By Matters India Reporter
Guwahati, March 27, 2023: Church leaders in India have reacted cautiously to the demand of an organization representing indigenous people that the government remove the reservation for tribal people to Christianity or other religions.
A March 26 rally organized by the Janajati Dharma Sanskriti Suraksha Mancha (JDSSM) in Assam’s Guwahati city also demand a ban on religious conversion of tribal people in Assam. Hundreds of Boro, Karbi, Tiwa, Dimasa, Rabha, Mising and other tribes from 30 districts of Assam reportedly attended the rally.
“Conversion of tribal people in Assam and elsewhere in India to foreign religions has been a threat to indigenous faiths and cultures for decades. The rate of conversion has increased and the ST people fall prey to communal theocratic foreign religious groups,” alleged JDSSM working president Binud Kumbang.
He said conversion could be checked if the converted tribal people are stripped off the Scheduled Tribe list. “The converted people completely give up their original tribal culture, customs, rituals, way of life, and traditions,” he alleged.
Allen Brooks, spokesperson of the United Christian Forum of Assam, says Christians would respond to the issue, but would to do it collectively taking all denominations together. “We will make a collective representation on the issue, as it concerns all Christian Tribals irrespective of denominations,” he told Matters India March 27.
The demand, he added, is not in the interest of indigenous people.
He also pointed out that Christians are now in the Season of Lent in progress, and the Church Leaders think they need to focus on their faith and look to God at the moment. “However, we will respond after Easter in a positive and constructive manner keeping in mind our rights as enshrined in the Constitution,” he added.
The JDSSM demanded an amendment to Article 342A of the Constitution, which highlights the benefits for the Scheduled Tribes. The amendment should ensure “automatic delisting from SC/ST reservation” if such people undergo religious conversion, the organization said.
In India, Christianity and Islam are considered foreign origin religions as other religions followed in the country are of indigenous origins.
The RSS and its affiliated groups are opposed to people converting from Hinduism or from the indigenous communities who follow animist religions to Christianity and Islam. They, however, do not oppose religious conversion to Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism and Jainism.
The demand to scrap the tribal Christian reservation has come at a time the Supreme Court is handling a petition demanding reservation to converted Dalits, formerly untouchables.
The federal government through a 1950 Presidential order had denied reservation benefits to Dalits who forms the lowest strata of life, converted to Christianity and Islam.
Archbishop Moolachira says those keen for indigenous people’s welfare should protect their culture, traditions and language that face gradual extinction. One things is true those indigenous people converted to Christianity still hold on with their language, traditions and culture”, the prelate said.
“This demanded for ending reservation benefits to the converted indigenous people,” a Church leader who did not want to be named said, “seems to be part of an agenda to threaten indigenous people from adopting a religion of their choice.”
Indigenous people from many provinces such as Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh among others have been demanding to recognize their animist religions through a special religious code after efforts were made to categorize them as Hindus in official records including national census.
Indian government has so far not responded to their demand and they still continued to be counted as part of the majority Hindu religious population in the country.
Christians make up 3.74 percent of the state’s 31 million people in Assam, as against the national average of 2.3 percent.
Religion has no boundaries. Many people in Western countries are adopting Hindu religion. They are many Hindu temples USA and Europe. China, Japan, Thailand etc have Buddhist population. They are not treated there as people belonging to a foreign religion.
Hindus need to grow up and become inclusive.
With reference to Janajati Dharma-Sanskriti Suraksha Manch (JDSSM) working president Binud Kumbang’s high-decibel demand that tribals who have converted to Christianity or Islam be delisted from the official list of Scheduled Tribes (STs) and all the government welfare benefits to them be stopped, it must be mentioned here that list of Scheduled Tribes (STs) is notified by the President of India, after following a well laid out procedure.
The notification of a particular tribal group as STs is done by the President of India based on Article 342 of the Constitution of India as follows:
(1) The President may with respect to any State or Union territory, and where it is a State, after consultation with the Governor thereof, by public notification, specify the tribes or tribal communities or parts of or groups within tribes or tribal communities which shall for the purposes of this Constitution be deemed to be Scheduled Tribes in relation to that State or Union territory (UT), as the case may be. Thus, the declaration of STs in a particular State/ UT is first notified by the President of India through an order
(2) The notified list of Scheduled Tribes is applicable or valid only for a particular State or UT and NOT uniformly across all states/UTs. These orders can be modified subsequently only through an Act of Parliament.
The criteria followed for notifying a community as STs are signs of (a) Primitive Traits (b) Distinctive Culture (c) Geographical Isolation (d) Shyness of contact with the community at large and (e) Economic Backwardness.
Tribal communities live, in various ecological and geo-climatic conditions ranging from plains and forests to hills and inaccessible areas. There are certain STs, known as Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups (PVTGs). They are characterised by pre-agriculture level of technology, stagnant or declining population, extremely low literacy and subsistence level of economy.
The tribal population of India, as per 2011 census, is 10.43 crore, constituting 8.6% of the total population. 89.97% of them live in rural areas and 10.03% in urban areas. The sex ratio of STs is 990 females per thousand males.
Broadly the STs inhabit the Central India and the North- Eastern Area, with more than half being concentrated in Central India. There is no ST population in three States (Delhi NCR, Punjab and Haryana) and two UTs (Puducherry and Chandigarh), as no Scheduled Tribe has been notified in these regions. (Source: Vikaspedia)
Therefore, the demand of Janajati Dharma-Sanskriti Suraksha Manch, urging the government to remove tribal people who have converted to Christianity or Islam from the official list of STs, is unconstitutional and is specifically intended to stir up unrest and division among tribals and the Indian civil society at large.