UPA trying to divide India

If the British used communal electorates to secure Partition in barely four decades, the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance may succeed faster in eating the fruit of its desire to allocate 15 per cent of the funds for development and welfare schemes exclusively for minorities. BJP president Rajnath Singh has done well to oppose this divisive munificence, which may or may not salvage the Congress's shrinking minority vote-bank, but will certainly intensify communal competitiveness and friction nationwide.

Such dangerously disruptive minority appeasement will not merely alter the definition of secularism, whose traditional meaning is state disinterest in the denominational affiliations of its citizens. France, father of Western secularism, later extended this principal from Christianity to all religions. In Nehruvian India, secularism began as apathy to the majority Hindu faith and solicitude towards Islam. Over the decades, this extended progressively to excessive minority appeasement and hatred of all things Hindu. Now, under the UPA dispensation, secularism is synonymous with a 'Muslim first' policy, making it difficult to distinguish India from neighbouring Islamic countries

The BJP rightly fears that the Centre's special 15-point programme for minorities in the 11th Plan draft paper could trigger competitive communal demands for budgetary allocations. Worse, it may stimulate caste-based demands for resource allocation, with consequences one does not dare dwell upon. Not only will this overturn the traditional holistic approach to national development, it may unravel the nation itself. The pre-programmed Sachar Committee report on the socio-economic conditions of Muslims, pretext for this dangerous step, militates against constitutional injunctions against discrimination on grounds of religion, and is a fit subject for public interest litigation.

Given these high stakes, the BJP States did well to oppose 'communal budgeting' at the recent National Development Council meeting. Pointing to the threat to the social fabric, Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi wisely suggested that funds for various schemes and programmes be allocated solely on the basis of socio-economic criteria, leaving execution to the States. Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan and Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Raman Singh also insisted that rather than caste or religion, economic criteria alone should determine allocation of funds for welfare schemes. With the challenge of poverty intact, the 11th Plan should resist the lure of a communal shortcut to development.

Amid the UPA's bid to heighten communal sensitivities, the National Commission for Scheduled Castes' chairman, Mr Buta Singh, has defused a high-voltage issue with finesse. An old Congressman, Mr Singh must have been under considerable pressure to endorse the recommendations of the Justice Ranganath Mishra National Commission for Religious and Linguistic Minorities. The NCRLM had on May 15, 2007, recommended that Scheduled Caste status, hitherto restricted to groups among Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists, be de-linked from religion by amending the Constitution (SCs) Order, 1950, and extended to "Dalit Christians" and "Dalit Muslims".

Possibly anticipating the Ranganath Mishra Commission's recommendations, the National Commission for Scheduled Castes had declared in February 2007 that the basic parameter for classification as Scheduled Caste was "untouchability", which does not exist in the theology of Christianity and Islam. In October 2007, the NCSC said the proposed reservation for "Dalit Christians" should not poach upon existing reservation for Scheduled Castes. Finally, on December 7, 2007, it declared there was no evidence that "Dalit Christians" and "Dalit Muslims" suffered "untouchability"; hence, they were not entitled to Scheduled Caste status.

This flawless reasoning will make it difficult for the UPA to extend quota benefits to Dalit converts to Christianity and Islam. Any attempt to grant additional quota for 'minority Dalits' could violate the Supreme Court's 50 per cent ceiling on reservation. The remaining option of carving Dalit converts a share out of the 27 per cent OBC quota is fraught with political danger; indeed, neither SCs nor OBCs will agree to share their quota pie. Mr Buta Singh's opinion is critical because a PIL in the apex court is seeking SC status and quota benefits for converts to Christianity.

Conversion lobbies in Christianity and Islam will find it difficult to overcome this roadblock. In order to procure a share of the coveted reservation quota for neo-converts, they will have to admit that Christianity and Islam practice untouchability in India! It will be difficult to do this without attracting penal provisions under the law for discrimination on grounds of caste or race (applicable to Islam). This will knock the bottom out of the moral high ground on which these two faiths stand and berate Hindu dharma and varna-jati for inegalitarian practices, violative of human dignity.

More importantly, it would have a deleterious impact upon both religions world-wide if they admit practicing and institutionalising discrimination in faith in any country. It may be pertinent that long before the collapse of the Soviet Union and fall of the Berlin Wall, Stalin rang the death-knell of Communism with his proclamation of "socialism in one country". This may have been pragmatic and necessary to consolidate his hold upon Russia, but it militated against the very ethos of a totalitarian, millenarian ideology. After that, it was only a matter of time for Marxism to be recognised as the monotheist god that failed.

Christianity and Islam should be cautious about leaping into this well without application of mind. Any further insistence on a quota for Dalit converts should be met with a nationwide ban on religious conversion as such conversion is admittedly promoting communal ill will and caste discrimination! Indeed, the demand for SC status for Dalit converts should be taken as a tacit admission of the wilful presence of untouchability in Islam and Christianity, and the conversions declared breach of trust, illegal, violative of human dignity, and detrimental to religious and cultural freedom. All converts suffering discrimination should immediately revert to their native traditions.

Interestingly, the Poor Christian Liberation Movement has condemned this church conspiracy to push 'Dalit Christians' into the Scheduled Caste list. PCLM president RL Francis says Dalits converted to Christianity to preserve their dignity, for which they sacrificed reservation benefits under the Constitution. Indian church authorities betrayed them on both counts and are guilty of collective sin, aggravated by the pernicious attempt to promote casteism in Christianity. Mr Francis's call for compensation for the 20 million 'Dalit Christians' who have suffered economic loss by converting deserves consideration as a class action suit by the apex court.

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