernakulam—in the Kottayam belt and northern pockets where Christians have a strong presence. The CPI(M) seeks to counter this by subtly falling back on the majority community, fielding Hindu candidates wherever necessary but doing this without being seen as anti-Christian.
