i discovered your website by chance.. You are a gem man!!! I wish I discovered your site long time back..

Keep up your good work.. If possible, try to give the name of charities which support hindu families or hindu children so that people can contribute directly and try to bring conversion activities against hindus to a stop.

jai hind
skn

Please note that the Bill bans only conversion by force, fraud and allurement. I dont think there’s anything wrong or illiberal with that.

A law banning such forceful and fraudulent conversions would serve the purpose of Article 25.

Article 25 grants freedom of practice and propagation of religion and also freedom of conscience.

The Supreme Court, in its verdict on the Stanislaus Case in 1977 held that the word “propagate” in Article 25 does not guarantee a right to convert. Religious conversions by force, fraud and allurement violate the freedom of conscience granted by the same Article 25.

I quote a part of the judgement here:

What the Article grants is not the right to convert another person to one’s own religion, but to transmit or spread one’s religion by an exposition of its tenets. It has to be remembered that Article 25(1) guarantees freedom of conscious to every citizen, and not merely to the followers of one particular religion and that, in turn, postulates that there is no fundamental right to convert another person to one’s own religion because if a person purposely undertakes the conversion of another person to his religion, as distinguished from his effort to transmit or spread the tenets of his religion, that would impinge on the “freedom of conscience” guaranteed to all the citizens of the country alike.

It peeves me a great deal that - to this day, 3 decades after that judgement - people cannot get themselves to understand such simple logic.

If you are really liberal, then you should be the last person to oppose something which makes violation of a fundamental right - freedom of conscience - by conversion by force, fraud and allurement a punishable offence.

>>Is hinduism so weak that it needs to forcibly legislate its own superiority?

The law is not targetted at proselytism directed against Hinduism. It is targetted agaisnt fruadulent conversions out of all religions. Since you suggest that it targets Christian proselytizers only, the question to ask is: why is Christianity such a fraudulent faith that the only way it seeks to spread is by force, fraud or allurement?

>>Instituting such disgraceful laws like “anti conversion” are profoundly illiberal

Interpreting them as “anti-conversion” is an illiberal thought influenced by Christian and Marxist fundamentalists. The law is actually anti-fraudulent proseyltism. As a liberal, need to oppose to fraud, but seem more than willing to succumb to it.

No matter how much you rail against leftist hypocrisy on the matter, you represent a point of view no better than the commies in economics. Saving people from their own follies. I’m deeply disappointed that the Hindutvavadis routinely go after the symptoms of the disease and rarely attack the root causes themselves, which would be fair more fair, equitable and justified.

Is hinduism so weak that it needs to forcibly legislate its own superiority? I’m sure we both can agree that that ain’t so. So what is the problem in conversion? Force and fraud you say? what does that mean exactly? You are only succumbing to the lame numbers game that the Churches are obsessed with.

But surely there is a problem? yes there is!
Here’s the root cause: bias and discrimination against Hinduism ENSHRINED IN THE LAW.

Now I know many people fume when they read horror stories of discrimination against Hinduism and just want to do the polar opposite. BUT this is NOT THE SOLUTION!

Here’s another: agitate to REMOVE THE DISCRIMINATION! Yes its a hard process, but it strikes at the root! For example, let the state truuuly out of religion. Let it subsidize neither the Haj nor Kumbh melas (bear with my ignorance if tht is not so, i am only making a point). Let not the state dare to touch a temple property. Grant religious trusts autonomy.
Grant private property rights, freedom of curriculum setting and teaching to Hindu educational institutions (indeed all private educational institutions).

Then can our culture and religion flourish.

Instituting such disgraceful laws like “anti conversion” are profoundly illiberal (in the true sense, not “leftist”) and should be a source of shame that they are to be used at all though I won’t dispute some temporary benefits that they may confer.

Pseudo-secularism can only be a valid insult, cry when you are fighting for TRUE secularism, not a pseudo secularism of another hue.

who is the scoundrel who wrote the article? You have not named him.Also why is that no other human being with the same fundamental quest for religious truth arose in those religions.

Life cannot be pigeonholed into simplistic theories.Hinduism is a complex religion.There are multiple strata in our society.Even christian evangelism might turn out to be good in the long run in the indian mainland.

I would prefer the evangelist or fundamentalist any day to the pseudo-secular apologist.I wish we had some special commando forces operating covertly who could take out these bleeding heart liberals.

>>Why can we not come up with a better way of examining whether a given person is converting for reasons of faith and not for reasons of allurement, coercion etc.

We did this. Niyogi Commission examined precisely the above question. Its answer was that a lot of conversions were happening through fraud, allurement or coercion.

I think your ignorance comes from the fact that you have not read that report. This is not a rhetorical answer.

For all practical purposes the reach of the blog is limited as the mass media. It would be more worthwhile to challange them on the same platform as they have aired their ideas. The whole purpose of the opinion peice is to stimulate a debate; however, barring a few of these fire breathers, the proposed legislative amendments doesn’t make any difference to a vast majority of the people.

We as Indians have allowed ourselves to cloud with lack of reasoning and have total inabilty to comprehend issues that affect us in a significant manner. Although, I may sound like a cynic, the reality remains dismal. The mentality of enslavement hasn’t changed in the past 60 years. The forces acting via media and education system are so deeply entrenched that it looks like a herculaean task to overhaul it.

To look at the bright side, although your efforts may look like a drop in the ocean (because people uncomfortable with the present scenario would agree with your observations on Hinduism and “secularism”), they go a long way to stick up a middle finger to these jhola bindi crowd. Interestingly, they choose to air their views more anonymously via news papers. They are hardly up to the challange of a debate on an open platform.

Keep up the good work.