The Roots of Religious Conversion in India – 1

Controversy Over Conversions: An Analytical Overview

The last few months have witnessed the re-emergence in Indian politics of the issue of religious conversions. This issue has come up at an opportune time. With the all the so-called ‘secular’ forces trying to mobilize against the rapid changes from the Congress-era status quo, the issue of conversion presents an opportunity to reveal the farce that is often carried out in the name of freedom of expression and right to propagate one’s religion.

The Current Scenario

The last few months have seen the revival of the issue of Love Jihad and conversions by Christian missionaries. Love Jihad, as the term suggests, refers to a social phenomenon wherein men from the Muslim community engage in a concerted, underhanded campaign based on ‘love’ to trap women from other religions with the purpose of converting them to Islam, mostly under the guise of marriage.

The controversy over Love Jihad first surfaced in Kerala in 2009 and has ever since remained in the public discourse. It re-surfaced last year when the BJP sought to leverage the issue of conversions as its key election campaign in the Uttar Pradesh by-polls. However, despite the fact that Love Jihad came into the public eye only in 2009, the roots of the problem are much deeper. In a judgement on a case on this issue by Kerala High Court, the court, quoting a police report on Kerala, stated that the roots of Love Jihad, with the express purpose of conversions, can be traced to organized efforts by Muslim organizations in this direction as early as 1996.1 This confirmed the erstwhile Kerala Chief Minister’s – VS Achuthanandan from the Communist Party of Indian (Marxist) – position that strict action needed to be taken against conversions due to Love Jihad.2 Furthermore, in 2012, the new Kerala Chief Minister, Oommen Chandy belonging to the Congress party, gave statistics in the state legislature stating that out of the total number of conversions to Islam, between 20093 and 2012, 2667 were women from both Hindu and Christian religions4, whereas the number of conversions to these religions was only 81!

Despite the clear evidence that was amassed when conversion through Love Jihad was at its peak, the debate over Love Jihad in India is politicized in terms of the minority question. This is a wrong approach. Conversions in the name of love are not peculiar to India or confined to the Hindu-Muslim question. They are happening in other countries too and have raised the angst of other religious communities as well. Not only had the Hindu and Christian organizations joined hands to counter connived Islamic conversions in Kerala, but there was also clear evidence of such conversions happening in the United Kingdom, where these manipulative conversions are referred to as ‘grooming’.

The rise of conversions to Islam is also a product of the aggressive proselytizing tendency of that religion, while another proselytizing religion – the Christianity – is in a mode of major decline world-over, especially in the West. According to the latest analysis of statistics5 on religion in a 2014 article in The New Indian Express, Islam is spreading rapidly in Europe as the followers of Christianity lose faith. In Britain, Anglicanism has been overtaken by Islam as the dominant religion, due to factors like ageing population, rapid ‘secularization’ and global onslaught of aggressive Islamism. Britain has seen the closure of about 10,000 churches since 1960, and Christian organisations predict that another 4,000 churches will be closed by 2020. More strikingly, 2013 census statistics6 released by the British Office for National Statistics (ONS) documents that more than half the Christian population in Britain is over the age of 50, and fewer than half the population under the age of 25 describe themselves as Christian, in contrast to the fact that one in ten people under the age of 25 is now Muslim. The current situation is no better in the rest of Europe. Not only is France home to the largest Muslim population in Europe, even the number of mosques being built has doubled to 2000 in the last one decade, and with an estimated 70,000 French citizens converting to Islam in recent years.7 Large-scale conversions have also been occurring in Sweden, Germany and Spain.

