Conversion

The debate on religious conversion in India has spiralled out of control
 
Tolerating conversion

The debate on the people’s right to convert from one faith to another has simply gone out of hand. India is simply losing its sensitivities on this issue. India is a vast country with many faiths. It is the home of many religions. It has the second largest Muslim population in the world – after Bangladesh. It has more Christians than Australia. It is the home of Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains and a myriad of other faiths as well as faiths within faiths. Hinduism is not a monolithic faith although the Supreme Court in its decision in the Swami Narayan Temple Entry case (1966) gave such an expanded assimilationist interpretation to the word ‘Hindu’ that it blurred over divisions within and beyond the Hindu faith. It repeated this exercise in the Hindutva cases (1996) by virtually helping to redefine a new political religion. In the Jain case (2005), the court clearly offended the Jains by an assimilationist approach to their religion. All this goes against common sense and the constitutional dispensation that a religion is drawn from the faith itself and not a judicial version of what judges think it is. It was not for the Supreme Court to construct a faith on the basis of what others think.

This takes us to the core of our present discontent about the present and past controversies about religious conversion in India. The entire conversion debate is dominated by the Hindu Right whose political agenda is: (a) to declare the country and Indian civilisation as primarily, if not solely, a Hindu civilisation, (b) to insist that all past conversions over the centuries were induced by fear, fraud and opportunism, (c) to regard all past conversion as essentially suspect and (d) to pursue an intimidating policy to try and ensure that future conversions from Hinduism should not take place, and in any event, be minimised. It is thus clear that the controversy about conversion is inextricably linked to the rise of the new religious faith of political ‘Hindutva’. Belligerent, apprehensive, uncompromising and vicious in its attitude, the new face of ‘political Hindutva’ has surfaced with plans, policies and programmes to attack and discipline all other faiths. The policy of attack is clear from the destruction of the Babri Masjid, the murder of Rev. Staines, the intimidation of Christians and Muslims and murders in Gujarat and elsewhere. The policy of disciplining other faiths includes both a programme to impose fear on others as well as a legal policy to intimidate non-Hindu minorities through the processes of the law. There is a vast trail of legal and illegal censorship imposed by the cohorts of the new political Hindutva. The illegal strategy is articulated in the attacks on Hussain’s paintings and on the Bhandarkar Institute which, ironically, has been home to a lot of learning and archives on Hinduism. The legal strategy has been to arrest and intimidate minorities for hurting Hindutva sensitivities. The sheer aggression of politicised Hindutva is self-evident from the various campaigns the Hindutva Right have followed.

Conversion, the Constitution and Hindutva

One of the areas of legal intimidation has been on the issue of ‘conversion’. A common sense approach would be to say that people are free to convert from one faith to another if they wish to. In fact, historically, India is a country of converts. There were conversions from Hinduism to Jainism, to Buddhism and to Islam and Christianity. Over time, all this had added a richness and uniqueness to India. Today a Muslim or a Christian is a Muslim or a Christian, not a past Hindu. If people want to convert, they have the right to do so – without requiring the permission of the state or setting up a system whereby police officials and magistrates will be watching conversions under a system of conversion by surveillance.

India’s Constitution has to be sensitively read so as to admit to the right to conversion being a constitutional right to pursue a faith and belief of one’s choice – including, perforce, the right not to have any faith. There are two aspects to this. The first is the right of the person to convert to another faith if they want to. This is clear from the text or Article 25 of the Constitution which says "all persons are equally entitled to freedom of conscience and the right to freely profess, practice and propagate religion". Nothing could be clearer than this on the question of choice of faith. The second aspect also flows from Article 25. This is a right of adherents to a religion to propagate their faith. This entered the constitutional text because in the Constituent Assembly, M. Rathnaswamy suggested an amendment to the earlier draft of Article 25 to add the word ‘propagate’ to the text. This was done with the object of giving proselytising (and indeed, non-proselytising) faiths a chance to make their faith known to others. That the Supreme Court in Stanislaus’ Case (1977) said that the right to propagate does not necessarily mean the right to convert does not alter the basic approach of the Constitution that (a) people have a right to pursue a faith of their choice and (b) adherents of a faith have a right to propagate their faith.

