by CHIDANAND RAJGHATTA
Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (C) swears in the newly elected members of the House of Representatives during the opening of the 115th US Congress on January 3, 2017 PHOTO/AFP Photo/Jim Watson/Yahoo
For years, particularly during the time when the BJP has been in power, many Indians have resented western media descriptions of India as ”Hindu India” or ”mostly-Hindu” India. That’s like gratuitously calling the US. ”Christian United States,” they’ve fumed, pointing out that India’s Constitution does not mention God or religious allegiance, and religious proclivities of a political party should not be used to tag a secular country with one, or any, religion.
The US Constitution does not refer to God either, but He (it’s always ”He” in Christian theology) pops in the Declaration of Independence, and is invoked in almost every political speech (”God bless you and God bless the United States!”), a ”verbal tic” that has been ridiculed by the country’s strong agnostic community. Countries that explicitly invoke ”God” or ”Almighty” include Pakistan, Brazil, Australia, Ireland, Greece, Canada, and South Africa, among others.
Well, regardless of Constitutional references and niceties, religion is very much a part of political life and calculations both in India and the United States. A new analysis by the Pew Research Center on the religious affiliation of American lawmakers has concluded that the ”U.S. Congress is about as Christian today as it was in the early 1960s… although the share of US adults who describe themselves as Christians has been declining for decades.”
The study says among members of the new, 115th Congress that was sworn in on Tuesday, 91 per cent describe themselves as Christians. This is nearly the same percentage as in the 87th Congress (1961 to 1962, the earliest years for which comparable data are available), when 95 per cent of members were Christian.
Among the 293 Republicans elected to serve in the new Congress, all but two identify as Christians; the only exceptions are two Jewish Republicans — Lee Zeldin of New York and David Kustoff of Tennessee.
Democrats in Congress also are overwhelmingly Christian (80%), but there is more religious diversity on this side of the aisle. The 242 Democrats in Congress include 28 Jews, three Buddhists, three Hindus, two Muslims and one Unitarian Universalist – as well as the only member of Congress to describe herself as religiously unaffiliated.
According to the survey, the number of Hindus in Congress rose from one to three, as Ro Khanna (D-Calif), and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Illinois) joined Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) who was first elected to serve in the 113th Congress (2013 to 2014) and has been re-elected twice, among those who identified themselves as Hindus.
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