Religious Conversion

Indian Disputes and Their European Origins

Sarah Claerhout, Jakob De Roover

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000571134
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This book re-examines the issue of religious conversion, which has been a site of conflict in India for several centuries. It discusses wide-ranging themes such as conversion, education, and reform in colonial India; the process and practices of conversion in Christian Europe; Gandhi, conversion, and the equality of religions; perspectives from Hindu nationalism, secularism, and religious minorities; religious freedom and the limits of propagating religion; and conversion in constitutional law, commissions, and courts, to chart new directions for research on religion, tradition, and conversion. Tracing developments from the 19th-century colonial era to contemporary times, the book analyses cultural background frameworks and the origins of religious conversion and its conceptualisation in Western Christianity. It further delves into how Indian culture and its traditions have shaped responses to conversion.

Part of the Critical Humanities Across Cultures series, this book will be useful to scholars and researchers of critical humanities, religion, cultural studies, sociology of religion, comparative religion, philosophy, anthropology, theology, Indology, history, politics, postcolonial studies, critical theory, and South Asian studies.

1 Introduction: The Issue of Conversion in India

DOI: 10.4324/9781003281269-1

In spite of decades of discussion in politics, the media, and academic scholarship, it remains difficult to explain why religious conversion has been so contentious in India. Over the years, protagonists have changed and political circumstances too; yet, while the conflict retains its intensity, the utterances on all sides have shown monotony more than anything else. Today, we are not in a position to address, let alone answer, basic questions like: What exactly is at stake in the disputes? Why has conversion to Christianity remained a site of conflict in India for more than two centuries? Why are so many troubled by the issue, even when it has scarcely had any direct impact on their lives? So far, the study of India’s conflict about conversion has not identified and formulated the central concerns of its participants in such a way that they become resolvable.

This introductory chapter highlights recurring themes and standpoints in the disputes, points out problems and lacunae, and brings to attention unexplored routes. Our goal is twofold. On the one hand, readers must feel that they have gained familiarity with the disputes concerning religious conversion in India. On the other hand, it must become clear that these surface-level disputes alone do not provide insight: there are underlying problems, which appear crucial to the conflict but cannot be localised and understood without systematic investigation.

Religious Conversion: Where Is the Quarrel?

By far the most common idea about the Indian conflict, both in the academic world and in the popular media, is that it concerns a clash between Hindu nationalist forces, on the one hand, and advocates of the secular state, minority rights, and religious freedom, on the other hand. One party supposedly consists of members and supporters of the family of organisations known as the Sangh Parivar (the BJP, RSS, VHP, and related groups); the other brings together Indian secularists, Christian and other minority leaders, and Western commentators. Despite its superficial appeal, this way of characterising the conflict falls short.

Generally, the ‘secularism vs. Hindutva’ framework suggests the following: whereas secularists, minority leaders, and basically anyone with a ‘liberal’ mindset defend the right to convert and condemn violations of religious freedom in India, Hindu nationalists strive for restrictions on conversion and thus curb the freedom of religion and discriminate against Christian and other religious minorities. Some authors argue that the assault on conversion is but a pretext of the Hindutva movement to promote its goal of a Hindu nation:

…[W]hat is at issue is not the act of conversion itself, but rather the challenge that conversion to Christianity presents to Hindutva. Conversion to Christianity threatens the construction of India as a nation for Hindus. Hindu nationalists regard Christianity as a foreign religion that is seducing people away from their original faith, Hinduism.¹

The Sangh Parivar needs an enemy ‘Other’ to consolidate the ‘Hindu community’ into an aggressive bloc, the historian Sumit Sarkar claims, and ‘[a]n anti-Christian campaign in India today necessarily has to base itself on the question of conversions’.² Others suggest that high-caste Hindus oppose the conversion of ‘Hindu’ lower castes because it diminishes their grip on Indian society. Yet others add that ‘every conversion to Islam or Christianity is strongly resented by the rightists in the majority community as it amounts to loss of numbers and hence loss of political weightage’.³ In the same vein, anti-conversion legislation instituted by state-level BJP-governments is often viewed as a manifestation of Hindu majoritarianism and anti-minority bigotry.

