RELIGION-INDIA: Faith Dispute Over Christian Tribals

By Sujoy Dhar Reprint | | Print |

Sujoy Dhar

CALCUTTA, May 18 2000 (IPS) - Leaders of India’s minority Christians and right-wing Hindu groups are sparring again, this time over the religious loyalty of the sizeable indigenous communities in the eastern border state of West Bengal.

Angered by charges of faith conversion, church leaders have rallied the more than 30,000 Christian tribal people in the state who are travelling in large numbers from their ancestral homes in distant villages to the big cities to join protest marches.

More than tribals walked through the streets of the state capital Calcutta late last month. They carried banners saying the church was being wrongly accused of luring poor tribal people into changing their faith.

A big protest meeting of Christian tribals was due in Calcutta Thursday. Similar gatherings have been held in Calcutta and other parts of West Bengal in recent months.

The controversy was kicked off by media reports and claims by Hindu groups that Christian tribals have begun returning to the Hindu fold. Television channels in recent weeks showed such ‘reconversion’ ceremonies in the rural pockets.

But Christian leaders have disputed this claim by a prominent Hindu right-wing group affiliated to India’s main ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

According to Herod Mullick, general secretary of the Bangiya Christiya Parishad, an umbrella body of Christians in east and northeast India, “the truth is that not a single true church-going Christian has changed his religion.”

The Christian leaders are pitted against the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, better known by the initials VHP, which translates as the World Hindu Council.

A well known international Hindu organisation that is close to Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s BJP, the VHP’s local leaders claim to have reconverted 300 Christian tribals back to the Hindu faith.

The state’s most widely read daily newspaper, ‘Ananda Bazar Patrika’, had reported a few months ago that 250 tribals, most of them Christians, had reconverted to Hinduism secretly in Bhatina village of Birbhum district in south Bengal.

Asit Bhattacharyya of the VHP claims this is true. “Of the 250 tribals, 245 were converted Christians while five were tribals who followed indigenous religion,” he said.

“We are helping them to return to their original religion after being misled into other religions,” he added.

But Christian leader Mullick denied this. “We went to the village and found that not a single member of the 13 Christian families there had reconverted,” he asserted.

“We have extensively toured rural Bengal and found all such claims of reconversion as fake. May be one or two Christians who were yet to be baptised had returned to their old religion,” he said.

Mullick denied the VHP’s accusation that Christian missionaries were offering inducements to poor tribals to change their faith.

The bulk of the Christian tribals in West Bengal work on the farms of better off land owners. Surveys by non-governmental groups have reported high levels of malnutrition among the tribals. Their original religion was nature and animal worship.

“If we had been so eager about converting people, the total percentage of Christians in India would not have been just 2.5 percent of the country’s one billion population,” Mullick said.

According to the Christian leader, the media reports were “false propaganda to demoralise the tribal Christians living elsewhere and create an anti-Christian feeling.”

The media reports do not seem to have worried the state’s Left government-ruling West Bengal for nearly a quarter century. State Chief Minister Jyoti Basu said the government was not aware of this.

“We can try to ensure that there are no forced conversions,” Basu was quoted as saying in media reports. However, Basu’s Communist Party of India (Marxist) and India’s main opposition Congress party have hit out at the BJP’s radical Hindu partners for trying to fan religious violence in the state.

Although local police officials too said they were not aware of reconversion ceremonies, media reports spoke of unease among the tribal communities.

Media commentators warned of violence and likely attacks against Christians. They referred to the ghastly torching of an Australian Christian missionary and his two small sons, allegedly by Hindu fanatics early last year, and the murder of another Christian priest later in the year.

Both incidents took place in the neighbouring eastern coastal state of Orissa. Over the past year, Christian leaders in India have appealed to the Indian government for protection from the “terror campaign” that has seen violent attacks against community members across north India.

India’s Home Minister Lal Krishna Advani has admitted that there were more incidents of communal violence against Christians in 1998 and 1999 than in the half century of the country’s independence from British colonial rule.

Those familiar with tribal lifestyles cautioned that the reconversion controversy could rupture the traditional harmony within the tribal community.

“I have so far not heard of any reconversion by force. But if reconversion exercises by deceit continue, it would lead to a fight among the tribals who so far have lived in harmony,” said tribal rights activist Mahasweta Devi.

According to Devi, winner of the Ramon Magsaysay award (Asia’s version of the Nobel Prize winner) and famous Indian writer, the tribal communities in West Bengal have traditionally taken part in all religious festivals. “These people are neither Hindu, nor Christian nor Muslim,” she pointed out.