‘Exploring Religious Conversions: A Discussion on IPS Baseline Study’
Religious conversion is a very complex phenomenon having several dimensions associated with it. There is a need to approach this much-hyped issue in Pakistan from diversified angles, not only looking at it from the religious perspective, but also incorporating the socio-economic, historical, political and other important factors blended with it.
This was the general consensus among the participants of the webinar titled ‘Exploring Religious Conversions: A Discussion on IPS Baseline Study’, which was organized by Institute of Policy Studies (IPS) on December 17, 2020.
The objective behind the discussion was to obtain critical feedback from a panel of national and international field experts over the Institute’s baseline study ‘Forced Conversions or Faith Conversions: Rhetoric and Reality‘, which critically reviews the existing literature and reports over the occurrence of this extensively publicized issue in Pakistan, and is supplemented with some ethnographic insights of the researcher and his first-hand interviews with relevant entities.
The session was chaired by Executive President IPS Khalid Rahman, and addressed by Ghulam Hussain Sufi, research fellow at IPS and the author of the baseline study, Michel Boivin, senior research fellow, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Paris, France, Dr Julien Levesque, head researcher, Centre for Social Sciences and Humanities (CSH – New Delhi), France, Prof Dr Sumeet Mhaskar, associate professor, Jindal School of Govt. and Public Policy, Jindal Global University, New Delhi, India, Dr Saeed Ahmed Rid, assistant professor, National Institute of Pakistan Studies (NIPS), Quaid-i-Azam University (QAU), Islamabad, and Dr Nazeer Mahar, executive director, The Research Initiative, Pakistan, whereas comments from Dr Nathaniel Roberts, a socio-cultural anthropologist from Göttingen, Germany and an award winning author for a book on his research on South Indian slums, were read out by Sr IPS Research Officer Syed Nadeem Farhat.
Opening the session’s proceedings, Hussain shed light on the need and significance of this study, apprising the audience that the issue of forced conversion in Pakistan was of critical importance not only for the researchers, academics, policymakers and the public in general, but also for the state and government of Pakistan, and hence cannot be ignored. He said that as a researcher it would be easy for anyone to get carried away by the popular rhetoric, but his report rather intends to make people read a different perspective over the issue compared to the prevailing one, while allowing them to develop an understanding on how the rhetoric was being created both locally and globally, and was being invoked and echoed on international forums by the adversaries to malign the country’s name time and again .
The researcher told the panelists that the objective of holding this session was to get engaged with concerned scholars and intellectuals in a bid to obtain critical feedback by reviewing the content of the study, identification of any institutional or locational bias in the study, identification of any subject or issue that may not have been attended or misinterpreted, any lack of synergy between the theoretical position and empirical evidences collected, suggestions over best ways to approach the alleged perpetrators and victims, and advices over what issues and aspects need to be taken care of while conducting field interviews over such a sensitive matter.
Sufi also threw light on various problems and challenges he was faced with during the course of his study especially in terms of methodology, epistemology and location reflexivity. He shared he tried to take all relevant stakeholders on board for his work including the alleged perpetrators, victims, converts, religious clerics, scholars from minorities, nationalists, etc., accumulating a bulk of primary data in the process. He also welcomed the entities, NGOs and their representatives who were raising the issue on different forums and tried to contact them for their input and collaboration, but did not get much response. He however maintained that the study was still ongoing and is only in provisional stages at present as he still needed to collect evidence from a host of other stakeholders as well including the Police, judges, lawyers, administrators, inmates of shelter homes, and concerned legislators. He also shared with the participants that he had just returned from Southern Sindh after 18 days of extensive field work, in which he has conducted over 80 interviews, which will be analyzed and incorporated in the detailed version of the report alongside the recommendations made by the esteemed panelists.
The panelists shared various ideas and suggestions to refine and enrich the study further. They all agreed that faith conversion was a complex, sensitive yet an important issue in South Asia and must be dealt with a lot of care. The panelists were of the opinion that although the issue being discussed in the baseline study was chiefly related to the socio-economic situation of minorities in Pakistan, the historical context of the phenomenon must also be kept in mind and should be made part of the future work. They suggested that where the gender ratio in the discussed areas could also be one of the factors behind conversion like in UP and Hariyana in India, any divergences between upper and underprivileged caste Hindus in Sindh should also be studied as it will be useful to know what kind of relation exists between them. In addition to the aforementioned, the general global tendency of conversion to Islam should also be taken into account while doing the analysis, they added.
Overall, the panelists were appreciative of the work done in the baseline study stating that it was the first time such comprehensive research and such large volume of data on the issue was being collected in the country. They maintained that the real value of the report was in the attempt to bring research, data and analysis over the subject together and it remains to be a commendable effort despite needing improvement in some areas.
EP-IPS summed up the session by informing the participants that the original report prepared by the Institute comprised more than four hundred pages but the Institute decided to launch only a baseline study in an attempt to refine and consolidate the findings further with more consultations. He termed the session very reassuring in the sense that it was participated by people who wanted to find out the truth and bring it to the fore. As a think tank, finding and highlighting the truth has remained the Institute’s passion, he stressed, and it was very much this spirit in which this session was held to seek views from subject experts over the effort made.
