The Karnataka state government has decided quickly to repeal the anti-conversion law, perhaps in a blatant act of appeasement. However, conversions in India will always be a point of debate since the term ‘freedom of religion’ in Article 25 means different things to the proselytising religions and the non-proselytising ‘religions.’ For the former, mainly Christianity and Islam, with roots outside India, freedom of religion implies an absolute ‘right to convert’ people into their faiths to the belief of one true God or prophet. It is a necessary dynamic for the religion to survive and expand. Radically different for the non-proselytising ‘religions’, which are more properly traditions, freedom of religion implies ‘freedom from interference’ by other religions.
Sanatana Dharma, a conglomerate of Vedic and non-Vedic traditions, is the essence of Indian culture. As a metaphor, from its trunk branch off Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, and any number of other traditions. What remains of Sanatana Dharma after these branches is the Hinduism we know. Similarly, regarding the ‘tribals’, the similarities between Sanatani Vedic traditions and the tribal traditions in their fundamental polytheistic nature and paganism (deifying the feminine, nature, and animals) make them clearly distinct from the prophetic-monotheistic religions.The many traditions, dependent and yet independent, grow dynamically, interacting with each other partly through distant common roots and partly through the integration of diverse elements into each other.
The fundamental characteristic of a traditional land (India of today; the Greco-Romans of the past) is an ‘indifference to differences.’ Intense philosophical debates might happen between different traditions, but they never degenerate into physical extermination of the opponent or forcible conversion. This is the nature of Indian culture; this is the Indian way of harmony; and this is how we have survived as a unity despite the huge diversities and the constant attacks since centuries, which continue uninterrupted even today by hostile elements both inside and outside India. For traditions, conversion to another way of thinking is simply evil and tears up the social fabric. Many so-called ‘tribal’ cultures have experienced this.
When alien religions came from distant lands, gradually they became like traditions and largely lost focus on conversions, previously a religious imperative. From the ‘I am true, you are false’ perspective, religions in India mostly became traditions that say, ‘I am true, but you are not false’. The problem of Indian politicians and the extremely dubious secularism across decades has been to convert our traditions into proper religions of the Abrahamic mould, because of which we are going from ‘indifference’ to an increasing ‘intolerance of the other’. Typically, anti-conversion laws have never been a great point of worry for Indian traditions since absorbing diversity is inbuilt within their culture.
The solutions for Indian harmony do not depend on the existence or absence of anti-conversion laws. It lies in continuing the Indian method of ‘traditionalizing the religions’ instead of ‘religionizing’ our traditions. That requires a radical rethinking of our social sciences too, which have remained extremely colonised in their thinking. Their views do not differ much from whatever the colonials or the western world say about us. Unfortunately, most political-academic-intellectual thinking after independence has been lazy to understand India through our own lenses, and thus, now we see the intense violence on Indian culture with political decisions regarding conversions made and reversed with impunity.
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