The real question was whether this right to propagate should be monitored under a system of surveillance under a threat of prosecution for wrongful conversions. Unfortunately, there are too many Hindutva myths about present day conversions. I use the words ‘present day conversions’ advisedly. Something may be made of the conversions of ‘imperial’ Christianity through its priests. But that was all in the past. People rooted in the present, whose ancestors may have converted out of the Hindu (or any other) faith, have to be respected for the faiths they continue to choose to follow. The ‘Hindutva’ faith profiles all conversions as inherently suspect since it seems to hurt Hindutva pride. The idea that Hindus might prefer another faith is anathema. Babasaheb Ambedkar made it clear that he was leaving Hinduism for Buddhism because he found the former insensitive, cruel and corrupt. But proponents of ‘Hindutva’ get more annoyed if Hindus convert to Islam or Christianity. In ‘Hindutva’ minds, these are foreign faiths even though they have been practised and have had a following in India for centuries. This rancour that Hindus are deserting to a ‘foreign’ faith becomes a rallying cry to the Hindutva faithful. Willy-nilly, Muslims and Christians come to be targeted not just because they are different but they are impliedly accused in the Hindutva mind as stealing Hindus to their fold. But in fact there is no evidence of such stealing. A convert can easily decry the process of conversion after the conversion. But years pass by and converts remain happy with the faith they have converted to. Not satisfied with this, it is said that it is the poor that fall prey to conversion. This too seems highly doubtful. Professor Kalam’s excellent research in Tamil Nadu suggests the contrary. It is not the poor but the better off who convert. The Kalam research is dated by a couple of decades. He is going to follow it through with confirmatory explorations. But the myth of desperate conversions by the poor under inducement and fraud does not seem to have any foundation and seems illogical.

Conversion under surveillance

But since the forces of Hindutva cannot police the minorities they have decided to police the conversions. In 1954, the union Parliament refused to pass an Indian Conversion (Regulation and Registration) Bill or the Backward Communities (Religious Protection) Bill in 1960. But with the change in political power in the states in 1966, state governments began to pass legislation to monitor conversions. First came the Orissa Act of 1967, then the Madhya Pradesh Act of 1968 and then the Arunachal Pradesh Freedom of Religion Act of 1978. Acts were passed in Tamil Nadu, which were sought to be made stringent by Chief Minister Jayalalitha. Similar legislation exists in Gujarat (2003) and Chhattisgarh (2005). More recently, a bill was passed by the Rajasthan legislature which the governor seems to have reserved for presidential assent.

The Orissa and Madhya Pradesh bills were upheld by the Supreme Court in Stanislaus’ case (1977) where the court took the view that the right to propagate did not include the right to convert. But the judgement of the Supreme Court is wrong both in its interpretation of the right to propagate as well as on other counts. Two aspects need to be highlighted. The first is that the Supreme Court looked at the right to convert as part of the right to propagate one’s faith to others but not the right of a person to get converted to another faith. Those seeking to convert another may have the right to propagate but not convert, but this cannot eclipse the right of the converted to choose a religion or faith of their choice. Secondly, the court did not scrutinise the contents of the legislation and test it on the grounds of public order, health or morality, which are the sole grounds on which the rights of a person to choose their faith can be curtailed. In 2004 the Supreme Court used up an opportunity to consider the issue by blindly following the Stanislaus case and giving a short judgement without even issuing notice to the other side to hear the matter properly.

Anyway, the standard pattern of conversion bills is founded on the principles of policing and surveillance over conversion. There is a system of reporting conversion to the authorities, subjecting the conversion to scrutiny on the basis of fraud or inducement and filing criminal prosecutions on those who perform conversions or organise events to enable conversions to take place. One would have thought the Indian legal system has better things to do than policing conversions and subjecting them to surveillance. Unfortunately, the votaries of the new aggressive Hindutva rely on the Supreme Court’s judgement in 1977, made during the height of the Emergency when the Supreme Court’s juristic sensitivities eluded some of the judges. The Stanislaus case (1977) must be reassessed. In any event, the new legislations on conversions must be subject to scrutiny. Such legislation is not getting better. It is only getting worse.

The process is the punishment

With this we must turn to the effect of anti-conversion surveillance regimes on the minority communities who are targeted by this and other legislation. Such legislation immediately puts them on the defensive. They cannot praise their own faith. When people want to convert, they are subject to report back and policing. This is followed by criminal investigation and prosecution. Eventually, they may be acquitted. But in real terms, the process is the punishment.

The fact that the process can be the punishment is what concerns me in respect of a recent judgement of the Supreme Court in the Pastor Raju case (2006). India has created many offences which are aimed at preserving religious and communal harmony. The upshot of these offences is that they prohibit promoting enmity between groups (Section 153A of the Indian Penal Code), imputations and assertions which are a threat to national integrity (Section 153B) and the acts which deliberately outrage religious feelings or insult the religion or religious beliefs of a class (Section 295A). Such offences may be necessary. But there is a significant aspect to these offences that cannot be overlooked. Under the Indian legal system, any individual can simply file a First Information Report (FIR) for serious (cognisable) cases. The effect of this is that as soon as an FIR is filed, the police start investigating and there is an even chance that the perpetrator will be subject to pre-trial imprisonment. If the offence is not serious, the process can be triggered off by complaints to the magistrate to initiate the legal process with all its ensuing consequences. This means anyone can put a religious adversary into a position where they are investigated and jailed. The government was aware of the mischief that could emanate from these provisions. Such mischief could create antagonism between communities.

