Secularism in India and Recent Developments

 

on

 

 

 

Namaste!

 

Ladies and gentlemen, I am going to tell you about the problem of secularism in India. It was 1988 and I was in India for the first time. I was an avid reader of newspapers at that time and so in Varanasi where I lived, I must have been quite a sight, because every morning I bought a few newspapers. Then I went to the Ganga river and then I took out my shoes and up to my knees in water, I was standing there reading the papers.

 

Now in the communist fortnightly Frontline, there was an interesting debate going on about the then fresh prohibition of the novel by Salman Rushdie called the Satanic Verses. As you know it was offensive to Islam and its believers essentially for two reasons –at the popular level where practically nobody had read the book – the rumour circulated that it was very offensive to the wives of Prophet Mohammed because there is a scene in a brothel where the women working there take the names of the wives of the Prophet. So, you could do it with Aisha, you could do it with Zainab and so on. So, the rumour circulated that Rushdie had depicted the Prophet’s wives as prostitutes. That was the popular reason why Muslims took offense. But the more sophisticated reason was that he questioned the whole process of Prophetism. What are the Satanic Verses? Mohammed in his early period was trying to win over the people of Mecca but they weren’t interested in his monotheism and that also was less important for the Prophet. But what was more important to him was his personal recognition as God’s spokesman. So, he thought of a compromise. He said the three popular Goddesses of the Arabs – Al-lāt, Al-'Uzzá, and Manāt–could still continue to be worshipped if only they would accept him as the Prophet. Now his own few converts whom he had made said, ‘Hey, wait a minute! You asked us to burn the murthis of our Arab Gods and now suddenly you want to permit this? So, this is a contradiction and this is a position we cannot stand.’ So, to talk himself out of it, Mohammed claimed that it was the Devil who had whispered those verses into his ear. So, it was the Devil who had reversed God’s role as the author of Quran. In that context, it was a sufficient explanation. Nevertheless, if you think twice about it, that if Mohammed could be mistaken twice about the source of voice he heard, who says that the other verses of the Quran are not equally Satanic or of some other origin? So, Rushdie questioned the whole prophetic status of Mohammed and that was considered as blasphemy. And for that, he was given a death penalty by Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran, then some Maulana from Delhi wrote an Urdu book about supporting the death sentence and showing that all the Islamic law schools from Mohammed to the present, all have held that the punishment for insulting the Prophet is death penalty. So, the book of Rushdie was banned in India. Some people on the secularist side were in agreement with this, particularly, all the Congress secularists like Khushwant Singh, M J Akbar defended the ban. But the hard secularists, the communists, at that time at least were opposed to this appeasement of the Maulanas. So, there was a debate going on between them.

 

So, I wanted to see what this is. There are secularists defending this obscurantist ban on the book. As Karl Marx used to say ‘critique of religion is beginning of all criticisms.’ It is absolutely fundamental. So, I already saw that there is something amiss with this Indian secularism. At the same time, I discovered that the root of this conflict was in an affair that I never heard about, namely the Ayodhya affair. Because in fact Syed Shahabuddin who had gone to Rajiv Gandhi to demand a ban on this book and who had obtained it had originally announced a Muslim march to Ayodhya which was to coincide with some Hindu festival taking place there. So, Rajiv Gandhi who at that time was pursuing a peaceful solution to the Ayodhya controversy thought that maybe banning this book is a good way of preventing a possible bloodshed. So, he said to Shahabuddin that we want you to call off this march, what do you want in return? So, one of things Shahabuddin wanted was the banning this book. So, that set me on the trail of Ayodhya. Now being in Varanasi at that time, here and there, I did know this. Some local newspaper, maybe Aaj reported everyday about the Ayodhya affair. So, I thought this is something worth investigating. I had come to India to study Philosophy, but frankly as a young man, you have nothing to say about philosophy and you want to do something that is more involved with the world. Maybe, now at this age, it is time to think more deeply. But at that time, the political affairs of India were most interesting and it was very useful to research because the rest of the world didn’t know anything about it.

