Conversion agenda

The BJP should stop pushing a non-issue

The just-concluded winter session of Parliament featured, as usual, disruptions holding up legislation. The Opposition was demanding that Prime Minister Narendra Modi deliver a speech rejecting the "ghar wapsi" campaign being launched by various members of the family of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) organisations, of which the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party is one. The campaign of "reconversion", which hit the newspaper headlines after a controversial attempt to convert dozens of Muslims in Agra, has long been part of the Sangh Parivar's plans. Two aspects of the response to the current political storm stand out. The first is the fact that Mr Modi was unwilling to make a statement condemning the campaign. The best construction that can be placed on this is that the PM does not want to give into blackmail by the legislature - but he had after all already made one speech, under similar pressure from Parliament, when a junior minister had insulted non-Hindus. The other alternatives are worrying: that he does not wish to be shown up as powerless to control the hotheads in his Sangh Parivar, or that he himself sees little wrong with what they are doing.

The second aspect is that the Opposition's protests triggered the BJP's reaction almost on expected lines: both the president of the party, Amit Shah, and the head of the parent RSS, Mohan Bhagwat, responded identically. If the Opposition cared so much about conversions of the sort that happened in Agra, they said, why did they not speak up about the Hindus being converted en masse to Islam and Christianity? If they were troubled by the Agra incident, the two leaders added, let the Opposition support a national anti-conversion law. This response may appeal to the BJP's Hindu vote bank, but is logically faulty. First, on a macro scale, there is little data to support the idea that citizens affiliated to minority religions are growing disproportionately, given their respective socio-economic statuses. In other words, mass conversion is not a trend that shows up in the numbers, so the very basis of the BJP/RSS complaint can be questioned.

The other issue is whether such a law would be constitutional. This is a knottier question. Several states at the moment have anti-conversion laws. Indeed, intriguingly, some of these laws permit conversion without any problems to Hinduism while preventing conversion to Christianity, Islam or Buddhism. Some of these laws date back to the 1960s. And in a controversial judgment in the 1970s, the Supreme Court declared that anti-conversion laws do not violate the fundamental right to "propagate" religion because, they argued, there was a difference between propagation and conversion. In any case, these laws ban conversion through "inducement" and "force" - though in some cases even the threat of divine displeasure is considered to be "force". But, even so, a national anti-conversion bill of the sort the RSS wants looks constitutionally unsound. So why is it being allowed to hijack the government's agenda? Whatever its ideological imperatives, there is much danger to the government in being bogged down in such matters when too much is to be done on the economic front. Already one session has been wasted, and ordinances have had to be promulgated. Clearly such campaigns are not sustainable, given the opposition that they evoke. It is to be hoped the BJP regains good sense, and shuts them down.