Wisely, Indian law has interposed a safeguard whereby these sensitive offences can only proceed if the government in question sanctions the prosecution. A similar safeguard is given in cases of corruption by civil servants and actions in defamation of government servants and some matrimonial offences (See Sections 195-199 of the Indian Penal Code). The purpose behind such a sanction procedure is to ensure that there is no frivolous prosecution and trial. In the cases that we are concerned with, if there was no sanction safeguard the forces of Hindutva would unleash prosecution after prosecution on minority communities on the basis of some or imagined hurt to the sensitivities of Hindutva. The question is how comprehensive and complete is the sanction safeguard so as to make sure that the offences to prevent religious strife are not used to create strife.

Pastor Raju lives in Karnataka. On January 14, 2005 there were great celebrations in Rampura, Channapatna. The occasion was the festival of Sakranti. Pastor Raju was also there. It is alleged that he spoke to various people to convert to Christianity in that the latter had more to offer than the Hindu faith. It is not entirely clear as to how and in what manner this speech was made – if indeed such a speech was made at all. This must have irritated a Shri Lokesha who then proceeded to file an FIR and an offence under Section 153B was made out. This section was introduced in 1972 and seeks to criminalise any imputation or assertion which is prejudicial to national integration. The purpose behind this section is to prevent a collective condemnation of any religious, racial, language, regional group, caste or community by asserting that they are not worthy citizens who believe in the integrity and sovereignty of India (Section 153B (a) and (b)). But Section 153B also criminalises assertions, pleas and appeals which cause disharmony, enmity or ill will between people (Section 153B (1)(c)). Where such offences are in (a) religious place or during a religious event, the punishment would increase from three years and/or a fine to five years and/or a fine (Section 153B (2)). Thus the offence is a serious offence subject to considerable penalties.

The police decided to arrest Pastor Raju. It is not clear why he was arrested. But there must have been some compulsions to do so. Pastor Raju was then taken to a magistrate and remanded to judicial custody. Later, a bail application was rejected. Pastor Raju moved the high court to say that the entire proceeding should be quashed because the safeguard of getting a sanction from the state government was not fulfilled. In common sense terms, it seemed fair to raise this plea. The very purpose of the sanction safeguard was to ensure that frivolous and vexatious proceedings should not be launched in cases of this nature. In Pastor Raju’s case the wheel seemed to have turned at least half circle. He was arrested and in jail. The high court took the view that this was clearly a case where sanction under Section 196 (1-A) of the Criminal Procedure Code was required. It seemed like vexatious victimisation where the accuser was creating strife through prosecutorial investigation and litigation. This may have influenced the high court’s decision.

But, in the Supreme Court, the decision of the high court was reversed. The judgement of the Supreme Court by Justice GP Mathur for himself and Justice Dalveer Bhandari concerned itself with the technical interpretation of the sanction requirement. Unfortunately, the court did not go into the intent of the sanction safeguard and why it was part of the criminal process. This might have helped both to interpret the sanction safeguard and apply it to the facts of the case. At this stage, it might be useful to reproduce the offences which contain the sanction safeguard in the Criminal Procedure Code.

"S. 196: Prosecution for offences against the state and for criminal conspiracy to commit such offence.-

(1) No Court shall take cognisance of –

(a) any offence punishable under Chapter VI or under Section 153A, Section 153B, Section 295A or Section 505 of the Indian Penal Code, (45 of 1860) or

(b) a criminal conspiracy to commit such offence, or

(c) any such abetment, as is described in Section 108A of the Indian Penal Code, (45 of 1860)

except with the previous sanction of the central government or of the state government.

(1A) No court shall take cognisance of –

(a) any offence punishable under Section 153B or subsection (2) or subsection (3) of Section 505 of the Indian Penal Code or

(b) a criminal conspiracy to commit such offence

except with the previous sanction of the central government or of the state government or of the district magistrate."

The entire controversy in this case rotates around the idea that cases concerning offences which deal with national integration and religious strife should proceed only with the previous sanction of the central government, state government or the district magistrate. The role of the government in this regard is a critical one. Religious leaders might be arrested out of spite to give rise to public disorder. In sanction cases, the government is expected to make a comprehensive decision and to examine the facts and evidence as well (See Jaswant Singh AIR 1958 SC 125 generally). It is obvious that without a sanction the criminal process must come to an end.

But there is an important distinction between the stage of investigation and the stage of trial. One view is that unless the sanction requirement specifically says so, an offence requiring sanction may be investigated but the trial cannot proceed unless and until government sanctions a prosecution. But in many cases it is the process of investigation under conditions of imprisonment that is onerous. So when does the safeguard of sanction begin to operate?

