Spurning both interpretations, Kerala's Pulayar Maha Sabha, a Dalit organisation, warns that ghar wapsi is a diabolical conspiracy to destroy Hinduism from within by flooding state and central legislatures with "Christian believers with Hindu names", like the strategy that C R Das and Motilal Nehru perfected. N K Neelakantan Master, the Pulayar Maha Sabha president, suspects "reconversion" is the handiwork of priests and nuns who are out to kill several birds with one drop of Gangapani sprinkled to the sound of Sanskrit slokas and a temptingly dangled ration card or BPL certificate. The immediate goal of these flag-of-convenience "converts" is to regain the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe privileges they lost on baptism into Christianity. The ultimate aim is to take over India by swamping all the reserved seats in state Assemblies and Parliament with pseudo-Hindus.
Hence the vested interest in backwardness that successive Commissioners of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes have noted. Thousands of unlikely folk (from rich Yadav landowners in Bihar to twice-born Brahmins in Karnataka) clamour to be called "backward", "more backward", Dalit or adivasi. The lists get longer and longer every year.
More From This Section
More underprivileged people means more reserved seats. Guided (misguided?) by Dr Ambedkar, India has improved on the divisive British plan for separate electorates to create even more divisive separate legislative seats that might one day outnumber the rest. It's like England's King Henry V, who conquered France assuring the defeated French king's daughter whom he wanted to marry that far from being her country's enemy, he loved France so much he wouldn't part with a single French village.
It's forgotten now that a later Henry (the eighth) invented love jihad 500 years ago because Pope Leo wouldn't let him make an honest woman of his mistress, Anne Boleyn. Earlier, the treatise Henry wrote (or a literate courtier ghosted for him) in defence of Roman Catholicism pleased Leo so much that he bestowed the title of Defender of the Faith on the king. But when Leo wouldn't let him divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne, an angry Henry abandoned the faith he was supposed to defend and became a Protestant. As if heresy wasn't bad enough, he got his parliament to redesignate him Defender of the Faith, which was like Saina Nehwal giving herself the Padma Bhushan or Sarita Devi replacing her bronze with gold.
An outraged Pope abolished the title and sent a Bull to excommunicate Henry. The Bull wasn't allowed to land and Henry's descendant, Queen Elizabeth II, Supreme Governor of the Church of England, still calls herself Defender of the Faith. Uncertain of which faith she defends, her son wants it changed to Defender of Faiths. If Henry had gone home (ghar wapsi) as Leo demanded, the ambitious Anne would have been demoted from queen to concubine; their daughter, the future Queen Elizabeth I, would have become a bastard.
His "conversion" established that religion and marriage go together like a horse and carriage in Frank Sinatra's song. That precedent possibly inspired the British Raj to bestow statutory respectability on love jihad. It was grounds enough for divorce if one spouse "converted" and the other refused to follow suit. Matrimonial harmony demands religious unity and sated ambition, as the two young Bengalis in Tarak Nath Gangopadhyaya's 1873 novel Swarnalata appreciated.
One considered joining the Brahmo Samaj to marry an educated teacher, which carried weighty social and financial benefits in those days. Setting his sights even higher, his companion hoped to scale the dizzy heights of race and colour by wedding a Christian memsahib. Neither would be tempted to go wapsi to a tented Islamic bride in the ghar. Legend has it that a young British seaman who did follow Owaisi's precept to avoid Sunday church parade recanted when he was woken up before dawn for namaaz and suffered mosque parade five times a day. The last straw was having to chew boiled cabbage while his mates feasted on bacon, ham and pork sausages.
The seaman escaped but the judgement of Paris must not spare the murderers who sent the Charlie Hebdo 12 on the ghar wapsi from which there is no return.