The Entire Hindu Right Wing movement was established in response to a particular mass conversion in Tamil Naudu. Let me give you a brief history of how it happend,
The Conversions
Minakshipuram is a village in Tenkasi Taluk in the western part of Tirunelveli District in southern Tamil Nadu. In 1980 it consisted of 300 households of whom 280 were Dalits of the Pallar caste and the rest belonged to the dominant Maravar caste. The land around Minakshipuram belongs to a Hindu monastery and is cultivated mainly by Maravar and Dalit tenants from Minakshipuram and surrounding villages. In 1969the tenants formed a co-operative society under Maravar control but it split in 1980 when the Dalits formed their own association. The Maravars regarded this as a challenge to their traditional dominance and relations between the two castes deteriorated sharply.
These relations had already been strained earlier when in 1977 a young Dalit from Minakshipuram eloped with a Maravar girl. Both converted to Islam in neighbouring Kerala and married under Muslim law.
After their return to the village the man worked on a nearby estate and in December 1980 he was accused of involvement in the murder of two Maravar guards on the estate. Police investigations led to the arrest and alleged torture of large numbers of Dalit but charges were eventually dropped. The police inspector in charge of the investigation was a Maravar, who owned land under his wife's name in Minakshipuram and allegedly colluded with local Maravars against the Dalits. In the face of what they saw as severe police repression a group of Dalits from Minakshipuram decided in early February 1981 to convert to Islam. They had considered this option on earlier occasions, but older,more conservative Dalits had opposed it. The older generation of Dalits leaders had gradually been replaced by a younger and more educated generation resentful of caste discrimination. The conversions were conducted on 19th February 1981 by the Isha-Athul Islam Sabha, a Muslim organisation based in the District headquarters Tirunelveli that provides support to converts. Originally 220 out of the 280 Dalits families had agreed to convert, but only 200 applied for conversion and of those who applied only 180 actually converted. A second group of 27 families converted on 23rd May 1981. The converts decided to change the name of their village from Minakshipuram to Rahmatnagar
Although the ADMK government of Tamil Nadu denied allegations that police behaviour had caused the conversions and accused the Congress-led central government of trying to make political capital of the issue, the Maravar police inspector in charge of the murder investigation was transferred and later charged with corruption. This was more of a Maravar-Dalit rather than caste Hindu-Dalit conflict.
The Hindu Reaction
The very first conversions on 19th February 1981 attracted no outside attention, even though the organisers had sought publicity. Only after the conversion of another 27 families on 23rd May 1981 were conducted by Abul Hasan Nadvi, a well-known Muslim scholar from Lucknow, were they reported in the Hyderabad Urdu daily Rahnuma-e-Deccan on 4th April. Eight days later the Madras edition of the Indian Express covered the Minakshipuram conversions on its front page.Within days the conversions became front-page and cover-story material for most Indian newspapers and magazines. Minakshipuram and its fallout received daily coverage in the regional and national press some times with upto a dozen articles a day dealing directly or indirectly with the conversions and their aftermath. Eventually news of the conversions even made it into the international press, for example, in the Economist and Time magazine.
Minakshipuram became a crucial rallying point in the Hindu revival. Long established Hindu organisations were reinvigorated and new organisations were established to mobilise Hindus against any further conversions and to bring about reconversions. Among the existing organisations that became involved were the Arya Samaj, the Viswa Hindu Parishad (VHP), Rashtriya Swaramsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The RSS All-India General Secretary declared the Minakshipuram conversions the main concern of his organisation and indeed of the entire Hindu society. Due to the mistrust in Tamil Nadu of Brahman-dominated and predominantly North Indian organisations, the intiative in opposing the conversions fell to the Hindu Unity Front (Hindu Munnani). At the national level, the main new organisation to emerge was the Virat Hindu Samaj (VHS). Its founder and leader was the former Education Minister and Vedic scholar Karan Singh, a descendant of the former Hindu dynasty of the predominantly Muslim state of Kashmir. In response to the conversions he convened the Hindu Unity Conference in New Delhi with participation of over sixty Hindu organisations, which decided to come together under the umbrella of the VHS with the aim of preventing conversions to look after the Dalits and eradicate untouchability.
