Tejasvi Surya, 30, is not some fringe figure. He is a parliamentarian and the president of the ruling BJP party’s youth wing, also gathering more than a million “followers” on his Twitter account.
In a recent speech which went viral, the Hindu nationalist politician set out the aim of “reconverting” Muslims to Hinduism.
This is not Surya’s inaugural controversy; earlier he has been criticized for targeting Arab women.
“Ghar Wapsi”: a Hindu Nationalist Dream
Surya is not alone in embracing this fantasy.
Ghar wapsi literally means “homecoming,” as Hinduism, as a polytheistic religion, promotes solidarity in purely racial terms (not religious because of the caste system). Hindu nationalists have a racial definition of “Hindu,” thus converted Muslims, in their imagination, are still Hindus because of their ethnicity.
So, for them, the “reconversion” of a Muslim into Hinduism is indeed “homecoming,” because, fundamentally, he never ceased to be a Hindu.
Ghar wapsi is so important to Hindu nationalist consciousness that Walter Andersen and Shridhar Damle, authors of Messengers of Hindu Nationalism, dedicate the whole tenth chapter of the most-respected academic study on Hindu nationalism to this notion of homecoming and its racial undertones.
Muslims of India should then know that ghar wapsi is certainly not the individual project of a single Surya, but literally one of the core tenets of the ideology which now rules their country.
The Hypocrisy Of Ghar Wapsi
Apart from exposing this nefarious plan, let’s also point out the usual hypocrisy.
Hindu nationalists have often called Christian converts “rice-bags,” as they allegedly accept Christianity in exchange for some food. Yet Hindus themselves often offer “material well-being” to attract converts. For instance they offered Below Poverty Line (BPL) cards, ration cards which give access to state-sponsored cheap shops for the poorest sections of society, to hundreds of peoples in exchange for ghar wapsi.
Another hypocrisy is that they have been relentlessly pushing for an “anti-conversion law,” again mainly targeting Muslims and their supposed “love jihad.” But “reconverting” Muslims to Hinduism is legitimate according to them!
This article first appeared on muslimskeptic.com