In dealing with the sanction safeguard, the Criminal Procedure Code does not use clear-cut language to distinguish between ‘investigation’ and trial. Had the code clearly said that an investigation in respect of such offences may continue but a trial may not there would have been no controversy. Whether that distinction may be implied is another matter. The code simply says that cognisance may not be taken of an offence without a sanction from the government. What does this mean? This cannot mean that no investigation of the offence can take place. But can we go to the other extreme and say that the arrest and judicial remand of Pastor Raju could take place and the sanction was only to prevent the trial from proceeding further? Where exactly does the protection of the accused from vexatious prosecution begin? Of course, the sanction safeguard is not just a protection for the accused but also a matter of public interest which necessarily recognises that random prosecutions in the area of potential religious strife are against the public interest.

If Parliament had intended the sanction safeguard to operate only to prevent trials until the government agrees, it would have said so. There are many recognised stages which could have been specifically mentioned including (a) the judicial remand stage or (b) the stage when the challan (police report) is filed or (c) the stage where the trial court draws up the charge sheet or (d) when the trial commences. But Parliament preferred to say that a ‘court’ shall not take cognisance of the offence unless sanction was given. Justice Mathur, in Pastor Raju’s case, accepts that "…(t)here was no special charm or any magical formula in the expression ‘taking cognisance’ which merely means judicial application of mind of the magistrate to the facts mentioned in the complaint and with a view to taking further action." He also admits that "...the word ‘cognisance’ has not been defined by the Criminal Procedure Code" and that the dictionary meaning is "judicial hearing of the matter". Matters of definition need not detain us. In RR Chari’s case (AIR 1951 SC 207), the Supreme Court laid down that "taking cognisance does not involve any formal action or indeed action of any kind but occurs as soon as the magistrate as such applies his mind to the case." This broad approach has been accepted in a large number of cases. Unfortunately, Justice Mathur does not quite tell us when cognisance is taken. He proceeds on the basis that since the sanctioning authority has to apply its mind to all the material collected during the investigation, cognisance must take place later. The real question then must be: When does the magistrate apply his judicial mind to a case? Perhaps when the magistrate simply orders an investigation he cannot be said to take cognisance of the offence (See Gopal Das AIR 1961 SC 986; Devarapally (1976) 3 SCC 252). There is some room for saying that in police cases based on FIRs the investigation takes place without an initial judicial application of mind. But there is considerable room for saying that when a person is remanded to judicial custody there has to be an application of the judicial mind and remand orders should not be "patently routine and appear to have been made mechanically" (Madhu Limaye’s case (1969) 1 SCC 292 at 299). The function of remanding a person to judicial custody is essentially a judicial function and not an administrative one. If we apply the "application of mind" test it would clearly be the case that when the magistrate decided that Pastor Raju should be kept in jail under judicial custody he applied his mind to whether an offence was committed and whether Pastor Raju should be remanded into custody during the investigation. If this was so, the decision to remand Pastor Raju was cognisance within the meaning of the sanction safeguard in Section 196 of the code.

I think we need to go one step further and assert that the term cognisance of an offence may mean different things in different contexts. Such a differentiated meaning has been accepted by the courts and on various occasions the court even took the view that the same word may have a different meaning in the same sentence of a statute (Printers (Mysore) Ltd (1994) 2 SCC 434; Ismail Faruqui (1994) 2 SCC 434). This might have been a better approach to take. Cognisance can mean cognisance for custody, cognisance of the challan, cognisance by way of the charge sheet, cognisance for the purpose of the trial. Ultimately, the purpose of the section must be looked at. The purpose of the sanction safeguard is to prevent the further harassment of a person in certain matters in the public interest. This purpose cannot be lost sight of. This is a matter of juristic policy. Justice Mathur observed; "on the view taken by the high court, no person accused of an offence which is of a nature which requires previous sanction of a specified authority before taking of cognisance by a court can ever be arrested nor can such an offence be investigated by the police." This summary is only partly correct. Investigation can take place. An arrest can be made. But the period for which a police arrest can be made is limited. As soon as this period is over, a judicial decision on custody cannot be made without a sanction. Justice Mathur seemed to have got lost in technical details and lost sight of the purpose of the section.

Arresting people is a serious invasion of civil liberties. That is the reason why so many judicial safeguards exist in matters of pre-trial imprisonment. The sanction safeguard was intended to prevent harassment other than starting a process of investigation. If the police think that they are right to effect an arrest and ask for judicial custody, the sanction safeguard must apply. We cannot forget or lose sight of the evocative phrase: the process is the punishment. Ever so often, it is only the process that is the punishment. Generally, in common law countries, the arrest takes place when the investigation is complete. In India, arrest and judicial custody are treated as routine affairs. This is precisely what should not happen. But if the police decide to combine arrest and investigation, in some classes of cases they must get sanction for the arrest from the government before the magistrate examines the case for custody. If this is not done, the punishment will be the process. In these religious and communal offences cases, Parliament wanted to be more careful than in respect of other offences.

