Conversion of Harijans to Islam in Tamil Nadu provokes excited and emotional reactions

The conversion of a few thousand Harijans to Islam in three districts of Tamil Nadu earlier this year, and in stray cases elsewhere, and certain more recent reconversions have provoked excited and emotional reactions that have generated more heat than light. What are the issues involved?According to some, individual conversions are all right and duly sanctioned by the Constitution, but mass conversions, as in this case, are impermissible as they are necessarily brought about by inducements, force or fraud.It is alleged that money and gifts have changed hands - a figure of Rs 500 per convert is mentioned - and that Gulf-money or Arab petrodollars are being used to buy souls with the not so distant object of securing the Islamisation of all Harijans and maybe of India. The danger of another religious divide is mentioned. A respected spiritual figure has even termed the Tamil Nadu conversions as a "political invasion."Altogether, this is an extraordinary reaction, quite apart from the fact that little if any convincing evidence has been adduced to arrive at such weighty and far-reaching conclusions. What is more damaging is the unspoken though totally false assumption that to be Muslim is to be un-Indian or even anti-national so that, by inference, a beleaguered "Hindu India" now stands pitted against world Islam.This is the product of a fevered imagination and an absurd throw-back to the era of the Crusades when Christendom and Islam were locked in bloody temporal combat for spiritual ascendancy. To recreate such reactionary medievalism in 1981 in an altogether different context would be a considerable folly. It is to promote social and security tensions, nationally and globally, where none exist.Real Issue: The Tamil Nadu conversions represent a social stirring and not a political or, paradoxically, even a religious problem: The Harijan condition is the real issue, not conversions. To believe otherwise would clearly be to confuse cause with effect, the symptoms with the disease. It would imply a deadening of the conscience to the anguished annual narrations of the hapless Commissioner for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.It is possible to argue that the social or economic condition of the Harijan will not undergo a magical transformation by conversion, or else mass conversion would be an instant solvent for a large part of India's destitution.Harijans will not wait forever for social equality and fraternity. If they - and more importantly the most deprived among them - do not sense an adequate pace of progress, they will seek "another place" in order to live with dignity. This is obviously true. But it is equally true that the Harijans and dalits are in revolt against deep-seated and humiliating social inequality upon which the exploitation and oppression they suffer is founded. Pushed to the wall, they are asserting a sense of dignity and self-respect, entirely peacefully, by conversion.But why mass conversion? Obviously, because their condition is defined by community rather than by individual status. Spiritual conviction might follow, but the immediate impulse is a reaction against and repudiation of their existing state.Kept outside the fold, they have now formally left it. As long as they vainly sought admission they were trapped in a system in which they could not grow. So, like the Black Muslims in the United States, they have turned away and got themselves a new identity.Why Tamil Nadu? Why Meenakshipuram? It could have happened anywhere - and still might. But the counter-question would be: Why Killimenveli? Why Tholar? On both occasions, the first in the '70s and the second on August 4, 1981, the Harijan quarters of these Tamil Nadu hamlets were destroyed by arsonists. Can Meenakshipuram then be far away?Thirty years ago, Dr Ambedkar sought to lead his flock to Buddhism, and some millions did follow him. There have been some Harijan conversions to Buddhism during these past few months also - in Gujarat for instance.But since Buddhism is seen as a protestant branch of Hinduism, these conversions have not attracted the kind of political reaction that the conversions to Islam have witnessed, though the individual and collective motivation is similar.Reaction: There has been both a misplaced and an over-reaction to Tamil Nadu conversions. The mistaken political focus and the sense of fear it generated among some encouraged others elsewhere to try and use the threat of conversion as a lever: either provide water supply to the village by such and such a date or do so and so, or else... Such threats should have been ignored and no more would have been heard of them.The real task is to assure human and civil rights to the downtrodden and to uplift them all - Harijans, Adivasis, backward classes and all other categories of people now oppressed and disadvantaged. Equality and fraternity are fundamental constitutional pledges on which performance has been poor, the reason: a clear lack of political will among all elites, whatever their faith, to end feudal relationships. Beyond that, but concurrently, secularism - another constitutional injunction - has to be made a reality.The meaning of secularism is not properly understood by many, least of all by policy makers who have consistently confused it with anti-communalism. Secularism implies more than equal respect for all religions and the separation of church from state and church from school. It entails modernization and social change in keeping