In Gujarat Hindu pilgrimage designed to convert Tribal Christians to Hinduism
Ahmedabad (AsiaNews) Hindu fundamentalists have launched a campaign to convert Tribal Christians in Gujarat to Hinduism. The partisans of Hindutva or Hindu supremacy are planning a Hindu festival in Dangs District for February 11-13 that is expected to draw 500,000 people despite the area's shaky environmental balance.
Dangs is a forested area largely inhabited by tribal groups, the Bhils and Warlis, who represent 92 per cent of the district's 186,000 residents. Christians represent only 5 per cent of total, but that is a higher proportion than the state-wide 0.05 per cent.
The state of Gujarat (western India) is well-known for being a stronghold of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a Hindu nationalist party that is currently in the opposition at the national level.
In the state, Hindu fundamentalist groups have clashed with Muslims in the past. In 1992 they tore down the Babri Mosque and demanded it be replaced with a Hindu temple claiming that mosque had been built on the site where once stood a temple to Rama. Sectarian tensions grew thereafter leading to the 2002 riots between Muslims and Hindus in which more than a thousand people died.
Christians have not been spared the violence. In 1998 the district was the scene of 38 acts of violence against 3,000 Christians and their ministers. Now local Christians fear renewed violence for the February Shabri Kumbh Mela festival.
According to Hindu tradition, four Kumbh are held every year in some areas of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra. But the Sangh Parivar, a loosely-federated alliance or family of Hindu fundamentalist groups, has come up with a new myth in order to organise a similar festival in Dangs. They claim that the goddess Shabri met Rama in the district and so plan to celebrate her submission to Rama as way to symbolically celebrate the submission of the Adivasi or tribal peoples to Hindu divinities.
Ahead of the festival, medals and small statues of Hindu gods are handed out and so are pamphlets that discredit Christianity under the banner "Hindu jago, Christo bhagao (Arise Oh Hindus! Throw out the Christians!" Christianophobic books and CDs are given away door-to-door.
According to local Christians, the new festival is the brainchild of Swami Aseemanand, a Hindu fundamentalist ideologue, who told the press that there will be a Shabri Kumbh every year to "eliminate every missionary activity in Dangs". This statement echoes what he had already said in an article published in The Times of India on February 11, 1999, in which he swore that "Dangs cannot know peace so long as even a single tribal remains Christian."
Shabri Kumbh Mela organisers expect an invading army of at least 500,000 pilgrims who will swarm Dangs forests where they will take part in a great sacred bath. Forty temporary villages housing 5,000 people each and a huge swimming pool are being built for the occasion thanks to public funds provided by the BJP-controlled Gujarat state government, funds which might otherwise go into development projects.
By contrast, local Adivasi complain that for decades they have been victims of land grabs and poor educational and health services.
This year's Shabri Kumbh Mela will include a re-conversion ceremony for Adivasi allegedly reverting back to Hinduism. Christian Adivasi have rejected out of hand the re-conversion argument pointing out that they were never Hindu the first place. Instead, they explain that their ancestors' traditional religion was animism.
Behind so much concern over conversion lies another problem: Adivasi social advancement. A report by the Citizens' Inquiry Committee suggests that social progress among Tribals is threatening further seizures of tribal lands by external economic interests. Education provided by Christian missionaries "is a threat to the designs of the upper caste/upper class; so Christian missions need to be thrown out from these areas."
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