Outside the Circle

ON JANUARY 27, the Supreme Court passed a ver­dict in a case where a deceased Christian man was denied space for his burial in his ancestral village in Chhattisgarh. Ramesh Baghel’s father had died on January 7, but since the family, originally belong­ing to the Dalit Mahara case, had converted to Christianity, the tribal-majority village denied it the burial.

The deceased man’s father had converted to Christianity in the 1980s. In the past, the burial of families who had converted to Christianity was allowed in the graveyard. But this time, the villagers would not let the family do so. They argued that since the deceased was a Christian, he could not be buried in a graveyard that they said was only meant for the Hindu tribals. Ramesh then kept his father’s body in a morgue and filed a petition in the Chhattisgarh High Court that dismissed the plea by saying that the petitioner’s father’s burial in a resting place meant for tribal Hindus could lead to “unrest and disharmony”.

Ramesh then went to the Supreme Court.

For its part, the Chhattisgarh state, represented by Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, said there was a separate Christian burial site a few kilometres away from the village and that the state government would even provide an ambulance to the family to take the de­parted there. The graveyard in Baghel’s village, Mehta maintained, was meant for Hindu tribals. The Supreme Court finally directed Baghel to bury his father in the burial site in the neighbouring village designated for Christians.

The Baghel case is just a small ex­ample of how politics around the conversion in tribal areas has become further complicated due to the assertion of the Hindutva groups. This assertion has led to a pushback not only in Chhattisgarh, but in most tribal regions, especially the Chota Nagpur Plateau, comprising, among other states, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Odisha. With the sustained cam­paign of Hindutva groups, this pushback is increasingly seen as an attempt to thwart what is essentially seen as a church conspiracy to convert tribals to Christianity and take them away from Hinduism or their animistic traditions that are closer to Hin­duism than any other religion. This campaign is now manifest­ing in two forms: militant extremism against church activities; and two, the idea of ghar wapsi, a process through which those who have converted to Christianity are being brought back to the Hindu fold. This is one of the pet projects of the Sangh Parivar, not only in the last 10 years but from the beginning. Earlier in January this year, the RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat claimed that the former President (and senior Congress leader) Pranab Mukherjee had appreciated the ghar wapsi programme and said that were it not for Sangh’s attempts to bring the converted tribals back to the Hindu fold, they would have turned “anti-national”.

This claim apart, the Sangh’s accusations against Christian missionaries is not new. Several times, including eight years ago in 2017, Bhagwat has accused missionaries of converting Adiva­sis (tribals) to Christianity. In 2017, he made this allegation from Gujarat’s tribal belt of Navsari. In Chhattisgarh, in the last few years, there have been several attacks on churches. Also, there has been violence against converted Christians, and in some cases, they have been driven out of their villages. In Jharkhand, in Sep­tember last year, a hundred people who had recently converted to Christianity were reconverted to Hinduism by Hindutva groups. The Sangh-affiliated groups have been raising their voices against converted Christians who do not formally declare themselves as Christians and keep on enjoying Scheduled Tribe (ST) benefits. This is one of the major grudges of several tribal communities across tribal regions in the country. Under the current law, those who convert to religions apart from Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism, lose their Scheduled Caste (SC) or ST status—a law that church organisations and those who benefit from them are keen to press for change.

The history of Christian missionaries in the tribal belt begins in the mid-nineteenth century from Calcutta where German missionaries first got introduced to Adivasis (tribals) working in deplorable conditions. This then led them to the Chota Nagpur Plateau, where they established their first mission in 1846 in Domba, an area dominated by Oraon Adivasis. Four years later, they opened up another centre, this time in a region dominated by Munda Adivasis. According to scholar Navin Kumar Bara, after the initial conversion of a few orphaned children and four Oraon Adivasis, a huge church named Christ Church was built in Ranchi. By the time the 1857 rebellion broke out, the missionaries had managed to convert 900 people, mostly among Oraons and Mundas.

The initial conversion, of course, was with the hope that the Adivasis would have a better life and access to basic things like food and clothing, as the missionaries had promised. But it was also to get out of the grip of local landlords, who were not at all happy with the missionaries, since they saw them as a threat to their power. In 1855, according to Bara, a missionary named Herzog was attacked and left to die.

After the rebellion was culled, the mission activities only intensified; the missionaries kept helping the Adivasis with their struggle against landlords, sometimes even offering legal assistance. The main motivation, Bara states, was to regain land rights, and in many cases, the converted reconverted in case the church could not help them.

After 1947, the missionary activity continued quite success­fully. There were several acts of resistance against it. And in some cases, it led to violence, especially in places where it was met with resistance from Hindu groups or individuals committed to pre­venting the spread of Christianity.

