Narendra Modi Government builds tempo for law against religious conversions

Mr. Modi’s government builds tempo for national law banning conversions to Christianity

JOHN DAYAL

The Indian Government sees an absolute ban on conversions to Christianity as the only way they can control Hindu religious nationalist elements from attacking Nuns, clergy and churches, big and small, from the forests of Central India to the national capital, New Delhi. And going by statements made by Prime Minister, Mr. Narendra Modi’s senior ministers, the first contours of such a law may soon become apparent. Civil Rights groups have recorded 168 incidents of targeted violence against the Christian community in the 300 days Mr. Modi has been in power.

The discourse is already heating up to a fever pitch as Mr. Modi prepares his party for the State legislative assembly elections in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh where his Bharatiya Janata Party, BJP, hopes to wrest power. These are among the biggest states in the Union of India, and the only ones in the so-called Cow belt of the Gangetic plains where the party does not control the provincial governments.

The BJP had repeatedly promised such a law made to their core constituency, of upper caste and well off Hindus, in their successful campaign in the General elections of 2014. This was reviving an unfulfilled dream that dates back to 1978 when Mr. OP Tyagi of the then unified Janata party moved a Private members draft legislation, ironically called the Freedom of Religion Bill, in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of Parliament. Although the Bill did not mention any religion by name, it was directed at Christianity.

Despite the support it had from Mr. Morarji Desai, the prime minister, the Bill fell through as the government collapsed when the socialist members objected to the “dual membership” that several ministers and party-men had in the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, RSS. Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee, Mr Desai’s minister for External affairs, and Mr. L. K. Advani, the Information Minister, were members of the RSS, and then broke away to form the BJP.

In 1999, Mr. Vajpayee, then Prime Minister, revived the debate on the Bill when  more than two dozen small churches were destroyed, allegedly by Sangh cadres, in Gujarat’s Dangs region on the eve of Christmas 1998. Mr. Vajpayee had visited the Dangs to see the damage, and apparently felt the Christian community had brought it upon itself by its work in the area. Mr. Vajpayee was challenged by the Late Catholic Bishops Conference President,  Alan De Lastic, the Archbishop of Delhi, who reminded the Prime Minister that the debate on propagation of religion was effectively settled in the Constituent Assembly.

The RSS, and even local Gandhians, were keen to have a law against conversions. Mr. Vajpayee did not have the strength to bring a national law. But the Gujarat state government under Chief Minister Mr. Narendra Modi later passed a Freedom of Religion Act criminalizing conversions traced to force or fraud. Such laws had been enforced earlier in Arunachal, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, and later by Himachal Pradesh, prescribing stiff punishment for those found guilty. Tamil Nadu too passed the law, but the chief minister, Ms. J Jayalalitha,  soon withdrew it bowing to a major protest by the Christian community which had a political clout in districts in the state.

These provincial laws have survived Christian challenge in the High courts, most recently in Himachal Pradesh, and in the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court has upheld such laws to be valid, maintaining that while citizens had the freedom to chose, or change, their faith, the constitutional right to propagate religion did not mean the right to “convert another person to one's own religion.” Clergy, then, does not have the right to convert anyone.

In between its campaigns warning that Muslims will overwhelm the “Hindu nation”, the RSS has maintained its pitch demanding that there be a national law to curb the growth in the Christian population, which it says, has been brought about by uncontrolled proselytization by western evangelical groups and politically powerful Catholics in the Congress party.

A national law will require an amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees Freedom of Faith. The government is in no position to do so with its minority presence in the Rajya Sabha, the Upper, where it was recently embarrassed when the Opposition forced an amendment to the Address of the President of India to the Joint Session of Parliament.

The Prime Minister, even as he praises the social work of the Christian community, darkly hints at the culpability of religious minorities in communal discord. His ministers are more forthright. Parliamentary affairs minister Venkaiah Naidu, Finance Minister Arun Jaitely and other junior ministers have repeatedly spoken of the urgent need to have a national law against conversions to check the violence against the Christian community.