 

So, in 1989 I published my first article about this affair, which communists indulged deeply. Because at that time, the Left was still hard secularists. Later they started appeasing Islam in Europe as well. The year 1989 was also when I first met Sita Ram Goel who had explained me everything about the situation here. While looking around, I had already discovered the RSS office and bookshop in Jhandewalan. But I had thought there was something mysterious about Hinduism. Islam and other religion by that time were well known and I thought Hindu political movements were more mysterious. But in fact it was disappointing.

 

But anyway, I was in Delhi for a few days to get some papers. So I went to the publishing area, Daryaganj to see what is going on and I found the book ‘History of Hindu- Christian Encounters’ by a historian called Sita Ram Goeland I thought it was very interesting. I read it like in one evening and the next day I went to the same book store. The bookseller said if you like the book, it so happens that you can talk to the writer. His office is just one block away. So, he arranged my meeting there. And that same afternoon, in fact I learnt more about the situation in India than any time ever. So, it turned out that there was very few people really standing up for Hinduism. There were lots of lobby groups and there were laws here in favour of Islam, Christianity, the minorities. At the same time there was also the Khalistani struggle which was very favourably reported in the Western press – everything was said to be the fault of the government. But for Hinduism, nobody was standing up – not even the supposedly Hindu movement. The RSS was always talking about India, never about Hinduism. I mean, now RSS is saying every Indian is a Hindu.

 

It is true historically that Hindu was the Persian word for India. But as soon as the Muslim invaders brought the word 'Hindu' to India, it immediately acquired a religious meaning, namely any Indian who is not a Muslim. So, immediately the opposition between the two came about and so the claim that Indian Muslims are also Hindus won’t work. Especially when no Muslims accepted it, except for the former President A P J Abdul Kalam who really lived a Hindu lifestyle. Except him, I don’t think that any Indian Muslim will accept that he is a Hindu. If you ask Mr Owaisi or so, 'are you a Hindu?', I don’t know. It is simply impolite to ask the people concerned whether they want to be called Hindus or not.

 

Anyway, Goel’s point was that Hindu movement was quite confused, it is quite illiterate, and it is unequipped to be the leader of the Hindu society especially at the time when it is besieged from all sides.

 

As for the Ayodhya affair, which was also at that time and about which Prof Shankar Sharan has told you a bit. It is true that I wrote a book. It is journalistic and not very deep but it was important. I concluded after looking at the records that there was a temple there, a temple that was destroyed. Now that was not really a very sensational thing to say. Years before everybody had heard of this. A century before that, in Ayodhya where both the Hindu and the Muslim claimants as well as the Church, they all agreed that there was a temple destruction and a mosque was built. So, that was not put in doubt by anyone. The question was what shall we do about it. So, the British judge ruled that it was very unfortunate that the temple was destroyed to make place for the mosque. But since this happened centuries ago, isn’t it too late to remedy the condition? Whether you agree with the judgement or not, the factual basis of it was not controversial at all. Of course, there had been a temple there. In the 1989 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, this is curtly given as a fact. But then also in 1989, there certainly was a statement by the eminent historians of the JNU history department that there was really no proof of a temple being there. And they tried to say how it came about – the Ramanandisadhus became prominent and they needed a myth and so they concocted the story of temple destruction. And then the historians concluded that this place – the Babri Masjid should be declared a national monument. They didn’t say give it back to the Muslims, but that it should be made into a national monument.

 

In fact, there have been many varieties on this “solution” like Ambedkarite movement had said that the thing to do with the site is to build lavatories. Others said, they should have a school, or a hospital or some socially good thing. And I said: I find that an interesting proposal. But I suggested that first you go to Ajmer or Mecca and propose to them that we are going to take apart this place of worship and we are going to build lavatories here. Now, if you can get away with that and survive, then you can come to Ayodhya and do the same thing. That is fair.

 

Anyway, I came out with a book in support of the old consensus which was suddenly being jeopardized by the statement of the JNU historians. So that was not so new or original or bright or anything. But it had the merit of breaking through the impression that was created with the rest of the world or the so called scientific West all on the side of the JNU historians. It is true that our academics have solely neglected their duties, they have not investigated the matter and they automatically as an immediate reaction sided with what they thought were the good guys because that had the merit of being against the bad guys, namely the Hindu activists. So, what I did was simply to show that if you look at things, there is no reason to be in the pocket of secularists, the facts tell a different story.

