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.
The Dangs is the smallest, least populated district of Gujarat, and lies in its southern tail, bordered by Maharashtra to the east and west. Seventy-five percent of its population of roughly 2 lakh lives below the poverty line, and 93 percent is adivasi. Like other tribal areas, it has seen a disproportionate share of conflicts over resources and ideology. The British first subdued the area’s tribal kings in the 1830s, and obtained the rights to exploit the Dangs’ teak-rich forest, which still covers more than half the district, in 1842. Apart from Christian missionaries, the British banned all social workers and political activists from the area, fearing the influence they might exert over adivasis’ sense of entitlement to the land. The first mission school there was founded in Ahwa, the district headquarters, in 1905, and Christian evangelists of many denominations have been active in the area ever since. According to Aseemanand, Christians used to call the Dangs “Paschim ka Nagaland”—the Nagaland of the west. “The threat was as big as in the Northeast,” he said.
On Christmas evening 1998, the Deep Darshan High School, in Ahwa, was attacked by members of the hard-line RSS affiliate the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Bajrang Dal, and the Hindu Jagran Manch, an offshoot of the VKA created by Aseemanand. Sister Lily, one of the Carmelite nuns who ran the school, said more than 100 people armed with stones participated in the rampage, breaking windows and destroying the roof of the school’s hostel for tribal boys. “Even after all these years I can still visualise it,” Sister Lily told me when I visited her at the school. “I was so frightened that day.”
Thirty kilometres away, in Subir, another school was attacked; a grain shed there was looted and then set on fire. In Gadhvi village, a mob of reportedly two hundred people demolished the local church and then set it ablaze; afterwards, they went to a neighbouring village and burnt down the church there. The church in Waki village was torched the next day; a forest department jeep was reportedly used in the attack. The day after, six village churches in the Dangs were destroyed. The homes of Christian tribals were pelted with stones. Christian and Muslim businesses were destroyed, and Christian tribals were assaulted.
The destruction carried on like this for a total of ten days. Between mid December 1998 and mid January of the following year, “40,000 Christians got converted to Hinduism,” Aseemanand proudly claimed. “We demolished thirty churches and built temples. There was some commotion.”
Aseemanand explained his approach. “To stop conversions is an easy job,” he said. “Use the route of religion. Make the Hindus kattar [fanatic]. The rest of the work will be done by them.”
Whether by inspiration or intimidation, Aseemanand’s ghar vapsi programmes became increasingly popular. For the next three to four years, whenever they had a roster of 50 to 100 potential converts, he and his aides would gather them up and haul them in open trucks and jeeps to the Unai temple in Surat. After a dip in a perennial hot spring next to the temple, and a tilak-pooja, the tribals were declared Hindu. They were packed back into the vehicles with a photo of Hanuman and a copy of the Hanuman chaalisa under their arms. On the way back, bhajans were blared from the vehicles so that the whole programme became a spectacle. The carnivals would stop at the Aseemanand’s Waghai ashram, where he hosted a feast and gave each convert a Hanuman locket.
Aseemanand’s concern for the tribals rarely extended farther than the question of whether they were praying to Jesus Christ or to Ram. In an interview with The Week, in January 1999, Aseemanand said, “We are not interested in poverty alleviation or developmental activities. We are only trying to uplift the tribals spiritually.”
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Around the time Aseemanand moved to the Dangs, in early 1998, the BJP politician Keshubhai Patel was sworn in as Gujarat’s chief minister. For most of the period since Independence, the state had been a Congress stronghold, although Patel had also headed it for seven months in 1995. In March 1998, when Vajpayee became the prime minister—and the ideological compromises of his government were still in the future—there was a surge of expectation in the RSS cadre that their vision for India was coming into being.
The Christmas riots in the Dangs seemed in some small measure to herald the change they desired. An early indication of Aseemanand’s success was the appearance of Sonia Gandhi, who travelled to Ahwa to condemn what she called the “heart-breaking” violence. Other politicians and celebrities followed suit. The news coverage significantly raised Aseemanand’s public profile—and his esteem within the Sangh. Not long after, the RSS granted him its annual Shri Guruji award, named after the RSS’s second and most venerated chief, MS Golwalkar.