The most direct so far has been the Home Minister, Rajnath Singh who said a few days ago that while he had no issues with the pace of growth of the Muslim population, he wanted and anti-conversion law. “It does not matter how many Muslims are there. If their population is increasing, let it increase. We have no issues. But the cycle of conversions must stop," Mr. Singh told a conference of state minority commissions in Delhi. Without naming her, he revived the RSS fulminations against Mother Teresa’s work as being motivated by her zeal to convert people to Christianity. “Why do we do conversions? If we want to do service, let us do service. But should service be done for the purpose of religious conversion. Do not do this (conversions). Leave it." He feels, as does his party, that conversions will change the demography of India, and therefore make it lose its cultural Hindu identity.

While President Pranab Mukherjee has decried violence against religious minorities, he has not spoken on  this issue. It has been left to Vice President Hamid Ansari to caution against such State meddling any more in religion.. More than once, the Vice president has stressed the freedom to change one's religion or belief is a fundamental right, and asserted that no religion should be given an “official status.” But his is a lonely voice.

The religious minorities have not really been able to forge a united movement against such laws in the states, and it has been left to the Christians to seek recourse in the courts. The Sikh community, despite the violence unleashed against it during a period of insurrectionist terrorism   in the 1970s and the 1980s, has not been impacted. While it attracts many Hindus to its fold, it does not actively seek converts. Muslims in India have not been accused of any magnitude of conversions, other than being repeatedly accused of increasing their population by large and polygamous families.

Among Christians, prelates of some of the Syrian denominations in Kerala have often said their churches have not been involved in proselytization, blaming it on evangelical groups.

But increasingly in recent years, human rights and freedom of faith activists within the Christian community, and in civil society, have felt that the fundamental Constitutional right of freedom to profess, practice and propagate religion, circumscribed only by issues of law and order and health, has to be defended to prevent a further erosion of  civil liberties which could alter the basic character of Indian democracy.

India is, at present, perhaps the only real multi-religious and multi-cultural country in Asia. Its neighboring countries are either theocracies or democracies where the majority religion, linked with ethnicity, is  overwhelmingly powerful, as in Sri Lanka which has only recently emerged from a three decade long civil war.

Will Constitutional Bench of Supreme Court give justice to Dalit Christians?

Caste and the Court

Heartbreak for Dalit Christians; fillip for ‘Ghar Wapsi’

JOHN DAYAL

Twice last February, the Supreme Court of India gave two rulings that have a grave import for the Christian community – and for that matter, the Muslims. And, as directly, for the social discourse of political Hindutva and the sometimes very violent organisations that enforce its diktat in the country.

On 6th February 2015, the Supreme Court referred the Dalit Christians and Dalit Muslims Scheduled Caste status issue case (Civil Writ Petition 180/2004) to a Constitution Bench of the court. This marked a period of further heartbreak for the perhaps 15 million [1.5 crore] if not more Christians who have converted from what were once the untouchable castes of Hinduism, later called the politically-incorrect Harijans by Mahatma Gandhi, and known under law as the Scheduled Castes. Their numbers remain indeterminate for many are loth to register themselves in the Census by their practiced faith for fear of legal repercussions or social wrath. They had been fighting in the court for the restoration of their rights of reservations in elective posts, government jobs and education, since 2005, which had been taken away by the infamous Presidential Order of 1950, enacted as Article 341 [iii] later through a Constitutional amendment. They will now have to wait many more years for justice. The Chief Justice of India  is yet to name the Constitutional bench to hear the important case. When it is set up, it will have to consider the two issues together.

In the second judgment on 26th February, in a case known as the K. P. Manu vs. Chairman, Scrutiny Committee for Verification of Community Certificate, [CIVIL APPEAL No. 7065 OF 2008], the court ruled that a Dalit Hindu who had embraced Christianity and then re-converted to Hinduism would be eligible for reservation benefits for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes if the re-conversion was genuine. The bench held that a person shall not be deprived of quota benefits if he or she decides to “reconvert” to Hinduism and adopts the caste of his forefathers just because he has a Christian spouse or was born to Christian parents. It further held that “There has been detailed study to indicate that the Scheduled Caste persons belonging to Hindu religion, who had embraced Christianity with some kind of hope or aspiration, have remained socially, educationally and economically backward.”

The Supreme Court bench laid down three main parameters for deciding whether a person who had reconverted to Hinduism from another religion embraced earlier was eligible to get the government benefits Dalit and tribal Hindus are entitled to. There must be "absolutely clear-cut proof that he belongs to the caste that has been recognised by the Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order, 1950". Second, it has to be established that there has been "re-conversion to the original religion to which the (person's) parents and earlier generations had belonged". And, third, there has to be "evidence establishing the acceptance by the community". 

