The Daily Times, December 22, 2014
Editorial: Forced conversions
Muslims and Christians are being forcefully or by guile converted to Hinduism in India. The Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) militant wing, the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) has started a forced conversion movement called homecoming. The RSS believes that these Muslims and Christian were originally Hindus and the homecoming movement is simply an attempt to bring them back to where they belong. This weird justification for forced conversion is one of its kind and therefore condemned and rejected by lawmakers from both the BJP and the opposition parties. BJP’s religious slant had made Indians speculate on the imposition of Hindutva if the party won the elections. From the statements made by one BJP minister abusing everyone other than Hindus, it seemed the speculations had been proved right. Though Prime Minister Narendra Modi has condemned these statements and actions, he has failed to give any policy statement in parliament against them. Can a country like India, riding on its image of being the world’s largest secular democracy, leave its fate in the hands of Hindu chauvinists? The BJP has distanced itself from the homecoming movement and is planning to bring in an anti-conversion law, but unless the party sheds its communal veneer and mainstreams its rightwing orthodox mindset, such events and statements will keep surfacing to give rise to more speculations about BJP’s Hindutva ambitions. There have been BJP governments in India before but none had allowed such extreme views to prevail. Narendra Modi’s handling of Muslims in Gujarat and BJP’s storming of the Babri Masjid could not be overlooked in the existing exercise to create an enabling environment to turn India into a Hindu society.
Extremism it seems has not afflicted Muslims only. In fact it has come to influence nearly every religious group. The strains of religious fundamentalism have been growing across the world. Even a religion like Buddhism adopted ruthless means to promote and maintain its religious identity in Sri Lanka and Myanmar. In Mali, fundamentalists destroyed the ancient desert city of Timbuktu, much as the Taliban did to the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan. India too is passing through a similar phase where the dominant discourse revolves around establishing a Hindu narrative. Any such attempt, especially in a diverse country like India, with its mosaic of religious and ethnic identities, will lead to more religious and other conflicts. *
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