The Sangh Parivar has made a habit out of raking up divisive issues which most people thought were settled at the time of Indian Independence or shortly thereafter. For instance, India adopted Parliamentary democracy in preference to the presidential system after much debate. But the unitarian, pro-centralisation Bharatiya Janata Party has always been partial to the presidential form. despite its unsuitability for a huge and diverse country like India.
When it first came to national power in 1998, the BJP-led government set up a high-level commission to review the Constitution. To give the commission minimal credibility, it had to appoint a legal luminary to head it. Mercifully, former Chief Justice M N Venkatachalaiah refused to alter the basic structure of the Constitution. Similarly, the Constituent Assembly debated and settled the issue of equality of all citizens before the law irrespective of their faith, and affirmed the principle of equal, non-discriminatory treatment of all religions by the state (Sarva Dharma Samabhava) as a minimalistic definition of secularism.
But the Parivar, including the BJP, demands primacy and supremacy for the Hindus and equates Hindutva, a toxic communal ideology, with ‘cultural nationalism.’ It regards equal treatment of citizens as ‘minority appeasement’—despite glaring evidence of the deprivation and discrimination faced especially by Muslims, documented by the Sachar Committee and numerous other reports.
Jammu and Kashmir would not have acceded to India in the absence of the autonomy guaranteed by Article 370 of the Constitution—and perhaps not even then. But the BJP cannot live with a relaxed notion of federalism or autonomy for the states, and wants to forcibly integrate Kashmir into India. This will only increase popular alienation and resistance, encourage brutal state repression, and foment social unrest which feeds separatist militancy.
Similarly, the Constituent Assembly debated the question of freedom of conscience at length and enacted Article 25(1), under which “all persons are equally entitled to freedom of conscience and the right freely to profess, practise and propagate religion” subject to “public order, morality and health.” This was fiercely opposed by Hindutva proponents of the day. Gandhiji had deep reservations about both conversion and reconversion, based on religious, not political, grounds: “I disbelieve in the conversion of one person by another. My effort should never be to undermine another’s faith but to make him a better follower of his own faith…” This is the opposite of what the Hindu-supremacist Sangh Parivar believes in.
In fact, Christianity in India goes back to the first century AD, and Islam to the seventh century when the first mosque was opened in Kerala, whereas Hinduism in its present casteist-Brahminical form is a more recent eighth-10th century phenomenon. Had the Muslim clergy during Moghul rule over large parts of India or the Catholic Church in Goa (ruled by the Portuguese for four centuries) practised mass-scale forced proselytisation, a majority of their people would not have remained Hindu, as they did. Many embraced these faiths voluntarily—often to escape Dalit oppression sanctioned by actually practised Hinduism. They still do.
The rights to the freedom of conscience and to practise and propagate one’s religion derive from fundamental considerations of citizenship embedded in a charter of democracy. They must be decoupled from people’s religious-ethnic-linguistic identities, and also from the premise that all religions equally capture the divine truth or spiritual essence. The state must remain firmly agnostic on this and not assign equal or dissimilar values to different religions. Religion is a deeply personal, intimate matter. In a free liberal-democratic society, the state cannot be allowed to dictate or interfere with it—so long as it doesn’t infringe on other citizens’ rights. Article 25(1) is based on this sound principle. Those in the Parivar who oppose it hold the mistaken view that Hindus, especially poor Hindus, convert to Christianity or Islam because they are ignorant, have no agency or mind of their own, and are lured or coerced into doing so. This is a deplorably paternalistic prejudice, typical of the largely upper-caste Indian elite.
This is not very different from the belief held by Christian missionaries during the colonial period that they were saving the soul of the heathen by baptising him/her, just as the imperial rulers thought they were on a mission of “civilising” barbarians. Such views are unworthy of a modern, civilised mind, but are widely held by India’s elite.
These views have found an uncouth and violent expression in the Parivar’s reconversion campaign. Behind the campaign isn’t a lunatic fringe of extremists over which the Parivar has lost control. It’s the BJP itself. Modi has brought RSS extremists into his government and party, and allowed them free reign. Thus, Christians are made to feel insecure with the officially-ordered observance (since modified) of a “Good Governance” Day on Christmas Day, also the birth anniversary of the Hindu Mahasabha leader Madan Mohan Malaviya and Atal Behari Vajpayee. And all secular people must suffer the pain of Sushma Swaraj’s advocacy of making the Gita the national scripture.
The message that emanates from these concentric circles of BJP leaders is clear: hate speech is the new normal; lionising Nathuram Godse is no longer taboo; the communal lumpen’s time has come; “our” government won’t stop ghar wapsi; we’ll temporarily postpone it, but take it up soon, under another name if necessary; if we could “accomplish” the Babri demolition and Gujarat 2002, nothing can prevent us from converting Muslims and Christians, whether in Aligarh or elsewhere, at a named price of respectively Rs 5 lakh and Rs 2 lakh. What’s scary is not that all this distracts attention from the BJP’s real agenda of “development”; but that shifting political goalposts through violent communalism has become its main agenda.
Praful Bidwai
