The Home Office recently invited a delegation from Hindu Council UK for a consultation on the oncoming legislation for "Ministers of Religion from abroad". A persistent demand has been made from all quarters to ensure that only qualified persons should be allowed entry.
Dr Stadlen, Head of the Faith Communities Unit, who chaired the meeting, explained that the White Paper, "Secure Borders, Safe Haven", undertook to review the existing arrangements whereby they would like to look at the proposal for allowing appropriately qualified persons to be allowed an entry clearance.
One of the proposals for an entry clearance is that the minister has sufficient knowledge of English (IELTS Band 6 Competent User).
OP Sharma of the Council pointed out that the re were about 140 temples, each having its own executive committee of volunteers from the community and that these were the people who actually ran the temples and arranged community activities.
The priests take a secondary role of performing various rituals and carrying out worship activities. They are not preachers as such and each temple on average has two to three priests only, in fact very few come to the UK, at least, in comparison to other faiths.
Sharma said that these priests, although highly educated and trained to perform the temple duties may not know English at all and that while "we are trying to get them trained in English also it will take about 10 years to achieve that requirement, which we too prefer".
Dr Stadlen stressed that English was a useful tool to communicate to the younger members of the community and in addition the requirement would be complimentary to the community cohesion programme.
Raj Bali of Derby Temple said: "We are concerned more about the priest's scriptural education and his command of Sanskrit rather than any other language."
Ishwer Taylor of Hindu Forum of Britain too agreed that community cohesion was the responsibility of the community, not so much of the priest. In Preston, he said that priests were encourgaed to attend college for English as a second language course but it was important to them that they spoke Gujarati and Hindi.
The Home Office was also informed by Dr Rao that a Hindu priest was not a preacher nor did he give sermons. He said that in his Ventakeshwar Bala ji temple they have six priests and none of them preach, which is left to the monks.
Jitu Patel then explained that at Swaminarayan they have various categories, for example:
a) Sadhus, who will preach and most know English well
b) Pujaries, who do the worship and ritual duties (actually, are the priests)
c) Puraanies, who read and analyse the scriptures
d) Bhandaries, who cook for the deities
Patel explained that actually the categories b, c and d have little or no contact with the public and they would like to maintain that.
Dr Stadlen enquired whether the priests were in two categories, a) where they provide a moral leadership role and b) where they just do the ritual work of the temples.
Anil Bhanot of UK Hindu Forum summing up the presentation said that probably only five per cent of the priests took up the leadership role, "where they do actually start giving sermons and go out to the community but the other 95 per cent remain basically in the temple and would give moral and scriptural guidance on an individual basis".
He continued on Raj Bali's comment that "our priest is consulted by the community on an individual basis and although he commands respect from the congregation he does not lead it as would be the case for instance by an Imam in a mosque, who actually acts as their leader". He clarified that the Hindu priest does not get involved with community issues, nor does he comment on them.
The example of the Wolverhampton temple was cited. Recently they held a congregation where the priest, who speaks broken English, did all the religious duties but lectures and talks were given by the community leaders and the congregation included three MEP's and 15 councillors and he reminded that that is community cohesion at work.
Dr Rao, finally made a point that actually switching does not happen in Hindu priesthood; it is not that an IT engineer can switch to becoming a priest; the training is long and arduous. He enquired at the end from Dr Stadlen whether it was now clear that such a law would undermine our system totally and although efforts can be made in future to request the schools to train the priests in English also that at the very least Hindus should be exempted in a transitional period of say 10 years.
Dr Rao said that if our youngsters demand that the priests speak English the system will automatically begin to cater for that and this legislation is not seen as necessary for the Hindu priestly roles, "that would be the case for our exemption".
Dr Stadlen hinted about considering
the downgrading of the IELTS Band 4 limited user requirement for English
but there was still no consensus on that by the delegation.