Outcry over conversions in India disrupts parliament

Charging that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has done little to stop hard-liners in his party from forcibly converting religious minorities to Hinduism, opposition lawmakers threw parliament into an uproar Monday, with the upper house repeatedly adjourned after descending into shouting matches.

Right-wing Hindu groups allied with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have conducted a series of ceremonies across India over the past week to convert Christians and Muslims to Hinduism.

Some of the Muslims, though, later said they had changed religions out of fear, raising the specter of religious communalism and a growing political divide in a country that has struggled for years with Hindu-Muslim violence. India is mostly Hindu, but it has a significant Muslim minority and a smaller Christian one.

Modi's reform agenda suffered a setback on Monday as opposition members threw papers and swarmed to the center of the upper house of parliament, forcing the suspension of the session and effectively preventing the government from tabling a bill to increase foreign participation in the insurance sector.

But comments at a Hindu convention in Kolkata by the head of a right-wing Hindu group, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, that India was a "Hindu nation" provoked a storm of criticism. Modi has a clear majority in the lower house of parliament, but he needs the approval of the upper house, where the BJP has just 45 of 243 seats, to enact legislation.

"This is an attempt to divide the society," Nitish Kumar, an opposition leader from the state of Bihar told hundreds of people at a protest in New Delhi, referring to religious conversions. "The government is not capable of resolving the core issues of our country, so they want to divide the society and distract people."

Modi, a Hindu nationalist and longtime member of the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak, one of the two main groups behind the conversions, has remained mostly silent on the issue.

To many members of religious minorities, that is deeply worrying. Critics say that Modi’s supporters have become emboldened in their pursuit of a Hindu nationalist agenda, threatening India's secular foundations. And Modi is facing a backlash for not doing enough to rein in hardline groups affiliated with the BJP.

"The prime minister's silence has been deafening," said Dominic Emmanuel, a spokesman for the New Delhi Catholic Archdiocese. "If Modi does not speak up now, the situation is going to slip out of his hands."

On Sunday, members of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, or World Hindu Council, converted 30 Christians to Hinduism in the southern Indian state of Kerala. In the western state of Gujarat, the VHP said 200 Christians had participated in weekend "homecoming" ceremonies.

Similar conversions were performed earlier this month in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, where around 100 Muslims converted to Hinduism. Many, though, said later that they were threatened with violence if they didn't go along, and that they were promised government ration cards and money if they did become Hindus. A Hindu priest-turned-lawmaker of Modi's party had planned a mass conversion ceremony in the state on Christmas Day, but that has been put off.

Hindu hard-liners often call the ceremonies "homecomings," insisting that members of minority religions descend from Hindus who converted to Christianity or Islam. About a fifth of India's 1.2 billion people identify themselves as belonging to faiths other than Hinduism. Conversion is a sensitive issue in India, with Hindu groups saying many poor Hindus were forced over the ages to give up their faith, or lured into Christianity and Islam.

Al Jazeera  and wire services