While the tribals tolerated the softer 'cultural influence' for many years, they are now resisting the more hard-core stance of socio-religious imposition
Years of effort put in by the Sangh Parivar to bring the tribals of Gujarat into the Hindutva fold seem to be going to waste.
While the tribals — some of whom are converted Christians — patiently tolerated the softer “cultural influence” for many years, they are now resisting the more hard-core stance of an outright socio-religious imposition.
Aggressive push backfires
Proselytisation efforts by Hindu right-wing outfits — led by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) — in Gujarat’s tribal belt had been continuing for years when the BJP had no foothold in these regions. The process of political infiltration was systematic, camouflaged in a “cultural” wrap, and backed up by financial temptation.
But winning 24 of the 27 seats in the tribal regions in the 2022 Assembly polls emboldened the saffron party, and the socio-religious imposition became more aggressive.
The party directly asked its tribal MLAs to take over activities such as ghar wapsi (reconversion to Hinduism), Ram Katha (reciting Lord Rama’s story), and dharma jagran (religious awakening) and oversee various schools and cooperative financial bodies run by the VHP and RSS in the region.
And that is when things went awry.
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BJP’s lone Christian MLA faces backlash
The tribal MLAs soon made it clear that they disagreed with the party’s decisions, inviting a direct confrontation with the right-wing outfits.
In one such incident recently, members of the Dev Birsa Sena, one of the many right-wing outfits that operate in Vyara, the district headquarters of Tapi, accused local BJP MLA Mohan Konkani, who is a tribal Christian, of actively encouraging evangelism.
Konkani has been facing opposition from his party members and local right-wing outfits for over a month now. The BJP’s lone Christian MLA, who won the Vyara seat in 2022, defeating four-time Congress MLA Punabhai Gamit, refused to promote the Hindutva agenda in tribal areas.
Temple, church, and a revered hillock
Arvind Vasava of the Dev Birsa Sena told The Federal about Konkani’s “evangelical activities”.
“Gid Madi Dungar, a hillock in Songadh taluka in Vyara, was chosen for a Hanuman Mandir. In November 2018, we even performed a bhoomi poojan. However, now there is a church at the spot with a concrete road leading up to it. Konkani supports these kinds of activities,” Vasava fumed.
The tribals of Songadh are, however, not complaining. Balubhai Gamit, a resident of Bandharpada village in Songadh, explained why.
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Disgruntled tribals
“Gid Madi Dungar is a place of reverence for tribals. It is where we worship our ancestors. There were stones with carvings representing tribals who had passed away,” he told The Federal.
“But things began to change in 2018, when a few men came to Songadh from Surat and told us that our ancestors were Hindus. First, we protested. But gradually, local youths began to join the [right-wing] outfit following the promise of employment,” Gamit narrated.
However, locals were disgruntled when the bhoomi pujan for the Hanuman temple was performed, he said. “We had raised the issue with (former Congress MLA) Punabhai Gamit but did not get any response from him. When Mohanbhai (Konkani) won, we approached him as well,” Gamit added.
“He assured us that no temple shall replace our ancestral place of worship. The church and the road came up later near our place of worship, and we welcomed it. For the first time, we had a concrete road in Songadh,” he said.
Konkani’s viewpoint
Konkani, whose mother’s family is from Songadh, told The Federal that his maternal side of the family has also worshipped their ancestors for generations at Gid Madi Dungar.
“So, when people from Songadh came to me seeking support against an attempt to stop them from practising their faith, I helped them as a tribal leader,” he said.
However, he declined to comment on his disagreement with the BJP on the internal tiff. “I have pledged allegiance to the BJP, and I would never be deterred from my political and social duties. But faith is a personal matter,” he observed.
Gone too far?
The issue is not restricted to a single tribal district.
Jitubhai Chaudhary, the MLA from Kaparada who switched to the BJP in 2017 after winning the seat as a Congress candidate, sounded incensed.
“I did not join the BJP to change my culture and faith. I am a tribal leader first and then an MLA. We trusted the BJP and now it has to respect our culture and customs. Besides, why does the party need its MLAs to attend ghar wapsi events? It always had a set of people to do all that,” he argued.
