The talk of the town these days is the NDA supported candidate for the upcoming Presidential Elections, Shri Ramnath Kovind ji. As was expected of the media, his history and backgrounds are being excavated to run him into some kind of controversy. Huffington Post came out with a statement by him in which he had opposed the quota for Christians and Muslims as recommended by the Sachhar Commission in 2010. When he was asked about how Sikhs and Buddhist while being different from Hinduism can enjoy reservation while Muslims and Christian converts can’t, he said that Sikhism and Buddhism are native faiths to India while Islam and Christianity are alien to India.
Sadly but the statement is true. Just because there adherents live in India, it does not make them indigenous to India.
Firstly the two faiths like many other faiths did not originate in India. Just as we can’t say that Taoism, Shintoism, Jewish faith, Confucianism etc originated in India, we cannot say that Islam and Christianity to have originated in India.
The two faiths did not start as a reform movement against Hinduism in the Medieval era like Buddhism and Sikhism. The fault lines between Buddhism and Sanatan Dharma and Sikhism and Sanatan Dharma is very bleak unlike the differences that exist between Hinduism and Islam and Hinduism and Christianity when compared on the basis of theology. The Hindus consider Gautam Buddha as the 9th incarnation of Lord Vishnu. Sikhs on the other hand have commonness of culture, language and cuisine with the Hindus. They celebrate the Hindu festivals with equal zeal.
Buddhists and Sikhs both qualify as ‘non-believers’ just like Hindus when seen from what the definitions for the term have been laid out in the books of Christianity and Islam.
Coming back to the issue of reservations to Muslims and Christians, one thing that we forget is that both these religions accuse Hinduism of differentiating its followers along caste lines. The followers of both the religions accept that their religions don’t differentiate between their followers like Hinduism does on the basis of caste. If the converts to either of these religions leave the fold of Hinduism along with their caste then what is the point of leaving Hinduism and how does this conversion emancipate the fragmented Hindu society?
Both of them were introduced by invaders who considered it as a divine duty enshrined upon them to morally uplift the natives by proselytizing them into their respective faiths.
The mode was conversion.
The partition of India was carried out on the premise itself that Hindus and Muslims cannot coexist together. They are two race, two nations. Reservation cannot be extended and should not be extended to faiths outside of Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism as it would tantamount to weakening of the very cultural milieu that is in the background of this nation.
Given the kind of coercion that is employed by the evangelical missionaries to convert the gullible masses, reservation serves as a glue to preserve the weaker sections in the fold of their original religion.
If there are castes in Islam and Christianity how do the two religions claim the emancipation of lower caste Hindus, as caste is the very reason they castigate it for?
Ironically, the regions of India where the Hindus are in minority are the most troublesome regions of India also. Be it Jammu and Kashmir or the troubled North East these are the regions where anti India sentiments galore. The missionaries have been found hand and glove with the Maoists in Chattisgarh and ultras of the North East who wish to establish a kingdom in the name of the Christ.
Extension of reservations to Christians and Muslims will sound a death knell to the idea of India as Savarkar has rightly termed the conversion of faith as conversion of nations.