When is a religious conversion a religious conversion?

I am not very religious. I would not even term myself as very spiritual, so whether or not the Hindu faith (the faith into which I was born) is being supported adequately or not, has never been my top priority. But a whole flurry of talk around the plight of the Dalit Christians has got me thinking about what religious faith means in our lives and when we deliberately choose a faith don’t we have to live with all aspects of it?

To elaborate on this, in recent months the Dalit Christian movement, demanding reservations for certain Christians, has seen an increased momentum. Dalit Christians are (in layman’s terms) those people who were Dalits under the original Hindu caste system but to break away from the social stigma and all the hardships that came with it, they moved to Christianity. Christianity being a religion that does not have a social caste system like Hinduism.

These conversions are nothing new. Many of the “modern” religions including Sikhism, Jainism and more recently the large scale Buddhist conversions by Ambedkar were all in retaliation to the excesses of the Hindu Caste system that denied people basic human dignity. We all read about this in our Class X History text books and dutifully noted it down as one of the causes of the wave of new faiths is the 16th century A.D.

So if these people moved out of the Hindu faith and accepted a new faith, how do they continue to be Dalits? Here I would like to clarify that I do not doubt that while conversion may have given them a sense of social dignity, it need not necessarily have elevated their financial status. But the fact is that “Dalit” is not defined in “financial” terms. It is a religious term, complete with a history of the various Gods and deities that the Dalits worshipped and how their line evolved. Therefore when our Constitution states that no one other than a Hindu can be termed as Dalit, it is not entirely incorrect. So if a converted Christian or a Sikh asks for Dalit reservations our courts are not wrong in questioning it.

It also makes us ponder whether the religious leaders who converted these people explained the whole truth to them. Did they work to help them unlearn their existing beliefs about caste systems etc.? Did they live up to their promises of providing education, food and social dignity through a new faith? I am NOT against conversion or change of faith. Faith is a deeply personal matter and when the religion we are born into does not touch us or guide us, every human being should be allowed to convert- a Hindu to another religion and vice versa. After all we see the power of faith in the ISCKON movement everyday.

But what makes me ponder is conversion done merely out of a need to change a social status, have access to charities and associations. Is that truly a conversion in faith? Would those people then have truly accepted the new God they worship? So when a converted Christian asks for ‘Dalit” reservations, I have to wonder how far has he really converted.

I will even go so far as to say that any conversion or re-conversions done by promising anything other than a deep new awareness of a faith, is not a conversion. It is merely a number game to fulfill the ego of the so-called religious leaders.

But in all of this we must not forget the plight of the “Dalits”- whether Hindus or non-hindus. You can not ask a hungry man his religion. So instead of wasting time and money debating whether Christians can be classified as Dalit, the Government should concentrate on providing basic amenities to all irrespective of faith and that should be the criterion for providing aid and support, rather than religion.