![\"chritian](\"https:\/\/patriotsforumindia.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/chritian-conversion-in-andhra.png\")
<\/a>About eight years ago, a\u00a0BBC report<\/a>\u00a0barely managed to conceal its glee over a ceremony where \u201chundreds of Hindu Dalits\u201d converted to Buddhism and\/or\u00a0Christianity. Among other things, the BBC report repeated the oft-heard canards about the unjust caste system and how laws against Dalits are ineffective, and therefore, converting out of Hinduism made sense. But such brazen editorializing in a news report is not the focus here.<\/p>\nScoring Political Goals<\/h2>\n
Buddhism, until very recently, had virtually no followers in India in the thousands of years of its evolution, spread, and destruction in the land of its own birth. And neither is its sudden, rapid ascendancy in our own times a surprise.<\/p>\n
Dalit champions of various hues use conversion to Buddhism as a point to score against Hinduism, which they regard as an oppressive religion. As the Dalit discourse has progressed over the years, it has become just that: scoring a political point.<\/p>\n
There is very little by way of any genuine understanding, insight or scholarship about Buddhism as a philosophy emanating from contemporary\u00a0Dalit discourse.\u00a0To be fair to Dalit ideologues, they have been almost completely appropriated by the JNU school of ensuring social justice, among other things.\u00a0The corpus of Indian Marxism has produced more than enough literature for us to conclude that a practiced\u00a0tactic of this school is to reverse the roles of victim and oppressor. This tactic is most evident in the Marxist \u201chistory\u201d of medieval Muslim conquest and rule of India where the Islamic invaders\u00a0made no distinction between\u00a0castes in either their orgies of mass murder or their oppression of the Hindu society. It is a cruel travesty that a very vocal and influential section of today\u2019s Dalit champions have lent their shoulders to the most rabid Islamists in contemporary India.<\/p>\n
History of Buddhist-Islamic Encounters<\/h2>\n
The history of Buddhism shows that it failed to counter Islam militarily and politically.\u00a0The most common reason for\u00a0Buddhism\u2019s decline in India is attributed to Adi Shankaracharya. Which is again a Marxist distortion. Of the chief\u00a0reasons, two are prominent. First,\u00a0<\/em>Buddhism with its insistence on renunciation of worldly life\u00a0automatically nipped the concept of family in the bud.\u00a0Second,\u00a0<\/em>its central doctrine of non-violence ensured a large mass of monks who were untrained in warfare.<\/p>\n And so, by the time Islam began to make successful inroads into India, it found these hapless monks and slaughtered them at will. Those that managed to escape fled away, some as far off as Tibet. Indeed, even the arch Marxist and extraordinary scholar Rahula Sankrityayana cites this as the main reason for Buddhism\u2019s decline in India.<\/p>\n During the initial days of British rule, a significant number of\u00a0upper caste Hindus\u2013chiefly Brahmins\u2013converted to Christianity. This class of people were close to the top echelons of the British administration, and were anxious to please their new colonial masters. And those Indians below them followed suit. It also helped that subtle and persuasive missionary propaganda played a significant in convincing them that Hinduism and Christianity were fundamentally the same.<\/p>\n However, this stopped soon after reformers in the mould of Swami\u00a0Dayananda Saraswati, Vivekananda and others showed the true nature of Christianity. It was then that the missionaries changed course and began to aggressively target the lower castes who were numerically greater. They realized that it was impossible for Christianity to defeat Hinduism intellectually and philosophically.<\/p>\n Back in our own time, the following reasons partly explain the spurt of Dalit\u00a0conversions to Buddhism:<\/p>\n It is clear that Dalit conversions to Buddhism and Christianity now rests on two main pillars: politics and money, not philosophy, not conviction in the high ideals and philosophy expounded by Gautama Buddha.<\/p>\n At the risk of generalization, there is perhaps no Dalit politician or ideologue who can speak coherently\u00a0about Buddhism. Which is these politicians\u00a0rely on aggressive sloganeering, political clout and brute strength of numbers to force their followers to embrace\u00a0Buddhism. In other words, the thousands of Dalits who\u2019ve converted to Buddhism have done so blindly. And majority of the Dalits who have converted to Christianity still live in the same, wretched conditions. But despite this conversion, their continuing wretchedness continues to be blamed on Hindus. Indeed, nothing could be a greater farce than the term Dalit Christian<\/em>. Yet such perverse\u00a0charades largely go uncontested, which only encourages the charade-perpetrators\u00a0further.<\/p>\n If Dalit\u00a0conversions to Buddhism were based on a fundamental understanding of Buddhist precepts, it would be based on truth and conviction. Consider a hypothesis:\u00a0had Ambedkar converted to Christianity or Islam, wouldn\u2019t his modern day followers have\u00a0followed suit?<\/p>\n The Dalit political discourse in India is based mainly on anti-Brahminism, which has reached alarming levels. An extreme example is a luminary named Kancha Ilaiah who called for Brahmins to carry feces to avenge a historical wrong.<\/p>\n The irony of the Dalit leader and former Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati\u00a0cosying\u00a0up with Brahmins<\/a>, the \u201cOppressor\u201d caste, should be lost on none.<\/p>\n – See more at: http:\/\/www.indiafacts.co.in\/politics-dalit-conversions\/#sthash.Bo4tbwJj.dpuf<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u0932\u0917\u092d\u0917 \u0906\u0920 \u0935\u0930\u094d\u0937 \u092a\u0942\u0930\u094d\u0935 \u092c\u0940 \u092c\u0940 \u0938\u0940 \u0915\u0940 \u090f\u0915\u00a0\u0921\u094b\u0915\u0941\u092e\u0947\u0902\u091f\u094d\u0930\u0940 \u00a0\u092e\u0948\u0902 \u092c\u095c\u0940 \u0959\u0941\u0936\u0940 \u091c\u093e\u0939\u093f\u0930 \u0915\u0940 \u0917\u092f\u0940… more Christian Conversions\u00a0during British rule<\/h2>\n
The reality of Dalit conversions<\/h2>\n
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