Anti-conversion laws and other games

Karnataka became the ninth state to pass a bill that makes religious conversion a crime. On the one hand, it is quite funny that a political party whose leader avows repeatedly that running business is not the government’s job is making religion its business.

On the other hand, it is bizarre because we know the truths behind the Prime Minister’s assertions. When he says that running business is not the government’s job, he only means that he wants to sell India part by part to his wealthy cronies who in turn will pamper his insatiable ego. When his party gets anti-conversion bills passed, it only means to criminalise certain people.

Modi’s party has seldom had noble intentions. Look, for example, at what happened in Odisha after the anti-conversion law was passed in an Indian state for the first time in 1967. Attacks on Christians began a few years after the passing of that law. The attacks culminated in the Kandhamal violence that resembled genocide. The anti-conversion law justified the numerous killings, destruction of about 4000 houses, razing down or burning of about 400 churches, attacks on over 600 villages and rendering 75,000 people homeless. Many Christian families were burnt alive. Hundreds of women were raped and then killed. The cruellest irony was the conversion of thousands of Christians to Hinduism under threat of violence.

The anti-conversion law justified all that inhuman violence as well as certain religious conversions.

Now we have Karnataka apparently getting all set to follow the example of Odisha.

Why would any person want to change his religion? The Sangh Parivar thinks that the economically backward people change their religion for a few bags of rice. Does that mean that Hinduism does not even have the worth of a few bags of rice? What a pathetic religion it is if people abandon it just for some small monetary benefits!

If this indeed is the case, the solution is simple. The Sangh Parivar can provide a few more bags of rice than the missionaries.

It’s not so simple. People are looking for many other things. Dignity, for one thing. And dignity is something that the Sangh is not willing to provide to many. The very foundation of the Sangh is laid on certain Brahminical precepts and keeping the vast majority in indignity is one of the fundamental principles of the Brahminical weltanschauung.

Now, why would a government support such a worldview which seeks to keep the majority in indignity? The answer to that question could be quite scary. We now have a government that is run by one man who seeks to be the Emperor of the country. Criminalising more and more citizens is part of the imperial ambitions of that one man. Anti-conversion laws are just part of a big gameplan which aims at eliminating by hook or by crook all potential enemies of one man’s imperial march to the fabulous Central Vista.