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Author: Ashok Malik
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: May 28, 2006
Meeting the new Indian Ambassador in his capacity as head of State of the Vatican City, Pope Benedict XVI, the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, complained about anti-conversion laws in India. Taking their cue, senior functionaries of the Catholic Church in India had digs at BJP Governments - particularly in Chhatisgarh and Rajasthan - that have brought in legislation seeking to curb mass conversions - and at the VHP.
As an auxiliary to this, the usual bunch of liberal-left pseudo-intellectuals sought to defend the notionally innocuous right of an individual to change his religion. One breathless newspaper editorial called the laws "Orwellian", comparing BJP governance to the Taliban.
All religions were equal before the State, went the jejune argument, the Government had no right to come in the way of a person's right to choose, which existed within a convenient little matrix of moral relativism.
Cute as this argument may be, it ignores compelling facts. First, the laws against "induced" or "fraudulent" conversions are scarcely a BJP invention. They were brought into effect in Madhya Pradesh years ago by a Congress Government.
Second, that allurements are used to invite the poor to change their faith, to "buy" their religious affiliation - in a manic search for "market share", almost - is not new either. It has been documented in official reports, most famously by the Niyogi Commission, set up by a Congress Government in Madhya Pradesh in 1956.
Third, even if one agrees with the "moral relativism" position - one the Pope disagrees with, albeit in a different context, which we will come to later - and condones an individual's right to change his faith, surely this requires some prerequisites?
A Hindu who switches to Islam or a Christian who becomes a Muslim must necessarily have the luxury of examining and interrogating both faiths, deciding why he rejects one and embraces the other. This requires an appreciation of the teachings and edicts of the two religions, an understanding of their nuances and basic philosophy.
So it follows that the well-heeled and the educated should be the first to change faith, provided this is a self-propelled, genuine transformation. Yet who are the target groups of Catholic proselytisers and the increasingly active Baptist missions from the American South? They focus on India's poorest, its Dalits and its indigent.
It was not for nothing that Mahatma Gandhi referred to these neo-converts as "rice Christians". In 1991, Mark Tully noted little had changed: "One Roman Catholic friend of mine still refers to Harijan converts as 'powder milk Christians', and there is no doubt that these people - the poorest of the poor - were attracted by the missionaries' promises to feed their bodies, rather than the prospect of spiritual nourishment."
There is a crucial difference between an individual's right to convert and the right of an external agency - external to the soul and body of the individual that is, not necessarily foreign by passport - to traduce an established faith and actively encourage a person or a group to change religious allegiance, by offering freebies and falsifying local customs if need be. The first is non-negotiable; the second is eminently eligible for curtailment.
Finally, there is a wider question. If the right to convert is acceptable, what of the right to uphold a society's - or an individual's - ancestral religion, the faith of heritage as it were? Does a moral relativism apply between intrinsic and received faiths?
In earlier communication, before his sermon before the Indian Ambassador, the Pope seemed to have a clear view. As a cardinal, in his book Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, he denounced the "dict-atorship of relativism", the false equation, as he saw it, of Christianity with other religions, with secularism or new-age fads.
Even after becoming Pope, he has spoken of the Catholic Church as being the crux of Western civilisation and the Christian calling as the core of the European idea. He has rejected Muslim Turkey, for instance, as "another continent", inappropriate as a member of the European Union.
The Pope sees Europe as a "cultural and not a geographical" entity. He implicitly recognises, correctly, the symbiosis between mainstay religion and civilisation. Replace Europe with India and Christianity with Hinduism: Is the Pope not adhering to the Hindutva position even as he pretends to dispute it?
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