By Deepa Majumdar
It is with consternation that those of us who are outside India read recent news about the persecution of religious minorities in India by right-wing Hindu extremists. It is unbelievably sad that fear of conversion has led Hindu extremists to destroy statues of Christ and burn effigies of Santa Claus. It shocks us to hear these words of Ajju Chauhan, regional general secretary of Bajrang Dal: “As December comes, the Christian missionaries become active in the name of Christmas, Santa Claus and New Year. They lure children by making Santa Claus distribute gifts to them and attract them towards Christianity.” Or these, from one of the men, during the disruption of a Presbyterian church in Assam, on Christmas night, where Hindu protestors demanded that all Hindu’s leave: “Let only Christian celebrate Christmas. We are against Hindu boys and girls participating in Christmas function … it hurts our sentiments. They dress up in church and everyone sings Merry Christmas. How will our religion survive?”
I could understand non-violent concern about Christian imperialism back in my youth in the Northeast, when just after independence, India was still diffident before the white man and his religion. But we never felt this kind of acute paranoia and hostility towards the heart and essence of Christianity. A beautiful universality, which was very Hindu in character, made us overlook the disdain for Hinduism among converted Christians. To this day, Vedantic chapels include symbols of all major world religions. I remember a young Hindu child entering the chapel in my Catholic school in Shillong, with a heart overflowing with a child’s piety and deep devotion for Christ. I remember, as well, a burning Hindu love for Christ. Indeed, it was in the heyday of British colonialism, that Gandhiji adored Christ. Only a total bigot would take offence at and destroy a statue of Christ. Only a perfect bigot would burn an effigy of Santa Claus. This last puzzles me even more. How can anybody be offended by a jolly old man who brings goodies for children? If in a Hindu majority nation, decades after independence, Hindu extremists are still afraid of extinction because of coerced conversions to Christianity, perhaps they need to take a hard look at who they really represent and what conversion really means.
Members of the Bajrang Dal claim to represent Hanuman, who is Rama’s monkey devotee in the ancient Hindu epic, Ramayana. Hanuman symbolizes virtues that go directly against what Bajrang Dal members practice today: moral strength, divine intelligence, wisdom, burning devotion, loyalty, and a spirit of service. All these virtues put together should open the heart to true universalism, just as the heart of prayer opens our eyes to the good in other religions. Sincere practice of the virtues Hanuman represents should cleanse the heart of paranoia, violence, vengeance, and identity politics. This, then, is the real heresy: to claim to be a follower of Hanuman and practice the opposite of the moral virtues he represents.
Likewise, the word conversion deserves scrutiny. In its heart and essence, conversion is a matter of inner spirituality. For theists, it is an act of God, who alone possesses the power to convert, or transform the human heart from a state of sin to one of virtue and inner peace. Conversion in this profound sense, therefore, signifies the descent of divine grace, to enable the ascent of the human soul. But when used in its historical sense, “conversion” becomes distorted to mean a transformation of the religious identity, without necessarily any accompanying conversion of the heart. As is the quality of the conversion, so will be the result thereof. Thus mercenary conversions will lead to mercenary forms of religiosity, which cannot possibly harm other religions, but harms the religion that does the converting. By using dubious means to convert others to our religion, we pollute and dilute our own religion rather than any other. The same may be said, perhaps more forcefully, of coerced conversions. Anyone will convert for the sake of food and shelter. But this is conversion of religious identity, not a conversion of the heart.
Finally, it is imperative that Hindu extremists recognize why some Hindus voluntarily convert to more accepting religions, like Christianity, Buddhism, Sikhism, etc. Those, like Dalits, who have been hurt by the lower ideological forms of Hinduism, have every right to voluntarily convert to more egalitarian religions. All religions come with contradictions between their higher and lower aspects. But no contradiction could be greater than the highest teachings of oneness in Vedantic Hinduism and the abomination of the caste system as it is practiced today. To be regarded as “untouchable” by members of one’s own religion is an abominable breach of human rights that deserves the strongest protest. One way of protesting this is to convert to more accepting religions. For, rare is the soul that can ascend directly from the pain of caste-oppression, to the wondrous and awe-inspiring mysticism of the highest Hinduism.
In these tumultuous times, we can only hope that the rationale of the Indian Constitution will prevail over the insanity of religious bigotry and identity politics.