The second judgment has been widely panned, by social activists as much as by jurists. “I am taken aback by the verdict as it has opened the door for a particular ideology to impose its agenda,” Supreme Court lawyer Rebecca Mammen John was quoted in  Firstpost. Suggesting the judiciary to be more careful while pronouncing judgement on controversial issues, she said, "Given the kind of politics being practiced these days in the country, the judiciary should be circumspect before such rulings." Nitya Ramachandran, another senior lawyer said, "The SC verdict has certified the fact that class and caste bias persist even after the conversion. All religious communities should seriously think over it to make the society free from all kind of discrimination." Describing the SC verdict “unfortunate” in the sense that it “gives reservation benefits to only those who re-convert, not those who converted because of atrocities in Hinduism”, Samar Anarya of Asian Human Rights Commission said, “We demand reservation benefits to all Dalits irrespective of relgion.”

Quite expectedly, the Sangh Parivar has enthusiastically welcomed it. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad describes the ruling as an “approval” for its controversial Ghar Wapsi programme According to VHP national joint secretary Surendra Jain, quoted in Firstpost, "Pseudo secularists who were objecting to our campaign should now change their minds and start supporting us if they have faith in the judicial system of the country. If there is a problem in the Hindu community, its solution lies also within the community. Those who converted to Christianity are facing worst discrimination. Dalit Christians are not free to offer prayers in any church they want. They have separate churches and graveyards. They are fed up and want to return the Hindu fold. If we are facilitating their homecoming, what is wrong in this.

The judgement does indeed seem to legitimize ‘Ghar Wapsi’, while making it prohibitive and punitive for any Dalit to exercise his or her freedom of faith and convert to Islam or Christianity. Conversions to Buddhism and Sikhism do not invite this punishment.

The entire question of caste and religion needs to be decided by a constitutional bench of the Supreme Court once and for all. How can one religion be called a ‘Way of Life’ and not a religion, as in the well known Justice J. S. Verma ruling, and yet conversions to or from it invite such contradictory results? Leaving Hinduism means losing all rights, including reserved seats to legislatures and parliamentarians apart from quotas in jobs and education. Dalit Christians and Muslims had challenged this dichotomy in a PIL before the  court.

This is not the first time a Supreme Court Judge has interpreted religious "scripture". One did so in his last judgment (on the Babri Masjid Case) on the eve of his retirement. It is harder in India to separate church from state because religion plays dominates so many social rituals. Still, it needs to be done. 

The court has acknowledged there has been detailed study to indicate the Scheduled Caste persons belonging to Hindu religion, who had embraced Christianity with some kind of hope or aspiration, have remained socially, educationally and economically backward. But the implication seems to be that this is a failure of the church to lift the status of such people, and not what several national commissions have found that it is inherent in the Indian social milieu. [A sad aside to this is that Rev Dr. James Massey, who the court cited as confirming disempowerment of the community, died a few days ago, as did Dr. Ninan Koshy whose indictment of caste divisions in the Christian community of Kerala first brought the issue in the open. Both were also pioneers of the Dalit Christian movement.]

The government also tacitly accepted that these castes were not merely confined to Hinduism too, which soon extended these rights to Dalits who converted to Sikhism and to Buddhism, religions which had challenged the Vedic stranglehold.  While conversions to Sikhism has been a continuous process since the religion was founded by Guru Nanak, there have been a series of mass conversions of Dalits to Buddhism after 1956 when the constitution writer Dr. B R Ambedkar, changed his faith to Buddhism along with 5,00,000 of his Dalit followers in Nagpur.  But the Congress government under Dr. Manmohan Singh refused to give the affidavit that the Supreme Court asked for in the tortuous course of the PIL hearings between 2005 and 2014, apparently for fear it would politically antagonize powerful Hindu upper caste groups. The Bharatiya Janata Party  had categorically rejected the Christian demand, and its members had impleaded themselves in the hearings to argue against the PIL.