To quell the uproar in Delhi over Aseemanand’s riots, LK Advani, then the home minister, was forced to intervene. “When my conversion stories made national news, and when Sonia Gandhi flew down to make speeches against me, there was a lot of discussion in the media,” Aseemanand said. “Then Advaniji was the home minister and asked Keshubhai Patel to rein me in. So then he started stopping us from working and even arrested my people.” But Modi was already waiting in the wings, and sharpening his knives. Aseemanand said that Modi approached him at a senior RSS gathering in Ahmedabad, and told him, “I know what Keshubhai is doing to you. Swamiji there is no comparison to what you are doing. You are doing the real work. Now it has been decided that I will be the CM. Let me come and then I will do your work. Rest easy.” (Repeated attempts to contact Modi through his office went unanswered.)
Modi became the chief minister in October 2001. When the anti-Muslim riots that killed over 1,200 Gujaratis began at the end of the following February, Aseemanand orchestrated his own attacks north of the Dangs, in the Panchmahal district, he claimed: “The wiping out of Muslims from this area was also overseen by me.”
Later that year, Modi came to the Dangs to help consolidate Aseemanand’s influence. In October 2002, Aseemanand started construction on Shabari Dham, a sacred precinct dedicated to the tribal woman believed to have helped Ram during his legendary 14-year exile. To raise funds for the precinct’s ashram and temple, whose centrepiece would be a statue of Ram, he organised an eight-day Ramkatha (Ramayana recital) by the celebrated rhapsode Morari Bapu. The performance attracted at least 10,000 people. Modi, in the midst of campaigning to regain his chief ministership—his government had dissolved that July, in the aftermath of the riots—appeared on stage to help kick off the performance.
Part of Modi’s election manifesto that year was the Gujarat Freedom of Religion Bill, which proposed that all religious conversions be approved by a district magistrate. Four months after Aseemanand’s fundraiser, Modi’s trusted aide Amit Shah brought the bill before the state assembly; the bill passed, and was signed into law in April 2003. Soon, Aseemanand, with the help of Morari, Modi, and the leadership of the RSS, began planning a high-profile ghar vapasi in the Dangs.
At the end of his Ramkatha, Morari had proposed a new kumbh mela at Shabari Dham. The festival, which took four years to prepare, would be a demonstration against conversion and a celebration of Hindutva. Aseemanand took it upon himself to organise the mela, together with the RSS.
In the second week of February 2006, tens of thousands of Indians flooded into the forest village of Subir, six kilometres from Aseemanand’s ashram at Shabari Dham, to attend the inaugural Shabari Kumbh Mela. Like the four traditional kumbh melas which it was meant to emulate, the Shabari Kumbh centred on an act of ritual purification; by ceremonially plunging themselves into a local river, adivasis would signal their return to the Hindu fold. Thousands of people from tribal districts across central India were trucked to the event; the response to an RTI application I filed stated that the Gujarat government spent at least Rs 53 lakh to divert water into the river—making it ample enough to accommodate the crowds.
The Shabari Kumbh was also a show of unity within the Hindu Right: over the three-day mela, well-known religious figures (such as Morari Bapu, Asaram Bapu, Jayendra Saraswati and Sadhvi Rithambhara), top leaders from the RSS and the broader Sangh Parivar (including Indresh Kumar, and the hard-line Vishwa Hindu Parishad leaders Pravin Togadia and Ashok Singhal), and senior BJP politicians (including the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, Shivraj Singh Chouhan) shared the dais. Hundreds of full-time RSS members and thousands of the organisation’s volunteers managed the event. As one pair of researchers put it, the Shabari Kumbh was a “confluence of … sadhus, Sangh and sarkar”.
On the festival’s opening day, Modi told the audience that every attempt to take tribals away from Ram would fail. Behind the stage was a giant mural of the Hindu deity firing an arrow into a ten-headed Ravana. The then RSS chief, KS Sudarshan, took a more belligerent line. “We are up against a kapat yuddha [deceitful war] by fundamentalist Muslims and Christians,” he told a gathering of sadhus, adding that this had to be “combated with everything at our command”. Sudarshan’s deputy, Mohan Bhagwat (who became the RSS sarsanghchalak when Sudarshan retired, in March 2009), told the group, “Those opposing us will have their teeth broken.”
An extract from ‘The Believer,’ published in The Caravan’s February 2014 issue. Read the story in full here.