The controversy over the issue of conversions could become a portent of unhappy things to come if the political leadership remains averse to the dictates of common sense, and impervious to the reality of our social and cultural make-up.
The sorriest aspect of the whole thing is that it is a manufactured debate. Nothing happened to trigger it. The contentiousness springs from the ideological bee in the bonnet of the Sangh Parivar that the country’s Muslims and Christians were once Hindu and must now be brought back to the fold through “re-conversion”.
This is, of course, an impossibility. Millions are hardly likely to stop following the faith their families have been born into for centuries and return to Hinduism. Besides, as a faith, Hinduism does not accept converts. A practical issue here is that of caste. Every Hindu is born into a caste. In what caste will a convert be placed?
The Sangh Parivar leaders know all this, and yet RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat and BJP president Amit Shah have unleashed a fiery debate on conversion underlining the seriousness with which the saffron brotherhood approaches the matter.
The whole thing began with a much advertised case of re-converting a small group of poor Muslims in Agra. A petty criminal, apparently owing allegiance to a saffron outfit, was put up to it, possibly for a consideration. He offered to get the poor Muslims ration cards and made them sit at a puja as a token of “ghar-wapsi”, or returning home. The frightened slum-dwellers hotly denied they had given up their faith. The matter kicked up a row in Parliament.
This was the opening the RSS was looking for. It nuanced the “re-conversion” argument to demand that all conversions must stop and a law be introduced on that. Stopping conversions is a decades-old demand of the RSS and its affiliates. No one took much note of it. But with a BJP government in office the saffronites are emphasising their demand with vengeance.
Freedom of faith is a key element of our Constitution. Stopping anyone from converting to a religion of his choice will be plainly unconstitutional if conversion has not been done by force or inducement. Bringing a law banning conversions flies in the face of the constitutional guarantee. B.R. Ambedkar and his followers would not have been permitted to migrate to Buddhism if freedom of faith were not guaranteed. Indeed, the RSS itself has been busy “converting” tribal people to Hinduism for decades.