 

It was the start of riots with hundreds of people being killed and the government falling, the state government was dismissed. Ultimately, it ended in the destruction of the Babri Masjid, lot more violence, ultimately culminating in a new type of terror, namely in Mumbai on March 12, 1993 at a number of different places in the city, bombs were detonated including at the Stock Exchange leaving some 250 dead. And that is a formula for terror that has been repeated again and again in New York, in Paris and many places. And of course in many Indian cities.

 

So, this Ayodhya affair became a pretty big, sensational thing. It need not had. Rajiv Gandhi’s policies in the 1980s were simply to leave the site of the Hindus and then buy off the Muslim leaders through some concessions like the ban on the Rushdie book. That was not a very principled, very noble policy. But it was a practical policy and particularly it had the merit of being bloodless compared to what then had effectively happened. Well, I think that the 'eminent historians' have something to answer for. Later, when the case went to court, while the place had been in the possession of the court since the 1950, the eminent historians were called to witness in that. Then one after the other backed out. They said, “I am not an archaeologist”, “I have never been to the site”, “I only signed because the others signed” etc. So, the eminent evidence turned out to be built on water. So, today most of those historians keep silent about the evidence on Ayodhya because they know very well that they haven’t done well. It is only a few newbies who are still talking about it without knowing the whole story. Because the whole story has been kept secret. The whole media had kept the lids on the story to save the faces of the eminent historians when they non-performed in court. Outsiders may not know.

 

The Allahabad High Court in 2010 did a good thing by accepting the evidence for temple destruction and therefore giving the site mostly to the Hindu claimants. Nobody was satisfied with the verdict. Neither the Hindu claimants, nor the Muslim claimants, they all wanted one hundred per cent of the site. So, this thing is now before the Supreme Court, which after some years of little progress is taking the matter seriously. Let’s see what comes of it. But, the battle of evidence has definitely being won by the Hindu side.

 

The Ayodhya affair says a lot about Indian secularism also. Can you imagine that the most sacred place for a religion is questioned like that by any government, in other countries? Mecca was supposedly built by Adam then it was destroyed and it was rebuilt by Abraham. Do you have proof for that? This is such a silly affair. In France, there is this place where supposedly Virgin Mary had appeared. Now French governments are the original secularists. France is a sovereign secular state, anti-religious and so most of the ministers in France used to laugh at this Catholic belief. Yet, nevertheless they never questioned it. So that is the normal behaviour for a secularist government. They don’t interfere with religion. By contesting the case of Hinduism, the Indian government had very strongly interfered in these beliefs. That is an interesting illustration. Yet, personally I don’t find that the most important. I rarely go to places of worship. I am not a very religious person.

 

What I find far more disconcerting is the several articles in the Constitution that are blatantly partisan, anti-Hindu. They discriminate against Hindus. Let’s first cite an Article that will be liked by many Hindus but is never implemented. It is for Uniform Civil Code. This is an Article in the Directive Principles which has no teeth. The Indian state pays lip service to these Principles but doesn’t enforce them. Even the Supreme Court has effectively asked the government what steps are being taken towards the Uniform Civil Code?

 

The lack of a common civil code is not much of a concern to me. It is not much of a concern to most Hindus because throughout history there were different law codes for different communities even within Hinduism. Like to give a famous example, the Brahmin caste for example was exempt from the death penalty, no matter what crime they had committed whereas other castes could get a death penalty. Then by contrast because of their duty to transmit the holy scripture, they were forbidden from getting drunk because if you get drunk you may not respect the scriptures or maybe you will start making jokes about something and the misfortune that would supposedly fall from it.