Although, Christianity is losing sway, especially, as seen above, in the West, this should not preclude the recognition of its fundamentally proselytizing nature and its struggle to establish a foothold in failing times. Evangelical missionary organizations are especially active in Asia and, increasingly, in Africa also. Recent reports confirm a truth that is already well-known – missionary organizations engage in widespread conversions in the name of providing humanitarian relief in conflict-ridden areas of Africa and with the vaunted aim of doing socio-economic good in other developing countries, including powerful countries like India and China. In Nepal, which used to be a Hindu kingdom where conversion was banned, missionary activity gained ground after 2007 with the adoption of a ‘secular’ Constitution. The rapid rise in Christian population in Nepal provoked a backlash from the Hindu, Buddhist and Kiranta communities.8 Whether the Christian missionaries act as agents on the behalf of the American government can only be speculated upon. However, the fact remains that they get massive funding from leading official ‘development’ organizations like the USAID (United States Agency for International Development), and use these funds for proselytizing rather than promoting aid and development work as they are required to do under the USAID ‘rules’. Some of such Faith Based Organizations (FBOs), controversially active in India, include Human Life International established in Goa in 2011, and Samaritan’s Purse which is active in both India and Africa and whose deep disdain for Hinduism in India is funded by both Republicans and Democrats in the US, and which is amongst the top ten recipients of the USAID funding.

These organizations engage in numerous innovative ways to attract more followers within the fold of Christianity. Much as in the case of Islam, the conversions are not based on outright coercion as was the case before the 19th century in India. Instead, they go even a step further than Islam in attracting followers by providing economic incentives, gifts, promises of equality and liberation from the caste hierarchies of the Hindu religion and a range of material and spiritual promises. Samaritan’s Purse, for instance, in what is called ‘Operation Christmas Child’ world-over9, delivers packaged gifts along with the Bible to the ‘needy’ children of the developing and underdeveloped countries, to eventually make them attend Church and convert to Christianity.
Besides these American government funded missions, there are even more non-US government funded organizations that do not even have to use the pretext of separating humanitarian work from proselytizing work to carry on their evangelizing activities.10 This has recently evoked the ire of the central government and falls in line with the government’s sustained crackdown on foreign-funded NGOs which have been violating the FCRA rules.

An Anti-conversion Law

Besides the Indian government’s crackdown on foreign-funded NGOs and Faith Based Organizations, several ministers of the current government have also proposed the promulgation of an anti-conversion law in response to the Parliamentary logjam instigated by the opposition parties, in the Winter session of 2014, on the issue of ‘ghar wapsi’ campaigns by Hindu organizations. Our colonial administrators did not have any laws against conversion,11 even though some princely states had such a law.12 Despite the fact that post-Independence, there has been no anti-conversion law on a national scale due to want of political support,13 several individual states – like Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh and Rajasthan – have wide-ranging anti-conversion laws.

At present, the proposal for an anti-conversion law has placed the ‘secular’ forces in a confused spot, while the Hindu organizations support the proposition. This is because Hinduism is a fundamentally non-proselytizing religion. However, Islam and, especially Christianity, being proselytizing religions will suffer if an anti-conversion law is put in place. On the one hand, secularists argue for religious equality before law, and object when organizations from the majority religion engage in re-conversions or ‘ghar wapsi’ campaigns. On the other hand, a proposal to ban conversions is met with stiff opposition as it is supposedly the right of freedom of expression under Articles 25-30 and also represents ‘affirmative action’ for the cause of minorities and their right to ‘profess, practice and propagate’ their religion. In all this, they fail to recognize the fact that India has the third largest Muslim population in the world, that Islam and Christianity are globally expansive religions, and that, minorities are not persecuted in India as a policy, unlike the case with some Islamic states.

In fact, thanks to the current ‘secular’ laws, history bears witness to the marked increase in the activities of missionaries in India after Independence, many of which were those expelled from China by the Communists.14 Suppressed voices such as those of K.M. Panikkar and the Niyogi Committee of 1956, from within the establishment, which reported on the rise of missionary activities post-Independence were marginalized in the mainstream secular discourse, while judgments like the Supreme Court judgment of 1954, by vesting the fundamental right to propagate with the non-citizens as well, helped in these activities. In fact, their aggressive onslaught, funded by foreign countries,15 post-Independence, was seen clearly when the missionaries supported the isolation of the tribals from the mainstream, to convert them, and by portraying the government as consisting of infidels.

