Praful Bidwai in The Frontline, 21 July, 2000
Our top leaders are playing down the gravity of what is unfolding today: a sinister campaign, if not a series of pogroms, against religious minorities by Hindu- communal fanatics who enjoy state patronage. Those at the apex of the government have casual and indulgent attitudes to this. Their close allies in the Sangh Parivar actually rationalise such barbarism ... Going by experience, it would be a surprise if the culprits are brought to book, and the minorities made genuinely secure through a principled assertion of the law of the land.
Today, the Sangh Parivar presides over a virulent anti-minority hate campaign. The government has failed to clamp down on it. Such top-level indulgence of communalism alone explains the impunity with which Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) vice-president Giriraj Kishore can malign all Christians and Muslims as "anti- Hindu": "This (Christian) community is worse than Muslims ... Muslims breed too much. But Christians go around desecrating Hindu gods and asking tribals to accept Jesus" ... Clearly, these elements feel emboldened only because of the signals emanating from the top that hate speech is kosher; and any vicious anti-minority barrage can pass muster in the name of "nationalism". Plainly, there is a casual connection between the cynically casual attitude of our seniormost Ministers towards this poisonous anti-minority campaign, on the one hand, and the activities of the Dara Singhs and the Giriraj Kishores, .on the other. Even Vajpayee is no exception to this. His fiery past speeches against religious conversion, and his outrageously smug recent statement that "all minorities are safe in India", bear this out. As does his proforma, unconvincing promise to punish those running the anti- minority campaign.
All members of the Sangh Parivar share some deeply irrational beliefs. First, they imagine that India's primary, quintessential, identity is Hindu. Christianity and Islam are alien to India. Hence, Hindu "assertion" is only fair even "natural". Second, they imagine that Islam and Christianity were promoted in India solely by force and that there is a Christian conspiracy today to proselytize Indians on a mass scale ...
And third, they believe that conversion is not only illegal, but so immoral that it must be prevented and punished no matter by what means. A poorly concealed rationalisation for violent means to do so is offered by Arun Shourie: "Society is too disorganised to act in an orderly manner. Inundated by infiltrators, people cannot get to the authorities to Bangladesh, they will get at their neighbour in the adjoining slum. Incensed by mounting conversions, they cannot get to the Pope in Rome ... they will leap at the poor convert next door."
All three premises offered by Parivar are dangerously false. Within our Constitutional framework, Indians have no "primary" identity, least of all one defined religiously. Nor is Christianity or Islam "alien" or new. Indian Christianity goes back to 52 AD - eight centuries before anything resembling Hinduism as we know it today was consolidated here. Christianity is much older in India than in Europe, today considered its "home". Islam in India too goes back more than a thousand years. It evolved organically here, as part of this soil. Historians such as Romila Thapar argue that India has always been plural and multi-religious.
Secondly, it is doubtful if most Christians or Muslims in India were "forcibly" converted. The operative identities of Indian rulers in the Middle Ages were more ethnic - Cholas, Yadavas, Rashtrakutas, Yavanas, Kushans, Shakas, Tajikas and so on - than religious. Even
the Delhi Sultans and the Mughals recognised the political limits of how far they could push proselytisation, Had there been mass-scale forcible conversion - as distinct from a willful change of faith by, say, Dalits, to escape caste oppression - India would not have had a fairly well- dispersed population of Muslims or Christians in most of India (barring the northeastern region). In Goa, ruled for 400 years by "Christian" Portugal, the majotity population remains Hindu.
Even assuming that there was coercion in the past, it does not follow that there will be conversion "conspiracies" in the future ... There are enough social and legal safeguards in India to prevent coercive conversion. You need a theocratic state to bring that about. Mercifully, the state in India is not even remotely theocratic.
The right to religious conversion is a fundamental Constitutional right. Article 25 guarantees the right to "practise" and "propagate" religion. There is nothing immoral about conversion cither. Some faiths are based on historical belief in the actual existence of prophets and revealed knowledge. They demand such adherence from their followers. This does not make them inferior to non-prophetic faiths -these faiths are only different from one another. Constitutionally, the adherents of a faith must have the liberty to practise, preach and convert. To argue, as Shourie does, that "Society is too disorganised to act in an orderly manner" and hence that devout Hindus will naturally "leap at the poor convert next door" is to inflame passions and rationalise fascist pogroms.
Deep down, such attitudes betray a profound irrationality which drives fantastic myth-making about imagined monsters and promotes fanatical intolerance and pigheadedness in understanding history and politics. It is precisely through the construction of terrible myths and gross misreading of history - for example, seen as a series of "repeated invasions" - that intense hatred can be mobilised to perpetrate mindless, barbaric, violence.