Conversion and secularism

India is witnessing the rise of politically motivated communalism. For this purpose, an entirely new religion called ‘Hindutva’ has been invented. Hindutva lays claim to India as an exclusively Hindu nation. The tactics of Hindutva are unscrupulous. Buildings have been destroyed. Places of learning have been looted. Paintings have been destroyed. Books have been banned. All this in the name of a pseudo-religion which claims secular credentials. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court has supported the case for an assimilative Hinduism (as in the Swami Narayan case; Yagnapurushdasji AIR 1966 SC 1119) and treated Hindutva as if it were a natural celebration of India’s culture (See election decision in Ramesh Prabhoo (1996) 1 SCC 130; textbooks decision in Aruna Roy (2002) 7 SCC 368). At the same time, the court has espoused the case for secularism being part of the basic structure of the Constitution. At some stage the judges must declare the inarticulate premises on which they have wandered in these lost directions.

But what we are also seeing is the harassment of minorities through killing and various kinds of actions and inaction. New legislations, like the conversion statutes, are being drawn up to harass the minorities. The campaign to intimidate the minorities is done both through legal and illegal means. Manipulating the law and using the police to arrest and detain people is yet another form of intimidation. This is what has happened in Pastor Raju’s case.

Unfortunately, India’s secular governance is allowing a large number of such instances of abuse and intimidation to occur.

Despite the letter and spirit of the law as laid down in Article 25 of the Indian Constitution, giving every citizen the right to freely practice, profess and propagate his or her religion, much of the impassioned discourse around the issue of conversions today reveals inherent bias in a dominant section of the Indian population. To them the existence of this basic right granted to every citizen appears as  anathema. Quite apart from right– wing chauvinists, the fact that it raises hackles among more progressive sections, be they Gandhians or other radicals, the issue of religious conversion bears careful examination.

Opponents of conversion cloak their inherent antipathy to it by criticising the methods used by those in the conversion business, alleging that financial incentives and material considerations govern the decision of individuals and groups to a change of faith. 

Today this bogey of  forced conversions has been successfully raised by the RSS–VHP combine, to numb the Indian middle class mind from the horrors of violence and terror unleashed on Christians and Muslims in the far–flung villages of Gujarat. The bald denial by the Gujarat state director general of police (DGP), C.P. Singh that any forced conversions have taken place have not stopped the avenging squads that are heaping terror and humiliation on large sections of the Indian population. The stamp of legitimacy to this warped discourse was recently given by none less than the liberal mukhota (mask) of the BJP, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee who called for a national debate on conversions instead of assuring the brutalised population of Gujarat adequate state protection against violence and terror. 

The manipulated discourse plays into the decades’ old fear of the upper caste Hindu – approximately a tenth  of the population — that the lower castes are being seduced away by ‘alien’ faiths. But little concern is ever shown to the material and social indignities that have compelled groups and individuals to exercise this choice. This apprehension of the sanatani Hindu also stems from a deep–rooted fear of loss of majority status: once viewed as either distinct from the upper caste Hindu —  or at least not a permament adjunct, as 22 per of SCs and STs and over 50 per cent of the other backward castes (OBCs) have so far been — the “majority” status of Hindus as one single, dominant, hegemonic community comes into serious question. 

There is an even more fundamental basis for the near–pathological reaction to conversions among the adherents of this world–view. Conversion undermines the theological  underpining of upper caste, sanatani Hindu faith in birth as the sole determinant of social station and position in life and notions of the ‘pure’ and the polluted.

That a decision towards a change of faith can ever be perceived as a positive move towards a life of dignity, if not an entirely egalitarian existence is not a factor or a possibility that a sanatani Hindu faith can easily accept. 

But for those committed to a plural society based on equity and justice,  religious conversion is not seen as a threat. In India, especially, conversions have been occuring for centuries, the assimilation or absorption of indigenous tribes into jatis by the sanatani Hindu faith being the first example of mass conversions.  Thereafter, individuals and groups, mostly from the oppressed castes, have through the centuries opted to convert to Christianity or Islam. In modern day India, conversions have been a matter of political choice towards social emancipation by a significant section of Dalits. 

On the flip side is the role of the other side, that is the faiths to which persons of oppressed caste origin are converting and the motives and attitudes of the clergy and other agencies of these faiths that effect these conversions. Theologically speaking,  scriptural Christianity and Islam do enjoin on their followers to convert the non–believers and save the “heathens” from hell and damnation. Conversions for the missionary then is a sublime duty. The missionary believes he is spreading the only true faith in the interests of human salvation. Undoubtedly, this worldview posits a superiority of faith vis a vis the non–believer. 

However, though modern Christianity may have come to the third world in its later avatar as an adjunct of colonial brute force, and latter–day Islam through medieval invasions, both Islam and Christianity arrived on Indian shores hundreds of years earlier through traders. Christianity in 58 A.D. and Islam soon after its birth through the Arab settlers on the west and south coasts. 