According to the Niyogi Committee report,16 post-Independence, Christian missionaries followed a threefold policy, which clearly revealed their ambitious aims of conversions:

(1) to resist the progress of national unity… (2) to emphasise the difference in the attitude towards the principle of coexistence between India and America… (3) to take advantage of the freedom accorded by the Constitution of India for the propagation of religion, and to create a Christian party in the Indian democracy on lines of the Muslim League ultimately to stake out a claim for a separate State, or at least to create a militant minority.

They engaged in extensive conversions among the backward castes and tribals through their schools, hospitals, employing pracharaks and money-lending services where the loan was waived in case of conversion to Christianity.

The appalling statistics, provided by the 1971 census data on population corroborate this fact.17 Between 1951 and 1971, the percentage increase in population of Christians in India was 69.4%, while the general population increase was only 51.7%. In the North East, the situation was worse.18 These figures corroborate the historical reality of Christian conversions in India, abetted by the removal of restrictions which even the British had placed over the missionaries.

Yet the secular view on an anti-conversion law paints the proselytizing minority missions in a victimized light. In this context, another argument put forwarded by the secular intellectuals is that forced conversions would automatically be covered under the criminal law, and an anti-conversion law would only hinder voluntary conversions especially by the lower castes who feel a sense of ‘bargaining power’ in being able to change their material circumstances by changing their religion.19 This is a common argument used by Christian organizations active in the South. The facts, however, belie it on two counts.

One, it is hardly ‘voluntary’ or liberation when people feel the need to change their religion out of allure for only marginally better economic circumstances. The realization of the promise of a better economic future may remain an unfulfilled dream, as seen in many studies done by sociologists in Southern states. In fact, the promise of economic betterment through re-conversion has equal, if not better, chances of providing a good material future, since it is not based on traditional discrimination or ousting of lower castes but the very opposite.

Two, do the Hindu lower caste converts to Christianity really achieve social liberation? This argument has been seriously outdated for years in the light of the numerous research studies that have been undertaken by sociologists like M.N Srinivas in states like Kerala. True to its spirit, India has accommodated Christianity in its fold, instead of remaining in confrontation with its structures. Down south, Christianity is itself characterized by deep caste hierarchies, which definitely make life oppressive for the ‘untouchable Christians’ or ‘Dalit Christians’. In fact, the top-ranked caste viz. the Syrian Christians prefer to intermarry with the Nambudiri Brahmins rather than lower caste Christians. The lower caste Christians have increasingly been agitating to be recognized by the Indian law in the same way as Hindu Scheduled Castes are recognized.

These realities belie the secularist arguments against an anti-conversion law on the ground that conversions are ‘voluntary’ and result in better economic and social circumstances.

Deep-rootedness of the Conversion Psyche: Islam and Christianity

The aggressive proselytizing onslaught of Islam and Christianity is aided by constructions of the modern Enlightenment social philosophy. The general tendency of the Enlightenment thought has been to re-define the individual and collective role of the person in accordance with rational-materialistic modes of life. Liberal/individualistic as well as varying degrees of socialist/totalitarian/collective philosophies of life are pervaded by this understanding. Even the so-called recent ‘post-modern’ thought, which claims to transcend the biases of the liberal and collectivist thought suffers from this fundamental rational-materialistic bias, beginning from the same assumptions about ‘reality’ that the earlier thought did. Even though these modern philosophies assert a division between ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’, they yet do not hesitate to use spiritual categories to couch their ideas – for instance, the re-definition of the ‘Self’ and ‘liberation’ is in terms of the purely individualist-materialist self, based on the selfish assertion of material freedom and ‘liberation’ from material structures of society.

