Comment

One justification offered by the Bajrang Dal for mindless violence against Christians is its opposition to religious conversions.

The Sangh Parivar is on the wrong track. The church attacks have only managed to portray Hindus as a violent and bloodthirsty community. Not exactly a good reason for Hindus to stay Hindus.

As a religion that does not seek converts, Hinduism faces a problem when confronted with proselytising groups. Sooner or later, therefore, Hindus will have to take a call on whether they too need a conversion strategy to retain market share in the religious marketplace.

Conversions are a good way to check out your appeal as a religion. If one looks at history, conversions have, by and large, tended to be more opportunistic than genuine. We have sometimes seen entire groups or castes convert to another religion because they saw some economic or political advantage in it.

Ambedkar converted to Buddhism because he wanted to make a political and social statement about Hinduism. Gandhi's son converted to Islam partly because of his estranged relationship withhis father.

Whether you convert due a genuine change of heart, for material gain, or on the rebound, in a free society conversion has to remain an option for everybody. If the church offers free food and education to the poor and, in the bargain, obtains a few converts, it should be entirely acceptable in a free country. And in this day and age, no church will ever dare convert people using coercive tactics. If it does, it will not go unnoticed.

But conversion or no conversion, Hindu extremism will remain a cause for concern for it derives sustenance from the same forces that are driving Islamic or Christian fundamentalism.

According to Karen Armstrong, a world authority on religions and fundamentalism, the rise of modernity and enlightenment has left large swathes of religiously inclined conservatives fearful about the future. "Fundamentalists feel that they are battling against forces that threaten their most sacred values," she says in The Battle for God, a book on the history of fundamentalism written before 9/11.

In a world where the progress of science and rational thinking has reduced all holy books to myth or nonsense, man is left with no sense of purpose or higher truth. All the certainties dished out by religion are gone. This is what leads Christian fundamentalists to propose intelligent design as an alternative to Darwin, or Muslim fundamentalists to insist that every word of the Koran is god's truth and unalterable.

In the case of Hindus, extremism results, first, from a paranoid fear of being reduced to a minority in their own land. It explains the obsession with conversions. The second, and related point, is about identity.

A key pillar of Hindu society — caste — is being slowly dismantled. Caste is not only about discrimination. It is also about preserving faith, relationships, tradition. Remove caste, and suddenly faith itself comes into question.

One reason why conversions to Hinduism are tough is caste — which caste do you convert into? The Hindutva project was conceived partly in response to the need to create a wider Hindu identity beyond caste. Hindutva is no longer an upper caste plot to keep the lower castes in subjugation, but a widely felt need for a broader Hindu identity. Leadership of Project Hindutva is now largely in OBC hands (Modi, Togadia, Vinay Katiyar, Uma Bharti, Kalyan Singh).

The third reason for Hindu paranoia is aggressive secularism. Secularists have largely seceded from Hinduism, having internalised western criticism of caste and other alleged shortcomings of Hindu society.

When intellectuals attack their own people with a vengeance, is it any surprise why some Hindus are retreating to an embattled Hindutva line? Hear Karen Armstrong on this. Fundamentalist movements, she says, have "often evolved in a dialectical relationship with an aggressive secularism which showed scant respect for religion and its adherents." The antidote to fundamentalism may thus be soft and sensible secularism.
Email:r_jagannathan@dnaindia.net