KS Muralidharan
The anti-conversion Ordinance passed by the Karnataka Government, following similar laws passed by other States such as Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh, has sparked a huge controversy, with the secular parties and leaders of the minority community making the most vociferous noise about it.
Leaving aside the legal position on this for the moment, consider the situation at the ground level.
There are instances where you can find more than one church or a mosque within a few yards. Why is this a problem? Just hear it out for a minute. For example, in Ulsoor, in Bengaluru, a small church has come up on a place which used to be a shop, Literally a few steps away to the left, you will find a big church which can easily seat 400 people at a time. As if this were not enough, barely a few metres away, another small church has come up on a site which used to be a residential place.
Further, in the same stretch of the locality, there are as many as three mosques within a half km radius.
Now, this is most definitely not to object to having a religious place of worship of any denomination. You are 100% right when you argue that that you cannot confuse or equate anecdotal evidence with empirical data.
The moot point here is, consider how many churches you need in barely a half km stretch when the church-going people in and around that area represent only a miniscule percentage of 3% of the entire Indian population, as per official data. The same logic holds for the other minority community which between the two, extends to 14% of the national population.
Now, in the example referred to above, only a handful of people can be accounted for as from the minority faiths, if you take into account that 80% of our entire population is from the majority community. Here again, let us cut some slack for some data inaccuracy as we are going only by the broad math.
So three churches and three mosques within the radius of half a km for a handful of their faithfuls is indisputably an excess. If you apply this statistical outreach as a yardstick, there must be around 25 temples in this vicinity when the fact is there are only about 6 temples.
In other words, typically speaking on an average, the religious place of worship for 4 out of 5 people is roughly the same as the corresponding religious place of worship for the remaining one out of the five. Of course, this cannot and does not play out the same way in every ward or every locality all over the country, as data inaccuracy will certainly skew the mix, but you get the picture. That the number of churches and mosques seem to be much higher relative to their population.
But it is not just limited to just this part of the neighborhood. The broad picture is that for a walking distance of about 5 to 10 minutes, you will find a church or a mosque or more than one of them. Viewed in the context of the official demographic, this begs the question: Are so many churches and mosques that, obviously are visited only by a certain percentage of a minority, really needed? Obviously, you don’t need so many of them. So what is the purpose at stake here?
Your guess is as good as mine.
It is most likely conversion.
How are people brought in, how they are converted, how are souls harvested, is it by design, force or allurement, are questions that arise later. The primary answer for the need for such a large number of churches and mosques, seems more than likely to be conversion. Or at the very least, to offer a readily available platform for conversion.
Before we get into why conversions happen at all, should there not be some regulation to govern the opening of such religious places of worship? The secular apologists will surely take cover quoting the right to propagate and practice any religion guaranteed by the Indian Constitution, but in the absence of any regulation or rationale for the opening of such religious places of worships, it is then theoretically possible to imagine a small locality having say a dozen mosques against a handful of temples. And later we should not pretend to be surprised when there are communal riots in that locality whose demographic mix offers a perfect context for both the majority and the minority communities to vitiate the atmosphere: The former because it feels endangered by the minority community who are in big numbers, and the latter because they are emboldened by their numbers. So it is extremely important to have certain well-defined regulations to govern the opening of religious places of worship, and not just rely on opaque phrases like “maintenance of public order or any other reason as may be deemed necessary” by the concerned district magistrate.
Coming to why conversions happen, while one obvious reason is the fragmented Hindu society built on a creaky, vulnerable foundation of caste, the other reason is that our own laws facilitate them. For instance, Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights specifies that freedom of religion also includes a freedom to change one’s religion or practice. Thus, the rights guaranteed under Article 25 and 26 of the Indian Constitution empowering individuals to profess religion also translate to a freedom to change religious identity.
However, this does not also constitute into a blanket endorsement or a free pass to convert one’s religion. In the 1977 case of Rev. Stainislaus v. State of Madhya Pradesh, the Hon’ble Supreme Court observed that while individuals have the right to propagate their religious ideals, this cannot be seen as a right to convert individuals using pressure or forced inducement.
The singular irony is, while Hinduism is strong on philosophy — respect to all religions and no insistence on a single god — and weak on the template it is built — a hierarchical caste system (which let me emphasize is debatable and arguably an artificial construct hoisted by the British), while the Abrahamic religions are weak on philosophy (my way or the Hell’s way), but strong on the template they are built — their god-inspired outreach to go forth and convert, due to which therefore they enjoyed the luxury of being on the right side of history. But this is a polemical exercise which is beyond the purview of this article.
While sorting out the legal quagmire surrounding conversion and freedom to practice one’s religion is in the hands of lawmakers, the ordinary citizen must keep his eyes and ears open to what is happening in his neighborhood, and before his eyes. There has to be some parity in the number of religious places of worship and when there is disparity, we have to be on the alert. We have to arise, awake and be on the alert, lest, we go from being the land of Amar, Akbar and Anthony, to Akbar, Anthony and Amar, in that very order. And history is witness to what happens later, after the second equation, plays out. Quod. Erat Demonstrandum (QED).