One prominent example is the assassination of the Hindu seer Swami Lakshmanananda Saraswati in Odisha’s Kandha­mal in 2008. Saraswati had come to the tribal belt in 1968, after taking part in the 1966 campaign in Delhi to demand a ban on cow slaughter. A sadhu in Rishikesh, Saraswati would recall, had told him about missionary activity in Odisha and how Hindus be­longing to marginalised communities were getting converted. It was also a time when the Hindu organisation, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, had just been formed. After consultations with Hindu groups, Saraswati left for Odisha (then Orissa). Within a year, he established the first boys residential school, and 20 years later, another one for girls.

The missionaries had been working for a long time in the region. They had successfully managed to convert people from several tribal communities, especially the Panos, the largest SC commu­nity in Odisha. The conversion gave them dignity that they could not get from the Kandha community, the most prominent tribal community in Odisha. In the church, though, they could sit next to a converted Kandha; association with the church, like in other tribal regions, also meant access to education and other facilities.

HOWEVER, WITH SARASWATI’S entry, conversion became difficult. Saraswati could not match the church funding, but a mix of welfare and Hinduism attracted Adivasis and managed to retain them within the Hindu fold.

To counter Saraswati, the church began to impose sanctions on Adivasis who would show a renewed interest in Hinduism. One such sanction was to bar such people from taking part in Prabhu Bhoji (Holy Feast). In that way, Kandhamal became a turf war between Christian missionaries on one side and Saraswati on the other. The Census figures also reflected the missionary aggression in Odisha—according to the 2011 Census, the Chris­tian population in Odisha jumped by 478 per cent in 50 years (as compared to 130 per cent growth in the Hindu population). In Kandhamal alone, around the time Saraswati was killed, there were 1,200 churches in the district, which came to one church for 125 believers. There were about 300 church-based organisa­tions active in the district, “from South Korea to South Africa,” as a government official told this correspondent around that time.

One of the bitter points in conversion politics is the church’s in­sistence on the converted people to discontinue their old practices associated with Hinduism. In Baghel’s village, in Chhattisgarh, for instance, villagers have told reporters that the resentment against the converted grew after they stopped participating in community festivals like “Rudi Parampara”. As tensions grew, the tribal communities began to socially boycott the converted families. In Kandhamal, as well, like all tribal regions, the church looked down upon various cultural practices and rituals and urged those who joined its fold to discontinue these. Hinduism, which Saraswati propagated, offered no such diktat, except the prohibition to consume beef. The tension was further aggravated as the Panos, who had caste reservation advantages, officially con­tinued with their SC (Hindu) identity to reap the benefits from both sides.

Saraswati was killed by a group of Maoists on the evening of Janmashtami on August 23, 2008. He was 82. The killing was bru­tal. His frail body had been pumped with bullets and his Achilles tendon had been severed by a sharp weapon. As his body was tak­en for cremation, the anger spilled out on the streets, resulting in anti-Christian riots in which at least 39 Christians lost their lives.

In October 2013, seven people, all of them Christians, and a Maoist leader, Pulari Rama Rao, were sentenced to life imprison­ment for their role in Saraswati’s killing. The judicial probe report on Saraswati’s death, despite several promises by the erstwhile BJD-BJP government, is yet to be made public. However, a big sec­tion of people in Odisha already believe that Christian missionar­ies used Maoists to put Saraswati out of their way.

In tribal areas now, the simmering tension has resulted in several cases similar to the Baghels. On January 2, a woman, Kunika Kashyap, was allegedly attacked by the sarpanch of her village in Chhattisgarh, due to which she reportedly suffered a miscarriage. A second-generation Christian, Kashyap believes that she was attacked for her faith—her husband has been active in another case with the Chhattisgarh High Court about the denial of burial to a Christian woman.

THE VIOLENCE ALONG this religious fault line has intensified, especially in Chhattisgarh; the state has seen several attacks against Christians and churches in the last three years. The United Christian Forum, a group advocat­ing Christian rights, said in 2022 that the state had the highest number of attacks against churches after Uttar Pradesh. That year, several Christian families had to vacate their houses after violence, forcing them to live in makeshift camps. The violence affected at least 16 villages. A team of the environmental protec­tion group Chhattisgarh Bachao Andolan that visited the affected people on December 22 said it found that violence against the Christians had increased with cases of attacks on churches and pastors and resistance to the burial of the churchgoers. The report also noted that after spending considerable time as Christians, “most churchgoers stopped attending the ceremonies of mar­riage, birth and death of those who did not follow the church.”

As pressure mounts against conversion, it is clear that the converted families will be at the receiving end of this aggression. Earlier in January, a BJP leader in Chhattisgarh claimed that he had managed the ghar wapsi of 651 tribal families. In 2021, a de­ceased Christian woman was ‘reconverted’ before her family was allowed to bury her. With pressure from the church to stop their age-old practices and threats of social boycott on the other, the fault line in the tribal regions will only widen.

BastarburialChhattisgarhChristian ForumconversionHinduism-ChristianityRamesh Baghelreligion