Many conversions to Islam or Christianity in the modern period of history have also coincided with the passage of emancipatory laws liberating bonded labour that allowed oppressed sections the freedom to exercise choice in the matter of faith. These sections, then, exercised this choice, after, rightly or wrongly, perceiving either Islam or Christianity to be more egalitarian than Hinduism’s oppressive caste system. 

There were a host of lower caste conversions during the second half of the 19th cent in Travancore, for instance. Educational endeavours of missionaries and the resultant more equal status played a crucial role in their choice of faith, not by inducements but through a perceived existence of equality. For example, the first low–caste person, in 1851, to walk on the public road near the temple at Tiruvalla in 1851 was a Christian. Around 1859,thousands became Christians in the midst of other emancipatory struggles in the region where they were supported by missionaries against oppressive upper caste traditions: for example the struggle of the Nadars on the right of their women to cover the upper part of their body. 

Or, take this example. On the Malabar coast in Kerala, large scale conversions to Islam did not take place during the invasions by Tipu Sultan but during the 1843–1890 period and were directly linked to the fact that in 1843 slavery was abolished in this region. As a result, large numbers from the formerly oppressed castes bonded in slavery by upper caste Hindus moved over to Islam, which they perceived, rightly or wrongly to be a religion of equality and justice.
In 1929, Dr. Babasaheb  Ambedkar advised Indian ‘untouchables’ to embrace any other religion that would regard them as human beings, and following this 12 untouchables  from a village near Nasik embraced Islam. In 1935, he strongly criticised Hindu scriptures that defined Dalits as lowest of the low. Under Ambedkar’s inspiration there was a mass movement of conversion when half a million untouchables (Dalits) embraced Buddhism on October 14, 1956 at Nagpur.

 This is a factor that needs to surface prominently in the current debate. Not surprisingly, dominated as the discourse continues to be by sanatani Hindu concerns and fears, this has not happened. On the contrary, ulterior motives are being sought to justify the fact of conversions. The reaction of Swami Aseemananda is a typical example of this. Speaking to a national weekly, on the VHP’s efforts to “popularise” Hinduism in the district he said, “We are not interested in poverty alleviation or development activities. We are only trying to alleviate the tribals spiritually.”
The sudden concern of columnists of leading periodicals appears to centre around the alleged monetary incentives and inducements offered by missionaries. But there is no examination of the developmental work in education, health and other areas that is undertaken by Christian religious persons in our remotest districts.

Lastly, the forced Ghar Vapsi  movement launched by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad is quite obviously a sanatani Hindu project as it has an intrinsic element of “purifying” the “impure” who have drifted and are being pulled back; if so, a pertinent question to ask the storm–troopers of the new Brahmanical order is: which caste are the “re–converted” being given entry to? 

’(Telephonic interview with Islamic scholar, Maulana Wahiduddin Khan)

What are your views on the Prime Minister’s call for a national debate on the issue of religious conversions?
First of all, I would like to state that this is one more case of a non–issue being converted into an issue. Only recently, our Nobel Laureate, Amartya Sen has said that the real issue before the nation is education. I agree one hundred per cent with that remark and would add the creation of a proper infrastructure to our list of top priorities.

But since the issue has been raised, what are your views on the subject?
Firstly, I would say that given Hinduism’s centuries’–old clear commitment on the issue, we cannot even raise this subject. From the Vedas and Gita to Swami Vivekanand and Gandhi, Hinduism has always maintained that Truth is only one though there are many paths that lead to it. So, before any debate on the conversion question, let Hindus first decide whether the first commitment of Hinduism — one truth, many paths — is right or wrong.

Secondly, the Constitution of India guarantees the fundamental right of every citizen to profess, practice and propagate a religion of his or her choice. Can Indian democracy give to its citizens something with one hand and take it away with the other?

Thirdly, India is one of the nearly 200 countries of the world that are signatories to the 50–year–old United Nations Charter on Human Rights. Included among these rights is complete religious freedom for every individual. Do we now propose to go back on that commitment?

We should first make our stance clear on these three points before we can even begin to discuss the issue of conversions. Otherwise, we would be guilty of double standards and hypocrisy, of saying one thing and doing another.

What about the charge of forcible conversions?
I would say that it defies common sense to say that a community which is less than three per cent of India’s population would even risk forcible conversion of people from a religion that constitutes a majority. So, prima facie, the charge is absolutely baseless. I might also point out that the charge of forcible conversions earlier levelled against Muslims was equally baseless. I can do nothing better than quote Swami Vivekanand on this: "It is nonsense to say that Hindus were converted by the sword."

And what about the charge of monetary inducements?
Just the other day I happened to watch a programme on BBC in which one of the persons interviewed was an adivasi from Gujarat who had converted to Christianity. This is what he told the BBC: "When we were sick and badly needed medical care, it is the Christians who came to our rescue. They are the ones who cared for our education. That is why I was quite impressed by their faith and decided to convert." Now, if this is inducement to conversion, what prevents anyone else from going to extremely poor and badly neglected tribal areas and impressing people with their spirit of service?