The National Commission for Religious and Linguistic Minorities, headed by former chief Justice Misra, and a committee report by academics had also recorded that castes and its infirmities followed Dalits in whichever religion they went. Justice Misra, found, and ruled, that caste in India transcends religion, and exists and is practiced in this day and age in Hinduism, of course, Buddhism, Sikhism, Islam and Christianity. This was also the conclusion of  research studies by universities  which found considerable evidence of caste-based discrimination exists in Kerala, but also in Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra, Telengana, Punjab, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Bihar, Bengal, Punjab, Jammu, Haryana and Rajasthan. It has led to caste violence within the church in several areas.

Theologian John C. B Webster, Dr. James Massey and others have also worked on aspects of Dalit Christians. This is now a matter of deep study by theologians, sociologists and activists at par with the study of  Race in the Western church.

Other than material issues, there remains the more complex issue of political empowerment. There are seats for SCs in state legislatures as well as in the Lok Sabha, in Panchayats and other forums. Dalits professing Christianity, and Islam for

that matter, do not qualify under the Representation of People’s Act and the Panchayati Raj legislation.  There is also the matter of caste persecution and the protection of the  law. Discrimination continues to exist in the larger society. The struggle for Dalit Christians for this political empowerment continues even if the Church were to find resources -- keeping future changes in the FCRA also in mind -- to ensure economic uplift as also universal education for the community. [See accompanying article on the debate in Cyberspace]

Not that Hinduism escapes scrutiny. Another fallout of this judgement will be for the reformists in the Hindu faith because of its implications that caste prejudice is alive and active in the religion. Or is the Indian government's point of view that untouchability and discrimination is still a hallmark of Hinduism despite being  outlawed in 1950?

For human rights activists stressing citizenship, this focuses on the wider issue of whether Freedom of Faith, a Constitutional guarantee,  be just for People Like Us? Why should a Dalit lose all his little hard earned perks if  choses Christ, or Allah?  And is affirmative action only for  Dalits who remain within Hinduism, and by extension, Buddhism and Sikhism. Article 341 [iii] therefore is not a sociological fence. It is a legal barrier constructed to prevent Dalits leaving the Hindu fold. This, in fact, was the first anti Conversion law. And it covers the entire country.

It needs be remembered that among the many assertions in their agenda of religious and caste supremacy that the Bharatiya Janata Party_ and Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh tandem wants to impose in the Hindu Rashtra of their dreams, a national Anti-Conversion Act is at the top of the list.

Hindu political groups set 2021 target to rid India of Christians and Muslim; the world must take notice

 The government encourages them with call for national laws against religious conversions

JOHN DAYAL

On 18^th December 2014, which is the official National Minorities Day, Mr.  Rajeshwar Singh, the head of the Dharm Jagran Manch [Faith awakening forum] declared on national television news channels that the Manch had set a 2021 deadline to cleanse India of  the “alien Islam and Christianity”. Another group said Christians would not be allowed in the Himalayan regions, sacred to the Hindus. The hate speeches went viral on social media, and then in the major newspapers across the country.

The Indian government of Mr. Narendra Modi, has so far not indicated if Mr. Rajeshwar Singh is being prosecuted under India’s strict laws against religious discord, used so far largely to target Christian pastors,  and in recent months, Muslim  youth active on Face Book who vent their anger against the State.

But members of Mr. Modi’s Council of Ministers, and official spokesmen of the Bharatiya Janata Party, BJP, which controls much of the Indian provincial governments, have been voluble in support of the Sangh Parivar. The Parivar is a very large and almost omni-present family of Hindu militant organisations created by the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh in the past two decades, of which the Dharma Jagran Manch, the Bajrang Dal and the  powerful Vishwa Hindu Parishad are among the more prominent  groups with aggressive cadres.

Political analysts have said it would be erroneous to assume that under the government of Mr. Modi, the RSS has reoriented its goals. Each time the BJP assumes power, its ideologues get emboldened. Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee was in power in New Delhi when major attacks took place on Christians. Over 30 village churches were destroyed in Dangs in Gujarat on Christmas Eve in 1998. Australian leprosy worker Graham Staines and his sons were burnt alive  in January 1999, and of a Catholic priest Fr George Kuzhikandam in Mathura, not too far from New Delhi, as he lay asleep in his church in June 2000. Christmas eve violence in 2007 in Kandhamal, Orissa, was a precursor of the 2008 pogrom, was when the BJP was in power in coalition government. Mr. Modi has made no bones of the fact that he was a leader of the RSS, and continues to profess its ideology.

