The Indian American Muslim Council (IAMC - www.iamc.com),
an advocacy group dedicated to safeguarding India's pluralist and
tolerant ethos has condemned the forced conversion of Muslims in Agra as
well as the government's suggested "remedy", of pushing
the anti-conversion bill, currently adopted in five states across India,
as brazen attacks on the nation's Constitution. News reports indicate 200 Muslims were made to participate in a ceremony, "converting" them to Hinduism. The individuals later denied having changed their faith, and referred to false promises as well as intimidation at the hands of the Hindutva militant organizations as the reason for their participation in the ceremony.
The fact that an RSS offshoot is
seeking donations to convert Muslims and Christians in Aligarh to Hinduism on
December 25th,
also exposes the Sangh's hypocritical position on the issue of
religious conversion. While genuine religious conversion is a personal
choice that should be respected, the Hindu nationalist organizations
have championed anti-conversion laws, ostensibly to combat the very
tactics they are now adopting. In practice the laws are used to curtail
conversions out of personal choice, and thus represent a further constricting of the religious freedom landscape.
The movement to forcibly convert India's minorities, mainly
Christians, Muslims and Dalits to Hinduism, is being spearheaded by
offshoots of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) such as the Bajrang
Dal, that have been implicated in some of the worst massacres of
minorities in recent Indian history. In the context of the rapid
increase in violence and a sustained hate campaign against minorities,
the
forced conversion drive is
another attempt to undermine India's secular fabric. The
anti-conversion laws, on the other hand, compel the individual seeking
to convert to solicit permission from the state, and represents an
unconstitutional intrusion in a matter of personal religious belief. The
UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion has referred to such laws
as
threats to religious freedom.
The government's duplicity on this issue is further evidence that
the new administration led by the BJP, itself an offshoot of the RSS, is
actively pursuing the Hindutva agenda that seeks to remake India as a
Hindu nation where minorities are relegated to the status of
second-class citizens. Social analysts and thinkers believe the Hindu
ultra-nationalist movement is also
manipulating Dalits to further their own supremacist agenda.
"Compelling individuals to adopt one faith, while actively seeking
to curtail genuine conversions out of that faith, exposes the desire to
impose a majoritarian agenda on the country. It is also a travesty of
international norms, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
to which India is a signatory," said Mr. Ahsan Khan, President of IAMC.
"
The fissures within the NDA government are
a natural outcome of the narrow and divisive agenda being pursued by
BJP leaders and Hindu supremacist organizations aligned with the RSS,"
added Mr. Khan
In recent years, religious conversion issues came to the fore when
Swami Aseemanand, a senior Sangh leader who is currently on trial in a
series of bombings in India, revealed how
he spearheaded the forced conversion programme of the Sangh in Gujarat's Dangs district,
that involved destruction of at least thirty churches just between
mid-December of 1998 and mid-January of the following year. His fiery
zeal to convert the tribal's did not involve any concern for alleviating
their poverty or social status. Aseemanand was later rewarded by the
RSS for his violent tactics when he was granted the annual Shri Guruji
award. The bombings for which Aseemanand is currently in prison,
had a
combined toll of over 85 lives, and were initially blamed on Muslim youth, for which they were illegally incarcerated.
IAMC has called upon the BJP-led administration, to rethink its approach to India's resurgence. Creating an atmosphere of
fear and intimidation and
heaping abuse on minorities will
gain neither respect nor influence on the world stage. On the contrary,
India's vision for development can be seriously compromised if it
involves the alienation of minorities, representing a population of over
250 million.
