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The politics of faith and fold -- Vasuki Nesiah
Much of the debate over conversion has focused on issues of tolerance and religious pluralism - and indeed, the space for secularism in public life. But perhaps it may be valuable to begin by urging that the most significant register of conversion may not be religious pluralism and tolerance but dissent - political dissent regarding the material conditions of the status quo. The move 'outside the fold' is perhaps a transgressive rewriting, even a rejection of dominant norms and structures regarding the received conventions of faith and fold. Gauri Viswanathan has argued that conversion can be one of the most destabilizing events in a society - rather than a statement about other-worldy spirituality, a social analysis of conversion patterns would situate conversions in the very material worldliness of religious belief and association (see Frykenberg 2000). In other words, conversion should not be understood in merely idealist terms, i.e., it is not just about resistance to particular doctrines, or acts of faith or acceptance of others More significantly, conversion may represent resistance to the lived practice of piety in the context of concrete struggles over resources and meanings. For instance, many Hindus who converted to Bhuddism in the context of anti-caste social movements continued with many practices and beliefs associated with Hinduism but rejected those associated with the caste system - in a sense the most radical understanding of this conversion is as an act of counter-hegemonic interpretation of what defines Hindu tradition; the transgressive nature of this resistance is in reading Hinduism against the grain. In fact, Visvanathan urges that we see conversion principally as an act of interpretation. Conversion may well be a 'canonical' example of 'weapons of the weak'. The fact that conversion rates appear to be highest in marginalized communities (such as the Puttalam IDP community) underscores this reading. Yet conversion has other registers too. 'Dissent' from the status quo is not the terms on which legal battles over the conversion bill have been fought over the last months. The legal debates have focused on issues of freedom of choice. The conversion bill tabled in parliament by the JHU just completed round one with the Supreme Court finding key clauses of the bill to be unconstitutional . The Supreme Court's finding of key clauses as unconstitutional weighed in favor of the bill's critics. The clauses in contention go to the issue of 'choice' - both sides of the debate frame their discussion in terms of freedom of choice - and the very same constitutional provisions that pertain to religious freedom - Articles 9, 10and 14. For the JHU the bill's provision that "No person shall convert or attempt to convert, either directly or otherwise, any person from one religion to another by the use of force or by allurement or by fraudulent means, nor shall any person aid or abet any such conversions" was an effort to guard against unethical, nefarious conversions - i.e., consumer protection from religious snake oil salesmen for potential converts. Those guilty were to be imprisoned or fined. For critics on the other hand, this language was so broad and vague it was feared that this would embolden interference with religious freedom and explicit constitutional protections for a citizen "to have or to adopt a religion or belief of his choice" . Religion, the Catholic Bishop's Conference argued is a deeply personal matter and constantly having to defend the practice of one's faith to the state was unacceptable. The argument was also made that what was at stake was not only the rights of potential converts, and their ability to exercise freedom of conscience and association - but also the freedom of Christians to practice their religious obligations regarding charity and social service as something other than the 'suspect' activity of 'allurement' - i.e. Article 14(1)'s provisions for freedom in "worship, observance, practice and teaching" was seen to be at risk. Thus terms like 'allurement' sent instant alarm bells as broad instruments that could be manipulated to fetter freedom of conscience and persecute religious minorities. Against a backdrop of majoritarianism that has fueled a civil war over the last several decades, and a dramatic rise in violent attacks against churches over the last year, this wasn't a merely academic concern with loose legal language. Since the proposed bill provided that, in the public interest, any person can initiate allegations of 'fraudulent' conversions the bill could have opened the door for endless repression and intimidation - from constantly hauling institutions and individuals to court to prove their innocence to making them vulnerable to violent abuse merely through such incendiary allegations. On both sides of the debate notions of choice attend a particularly liberal individualist understanding of political action - and indeed, an implicit assumption that there is a sphere where matters of conscience can be abstracted from material realities. An underlying premise relied on by some critics (not only of the bill but of the constitutional provisions for giving Buddhism foremost place in Article 9 of the Constitution) was the separation of church and state - the argument is that the state may act to guard against fraudulent voting and such because these are appropriate matters of state jurisdiction while issues of faith are zoned into the private sphere and the state is held back from entering that zone too readily. Implicitly, this also suggests that the zone of the (secular?) 'public' where the state is given free reign does not impact on religious freedom. The critique of this deployment of the public/private distinction has run from 19th century Marxists to 20th century feminists and need not be recapitulated here. For now, suffice it to say that as we have argued in previous editorials (See lines Vol.II, No. 3, November 2003), the classical tropes of liberal statecraft such as the public private distinction, including the ostensible promise of liberal rights guarantees, such as state secularism, can be precisely the masking (and even entrenching) of deep social differences and substantive inequalities in the name of formal neutrality. More interestingly, however, the conversion bill inserts citizens into liberal statecraft in a different way as well - by regulating conversion, it also makes the 'religious subject' available for the state to classify into singular religious identities. Many have argued that significant numbers of Sri Lankans are in fact pluri-religious - in particular that Buddhism and Hinduism are practiced in non-exclusive ways. A hybridity that is not captured by census tables, and certainly one that is likely to elude the conversion jurisprudence anticipated by the proposed JHU bill. It has been pointed out that many beneficiaries of food distribution at Christian institutions find no contradiction in also participating in worship rituals at other religious institutions. Similarly, a quick survey of the 'official' religious affiliation of attendees at Sai Baba bajans and kataragamma festivals, or the religious iconography displayed on buses and taxis, suggests that many Sri Lankans distribute their bets and find no contradiction in praying at multiple alters. Against this non-exclusive, pluri-religious backdrop, the very term conversion seems misdirected. Ironically then, just as the conversion bill advanced by Buddhist chauvanism is at odds with this pluri-religious ethos, some Christian fundamentalist conversion practices are determinedly hostile to this hybridity as well; some churches require that 'converts' destroy the religious idols and other iconography of their 'original' religion. In this sense, these 'extremisms' have not only fed each other, they have also operated on a roughly parallel logic of exclusive religious identities. This logic may itself reflect the dynamics of a historical struggle over the administrative state and its production of citizens available for regulation. Thus, following Viswanathan's materialist understanding of conversion as a space for social protest, we may also need to situate the coercive imposition of exclusive religious identities in relation to broader struggles over resources and meanings - i.e., it is not that the extremists got it wrong, but rather that the positions they adopt also have socio-historical roots that need to be analyzed to better understand the issues at stake. In sum, penalizing the adoption of new religious affiliations and disaffiliations has repressive consequences beyond those borne by potential converts and their adopted religious institutions; rather, costs are imposed on all positions that do not fit the hegemonic categories of privileged citizens. For instance, although not targeted for violent persecution, the situation of the atheist (or those who have disaffiliated from the zone of organized religion as such) is also precarious in the omnipresent personification of state religiosity in school syllabi, national ceremonies, budgetary expenditure, official holidays and a range of other official and unofficial instanciations of hegemonic tenets regarding the virtues of religiosity. To the extent that religious 'exclusivism' as such restricts the way political protest can be articulated, we need to protect the space of the pluri-religious and non-religious (or some may say 'post' religious), and expand the idioms through which we articulate resistance - concomitantly of course, this requires that our political system recognizes and responds to these articulations.
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