 

You have this system of different law system for different castes and the ultimate arbitrator was not even the King or someone, it was the caste panchayat. So, they could have very different systems. They could change their systems if they wanted to, nobody else would interfere. So, when the Hindu Marriage Code came about in the 1950s, it was a bit of a revolution for Hindus. To uniformise family law for the Hindus - nevertheless Hindus have accepted this and nowadays it has become common and they have not questioned it. The same does not count for the minorities. There is separate law for Parsis but they don’t make any trouble of it, nevertheless they enjoy it. For Muslims it is very important to have a code because Islam is not a belief system that you can practice behind closed doors, it is also a law system. So, they said it is fundamental for Islam to follow the law system. Again, I don’t find this as very important point for Hindu interests, but nevertheless it is not secular.

 

Therefore, it is not Hindus who should go for a Common Civil Code, it is the secularists who should do so. I smile at the claim that India is a secular state. It is not a secular state. Already it is not a secular state because of the different family laws. I mean a secular state by definition means all citizens are equal before the law. They have to obey the same laws, they get the same punishments if they don’t. Article 1 of the Belgian Constitution says every Belgian citizen is equal before the law. That’s secularism for you. So, India does not satisfy that criteria.

 

Moreover, this Hindu Marriage Act is not secular on a meta level, namely, it is not Hindus amongst each other that have changed the law. It was the secular Parliament where there were Christians and Muslims and so on who voted on this. There was an interference of the state in India’s major religion, and that is not the case what happens with the minorities. When I started researching on secularism in India, I thought why is everybody claiming that India is a secular state. It is not!

 

Now there are a few Articles in the Constitution that are far more important for India’s interest – mainly Article 13, 15, 19, 25, 29 that make a distinction between the Hindus and the minorities. Article 30 says that minorities have the right to set up their own educational institution. Well, yes of course. Most secular countries that consider minorities also consider the majority. It is only in India that this distinction is being made only one way. Actually, in India, the Constituent Assembly when they voted this Article, what they had in mind, you can clearly see it from all the statements at that time, their interventions in the Constituent Assembly and also from their personal correspondences, that what they had in mind is that we have to ensure the rights for the minorities, obviously they also counted for the majority already having those rights. So, initially there was no discrimination. They thought that the rights of the majority need not be stated explicitly.

 

However, that has changed. It is researched and mapped out in great detail how this changed. But roughly I see this changed around 1970. This had much to do with the inner Congress power struggle in which Indira Gandhi got an upper hand and she relied on that to some extent on the support of the communists. And the deal they made was something like this: with the communists saying that you can have all the perks of the office, all the names, statements, you pocket them all. But we want to have control over the cultural and educational sector. Because that is where the real power is.

 

As ArunShourie once told me, many journalists say that politicians want power, but that is not true. Politicians want office. They want to look nice, they want to come on TV and so on. They want to have that kind of power that they can dole out to their relatives, to be someone big in their own communities. What they don’t care about is to change the world according to their designs. That the communists did want! They didn’t care about the perks of office. What they wanted was to change the society according to their own ideology. The big names were P N Haksar, the Secretary of Indira Gandhi and the education minister NurulHasan. The end of the story is that this changed the face of India and so this became a Nehruvian secular state and an anti-Hindu state.

 

If you don’t believe me, when I say that Hindus are at a disadvantage in India, well then explain this to me. Why do a number of Hindu communities scramble to get at the exit door? You know the case of the Ramakrishna Mission that in the 1980s went to the court to have themselves declared as a non Hindu minority. Now remember, that the Mission was founded by Swami Vivekananda who used to say “garv se kahoki hum Hindu hain”. Well, partly it was because the Mission got a big idea of themselves that they are not Hindus, but universal. We are bigger than Hindus. Now that also says something, namely that Hinduism was getting a bad name in India and also internationally to some extent, so they don't want to call themselves Hindu. You have these Hindu chauvinist websites where they bring together all the statements that foreigners said in favour of Hinduism. The foreigners who wrote are from long ago. Today, you find very few foreigners who make that kind of statement. Instead, there are very negative talks about Hinduism. Today, Hinduism is caste, the holy caste and nothing but caste. Hinduism is oppressive obscurantism. This is what is being largely taught in Indian schools too. So, one reason was simply this image. But the other is there were very tangible interests involved.