I honestly believe that missionaries have done more for women’s education in this country than government itself. The women population of this country has been placed under a deep debt of gratitude to the several missionary agencies for their valuable contribution to the educational uplift of Indian women. Of course, at present India can boast of several other religious bodies such as the Brahmo Samaj, the Ramakrishna Mission, Arya Samaj, etc., doing work in the field of women’s education, but in the past the Christian missionaries were the only agencies in that field… Had it not been for these noble bands of Christian women teachers, who are the products of missionary training schools, even this much advancement in the education of the Indian women would not have been possible; even to this day, in every province, we find the missionary women teachers working hard in a spirit of love and faith, in out-of-the-way villages, where Hindu and Muslim women dare not penetrate.
— Dr. (Mrs.) Muthulakshmi Reddi, in her presidential address to the All–India Women’s Conference in January 1931.

Being a mission school we had a Bible class every morning which nobody minded attending even though the bulk of the students were Hindus. I happened to be a good student of the Bible and carried away many Bible prizes. This fact, and the fact that I was good in English made me a favourite of the Principal. Even in those days, however, there used to be scare-stories about missionaries trying to convert students to Christianity. I remember a wholly unfounded report having reached my parents that some of the teachers were trying to convert me into a Christian!
— Motilal C. Setalvad, first attorney general of India, in his autobiography, My Life — Law and Other Things) 

Christian schools have been able to inject a large number of non–Christians with a sense of dedication and commitment to education. That has been a very major contribution. Commitment to education that comes from commitment to scholarship is a good thing. But when it comes from a stronger motive, like service to society or religion or God, I think the commitment is raised to an entirely different level altogether; and such commitment is what you have been able to achieve for a number of years and to communicate to others.
— JP Naik, eminent educationist and a former educational advisor to the government of India.

Logic and reason, and even the most elementary notion of fair play should defy the grand lie. If the lie holds it’s own against lived experience, reason, and the harsh reality of statistics, there must be ‘good reason’ for its tenacity. If hysteria governs its currency, an emotion of unreason clouds clear–thinking and honest responses, the lie has hit upon an emotional chord or bed of support, however perverted. The kind of emotion that helps perpetuate the lie.

The grand lie that I speak of — and we have as a nation been piteous victim to a series of small and big lies over the last two decades or so — is the one unleashed against Christian institutions. It is alleged that the insidious intent of ‘conversion’ is the sole reason why,  in the service of their Lord, Jesus, Christians travel to regions ignored and neglected, to people forgotten and even brutalised, to educate, to nurse, to cure and to comfort — all with the missionary zeal that has come to be associated with their life–long work.

The lie took its toll in the past, too. But it has achieved unsurpassed success in the past five years or so, with chilling violence of varied kinds being used against Christians. This despite the dogged service that these women and men of faith continue to perform. We have as a nation allowed the burning of Bibles and the desecration of churches, just as a 400–year–old mosque was demolished to lay the foundation for mass violence against others in our midst. Worse, nuns and priests have been killed and terrorised, sexual violence, too, used to ram home the message.
 

All these assaults have taken cover under the grand lie. Why do I call it the grand lie?
Consider this. As we enter the third millennium of human civilisation, as calculated by the Christian calendar, Christians of various denominations in India, totalling not more than 2.3 per cent of the entire population, are responsible for 25 per cent of the social services provided in the country. Consider this. Forty per cent of the total social work by NGOs undertaken in the country is undertaken by Christian institutions alone.

Consider also this. The UN Human Development Report, 2000, ranks India abysmally low in human development — at 128 out of 174 countries in the world. Low life expectancy (people not expected to survive beyond 40), high levels of adult illiteracy, deprivation in economic provisioning, counted by the percentage of people lacking access to health services, safe water and social inclusion (employment is one indicator) are the areas where Indian governance has failed it’s own people. 

A decade–old UNESCO figure tells us that we had 370 million illiterates amongst us. Literacy rates among women of all classes, castes and communities are lower than those of men; other figures of the vast disparities or differences between the opportunities and privileges available to one section as opposed to another tell their own tale:

For example, in India, the illiteracy rate among the scheduled tribes (about 7 per cent of our total population) is 70 per cent compared to 48 per cent for the country as a whole. What does this mean? That, whereas nearly half of all Indians are today denied the basic right to education, among scheduled tribes who live in remote and far flung areas, the deprivation is far higher. 

What else does this mean? That, the buzzword on development and progress notwithstanding, we need to dig deeper behind the cold comfort of numbers and see their social relevance. We need to face our own shame and recognise that based on religion and scripture and the cultures and traditions that have evolved from these, we have created and allowed different levels of denials.So that the poor and marginalised oppressed castes, were and still are subjected to inhuman levels of spiritual, physical and material denials; long–forgotten tribes who are the original, pre–Hindu inhabitants of this land were and are rendered even more illiterate; our women, whether Brahman to ‘atishudra’ or ‘mleccha’, were and are not only kept away from education and attendant empowerment, but also subjected to violent abuse, within the family and outside.

