By Aakar Patel
Headline from this week: “Pune Police withdraws conversion law provisions from 2 cases after officials find Act not in force yet.”
Our ever-vigilant law enforcers have not only sorted out and solved the problems of previous laws but also those of future ones. The new law referred to has since come into effect and is one of the gifts the BJP has given India since 2018, when the first such law came into force in Uttarakhand. Freedom to propagate religion is both a fundamental right in India (Article 25) and a criminal offence. This might puzzle some people about what we are actually trying to do, but the mother of democracy is wise and knows how to keep her children in line.
I have written here before about the specific problems these laws have, and I will not repeat them. But we should take a look at what the problem actually is that these laws are attempting to solve. How big an issue is religious conversion in India?
Conversions in India
Conversions in India have happened historically through communities. It is difficult for an individual to change her faith in India because ties to community and family are strong. For this social reason, as well as the restrictions placed on the freedom of religion, the numbers of conversions in India are quite low. In its issue of September 15, 1981, India Today reported that “figures painstakingly tabulated by the Home Ministry showed that in the past fourteen months the number of conversions recorded—mostly of Harijans to Islam—numbered no more than 5,000.” It added that though some conversions had been reported from north India, they were happening primarily in Tamil Nadu where, including the 1,100 in Meenakshipuram, around 2,000 people had switched religions during the previous eight months, against fewer than 1,500 between 1944 and 1980.
On March 7, 2017, Malayala Manorama reported on research by a non-profit organisation, the Media Development and Research Foundation, Kozhikode, which showed that 60 per cent of those who had converted in Kerala between January 2011 and December 2017 chose to become Hindus. Gazette records of changed names showed that 8,334 people had converted during the seven-year period, of whom 4,968 chose to become Hindu. Of these, the vast majority—4,756—were Christians and 212 were Muslims. Of the total, 2,244 were women and 2,724 were men.
Of the 1,864 who became Muslim, 78 per cent were previously Hindu, with male and female converts again being roughly equal in number. Of the 1,496 who became Christian, 95 per cent were Hindu, with 720 women and 776 men. Six individuals chose to become Buddhist, of whom five were Hindu and one was Christian; there were two women and four men. There is no official data from the state on this. However, a report in The Times of India a couple of years earlier (“Nearly 6,000 converted to Islam in Kerala in 5 years: Report”, July 15, 2016) quoted an “intelligence report” filed by the police showing that 5,793 people had converted between 2011 and 2015. Of these, about half were men and half women. Hindus converting numbered 4,719, with 1,074 being Christians. These numbers over the years, whether from Tamil Nadu, Gujarat or Kerala, pale before the conversions done by the VHP.
On October 26, 2019, PTI reported the VHP saying it had converted 25,000 Muslims and Christians, mostly Adivasis, to Hinduism in 2018. On January 8, 2016, PTI reported VHP leader Pravin Togadia claiming at a rally that his organisation had converted more than five lakh Christians and 2.5 lakh Muslims to Hinduism in the previous ten years. “In the last ten years, we did ghar wapsi of more than five lakh Christians and 2.5 lakh Muslims. Our rate of ghar wapsi used to be around 15,000 each year. But last year, we crossed the mark of 40,000, which is excluding the figures of RSS,” Togadia said, adding, “If Hindus need to be in majority in India and to save our religion, we have to engage in many more ghar wapsi drives to bring crores of others into our religion.” To this end, he said the VHP “wants a bill which will make it difficult to convert people to other religions.”
On December 13, 2015, Rediff interviewed the man who would go on to become chief minister of Uttar Pradesh (“Yogi Adityanath proposes anti-conversion law, without ban on ‘reconversion’”). “We have reconverted several lakh Muslims and Christians over the past ten years,” he claimed, speaking of the activities of his organisation, the Hindu Yuva Vahini. “What I am doing is simply taking such people back to their old home from where they were weaned away through inducement or coercion.” He explained why he wanted an exemption for his own conversions from the law:
“So what if someone’s ancestors were converted to Islam or Christianity several hundred years ago? Time is of no consequence. Therefore, all those Hindus who were compelled to switch over to Islam during Mughal emperor Aurangzeb’s rule—when the maximum mass conversions took place—should get exemption under the new law that the BJP wants to legislate.”
And sure enough, the post-2018 BJP laws specifically exempt those who convert “to their ancestral religion”. This is the background to the laws we are passing today. Having comprehensively solved all of our problems of unemployment, poverty, education, justice and so on, the mother of democracy is now passing laws and her police are enforcing them on the pressing matters of personal faith and which gods one should and should not believe in.