Sheikh Hasina’s post-January 5 revamped “consensus” government is suddenly faced with a new danger, or more appropriately a latent peril suddenly awake and snorting with rage. It is the peril of push-back across the borders of Bangladesh of Indian Muslim “voters”, settled or migrant, who are supposed to have their origins in Bangladesh.

Push-back of Bengali-speaking bustee-dwellers from around Delhi, Mumbai and other big cities of India (excepting Kolkata) was an old programme of BJP government in Delhi under Vajpayee through the transitional years of the last and the new millennium (1998-2004). The-then BDR border surveillance supported by public vigilance in our borders managed to foil most “push-in” attempts to forcibly crowd Bangladesh with evicted groups of impoverished Indian families. As such, the programme was shelved, as the SAARC process and globalisation trends gradually gained momentum under post-Cold War ambience. But with the Modi-wave continuing to sweep India, emboldened members of his Sangh Parivar (Family of ideological compatriots) are threatening to bring back that programme from the cold.

Wild claim on Bangladeshi refugees
Balraj Dungar, Meerut convenor of the Bajrang Dal, an affiliate of Indian Sangh Parivar said on 23 December that (supposed) Bangladeshis living in India must either leave the country or convert to Hinduism: “Our first demand is that they must leave the country, as they are abusing our resources. However, if they wish to live here, they must convert to Hinduism and adapt to the ways of our life.

“We had been involved in ‘ghar wapsi’ reconversion into Hinduism) campaigns even during the UPA regime. This is a continuous, ongoing process. Bangladeshis have taken refuge in India, and continue to live here even 43 years after the Bangladesh war. They now need to go back. The illegality of the stay would not change with conversion, but at least they will add to our strength in numbers.”

The Sangh Parivar has been making wild, often contradictory claims about presence of illegal Bangladeshis in India. The 2001 Census report, quoted by an online site, estimated that there were 30 lakh Bangladeshis in India. In 2007, central government statistics had said there were two crore Bangladeshis living in India illegally. In 2012 Mullappally Ramachandran, then Union minister of state for home, claimed that nearly 14 lakh Bangladeshi migrants had entered India in the last decade (2001-2011).

Bajrang Dal threatened with an even higher estimate of suspected Bangladeshi presence in India: “Our organization’s agenda does not give any respite to Bangladeshis. As per government statistics, there are around three crore Bangladeshis in India. They must all leave. There is no question of them converting to Hinduism (if they leave India). Because of them, unemployment and crime rates have risen. They indulge in anti-national activities. Despite all that, various governments in the past have been providing them with benefits. They have ration cards and voter IDs. Nothing will legalize their stay in India. They have to go.”

Regained Delhi ‘empire’
Another group of the Sangh Parivar, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), championed the ‘ghar-wapsi’ reconversion campaign by claiming it was due to their “struggle” in the last 50 years that Hindus have “regained” the lost “empire” of Delhi after 800 years: “Our culture and religion were subjugated and we struggled. In 800 years, a day has now come in which we can say we have a government which is committed to protecting Hindutva. Our values will be gradually established in the country, Hindus have come back to power in Delhi after Rajput king Prithviraj Chauhan lost it in the 12th century.”

Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), from which Modi joined the ruling party BJP, had on December 20 described India as a Hindu rashtra (nation-state). Addressing the first-ever public rally by Vishwa Hindu Parishad in West Bengal, RSS chief Bhagwat said: “This is our Hindu ‘rashtra’. What we lost in the past, we will try to bring back. Some are raising their voice against the rise of Hindus. If they oppose, there will be confrontation. “Hindus have been tolerating crimes by Bangladesh or Pakistan. Our God says after 100 crimes, you must not forgive any crime.”

Thus the Hindu hardline groups, emboldened since the BJP was elected, are loudly promoting a Hindu-dominant agenda. Modi, who spent his early years in the RSS, has made no comment on religious issues since becoming premier.

But RSS remains the ideological wing of the governing Bharatiya Janata Party and this month in Agra, nearly 200 Muslims were reported to have been converted en masse to Hinduism by an offshoot of the RSS. They were promised ration cards and other financial incentives.

Last week, the VHP said it converted Christian tribal people to their original Hindu faith in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s western home state of Gujarat. Within India itself, political repercussion of such reconversion campaign and accompanying loud propaganda has been tremendous, apart from widespread criticism by Muslim, Christian and ethnic minority group leaders and rights activists. “Extreme right wing is flexing its muscles; VHP/RSS through Hindutatva (“Hinduness”) propaganda is rewriting history and economic policies,” they claimed.

Centrist parties look for ‘vote bank’
Religious violence has convulsed India repeatedly, and religious identity often shapes voting patterns. Hindu Nationalist groups have been persistently alleging that centrist parties, particularly the Indian National Congress, Trinamool Congress and Samajbadi Party are pandering to minorities to win the support of “vote banks.”

Opposition lawmakers, denouncing the Hindu conversions as divisive and politically motivated, have united to paralyze India’s upper house of Parliament until Modi publicly condemns the conversions. “This is far too serious a national issue for anyone but the prime minister to address in Parliament,” demanded the spokesman for the Indian National Congress party, Abhishek Singhvi.

With the parliamentary session scheduled to end after Christmas, the paralysis stymied Modi’s modest agenda of change, dealing a serious blow to efforts to revive India’s stalled economy. Modi refused to publicly call for an end to the conversions despite the legislative paralysis, the excuse put forward by his party spokesman being that India’s previous prime minister, Manmohan Singh, had rarely spoken publicly at all: “We should leave it to the prime minister’s discretion to choose the time, place and message that he believes are important to the country for him to address.”

But veteran Indian political commentators opined that it was counterproductive for Modi had not to denounce the conversions — a seemingly easy price to pay to get his legislative agenda moving: “So either the prime minister is not strong enough to stop these guys from doing these conversions, or he thinks like them (the hardline Hindu nationalists). One wonders which one of those options is worse.”

Indian politics becoming messy, retrograde
Modi had come to national power promising to be prognostic and to focus on India’s economic development while moderating his Hindu signs since his election in May of being a religiously divisive figure. But hard-line Hindu groups, impatient with Modi’s refusal to champion their causes, have shaken off months of quiescence and begun to speak out, with or without Modi’s tacit approval. Indian politics is becoming messy and retrograde again.

On December 21, about 30 Christians were converted to Hinduism in a four-hour ceremony conducted by a chapter of the Vishva Hindu Parishad in a small temple in a village near Kochi, on India’s southern coast, an area where Christianity arrived early and is widespread. A VHP top official put a doctrinaire garb over the event suggesting that the conversions resulted in part from a crisis in the state caused by “Semitic Abrahamic religious intolerance.”

The allusion is significant. For resurrecting a “push-in” campaign to choke Bangladesh with uprooted Indian Muslims, Hindu nationalists could simply claim they were expelling alien harbingers of “Semitic Abrahamic terror.”
(Holiday)