By Amulya Ganguli

If Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi presumed that an anti-conversion law was the right card to play to consolidate his position in a state that is yet to recover fully from the after-effects of the 2002 riots, then he seems to have miscalculated.

The Hindutva lobby has routinely used laws of this nature to target the Christian missionaries and propagate the fear that the conversion of Hindus, along with the faster growth rate of the Muslims, would gradually reduce the Hindus to a minority in India.

Although the law only rules out conversion through coercion or allurement, the objective is to create the impression that the Christian missionaries are up to no good. The fallout has been to intimidate them and keep the entire community under pressure. An occasional attack on churches and on individual Christians, including nuns, has been the result of these tactics of the saffron brotherhood.

However, the problem with the latest law is that it has clubbed the Jain and Buddhist communities too along with the Hindus. The explanation behind the move is that Article 25 of the constitution does put the Jains, Buddhists and Sikhs on the same category as Hindus in the matter of laws regulating or restricting economic, political and secular activities associated with religious practices.

However, members of these communities have generally been against this categorization although it remains in the statute book. Significantly, the Sikhs haven't been included in the Gujarat legislation presumably to avoid offending them and thereby jeopardizing the ties between the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Sikh-dominated Akali Dal in Punjab, where an election is due early next year.

As may be expected, the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) has noted the exclusion and called for including Sikhs in the new law since it is less concerned with political sensitivities than with expanding the Hindu sphere of influence. But it is unlikely that Modi will heed its request if only because he now has to contend with the protests from the Jains and Buddhists.

Since both constitute small and peaceable communities, it is unlikely that there will be any serious law and order problems. But the impression will persist that Modi's chief motivation is to derive political mileage through what he considers a safe route, especially because he has chosen to leave out the Sikhs.

But there is another aspect of which Modi may be aware. The Buddhists may be small in numbers but there is a connection between them and Dalits ever since B.R. Ambedkar's conversion to Buddhism in 1956 when the iconic Dalit leader said: "By discarding my ancient religion which stood for inequality and oppression, today I am reborn."

This is the central point of difference between Hinduism and the other religions, which even Ambedkar admitted were "a part and parcel of Bharatiya culture", because there is no caste system in the latter.

It is possible, therefore, that the Dalits in Gujarat, as also elsewhere in India, will not be too pleased with this blatant decision by Modi to play cynical games with religion. As a party, therefore, the BJP will have to contend with the resentment of Dalits in states like Uttar Pradesh where they have considerable electoral clout.

Modi's latest decision may not be unrelated to the widespread criticism of his government by his own party men over the recent floods in the state. Moreover, the Congress has been trying to exploit the recent reopening under orders of the Supreme Court of more than 2,000 riot cases, which had been closed by the state police on flimsy grounds.

The Congress has been claiming that the Supreme Court intervention, which also led to the transfer of several important cases to Mumbai for a fair trial, has tarnished Gujarat's reputation. The criticism carries weight because it targets not only the state's politicians and policemen for shielding the members of the saffron fraternity for their involvement in the riots but also the lower judiciary, which could not ensure that justice was done to the victims.

Since the BJP is already sharply divided in Gujarat with no love lost between Modi and the influential group led by former chief minister Keshubhai Patel, the former evidently had to initiate a step which would boost his position before the next elections. Given the speculation that Modi has to ensure a second successive victory for his party in the state before he can move to the centre in search of a larger role, the anti-conversion measure was an obvious choice for him.

But what he may not have taken into account is the fact that the Hindutva wave of the 1990s has waned. As much was clear from the decision of one of BJP's foremost allies, the Janata Dal-United, to oppose an anti-conversion law proposed by the BJP-led government in Jharkhand which has since fallen.

It is worth recalling in this context that the Janata Dal-United leaders did not let Modi take part in the election campaign in Bihar, which it subsequently won.

So, given Modi's continuing unpopularity except among his supporters in Gujarat, he seems to have unnecessarily courted further controversy by alienating the Jains and Buddhists.

(Amulya Ganguli is a political analyst. He can be reached at aganguli@mail.com)