 

The Ramakrishna Mission had invested heavily in running schools. So, to protect these schools, particularly in Bengal where there was a lot of agitation by the Communist teachers, they wanted to get out and they wanted to have the privileges that all the minorities have. The same thing happened with the AryaSamaj. At least, provincially in Punjab they got the separate status whereas the Ramakrishna Mission was denied the separate status.

 

Recently, you had the cases of the Jains. Same thing – there were a lot of educational interests involved. And with the Veerashaivas strongly supported by the Congress in Karnataka. So, it is a bad thing to be a Hindu now; and if this continues, I am afraid there is something what I have heard several Hindus say – at this rate Hinduism is going to disappear and rather soon.

 

So, I would like to announce to you that two days ago there was a conference in Delhi about a proposal to amend these Articles in the Constitution and to make the religions equal before the law. That is not a matter of pushing Hindu interests or Hindu rasthra, it is simply a matter of pushing equality. You give the same rights to Hindus as you give it to others.For instance, in the Right to Education Act, you say that Hindu institutions have to do this or that, but not the minorities.That is in the Right to Education Act today. So, these discriminations have to be abolished.

 

So that conference was a good thing and I am glad that I have associated myself with this endeavour. I do not agree with every single line in the proposal. Like there is this one thing that I think is particularly unrealistic. They want to do away with conversions. Article 25, which gives everybody the right to practice and propagate religion. But to the practice of conversions, it will not make any difference. Even in states where they have the so called Freedom of Religion Act, they are totally ineffective. And in India you can vote any law. And I am sorry, as a foreigner you can’t miss, that many laws are nice on paper but they are not being implemented. Like when NarendraModi came with his plan to provide lavatories to every family, they laughed at him saying it is a nice thing on paper but will never be implemented. Now one of the nice things about Modi is that he gets the work done. But still, I wouldn’t expect anything good from an anti-conversion law.

 

Look at China. You see in India, laws are debatable. In China, a law is very strongly enforced. Now China also wants to stop conversions to Christianity but it cannot. At least the volunteers sent home by the Christian missionaries in China are impressive. Tens of millions of people converted to Protestantism in China. I don’t think therefore, that you can count on the law. There it is a matter for civil society.

 

Freedom is not a cakewalk. So, if you have equality also in matters of conversion, then you have to be active and give people reasons why it is better to not to convert to Christianity. For instance, there is a whole literature in the West written by Christians and ex-Christians about the history of Christianity, the theology of Christianity, why it is wrong, why you shouldn’t convert, etc. And nobody in India knows about it. In the time of Mahatma Gandhi, there was already plenty of critical scholarship about Christianity in the West, but the only thing Gandhi borrowed from the West was about the missionary propaganda about Christianity! Whereas the really new thing from the West at that time, the good thing was precisely the critical scholarship about religion.

 

Now about that in one sentence I can say that in the case of Hinduism too, it will be better to whittle down a few beliefs. But the essence of Hinduism will remain standing. Whereas in the case of Christianity and Islam, if you study their core, I am afraid that it can’t stand scrutiny. So, if you bring that free intellectual live investigation: that we searched, make it common, make it well known in India, it will automatically do the job of stopping these conversions. So, there I don’t think that the law should be changed fundamentally. But the discriminations against Hinduism have to be abolished and in fact every secularist should be adamant about it.

 

Thank you.

 Q: The term secularism was coined by Holyoake. And if somebody was called an atheist it was punishable by death in some countries. So, now some centuries later nobody is going to get a death penalty for it. So, secularism in a lot of countries has different meanings. For example, in India, it is completely opposite. You are talking about a state that has nothing to do with religion. Is it time to have a new definition of secularism? How do we define secularism in the 21st century? Because the original meaning is totally lost.

 

A: We should simply restore the original meaning. Secularism already had a meaning. It means separation of the state from religion. It was distorted by the Nehruvians and that distortion has lasted for 70 years. Now we should simply go back to its old definition.

 

A: The first answer is relatively simple. Taking pride in one’s religion is not exactly the same as chauvinism. I don’t see much Hindu chauvinism, I see a lot of Indian chauvinism. They germinate against the West. There I think it’s a complete mistake. Often they don’t know much about the West even though they get classes in English and so on.They have much more access to Western culture and vice versa. The Westerners are completely clueless about India and that is not good.I know where that comes from. If Indians are clueless about the West, that is chauvinism for me. So, I really don’t know of Hindu chauvinism.