RSS affiliated groups have launched a campaign to convert the poorer Christians and Muslims to Hinduism, a process they call Ghar Wapsi, or home coming under their argument that every Indian is actually a Hindu, and Christians and Muslims are those who have strayed, or have been bought over by missionaries. In turn, the Sangh groups have called for a war chest for the Ghar Wapsi, earmarking Rupees 500,000 for every Muslim they convert, and Rupees 200,000 for every Christian. The different rates are presumably because Muslims are felt to be more difficult to “persuade’ for a change of faith.

In the central Indian State of Chhattisgarh, where some months ago radical groups enacted villages banning the entry of essentially Christian pastors and religious services other than those of the Hindus, the focus is now on Catholic Schools. In its Bastar Tribal region, Christian schools, which are otherwise in great demand, need to install statues of the Hindu goddess of learning, Saraswati. And priests running these institutions can no longer be called “father’, but need to be called “Pracharya”, a teacher. Protestant pastors are now beaten up, home churches raided almost as a matter of routine, with the police looking on, or an active participant. Santa Claus, of course, has been proscribed. Needless to say, the State has been governed by the BJP for the past 12 years.

The fact that the Sangh Parivar runs over 57,000 ideology based schools for children in villages across several states, and specially in areas populated by Tribals and the Dalits, groups once called Untoucbable, makes available a cadre of youth and their parents ready to do their bidding.

The BJP’s response has been to suggest that the religious cleansing deadline needs to be seen in the context of fiery speeches by Muslim TV evangelists and western campaigns to spread Christianity. The government’s senior minister, Mr. Venkiah Naidu, a former president of the BJP, has called for a national law against religious conversions. These laws exist in six states, and have been passed by two more states but yet made cleared by the Governors. It is a matter of a few months before they too are brought into force. These laws have also led to some considerable violence against religious groups in the years they have been in force.

United Nations Human Rights Special Rapporteurs for Religious Freedom have slammed these laws as infringing the basic rights of freedom of faith and belief, enunciated in the UN bill of Rights, and in fact, an important part of the Indian Constitution.

Other ministers have suggested an immediate enactment of a Common Civil Code, seemingly a good thing, but rooted in the unsubstantiated premise that Muslims can marry four wives at a time, are breeding too fast, and will outnumber the Hindus soon. The law will also impact on Christian personal laws and customs, particularly in rural populations where tradition and custom are the glue that holds their society together.

Mr. Modi’s minister for education, the former TV actor Mrs. Smriti Boman Irani, who has ordered a revision of text books, particularly of history, to incorporate more of ancient Indian traditions including references of Hindu sacred texts. Various important councils in the ministry are now chaired by luminaries wedded to the thesis that India is the fountainhead of all knowledge in the world. The BJP and the Minister hold Hindu sacred texts are the 5,000-year-old source of knowledge on such diverse subjects as plastic surgery, aviation, nuclear weaponry and genetic engineering. 

Her officials passed orders earlier this month that Christmas Day will now be called “Good Governance Day” in honour of the birthday, not of Jesus, but of Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee, the first BJP Prime Minister who ruled from 1998 to 2004, and is now critically ill and has not been seen in public for several years. Academic institutions from junior schools to Universities were keep their doors open and organise social programmes for the students, supervised by the teachers. Christmas was not to be a holiday any more.

An outcry by Church and Civil Society, an acrimonious clash in Parliament where Mr. Modi still does not have a majority in the Upper House, Rajya Sabha, forced the government to dilute its order. Christmas remains a Holiday, but the “educational” programmes of declamations and other activities will also be held, with Principals and officials told to report to the government that they did indeed comply with the order.

Muslims and Christians feel they are being encircled in a vicious and tightening noose,  in the villages and small towns by Sangh cadres who have the police on their side, and nationally by the Federal and State governments who seem to endorse the hate campaigns and the violence.

But for Civil society, the threat is to  the Constitution of India which ahs evolved as a great international democratic document that protects the subcontinent-sized country’s hundreds of cultures, languages, races and faith. All too many people in office and heading Sangh groups have  said  the Constitution is a British inheritance  that has no place in Hindu Rashtra, the Land of the Hindus.

This is something that must worry not just Indian religious minorities, but the world.

[UCAN]