with contemporary values of equality, fraternity and human dignity. Universalisation of education, ending of destitution through the provision of basic needs, equality of opportunity, and acceptance of the oft-repeated concept of unity in diversity, shorn of the cultural arrogance of insistence on various others joining "the mainstream", are among the attributes of secularism as state policy.Within their own spheres, it is for the religious communities in India to retain contemporary relevance through reform. This is the only way any religion can survive. Hindu society has by and large rejected the anachronism of caste in religious terms, though not yet to the same degree in social categories.This is an element of continuing reform that must go forward. The Tamil Nadu conversions should stimulate and quicken this process rather than get everybody tied up in fighting that ubiquitous 'foreign hand". The need for continuing reform applies in different ways not just to Hindu society but to all the other denominations in India, Muslim and Christian included.Phenomenon: Proselytisation in modern times, and more especially in a multi-religious society such as India, is out of place and could arouse various sensitivities and there by affect public order, one of the conditions for the ensurance of which Article 25(1) provides that "all persons are equally entitled to freedom of conscience and the right freely to profess, practise and propagate religion".However, conversions do and will take place from time to time and, occasionally, reconversions. There is also the phenomenon of upward social mobility or sanskritisation at work: a process by which lower castes and outcasts (such as Adivasis) have been absorbed into higher levels of the Hindu fold. This is not tantamount to conversion but would be more akin to absorption through social osmosis.Recent Harijan converts to Islam read the Quran in Tamil Nadu's Athiyuthu village: Asserting a sense of dignityThere has been a somewhat similar trend in the North-East where certain young tribals have embraced Christianity as part of a process of modernization and differentiation and not through any particular missionary effort. Per contra, in their search for a new identity, Meitei nationalists in Imphal valley are returning to their pre-Vaishnavite Manipur faith and script which they gave up two centuries or more ago.These examples well illustrate the relationship between religion and culture which is again widely misunderstood. Religion and culture have a close affinity; but they are nevertheless separate. Therefore, the notion of converts to Islam being in any way culturally un-Indian is thoroughly misconceived. The Harijan does not and certainly need not lose his Hindu culture by becoming Muslim.The best illustration of this is to be found in Indonesia, the world's largest Islamic nation, which boasts a rich and vibrant Hindu culture. Likewise Buddhist Thailand. Their Hindu culture does not make the Indonesians or Thais Indian. In the same manner, and even more so, India's "Hindu" culture is the common inheritance of all Indians. Equally, Hindu culture does not exhaust Indian culture which is made up of several other distinct elements, among the most important of which is the Islamic stream which has enriched Indian life and civilisation in so many ways.Our many tribal cultures too are part of the varied cultural tapestry of India. Not to recognise this manifold heritage and to cling only to one part or other and remain alienated from the rest is to diminish one's Indianness and not to enhance or refine it in any way.That Muslim Indians should be drawn towards their co-religionists elsewhere round the world is entirely natural and consistent with the concept of Islamic brotherhood. This, however, does not imply extra-territorial loyalty but is a manifestation of "ethnicity" in its widest sense in much the same manner as a Hindu should be drawn to his co-religionists in Mauritius, Fiji, Bali, Nepal or Bangladesh.Therefore it is foolish to get unduly agitated if some funds do flow into India from Islamic sources abroad for advancing the welfare of Muslim Indians. To equate West Asian funding of a few educational and theological institutions in and around Moradabad as an Islamic "gherao" and proto-Pakistanisation of that city and its environs, as was made out by some muddled rabble-rousers last year, is to abandon all rationality in blind panic and to denigrate the unbroken and vigorous continuum of Indian civilisation.Left alone, the current spate of Harijan conversions to Islam will subside. It is however a blunt warning that the Harijans will not wait forever for social equality and fraternity. If they - and more importantly the most deprived among them - do not sense an adequate pace of progress towards redemption of their miserable plight, they will seek "another place" in order to live with dignity. That would be the day of reckoning. But there is just time enough to avoid the bitterness that that would bring.Published By: AtMigration Published On: Nov 4, 2013 14:59 IST--- ENDS ---

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Conversion of Harijans to Islam in Tamil Nadu provokes excited and emotional reactions

The conversion of a few thousand Harijans to Islam in three districts of Tamil Nadu earlier this year, and in stray cases elsewhere, and certain more recent reconversions have provoked excited and emotional reactions that have generated more heat than light. What are the issues involved?

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