How to Be Un-Born Again
India's biggest radical Hindu group aims to wipe out Christianity through reconversions and violence.
Vijay Simha | posted 11/10/2008 10:14AM
Laba Digal, 50, sits mending flat tires of bicycles and two-wheelers near the thoroughfare in Kasinipada, a village in the district of India that saw the most anti-Christian violence this fall. Digal says he was a Christian until September, when a local head of the radical Hindu group Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) came to him twice.
"He told me to become a Hindu. He said if I did not, I would lose my home. He said I couldn't live in the village as a Christian. I did not want problems. So I accepted," Digal says.
Now a Hindu, Digal says he will get a government certificate stating that he is a Dalit. Such a certificate will make Digal eligible for other affirmative action benefits, such as government jobs reserved for Dalits.
The RSS has been reconverting people like Digal to Hinduism — usually from Christianity — for over a decade. Their reconversion campaign is called "homecoming." It is well organized and has cadres assigned to it almost across the whole of India.
The RSS has groups that use propaganda and groups that use violence. The groups entrusted with the task of getting the message out in words conduct meetings where they denounce the church as evil. They follow that up with warnings that Christians must reconvert to Hinduism or die. The RSS arm entrusted with enforcement follows with attacks.
A 1967 law in Orissa bars religious conversion by use of force and by means of inducement or allurement. The law says that the head of the district administration must permit every conversion. The RSS says that despite the law, few converts to Christianity in Orissa have obtained legal sanction, though the number of Christians in the state is rising fast.
On September 25, 2008 Vidyaram Pandey, the head of an RSS branch in Uttar Pradesh, made the claim that the RSS had reconverted 50,000 Christians so far in the state, India's largest. He added that the RSS would drive all pastors out of Uttar Pradesh in five years.
Pandey's statement offers insight into the timeframe that the RSS has set for its drive against Christians in India. The organization was founded in 1925 and now has about 30 different branches, including the Bharatiya Janata Party, India's principal right-wing political party.
Organizations like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal, a collection of young, armed radical Hindus, have targeted Christians in the states of Orissa, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Delhi, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, and Rajasthan. The Bajrang Dal rarely targets the rich converts. The poorer Christians are warned to reconvert or lose lives and property. To survive, they reconvert.
The RSS may host a reconversion ceremony up to every fortnight. A typical reconversion ceremony would take about an hour or so. Christians are asked to burn their Bibles first in a bonfire. They then sit in a circle, light incense sticks, and tie red threads to their wrists. The person in charge of the reconversion ceremony, usually a Brahmin, says a short Hindu prayer.
Then, the Christians rise by turn and take a pledge that they have become Hindu, and that their dynasties will perish if they become Christian again. Each of the Christians-turned-Hindus breaks a coconut, and Hindus apply vermilion to the reconverts' foreheads.
The leader chants Hindu mantras and the participants repeat. In the end, they all kneel and place their foreheads on the ground. Weeks later, the reconverts will attend a yagya, a Hindu ritual where they will wear saffron clothes and a sacred thread on their torsos. They will get their heads shaved, and drink cow urine and the water of tulsi (holy basil).
November (Web-only) 2008, Vol. 52
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