Proselytizing religions play on, and appeal to, the formations and constructions of people living in such a society. It is, thus, that Christianity claims to mobilize factors like religio-social discontent with Hindu social structures such as the caste system, and uses philanthropy and charity work to show itself to be the upholder of modern ideas of equality, liberation and brotherhood. Similarly, the Islamic idea of jihad through love exploits the modern-materialistic definitions of individual and social identity to their advantage, making the targeted women feel as if they are asserting their identity or claiming the ‘freedom of expression’ by defying the dictates of their religion and society. Both the religions rely heavily on the misplaced modern constructions of social equality and brotherhood, which they claim, the Hindu caste system lacks.

In the context of the aggressive attempts at expansion by these religions, two questions arise. First, why do these religions proselytize, unlike Hinduism? Second, despite centuries of their proselytizing activities, why haven’t they been able to establish a sustained foothold in India? The perspectives on both these questions are to be found in the nature of their historical expansion as compared with Hinduism and in the very nature of the deeper roots of Hinduism itself.

Nature of Islamic Expansion in India

The nature of Islamic rule in India reveals that the conversion or the proselytizing psyche was inherent in the spread and consolidation of Islam in India. It cannot be compared to ordinary foreign conquests which preceded Islamic invasions, as these conquests did not seek to demolish the cultural and religious institutions of the country, unlike Islam which sought to expand itself through religious aggression and demolition. As historian Sita Ram Goel points out, the pre-Islamic conquests of the Greeks, the Scythians, the Kushans and the Hunas, did not target Hindu symbols, traditions and their women.20 The historian further argues that such records of Muslim plunders can be found in the Muslim documentation itself, where all the wars were regarded as furthering the cause of ‘jihad’ or a holy war, as has been documented widely in the treatises of Muslim invaders themselves. Historical events abound whereby famous rulers like Mahmud Ghaznavi, due to their foremost allegiance to Islam, expressly refused to accept wealth in exchange for leaving the Hindu shrines intact.

Such events belie the theory of modern intellectuals like Bipan Chandra and Romila Thapar that medieval conflicts between Hindus and Muslims were not a product of their identity but merely a political conflict, or, a construction of the British imperialistic policy of divide-and-rule. The main argument of modern secular intellectuals that religious conflict over conversions and massacre cannot be traced to the history of Muslim invasions is, thus, riddled with politically convenient exclusions. The modern Indian historical narrative borrows heavily from the baseless assumptions of the Aligarh school, which absolves Islam of all responsibility by laying the blame at the door of the Turkish ‘barbarians’ who also came to India during that time – a theory which was widely accepted by the ‘secular’ intellectual and political class in the post-Independence period.

There is, however, ample evidence to the contrary. Historian Sita Ram Goel quotes from the treatise of the ruler Amir Timur, Tuzk-i-Timûrî, when Timur came to India in 1399 AD, “O Prophet, make war upon the infidels and unbelievers, and treat them severely…My great object in invading Hindustan had been to wage a religious war against the infidel Hindus[so that]the army of Islam might gain something by plundering the wealth and valuables of the Hindus”. This was common to all famous Mughal rulers, such as Babur, Akbar, Jahangir, Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb. In Babur’s reign, it was incumbent upon every king that he should style himself a Ghãzî, that is, slayer of infidels,21 and this tradition was faithfully followed by Akbar, in the name of the Prophet, in his massacre at Chittor, although Akbar also combined massacre with diplomacy and reconciliation to bring non-Muslims within the political fold of Islamic kigdom. Jahangir, on the other hand, besides, ordering Hindu massacres, carried forward the policy of religious conversions by giving daily allowances to the converts. It was during Aurangzeb’s reign that the resistance against conversions took the form of the rise of the Sikhs. Historical records document how, in 1675 AD, Guru Tegh Bahadur was tortured to death for resisting the conversions of Hindus.22