We do not, however, rise as a people in anger and shame even while these figures and searing tales of humiliation and cruelty stare us in the face. We are not outraged when the current–day perpetuators of the big lie travel long distances to perform ghar vapsi (return to the home) rites on children, women and men from whom their own forefathers have snatched land, food and shelter for centuries. And then, having forced the re-conversion on the tribal people, and unconcerned about issues like food, education, health and empowerment), say they will construct separate temples for them to pray!

Within this larger sphere of material and spiritual disparity, present day statistics and our history of the past centuries, lies embedded the contribution of Christian individuals and institutions,  of varied denominations but all driven by the message of Christ — in building schools to educate girls as well as boys, in reaching inaccessible areas and holding out a caring hand to sections brutalised and excluded by scriptural faith and certainly by living tradition. 

It was inevitable that the mission of Christians in India would take them where the Indian establishment, still shackled by caste–bound prejudice, dithers and even after Independence, gingerly refuses to tread. To provide succour and to empower the poor, the tribal, the Dalit, the women.

We turn a blind eye to both realities. And both denials together make up the grand lie. The first is the collective denial of present human development figures that stare us in the face and which are linked to the historical denial of opportunity and fair play to large sections of our population in the past. The second denial is our refusal to recognise the contribution of Christian institutions.

The second denial is indeed linked to the first because it is in the arenas of these past and present day inequities and injustices that Christian individuals and institutions have located their work, their mandate being to work for the most marginalised and underprivileged. To deny the existence of disparity now, and historically, is to deny Christian contribution, then and now, and to claim that its all nothing but convenient cover for conversion. To accept their role is to face our moral and cultural poverty, the rank injustice and marginalisation that we have perpetuated on sections of our people. To accept their role is to nail the grand lie.

We have heard so much in recent years about the offensive language contained in the Minute of Macaulay (March 7, 1835). But what we refuse to accept is that elementary and higher education came in through different Christian missions long before the colonially driven and objectionable Macaulay edict, that spoke brazenly about the promotion of European literature and science among the people of India, and that referred to the indigenous people as persons of inferior (heathen) status.

There was a St Francis Xavier who trailed the path in elementary education by exhorting companions to build a school in every village next to which a church was built; today Christian schools number 11,801 (pre–primary, primary and village level); secondary and higher secondary schools total 3,614! 

Since as early as the 16th century, several Christian colleges have existed in western and southern India. These colleges were not only in the business of education, but they also created fine libraries and collected archival material valuable for oriental knowledge. Missionaries who set up these institutions of education got engaged and embroiled in the land they came to inhabit. The tracts on biological species, the first dictionaries in many Indian languages, the singular contribution to indigenous dialects, are some of the fruits of that engagement. 

It was the Scottish mission, begun in South Konkan in 1822, that inspired the young, Jyotiba Phule, a radical mind from the region of current–day Maharashtra, who was a strong critique of the Hindu caste system in the 19th century. Pandita Ramabai, a Brahmin widow who chose conversion to Christianity as a means of emancipation from the persecution and drudgery of life as a Hindu widow, gave her testimony before the Education Commission in 1882. Official estimates of the time stated that one hundred million women were uneducated, with both Hindu and Muslim traditions historically denying women these rights. Included in this were girls, married women and, worst of all, widows who were subjected to humiliation and denied the dignity of living autonomous lives. 

Testifying before the commission, Ramabai had remarked that in ninety–nine cases out of a hundred the educated men of the country were opposed to female education and the proper position of women. It was of little use to build schools without girls to fill them, or without a staff of female teachers. The teaching profession for women was thought to be incompatible with womanly modesty, she had said. 

As far back as 1823, the Church of England Missionary Society ran 23 girls’ schools in Calcutta. In 1824, the American Mission opened the first school for girls in Bombay, a school that, incidentally, was open to children of all castes. The threat of the democratising processes that these contributions unleashed are undoubtedly behind the violent resistance to their work, then and now. 

In South India, too, it was the missions who pioneered women’s education — the first university college, the first medical school and the first training college for women — the Sarah Tucker College, Palamcottah, the Christian Medical College, Vellore in 1918 and St Christopher’s Training College, Madras in 1923 were set up by them.
 

In failing to nail the grand lie, we deny not just our past but also present day Indian reality. A few weeks ago, the RSS chief KS Sudarshan demanded, if you please, the ‘Indianisation’ of the church in India. It needs a great lie to hide the truth of the Church’s engagement with the marginalised people of India who are perceived by some as the real ‘problem’ of India. 

It is not my intention to uncritically glorify the role of the Church in India. It is definitely my intention to challenge the insidious attempt to deny and dismiss decades, even centuries, of compassion and commitment with a grand lie.