 

Second question. There is a law professor in India called RatnaKapoor whom I have heard some five years ago arguing at length that this discrimination is a good thing and it is necessary. It is very very exceptional. Because most Indian secularists are going to say that India is a secular state where all religions are treated equal and the Hindu chauvinists are threatening secularism. I can understand where this comes from. Because you have had situations in the West where minorities needed protection. This is very obvious in the history of religion when you see how Christianity conquered Europe by partly violence. But mostly the Christian missionaries developed a great knowledge of mass psychology and all the ways of modern advertisement, marketing and so on. They did everything right to make Christianity penetrate as far as possible with the least possible resistance. For instance, they allowed people to keep worshipping at their own places of worship. They only gradually brought in Christian elements. For example, in the place where I lived, there were sacred trees. In the beginning the missionaries brought down sacred trees. In this case, an image of Virgin Mary was hung in the tree and then a pagan came along, he didn’t like it and tried to take it down. Then the Christian story goes that he was paralysed. But fortunately, a Christian came by who hung the image back on to the tree and he was released from his paralysis. And so now, it is a sacred place where people go and worship. So that was the Christian approach.

 

Nevertheless, there was also quite a bit of violence once Christianity was in place. For instance, the Jews were not really persecuted, but they were kept in ghettos, they were denied quite a number of rights and so on. There things happened that make you say that the minorities need protection. Today when we think of protection for minorities, it mostly emanates from America. In terms of religion, the American formula is pretty good – protect the churches from the state. In America they protect religion but they don’t want religion to interfere in the state or the state to interfere in religion. But there the Blacks have a terrible history and even after they were released, they were discriminated against. So, it took a lot of activism to correct all that. Which is why the Westerners are so worked up about caste.Because they have this history of enforcing justice for a great cause.For example, the American civil war. Or the Crimea war against Russia by England for Turkey. But the price they paid for the costs of the war was the Turkey was made to abolish slavery. So, in the West whatever has been the history of slavery also has a pretty glorious history about the abolition of slavery.

 

Indeed, I interject myself with a mention of my own country. Unlike our neighbours, in Holland, France and England, we never had slaves. The only government in Belgium with slavery connection is that it waged a war in Congo to abolish slavery.

 

From this history, you get a mentality in the West that we have to do something about slavery wherever it exists. And then you get the propaganda that the caste system is a type of slavery and many don’t realise in the West that it has been abolished etc. Moreover, to make it worse it is seemed to be racial. This is where the Aryan invasion theory comes in. The Aryans were white and they came to India and the dark natives were put into confinement of caste and they were oppressed by the white upper caste and were invaded. So, the whole history of how America was colonized by European powers, by Christians, that is projected on to India. There is this strong drive against caste and that is why many people consider Hinduism somewhat evil. So, the propaganda that in Islam there is equality which is not true of course. That propaganda goes well and like McCaulay said explicitly that we shouldn’t interfere in this religious affair of these miserable backward Indians. But if we do, it should be on the side of Mohammedans. From there you get the psychology that something must be done for the minorities. Now to project that principle on to India is so silly, it is so counter to Indian history.

 

There has never been a time when the Hindu majority has oppressed the minorities. For Europeans with a history of oppression of the minorities, this may come as a surprise. But really, you can’t tell me of any example in Indian history where the majority oppressed the minorities. The other way round by contrast, yes. Whether the reservations for Blacks in America are the solution or not is debatable. But the historical fact that the Blacks were oppressed is there, that can’t be argued.

 

Now in the case of India, it is just the opposite caste. The Hindus have been treating the minorities well is a fact of history. That the minorities did not is also a fact of history. And indeed if some injustice should be compensated, it should be the other way round. It is not like how RatnaKapoor says that Hindus have an obligation of appeasing the minorities or compensating the poor, hapless, position of the minorities. That is not the position of the minorities at all. Historically, Hindus have converted to Christianity or Islam when it was in their interests, or often when they were forced to, I will even leave that out. But in the case under the Mughals when you had a quarrel with your neighbour, you went to the court and you found out the Muslims are always treated better in courts than the Hindus. So, you convert to Islam and you won the trial. So, who are the Muslims? They are people who had chosen privilege. People who had scrambled for the exit door and left.