Moreover, the widely practiced policy of the Muslim rulers was the choice given between death and conversion, to Hindus. Several well-known historians have documented how this played out. Particularly notable in this regard is Chapter 6, Volume 1 of The Story of Civilization by Will Durant. According to Durant, “The Mohammedan Conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history”, the public exercise of Hinduism was strictly banned, and the Hindus were deprived of their wealth through excessive taxation and other coercive measures. Famous Indologist Koenraad Elst in his work Negationism in India: Concealing the Record of Islam has documented that conversions of low-castes occurred during the Muslim rule – through rewarding instruments such as tax discrimination, legal discrimination, awarding posts to converts and through pure coercion – once the Muslims had consolidated their power. According to Elst, the choice offered by Islam between death and conversion can be seen in the fact that between 1000 and 1525, about 80 million people were wiped out of the Indian subcontinent. Subsequently, the pacifist ideas of the Hanifite school of Islamic thought persuaded the Muslims to extend the possibility of compromise to Hindus, as they had done with Christians and Jews, although this compromise came with humiliating conditions and collection of the ‘toleration tax’ or ‘jizya’.

These historical recollections show exactly from where the conversion psyche is coming. Not only has the tendency been very strong as early as the medieval period in India, but there is also the significant fact that this tendency is not simply external, but can be traced to certain aspects of the Islamic religion which have inclined themselves to such outer manifestations. This is because the early history of Islamic imperialism shows that the life of the Prophet and his followers also followed such a trajectory of aggressive expansion.23 Whatever be the various spiritual-philosophical interpretations of Islam – centered on the idea of the One and attempts to trace spiritual absolution through devotion – by the Sufi saints or later philosophers, its dealings with life and action simply did not figure in its spiritual descriptions of salvation. Therefore, the outer curve that the historical and current trajectory which such a religion would follow will necessarily be full of human resistance and arbitrariness. What is the way of dealing with outer forms of human resistance and the perceived forms of sin and evil in this world, when the holy text dictates absolution and liberation in the One? Islam – having not the provisions to understand the life manifestation and its relationship with the Divine Reality – cannot answer this question except by dictating the outer ‘conquering’ of such resistance. This is what is clearly reflected in the history and current prevalence of Islamic wars or jihad and forcible or manipulative conversions.

Christian Expansionism in India:

Much like Islam, global history of Christianity is full of bloody records such as the Inquisition, torture of the non-believers, and providing a cultural backbone to the imperialistic ambitions of the British Empire. Evangelism and conversions form an inseparable part of the Christian religion24 and are regarded as sacred duties by many of its followers. The initial Christian contact with India can be traced to their internal divisions and persecutions in foreign lands of Syria and Iran which drove the Roman Catholic refugees towards tolerant Asian countries like India and China, subsequently allowing them to take full advantage of the economic liberties and shelter provided by the Indian kings in Malabar.25 Despite having acquired the mannerisms of the local population, the Syrian Christians, as they came to be known, remained alienated from the Hindu society, as seen in their loyalty towards the Portuguese invasion.26

This alienation took a more aggressive turn, later in history, with the coming to India of the notorious Francis Xavier27 in 1542 AD, who had the clear intent of uprooting paganism and establishing the reign of Christianity. Directing major assaults towards the Brahmins due to their power in the Hindu caste hierarchy, the Church immediately started the clear movement towards mass conversions.28 These conversions were realized by creating conditions that would leave the Hindus with no option but to convert. The Portuguese state was a partner with the Catholic Church in this institutionalized discrimination and violence, which included the destruction of temples, banning of public practice of Hindu rituals, discrimination in employment and mandatory attendance of the church to listen to the refutation of Hinduism, besides widely providing money to the converts as has been recorded in The Marsden Manuscripts preserved at the British Museum.29 Conversions also occurred through the mode of ‘mass baptism’, popularized in Goa by the Jesuits, wherein Hindus were forced to violate their beliefs to make them untouchable within their own religion and convert them to Christianity. They displayed extreme cunning in the conversion agenda, unlike the plain crudeness of the Muslims, as they showed patience towards the imperfections of the initial converts, targeting instead, the strong indoctrination of the subsequent generations. Long abandoning the forced conversion scheme of Francis Xavier, the innovative attempts of missionaries like Robert di Nobili – known as the leader of indigenization of Christianity in India and the leader of the first ‘Christian Ashram’30 – showed the extent to which the missionaries were willing to adapt their customs to the local culture to ensure conversions to Christianity. This clearly reveals how well-planned the agenda of conversion has always been, historically. Besides south India, during that time the Augustinians and the Jesuits were also practicing active conversions in Bengal.

