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| A worker arranges a placard of the RSS outside a tent at Dastan Farm on
the outskirts of Ahmedabad where a three-day Karyakarta Shibir is to
take place from Jan 2-4, in which some 25,000 RSS volunteers from across
Gujarat are expected to participate. — AFP |
NEW DELHI: This month, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, India’s
powerful, male-only Hindu nationalist outfit, finally played a card it
has long held in its hand. It announced an intensive conversion
programme to recover its “lost property” in India, feeding the dream of
its cadre and allied organisations of an India that is nothing less than
“100 per cent Hindu”.
The RSS has visibly grown in power and
ambition in the seven months since the arrival of a new government —
unsurprisingly, as it counts among its past members the current prime
minister, Narendra Modi, as well as many old and new chief ministers in
the states. With this carefully calculated provocation under a regime
sympathetic to its ideology, the non-governmental organisation is
seeking victories in many arenas.
In the realm of law, the RSS
wants the passage of a stringent nationwide bill that would ban
religious conversions. In the public sphere, it has arrogated the right
to pronounce not just on the future of minorities in India but that of
India’s Hindu majority as well. In the war of the religions, it seeks to
spread the news that there is now a Hindu fundamentalism eager to goad
and trump well-established Christian and Islamic
fundamentals in India
and around the world. And among its own vast cadre, it has generated the
sense that it, much more than the government of the day or the diverse
institutions of civil society and business, holds the keys to India’s
future.
But let’s consider conversion as a recurring question in
Indian history, one that reveals the tensions between a religious
society and a secular state, between conservative and liberal adherents
of a religion, between majorities and minorities in a multicultural
milieu, and between religions that have a history of proselytising and
those that don’t.
The RSS’s new emphasis on conversion actually
represents an about-face for the organisation, which has for decades
condemned missionary activity by Muslims and Christians in India. In so
doing, the RSS often points out that Hinduism suffers because it has
historically never been a proselytising religion (its identity is partly
based on being born into a pre-existing caste order). Therefore, if
religion were to become a sort of free market in a multi-faith country
such as India, Hinduism could only stand to lose followers, not gain
any.
As a Hindu, I have some sympathy with this viewpoint.
Missionary activity has always seemed to me unacceptably crude and
arrogant, not only in its conviction that there is a single truth that
must be propagated, but also in its contempt for two of the forces that
most strongly influence religious belief: the accident of birth in a
certain religion, which is then followed by many years of socialisation
into its worldview.
To be sure, I respect an individual’s freedom
not only to practise his or her faith but also to change it, as allowed
in India by the constitution. But shouldn’t this follow from a person’s
own dissatisfaction or personal struggle, not as an outcome of the
outreach work or material inducements of an organised religion? I even
find myself in sympathy with Mahatma Gandhi’s unusual idea that it’s
best that a person rule out the option of changing his religion and
instead live through his or her quarrels with it (as Gandhi very vividly
did).
So if the RSS’s new and crude campaign were aimed at simply
drawing attention to the absence of a level playing field in India on
the issue of conversion, as well as to generate the necessary debate
leading to the passage of such a bill, I could see the point of it. But
in truth, even if such a bill were passed, the RSS would insist that it
would nevertheless not be bound by the bill’s terms. That’s because the
present aggressive campaign of the RSS is, in its own eyes, not about
conversion but about reversion: the return, after many generations, of
Christians and Muslims whose forefathers were once Hindu but were
converted during India’s centuries under Islamic and colonial rule.
What
the RSS seeks, then, is a new disequilibrium in which no other
religious organisation would have the right to convert people. No wonder
it salivates at the prospect of a future India in which, by generating a
consensus against the missionary activity of other religions, it can
engineer a society that’s 100 per cent Hindu.
And we shouldn’t
lose sight of the even more slippery and sinister part of the RSS’s
sinister agenda: the simultaneous conversion of a few hundred million
people from Hinduism to Hindutva, the rancorous, intellectually and
morally impoverished version of Hinduism that the RSS propagates.
This
is a dour doctrine that — like other religious fundamentals — makes no
distinction between myth and history, science and religious belief, and
often comes close to caricature. It believes that Hinduism is a thought
system perfect from its very origins, that all the problems of modernity
and history were foreseen by Hindu sages 2,000 years ago, that all
modern scientific achievement was prefigured in Hindu thought, that
Indians of all faiths are “culturally Hindu”, that India’s four-fifths
Hindu majority is under threat from minorities, and that all Hindus
should fall in line with a singular interpretation of Hindu tradition
controlled by a central authority. That body would be — surprise,
surprise — the RSS.
What’s the view of the Modi government on all
of this? In the firestorm that has erupted around the conversion issue,
one man’s refusal to comment has come to seem as meaningful as any
argument: Prime Minister Modi, who in recent months has taken his
message of development and an economically resurgent India to many parts
of the world, has remained shamefully silent. (As usual, his friends in
the media have found inventive ways of coming to his defence.)
Perhaps
this non-gesture reflects Modi’s divided allegiance between the oaths
and responsibilities of his present post and the convictions and
prejudices of his often murky past. But there’s no getting past the
truth that the evasion by this allegedly firm and decisive leader — the
holder of the largest majority in India’s parliament in three decades —
of the conversion debate holds profound implications for the freedom and
future of all of India’s 1.2 billion people.
