The Hindu : Jamat disputes VHP claim on conversions

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Feb 19, 2004

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Jamat disputes VHP claim on conversions

By Our Staff Correspondent

JAIPUR, FEB. 18. The Jamat-e-Islami Hind today disputed the Vishwa Hindu Parishad's claim of having converted 586 Muslim families to Hinduism in the Beawar region of Rajasthan this past Sunday and accused it of indulging in fraud and deception to mislead the gullible people in rural areas.

"The people whom the VHP claims to have reconverted to Hinduism were already Hindus and were brought to the VHP's Dharma Sabha on some other pretext,'' Mohammed Salim, president of the Jamat-e-Islami's State unit, told reporters here. He said the VHP was taking advantage of the complex social behaviour of various castes in the region to hoodwink the public opinion.

The Beawar region in Ajmer district is dominated by Cheetah, Mehrat, Kathat and Ghodhat tribes, most of whom had converted to Islam in the 14th century.

However, many of them continue to practise the social customs of their Hindu counterparts and are said to be a "bridge'' between the two religions. The members of the Rawat caste are orthodox Hindus.

Mr. Salim, accompanied by half-a-dozen functionaries of the Rajasthan Cheetah Mehrat Kathat Mahasabha, affirmed that those who attended the VHP's function were the practising Hindus belonging to Rawat and Ghodhat castes. "The VHP's claim that Muslims had embraced Hinduism is a misrepresentation of facts aimed at deceiving the people who do not know about social complexities of the region,'' said the Mahasabha's president, Zafar Cheetah.

Moreover, Andheri Deori village situated about 70 km from Ajmer -- where the Dharma Sabha was organised in the presence of the VHP president, Ashok Singhal -- is populated by Rawats and has only a single Muslim household.

The Mahasabha office-bearers said the function was held in the village in view of its demographic pattern and the participants were brought from the neighbouring villages on the pretext of holding religious ceremonies.

"None of the alleged converts is from the Cheetah, Mehrat and Kathat tribes who are Muslims,'' Mohammed Shafi, the Mahasabha's general secretary, said. The VHP, on the other hand, has claimed that the ancestors of the villagers who were converted into the Hindu fold were made Muslims by force a few centuries ago and they were now observing the ceremonies of both the faiths.

The VHP has targeted the Beawar region during the past one decade and launched a campaign to attract local Muslims to the "religion of their ancestors''. It has built a temple of Ashapura Mata -- the family deity of the erstwhile Rajput ruler of Ajmer, Prithvi Singh Chauhan -- in Beawar in a bid to convince the people to return to their roots.

The significance attached to Sunday's Dharma Sabha in Andheri Deori can be gauged from the fact that the VHP president, Mr. Singhal, two former Bharatiya Janata Party MPs, Rasa Singh Rawat and V.P. Singh, the BJP MLAs from Beawar, Kishangarh and Masuda, and the VHP State president, Jagannath Gupta, came all the way to the village to attend it.

Mr. Singhal welcomed the 3,000 people participating in the function to the Hindu fold and gave them the `tulsi' garlands and copies of Ramcharitmanas. He flayed the "conversion drives'' of Muslims and Christian, saying they were working to enslave India once again.

The Jamat-e-Islami has taken strong exception to the statements reportedly made by Mr. Singhal and others in the Dharma Sabha threatening Muslims with the "repetition of the Gujarat model all over the country''. Some of the speakers in the function reportedly went to the extent of attacking the Holy Quran and Prophet Mohammed.

Mr. Salim said the VHP's propaganda was creating an atmosphere of fear and mistrust in the country and leading to misconceptions about Islam and Muslims.

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