In contrast to the Catholics, the Protestants have always been known to be more democratic and secular, though only marginally better in their dealings with the Hindus. They too espoused an agenda of conversion. But the technique they adopted was different. They tried to understand the roots of persistent Hindu resistance to Christianity by learning their languages and texts, and some, like Abraham Rogerius, acknowledged the existence of the Hindu ideas of the Divine.31 This manipulative tendency only consolidated during the later period of the rise of the British Empire and the decline of the Maratha political power in the 19th century. Individuals like William Hastings, J.S Mill and Lord Macaulay used intellectual and cultural mediums of attack on Hinduism to weaken Indian culture and melt away all forms of resistance.

As the current debate on conversions shows, instead of breaking away from the British tradition of Christian consolidation, post-Independent India continued this under the statist ideology of ‘Nehruvian secularism’, which gave unparalleled power to the Christian missionaries to propagate their religion and practice conversions under the mandate of the Indian Constitution.

As these historical descriptions show, the mode of conversions by Christianity considerably differed from those of the Muslim invaders, which were based largely on forcible conversions through genocides. The major history of Christian conversions occurred after the 16th century, which was also the period of the decline of the medieval age and the emerging power of British imperialism. The ideas that, therefore, couched the philosophy of conversion were no longer so crudely expressed as during the Mughal rule. Instead, two tendencies – of inner decline and outer conquest – were clearly visible.

The inner decline occurred through the loss of vitality in the true Hindu religious spirit and a fossilizing of life into empty rituals no longer providing scope for spiritual liberation of the individual. The emergence of untouchability and the skewed functioning of the varna ashrama were the hallmarks of this period, where every little violation was decried by the pandits who had become the guardians of the religion. It ceased to express the sanatana or infinite spirit of its culture in its life. This inner decline was exacerbated by the external assault of the Christian culture, which solidified in the later centuries with the advent of British imperialism. Consistently claiming to be on a ‘civilizing’ mission of the Indian race, Christianity pretended to be the self-righteous harbinger of equality and brotherhood and attacked the Hindu practices like caste-system, idol worship etc. It was greatly helped in its assault, in the later ages, with the global rise of the Enlightenment era and its modern ideas of fraternity, equality, freedom and justice.

Confrontation of Islam and Christianity with Indian Life-values: Failure of Proselytization

As we have seen in the spirit of expansion of Islam and Christianity, both historical and present, these religions are marked by a fundamental disjuncture between their spiritual and social action. They necessarily need the presence of an external adversary in order to assert the basis of their social action. They need to thrive on the ideas of sin, evil, divisions between good and bad, and enemies of the God or ‘kafirs’ in order to have a basis for action in life. Their spiritual philosophies do not relate to life in its social or individual manifestations. Thus, these cultures are not resilient or spontaneously pervasive. This is documented clearly in the current rapid decline of Christianity. As already seen, not only has this religion declined in the West, but in Africa and developing countries too it has been reduced to a mere political instrument of American foreign policy, dependent on funding to propagate itself and hardly presenting any cultural threat whatsoever.
How, then, can we place the failure of these cultures in relation to the Indian cultural development? Having suffered widespread cultural and political assaults by Islam and Christianity, how is it that the Indian culture is still thoroughly infused with the spirit of the Hindu religion, and what exactly is this Hindu religion?

The next issue will throw more light on this perspective.