The problem with this type of description is that a range of concerns are clubbed together and classified in terms of two opposing parties, as though this classification could serve as an ‘explanation’ of the disputes about conversion. The widespread antagonism towards religious conversion in contemporary India is then ‘explained’ by referring to the rise of Hindu nationalism. While there is no doubt that Hindutva organisations have shown hostility towards missionary activity and have been involved in violent harassment of specific Christian groups,⁴ we cannot make sense of the long-standing conflict about conversion by presenting it as a hobbyhorse of ‘the Hindu right’. The preoccupation of these organisations with conversion is part of what ‘needs to be explained’, not what ‘does the explaining’. Therefore, we begin by examining the claims of different groups involved in the disputes as expressions of ‘clusters of concerns’, which need to be studied closely because – buried under the often-aggressive rhetoric – there are real issues and worries lingering.

Two Clusters of Concerns

One cluster of concerns focuses on the protection of the right to freedom of religion. This right, it is said, entails a freedom for each individual citizen to choose his or her own religion; that freedom, in turn, implies a right to convert and proselytise, which should be protected by the state and respected by other citizens. Consequently, any legal restrictions on conversion that go beyond banning the use of force and fraud amount to violations of the tenets of religious freedom. Consider a typical statement: ‘Every man has the right to change his faith. It is the sacred and inviolable right’.⁵ Or, as an Indian constitutional expert puts it, ‘conversion does not in any way interfere with the freedom of conscience but is a fulfillment of it and gives meaning to it’.⁶ Conversion, then, belongs to the domain of the freedom of religion and conscience, which are universal, inalienable, and inviolable human rights.

Christians concur with such claims. Just before leaving India in 1999 after a papal visit, Pope John Paul II insisted that ‘the Catholic church had a right to continue missionary work in Asia, saying conversion should be recognised as a human right’. ‘No state, no group has the right to control either directly or indirectly a person’s religious convictions…or the respectful appeal of a particular religion to people’s free conscience’, he told a meeting attended by Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Jews, Buddhists, Jains, Zoroastrians, and Bahais. And the Pope added: ‘Religious freedom constitutes the very heart of human rights. Its inviolability is such that individuals must be recognised as having the right to change their religion if their conscience so demands’.⁷ Similarly, in his reaction to a recent ‘anti-conversion’ law, the Freedom of Religion Act 2019 of Himachal Pradesh, Archbishop Felix Machado of Vasai Diocese explained that for Christians it goes against religious freedom:

All human beings, he said, are born with the right to choose in conscience the religion of their choice. But the understanding in India is that all religions are good, and everyone born in a religion should not change it. Any conversion is coercion, they say.⁸

In brief, no government, group, or individual has the right to control a person’s religious beliefs or stand in the way of their right to change their religion. If a religion appeals to an individual’s conscience, neither the state nor any other organisation may create obstacles to prevent conversion since that would violate the freedom of conscience. Therefore, restrictions on the right to convert are viewed as stains on the Constitution of India, the country’s status as a secular democracy, and its human rights record.

Another line of argument in this cluster concerns the ‘social’ dimensions of conversion. It argues that the freedom to convert from one religion to another offers a means to move away from the oppression and other ills ascribed to Hinduism: the caste system, discrimination of lower castes and tribal groups, inequality, etc. B.R. Ambedkar famously made a case for conversion as a means to escape from the hold of Hindu religion:

No progress can be made without change. Conversion is a sort of change. And if no progress can be made without change, i.e. conversion, obviously conversion becomes essential. The ancestral religion cannot be a hindrance in the path of a progressive man.⁹

Since there is no equality in Hinduism (in fact, ‘[s]uch a living example of inequality will not be found anywhere in the world’, according to Ambedkar), conversion should allow the oppressed to throw away the shackles of this religion.¹⁰ More recently, a BBC reporter formulates the issue as follows: ‘But there is one good reason people do still want to convert – Hinduism’s rigid social hierarchy, the caste system. At the very bottom are dalits, once known as “untouchables”. For them, a new religion can mean a more equal existence’.¹¹ From this angle, the legal curbing of conversion is denounced as an attempt to prevent individuals from leaving an oppressive majority religion.

