Excelsior Correspondent
NEW DELHI, Mar 23: Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh categorically stated here today that no country in the world can allow religious conversions to become a tool for demographic change.
Rajnath Singh was delivering the inaugural address at the opening session of the Annual Conference of State Minorities Commission. Union Minister for Minority Affairs Dr Najma A Heptulla presided over the function, while Dr Jitendra Singh, Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) of the Ministry of Development of North Eastern Region (DoNER), MoS PMO, Personnel, Public Grievances, Pensions, Atomic Energy and Space, and Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, Minister of State, were guests of honour on the occasion.
Rajnath Singh said that while the Government will go to any extent to protect the minorities, the message should go loud and clear that nobody will be allowed to tinker with the demographic character of India.
Making another significant observation, Rajnath Singh raised the question “is it not possible for the religious activists to offer social service without inciting or evoking religious conversion? Can’t we take the pledge that while offering social service to the needy, poor or sick, none of us will ever allow ourselves to be motivated by the thought of inciting religious conversion?”, he asked.
Raising another question, Rajnath Singh said, “is it not a contradiction that while in other countries of the world, anti-conversion law is normally demanded by the minorities, in India it is the other way round”.
Dr Najma Heptulla, in her address said that when the Modi Government took over, there was a lot of scepticism among the minorities about the manner they were likely to be treated but soon this sceptism got brushed aside by the fair and impartial treatment received by them under the present regime.
Dr Jitendra Singh said that secularism is more often than not an abused word, frequently used by vested elements to misguide innocent people. Wherever he goes, he said, instead of preaching secularism, he urges everybody to follow his respective faith truly and honestly because if a Hindu becomes a true Hindu and a Muslim becomes a true Muslim, the only cord of relationship between the two will be that of love and brotherhood, and they will automatically be secular.
Dr Jitendra Singh said, Indian democracy offers enough resilience and space for a member of every caste or community to find opportunity depending upon his or her potential, caliber and hard work. Citing his personal example, he said, he represents one of the most backward, far-flung and heterogeneous Lok Sabha constituencies in the country and the district of Doda, from where he hails, has a predominant population of the other community but in spite of that, if today, he is endowed with the opportunity to share the dais with the country’s highest hierarchy and address the most august audience of the country, this itself is a tribute to the founding fathers of the Indian Republic who established the tradition of equality and equal opportunity for all.
Sounding a note of caution, Dr Jitendra Singh said, he sometimes feel alarmed at the prospect of “competitive minoritism” and said that unsolicited war between majorities and minorities should not trickle down to unsolicited war between one minority and the other minority. Referring to Article 30(1) of the Indian Constitution which provides for all minorities the right to establish and administer their own educational institutions, he said, he has come across complaints that a certain minority community was not encouraged enough to open its own educational institution while another community was. He called upon the Minority Affairs Minister to look into such complaints judiciously.
Citing Pandit Deendayal Upadhyay’s concept of ‘Antyoday’ which judges the success of democracy on the quantum of benefit received by the last man in the last queue, Dr Jitendra Singh said, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ‘Jan Dhan Yojana’ is also inspired by the same concept and it is indeed the alleviation of backwardness, lack of education and economic deprivation which will finally bridge the gap between different communities and bring them at par in every sphere of life.
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