The phenomenon of conversion is guaranteed to make the militant Hindu turn a violent shade of saffron. This was evident, for instance, in the fuss regarding the Tipu Sultan. What exercised the VHP so vehemently was not its brazen tastelessness, but rather the alleged glossing over of Tipu's "forcible" conversion of Hindus to Islam in 18th century Malabar. Even if it is agreed, for the sake of argument, that 18th century Malabar was the scene of widespread and forcible conversions, of Muslim tyranny - surely any protest had best come from the descendants of the "victims" of that "tyranny" - i.e. the Muslims of present-day Malabar! And if, indeed, there is no protest, are we to suppose that we confront, in 18th century Malabar, a tyranny without victims? After all, the Hindus of Malabar (and elsewhere), who evidently survived the ordeal with their Hinduism intact, can hardly claim to be victims of forcible conversion. Unfortunately, however, the VHP's loud outrage manifests itself in a spirit of vengeance against their heirs and successors - even, it seems, a wholesale transformation of the only possible "victims" into tyrants and "invaders".
In confronting such Hindu ideologies, it is a difficult matter deciding whether one is dealing with a position - or a pathology? Thus, should one trade arguments seek to understand the traumas, individual and collective, that have produced these widespread neuroses? To wit, who "invaded" the infant Hingonani? As a consequence of what terrible violation do these ideologues now seek to violate the "invader minorities" and expunge them, now and in the irretrievable past, so that the body politic may once again regain its mythical virginal innocence - its "uninvadedness"?
Needless to say, the metaphor of "invasion" provides a curious and wholly inadequate matrix for interpreting the spectacle of our history. The continually delineating and crystallising politics, the endlessly shifting boundaries, the fractious principalities that were being invaded when they were not themselves invading some hapless neighbour - these cannot be accommodated within the simple binary frames of the contemporary Hindu ideologues.
Their implicit discovery of some mythical "aboriginal moment", some point or threshold where the "original", as it were, ended, as the "invasion" began - this is at best naive. After all, one asks where might such a point or threshold be most profitably located: in the 11th or 12th century, or the 15th or in the turbulent millennia before the birth of Christ, when fair skinned "invaders", also from the north, violently displaced over the course of centuries - as the epics record with such irrefutable eloquence - the forest-dwelling tribes of the Indian sub-continent?
The "Hindu" location of the threshold, after which all is violence and "invasion", sometime in the 10th century serves an obvious purpose; the familiar periodisation of Indian History into Hindu, Muslim and British periods. There is however, a problem with this: whereas the British - the "last invaders" - left in 1947, the Muslim "invaders" are still very much in our midst - indeed, "they" are indistinguishable from "us". The unacceptable truth of the matter - unacceptable to Hindus, unacceptable to Muslims - is that the vast majority of Indian Muslims are converts from that loose conglomeration of beliefs which are sought to be unified in "Hinduism".
The myth of "violent invasion" then - as distinct from the historical facts of conflict and conquest - serves two distinct sets of purposes. The first of these has to do with the retrospective absolutism of brahminical Hinduism. The reiterated myth of "invasion" seeks to camouflage its inner defect, to elide the inhumanity of caste-ridden Hindu society. By implying a state of innocence prior to "invasion", it cleverly assumes the existence of a Hindu "body" which could, so to speak, be "invaded". The myth thus seeks to cover up the facts of social division, of sclerosis and callousness. Ironically enough, it is the myth of invasion that yields a homogeneous Hindu past as an ideological spin-off.
The myth of "invasion" of which the myth of forcible conversion is a part - serves the further purpose of denying present historical rights to significant sections of the population - the Muslims. Because the curious thing is that this "invasion" is not a matter of a historical moment or threshold. Akbar is as much of an "invader" as Babar, as Aurangzeb, as Bahadur Shah Zafar, who died, pining in exile, for the dust of that homeland where he has become, after a mere hundred odd years, an "invader". Invasion then, is not an act or an event, it is a taint, a curse that passes down the generations and the centuries, to afflict the upwardly mobile artisan who opts out of hierarchical Hinduism, and the restless and conscious peasant who seeks to escape the dead hand of Hindu orthodoxy. All of these are simply, "babar ki aulad", invaders all.
The reiterated myth of the invader - or the perpetually renewed "invasion" that is always and everywhere - serves and seeks to disenfranchise the Muslims in the present. It casts on them a sort of spell of silence and even of invisibility. Saddled with a historical guilt, Indian Muslims are increasingly being forced into a sullen, ominous silence. The most conscious, restless, dynamic and articulate classes that courageously opted out of the dread embrace of brahminical Hinduism in the course of the centuries—these are sought to be conjured away in visions of Central and West Asian "invaders".
The paradoxical working of the Hindu myth of Muslim invasion and forcible conversion serves to deny sympathy and recognition not only to its alleged victims — i.e. today's Indian Muslims — but also to the present-day victims of the traditional tyranny of brahminical Hinduism—the orphans of Hindu society, the so-called children of God. Because, of course, corresponding to the "invasion" that is always and everywhere, the threshold of the "innocence" too is highly mobile. And, wonder of wonders, "we Hindus" are always on the right side of it. Thus, while "we" cannot invade ourselves, "their" mere presence is an invasion. The ideological manoeuvre thus serves to exculpate the contemporary violence that is being wrecked on Harijan bastis, or tribal societies. It serves to cast a pall of "innocence" over contemporary acts of callousness and appropriation.
The truth is that militant Hindus, eager to inherit the vishwa cannot afford to recognise the fact of conversion: not in the past, and not in the present. Because conversion which must undoubtedly sometimes have been enforced, and sometimes undertaken for cynical and opportunistic reasons—is most frequently an assertion of the freedom of belief and association, an assertion of the freedom to secede from a "community" whose precondition for membership for large sections of the population is a denial of their humanity. It must be, in the first instance, an act of refusal. It is this that the militant Hindus cannot countenance, because it implacably draws attention to the skeletons in Hindus' bulging cupboard of horrors.
Hindu pathologies: the fierce refusal to recognise the fact that people can choose—freely, deliberately, without threat of violence or lure of lucre—to secede from Hinduism. And that they have a right to do so.
(Source: The Times of India, New Delhi, 12 August, 1990)