By Nirmal Kaur | India Today | India |
Earlier this week, the Jathedar of the Akal Takht (i.e., the chief temporal seat of the Sikh faith) made national news by declaring that Christian evangelicals have been using fraudulent and unscrupulous methods to convert the Sikhs and Hindus of Punjab on a large scale. His comments, which were trailed by similar expressions of concern by functionaries of various Gurdwara Prabhandak Committees, suggest that the Sikh religious leadership, at a meeting to be held in Anandpur Sahib on 5th September, will demand that the state government enact stringent provisions to prevent conversions from parent religions, akin to those enacted by certain other states.
The combative response of Sikh organisations to missionary activity is a testament to the recent success of well-funded conversion programmes in the state, the origins of which can be traced to the colonial era. In the districts of Gurdaspur, Amritsar and Tarn Taran, where evangelical activities are mainly concentrated, the opposition has taken on particularly militant tones—also known as the Majha region, these districts, along with other parts of the erstwhile Lahore Division, once formed the heart of colonial authority in Punjab and have been a focus for Christian groups for the better part of a century.
To those viewing the issue of religious conversions in the state from a distance, the issue may seem unduly tendentious. After all, the share of the state’s Christian population has barely moved from the 1% mark over the past three censuses. Yet, what is obscured by this statistic is the complex sociology that forms the backdrop to missionary activity in the state, which has long targeted the most vulnerable and marginalised sections of Sikh and Hindu society.
By holding out the promise of free English-medium education and subsidised healthcare—rendered possible by formidable financial machinery—missionary groups have induced large numbers of Sikh and Hindu Dalits (in particular, those belonging to the Mazhabi and Valmiki communities in the Majha) to accept Christianity in practice. Yet, given that conversion implies loss of reservation benefits, it is only rational that converts choose to retain their parent faith and birth names on paper. The official figures are thus likely to significantly undercount the state’s Christian population.
The crisis unfolding in Punjab, most importantly, exposes the philosophical chasm between indigenous Indian religions, which are nothing if not ideologies of coexistence, and those religions that exhort missionary activity. Islam and Christianity, at least in their organised forms, make absolute claims about God and salvation; a corollary of this is that all other faiths are not just misguided but blasphemous. Spreading the divine message is thus a part of the foundational logic of both faiths.
For good measure, Abrahamic faiths have managed to adapt their proselytisation strategies to the modern age. The slick, viral Punjabi videos promoting claims about the performance of miracle cures by Christian priests are redolent of the biblical zeal that has long driven mass conversions in states such as Jharkhand and Odisha.
(This article is authored by Nirmal Kaur who is a retired IPS officer of 1983-batch. She retired as DGP in Jharkhand. All views are personal. Click here to read the full article)
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