 

Are there any Hindus here? If there are, there is one good thing I want to say about you is that you people are not rats. Hinduism at the moment is a sinking ship and the rats are the one who leave the sinking ship. Well, you people don’t and I appreciate that about you. That is my answer. There is nothing that the Hindus have to compensate for. Maybe the others have to do some compensation for what their ancestors did, maybe not. But I don’t want to press that point. I don’t think they should pay compensation or anything. Just equality is good enough.

 

A: Yes, I admit I have not said the whole answer. The situation is quite serious in that regard. Like you see, converts are not only numerous among the tribals or the pariahs. Like for example, the Sikhs getting converted. Many people don’t know that, not part of the stereotype. Or for those Indian chauvinists who complain about the missionary activity being part of white supremacy or American imperialism. That fact is that today 99 per cent or so of the missionary organisations are native. Some organisations are still controlled from Europe or so, but a very large number is native. Moreover, India is now a net exporter of missionaries.There are Indian missionaries going to Africa, going to Europe and other places. So, Christianity is now very much part of the fabric of India. It is also larger than the figures in the Census say because many Christians are instructed not to make public that they are Christians and also for keeping the caste reservations and so on. They don’t change their names anymore. So, you can’t say this must be a Christian. I can perfectly understand that you are concerned about this.

 

Now to what extent should the law solve that problem? I am temperamentally rather inclined to say that this is not a matter of law. This is civil society that should act. Nevertheless, I can understand your position and ultimately it is Indians themselves who have to decide. In the conference two days ago, it was proposed that the law concerning freedom of religion including propagation of religion, at first the word propagation should be left out, but they even go for a complete ban on conversions with the footnote that conversion to Hinduism, Buddhism and so on is not conversion. Now I don’t think that you can sell that. That would be certainly zealous. They can pay for lawyers and they can pay Hindus for the tactics, it would be a Christian defending his own thing. Internationally, it will create a storm of protests. And now many Indians are proud to say that we don’t care about Western opinions anymore. Fine, but I think that you do care. If you see the American influence in Bollywood. The BJP so far has tried to live up to secularists, part of that secularist pressure is also the foreigners who are parrots of the secularists and who have the prestige of American institutions behind them. So, Indians look up to that. That factor still plays a role.

 

So, it is easy to say that we are going to prohibit conversions. I don’t know if you can pull that off. On the other hand, sometimes it just has to ignore the world. This is what happened with Kashmir with Article 370. Everybody was mesmerized by this secularist idea that Kashmir needs Special Status. That was not true. When Article 370 was abolished, Modi got a very huge majority in the Parliament like two-thirds majority in the RajyaSabha and even more in the LokSabha, several members of the opposition parties joined in, several members of the Congress who officially were against it voted against their own party with the government. So, that really was a people’s vote. The whole of India was in favour of the integration of Kashmir. And in foreign countries there are still protests against that. But all the Western Leftist intellectuals are in favour of open borders. They are against Donald Trump’s war against Mexico, they are against Brexit that recreates that border between Britain and Europe, they are for open borders. And yet suddenly, because of Kashmir, they have discovered the virtue of borders! Not even the international border, but a border between one province and the rest of the country. This is so absurd and it was already an absurd situation - that you are sovereign state yet you are not allowed to go to a part of your own country. No sovereign state would accept that. And so, Modi did nothing but normalise the situation. This made no sense, the special status of Kashmir. So, he re-normalised the situation. In fact, the amendments to the discriminatory Articles in the Constitution are also simply a normalisation. They simply restore normal sense. There is nothing Hindu fanatic about it. It is just normal.

 

Ultimately, I admit that conversions are a difficult problem and I am in favour of the approach of persuasion. Nevertheless, maybe sometimes something more may be needed. I will leave it to you to decide.