Come, O Aryans, come non-Aryans, come Hindu and Mussalman, Come you English; come, come Christians; come Brahmins, purify your hearts and hold hands with the downtrodden and the out-caste” - Rabindranath Tagore in Bharat Tirtha
Rabindranath Tagore’s words resonate with particular urgency at a time when a strident debate — totally and completely irrelevant in the modern context — has erupted across the country on the issue of “ghar wapsi” (returning home), i.e. religious re-conversions of minorities and their return to Hinduism, “the faith of their fathers”.
Matters of far greater urgency demand the attention of members of Parliament. The country could do well without the vitriolic speeches from politicians, who seem to still live in the Stone Age. The conversion debate says a lot about the level of politics practiced in India. Obscurantist mendicants remain very much in demand as crowd pullers during every election, primarily because that is what the Indian electorate demands, and that is how the bulk of the Indian electorate still prefers to vote.
The witch doctors of caste and religion, therefore, still remain an important asset for political parties. In the case of “ghar wapsi”, the battlelines and protagonists on both sides are well known. Imagine a figurative boxing ring where all political parties square off against each other. In the red corner is the “right-wing Hindu nationalist” lobby; facing them in the green corner is the so-called “secular Opposition” lobby, which is desperately treading water as it attempts to stitch together a cat’s cradle of alliances amongst the most contrarian of political parties.
In the centre, around a havan kund (figurative again), are bewildered trophies for the winner — emaciated, wretchedly poor and visibly undernourished citizens of “Bharat Mata”. In this case they happen to be Muslims and Christians — for whose “shuddhi (purification)” this entire circus was organised by some local politicians in Agra recently. Quite naturally, the “ghar wapsi” event kicked a political firestorm, igniting shouting matches on media networks, as also on the floor of both the Houses of Parliament, along with the accompanying social tension. The whole cynical charade would have been uproariously comical had it not been so unspeakably tragic for the few forlorn, totally ignored, acutely poverty-stricken figures at the centre of this grotesque tug-of-war.
No one asked them what their personal preferences in the matter were, or to apply Mahatma Gandhi’s famous but long ignored dictum to these wretched people: “To the hungry millions of India, God dare not appear in any other form except food.” Or, in their particular case, in the form of ration and Aadhaar cards.
Like it or not, the fact of the matter remains that throughout history, the vast majority of religious conversions in any part of the world have almost always been by “force, fraud or inducement” in some form or the other.
India has been no exception. Over the ages, invading waves of Arab, Pathan, Mughal, Portuguese and British conquerors, followed up by priests and missionaries in their wake, proselytised those they had conquered by the fear of the sword, or allurement of heaven, official status, favours and money. Indeed, it remains one of the great geopolitical mysteries of history that Hinduism, the original religion in India, which is more an abstruse philosophy and a way of life rather than a tight, well-organised, politico-religious system like some of its contemporaries, has managed to survive, that too as the majority religion in this country, even after this country had been repeatedly conquered by invaders.
Hinduism in India should have been uprooted and obliterated by now. There has to be some ideological X-factor in Hinduism which has enabled its unique survival. The full-length recital of Tagore’s poem graphically describes the successive waves of Muslim invaders from Afghanistan and Central Asia, as well as Europeans from a dozen nations who came to India for many centuries, each bringing their own culture and religion. All of them have been totally assimilated into the Indian gene pool. The India of August 15, 1947, acknowledges this totally mixed ancestry, and that fact, in letter and sprit, is superbly reflected in the Constitution of the country.
Freedom of religion, including the right to practise and propagate, is an inalienable constitutional right given to all citizens. But it must not be forgotten that religion, particularly the aspect of conversion, has also been the single biggest cause of civil disturbance in the country. “Ghar wapsi” doesn’t just rekindle the flames, it adds fuel to it.
To find a way out of the morass, the government had offered to sponsor a law banning religious conversions. This apparently pragmatic solution (at least to the non-political outsider) has promptly been rejected by a rainbow coalition of a “secular” Opposition, leaving Parliament and its working anchored in a non-functional permafrost.
India’s national culture is essentially a distillate from the prolonged fermentation of religion, language, geography, political science and economics, simmered over the slow fires of history. Bhangra, bharatanatyam and ballet, and Rabindra sangeet, Sufiana kalam and Chopin are all part of the same unified heritage. Religious conversions and re-conversions are best kept out of it. An anti-conversion law provides a practicable release from this endless, needless, time-wasting and infinitely agonising charade.
The writer is a former Chief of Army Staff and a former member of Parliament