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Letter to state BJP chief
Another tribal BJP MLA, Kanhaiyalal Kishori, who won from Dahod defeating Congress’s Vajesinh Panada, has shot off a letter to Gujarat BJP chief CR Patil saying he is not comfortable leading the Hindu religious events in his constituency.
Kishori, who refused to comment on the matter, wrote in the letter that participating in conversion activities might draw flak from the locals who have never been happy about the proselytization activities by right-wing outfits.
Notably, the local wing of the RSS staged a protest against Kishori in January 2025 after a video of him attending an event organised by a local church went viral via WhatsApp.
A question of will
But why are the local tribals so opposed to Hinduism when some of them embraced Christianity willingly not so long ago?
Ashok Shrimaali, a tribal rights activist, explained: “The Christian missionaries never tried to change the indigenous tribal practices. There are many tribal families where one brother is Hindu while the other converted to Christianity, but both of them practise the ancestral tribal rituals.”
But the Hindu right wing was not so generous. “When right-wing outfits tried to impose Hinduism on the tribals, a section of the latter formed tribal rights organisations in protest, even if they had voted for the BJP,” Shrimaali added.
He said if the tribal BJP MLAs engage in Hindutva activities, they risk losing their tribal support base, at least partially.
A change from 2018
The tribal belt in Gujarat stretches from its central to southern parts. Tribals account for about 14 per cent of the state’s population though Christians comprise only about 0.5 per cent of the overall population, mostly centred around the districts bordering Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh, such as Dahod, Tapi, Valsad, and Dang.
Most of these tribal rights outfits cropped up in 2018, when at least a dozen right-wing organisations set up shop in every tribal district to promote the Hindutva agenda, said Mahesh Vasava, another tribal activist.
“Until 2017, Congress dominated the tribal region and swept every election, from local bodies to Assembly polls. Although various right-wing outfits were actively trying to promote Hinduism over tribal culture, the process was not as aggressive, primarily because the BJP never looked at the tribal votes seriously — until the 2017 elections, when the party lost a major chunk of its loyal Patidar votes,” Vasava told The Federal.
“In one of its worst performances, the BJP bagged only 99 seats. Subsequently, the BJP started aggressively pursuing the tribal vote bank,” Vasava explained.
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Financial temptation
“After the Hindutva push in the tribal belts in 2018, the BJP won most of the seats in the 2019 local body polls, ousting the Congress. Since then, the tribal regions have witnessed the saffron upsurge. And in the 2022 Assembly polls, the party won 24 of the 27 seats in the tribal regions,” he added.
Initially, the right-wing organisations faced pushback from the tribals. “But then, they came up with financial programmes, such as small savings schemes with 4 per cent interest and low-interest loans through cooperative societies run by the RSS and the VHP,” said Vasava.
However, these schemes came with a rider — only those who reconverted to Hinduism were eligible. “For the impoverished tribals, the financial aid meant a lot, and gradually, a section of them began to embrace Hinduism,” Vasava narrated.
Tribals ‘reconverted into Hindus’
The Hindu right wing, for which it was a matter of survival in these highly Christian-dominated regions, claims to have “reconverted” a sizeable section of the tribals, though.
Naresh Mavi, an RSS member and in-charge of Dharm Jagran events in Dahod, told The Federal that the BJP could not penetrate Dahod in two decades. “The primary reason was the influence of missionaries among the Bhil sub-community who form 87 per cent of the population,” he said.
“For those two decades, the RSS has been on a collision course with the Christian missionaries in the district. Dahod taluka has 70 churches and every year, the numbers kept increasing until 2018, when we started our work there. We found that more than 80 per cent of local tribal families had been converted to Christianity,” he added.
“But our efforts finally bore fruit in 2022 when the BJP won Dahod for the first time. And in the past two years, we have converted at least 60 per cent of the tribal families back to Hindus. It is not the triumph of one person but the party and its ideology,” Mavi claimed.
