#dnaEdit: Conversion issues

Union minister for parliamentary affairs M Venkaiah Naidu during Zero Hour in Lok Sabha at Monday forenoon session declared that the government has nothing do with conversions or reconversion, that it did not support either conversion or reconversion. He said if force or allurement was used during the conversion, then it should be decided by the courts. This was in the wake of the issue raised by Venugopal from Kerala about the report of conversion of Dalit Christians to Hinduism in Kerala and Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s (VHP) Praveen Togadia’s claim to increase the Hindu population from 82 per cent to 100 per cent. Another VHP leader Ashok Singhal wanted the conversion programme to continue. The Narendra Modi government seems to have backed off a bit because last week Venkaiah Naidu in Lok Sabha and Union finance minister Arun Jaitley in Rajya Sabha had challenged the opposition parties to a debate on conversion and they expressed their support for a legislation banning religious conversion per se. 

The Prime Minister has maintained a determined silence even though the opposition in the Upper House has been stalling the proceedings on the demand that he should clarify his position. Meanwhile, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) chief Mohan Bhagwat defended conversions — in the view of RSS and its affiliates it is reconversion or bringing back those who were Hindus but got converted to other religions, and there is also the claim that at one time everyone in the country was a Hindu — and the RSS’s general secretary Bhaiyyaji Joshi declared in Hardwar on Sunday that conversions should stop because it was creating problems in the country.

It is clear that the belligerent acts of conversion being carried out by organisations like the VHP are pushing the Modi government to the wall. Naidu’s latest statement shows that the government wants to distance itself from the whole issue. Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president Amit Shah did not want to comment on the conversion issue. The Modi government and the BJP are feeling the heat. The Prime Minister does not want his cultivated image of a man focused on development in the country and abroad to be dented by negative publicity. He is keenly aware that Western Christian countries would not take kindly to attempts to wean away Christians or even Muslims. 

The confusion in the government and party circles is writ large. Many of the right-wingers are supporters — some of them are vocal, others are silent — of converting sections of the minorities to Hinduism because they look upon with disfavour on, and hostility towards, proselytisation of some of the Christian missionaries and Muslim organisations. Many of them are in favour of a law banning religious conversion per se. Right-wing Hindus are not yet prepared to face up the harsh reality that Dalits and other oppressed castes are only willing to convert to other religions because of the inhuman discrimination practised in mainstream Hindu society. They are not willing to envisage a casteless Hinduism. Even RSS and VHP who are reaching out to Dalits and tribals in order to convert them to Hinduism are flummoxed by the caste imperatives of Hinduism. One of the BJP leaders said that the Dalits and others who are supposedly reconverting to Hinduism should once again take up their position as members of the caste they belonged to before they got converted to other religions. They do not realise that if that is the case, the ‘reconversion’ programme is an act of self-destruction. There is then no incentive to reconvert to Hinduism.