People giving voice to the second cluster of concerns generally agree that freedom of religion is a fundamental right and that individuals should be free to follow the religion of their choice. But they then take a different turn: freedom of religion entails that communities have the right to freely practise their religion and its traditions without interference – i.e., without being disturbed by missionary activity and attempts to convert people from one religion to another. Protesting against Pope John Paul II’s visit to India in 1999, Hindu activists ‘accused Catholic missionaries of coercing poorer Indians into converting to Catholicism. They demanded that the Pope order a moratorium on conversions’. ‘Everyone is free to propagate their religion but nobody should press anybody’, a Sikh holy man stated.¹² In his open letter to Pope John Paul II written on the occasion of the papal visit, Advaita Vedanta teacher Swami Dayananda Saraswati brings to the Pope’s attention ‘the concerns of many Hindus in this country about religious conversion’ and appeals to him ‘to accept that every person has the freedom to pursue his or her own religion’. The Swami distinguishes among the world’s religious traditions between ‘those that convert and those that do not’ and characterises the latter as ‘non-aggressive’:

Religions that are committed by their theologies to convert, on the other hand, are necessarily aggressive, since conversion implies a conscious intrusion into the religious life of a person, in fact, into the religious person. …Any protest against religious conversion is always branded as persecution, because it is maintained that people are not allowed to practise their religion, that their religious freedom is curbed. The truth is entirely different. The other person also has the freedom to practise his or her religion without interference. That is his/her birthright. Religious freedom does not extend to having a planned programme of conversion. Such a programme is to be construed as aggression against the religious freedom of others.¹³

Here, conversion is rejected as a form of aggression and intrusion into persons and their religious lives, while freedom of religion implies being able to practise one’s religion without such interference. Consequently, opposition to conversion does not aim to curb people’s religious freedom but rather to protect it against infringement.

The claim that conversion constitutes aggression towards Indian traditions and their followers is common.¹⁴ It is said to cause disruption of social life and unrest in communities and families; missionary activity is accused of putting public order at risk. These critics of conversion argue that the freedom of religion is rooted in respect for other traditions, which implies refraining from insulting and intruding upon those traditions. Hence, non-interference is advocated as the most appropriate attitude in the encounter between religions. Certain points are frequently repeated in this context: Hinduism does not proselytise, and conversions to Christianity and Islam may therefore pose a challenge to its long-term survival; conversions incite violence between communities; India herself has old and venerable traditions; religions should leave each other alone, rather than trying to harm or destroy one another; to follow the religion of one’s own choice without intrusion by others is a human right; being ‘pro-conversion’ amounts to being ‘anti-social’ and against the freedom of religion; missionary activity is alien to India, and conversions are forced upon its people through financial means and support from foreign organisations.¹⁵ Generally, these critics treat conversion as though it were a subversive force endangering the very foundations of Indian culture and society.

How can we make sense of these two clusters of concerns? If we follow the secularism vs. Hindu nationalism approach and carve up the conflict into two warring blocs, this may create the impression of having identified the core issue: it would boil down to two incompatible ‘interpretations’ of the right to religious freedom – one which prioritises the individual’s freedom to convert and another which revolves around a community’s freedom from external intrusion. The contemporary situation could then be explained along similar lines: Hindu nationalism builds the antagonism towards proselytisation into legislative measures that regulate and restrict conversion in the name of ‘freedom of religion’; religious minorities and secularists oppose such legislation because they find that it violates the right to freedom of religion and is merely a pretext for harassing Christians, Muslims, and potential converts.

While such claims are present in the Indian dispute, they cannot serve as its explanation. The two clusters of concerns in themselves do not ‘explain’ anything. What they can do, however, is allow us to narrow down what requires explaining. Both the critics and advocates of the freedom to proselytise appear deeply concerned and feel that core elements of their respective religions or traditions are at stake. Therefore, we propose to examine the kinds of concerns and the way in which they are formulated so as to find out what these teach us about the situation in contemporary India.

Attitudes towards Conversion

Despite its popularity, the secularism vs. Hindutva framework faces problems that undermine its prima facie plausibility. Large sections of the Indian population have expressed a sense that religious conversion is somehow improper and received Christian proselytism with a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: The Issue of Conversion in India
• 2 Conversion, Education, and Reform in Colonial India
• 3 The Process of Conversio in Christian Europe
• 4 Gandhi, Conversion, and the Equality of Religions
• 5 Religious Freedom and the Limits of Propagation
• Index