Skip to main content

Anti-conversion laws and other games

 

Image from Global China Daily

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.

 

Comments

  1. Yamini MacLeanJanuary 4, 2022 at 10:45 PM

    Hari Om
    ...and the jackboot stamps its presence upon the new year... it all smacks of the inquisition, or the pogroms... history is full of such stuff. More's the pity... YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
  2. magiceyeJanuary 5, 2022 at 6:14 AM

    The future indeed is bleak.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...
2 comments
Read more

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...
16 comments
Read more

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...
18 comments
Read more

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more