Earlier this week, two hundred Muslims in Uttar Pradesh were reportedly converted to Hinduism by members of the Bajrang Dal—a militant wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh—and another Sangh-affiliated organisation. Many of the Muslims later said they were misled into converting through the promise of identity cards, which could help them access welfare schemes. The senior RSS ideologue Manmohan Vaidya and other Sangh leaders called the event a ghar vapsi, or homecoming. “It’s not conversion, it’s reconversion,” Vaidya told the news agency ANI. “All the Muslims and Christians staying here were earlier Hindus only, if they want to return to their religion they have the permission.” The Bharatiya Janata Party member of parliament Yogi Adityanath plans to carry out a similar conversion ceremony in Aligarh on 25 December, Christmas day. The RSS and its affiliates have been carrying out such conversions since at least the 1960s. Much of this work has been done by the Sangh’s tribal-affairs wing, the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram. For many years, the head of the VKA’s religious activities and the driving force behind its conversions was Swami Aseemanand, a senior Sangh leader who is currently under trial for his role in a series of bombings across India that killed 85 people, mainly Muslims. (He is also implicated in two other bombings that together killed 37 people.) Caravan reporter Leena Gita Reghunath profiled Aseemanand in our February 2014 issue, and wrote in depth about his conversion activities, many of which were carried out in the remote Dangs district of Gujarat, with the support of Narendra Modi. In the following edited excerpt from ‘The Believer,’ Reghunath writes about one particularly assertive period in Aseemanand’s work there.
Posted on: Thu, 11 Dec 2014 12:28:38 +0000