SOCIAL SCIENTIST
several shifts beween the 1920 and 1990s, are being increasingly fused into a single issue by the hindu right — a subject too vast and unexplored to address in the limited scope of this essay. Here I only set out to indicate that together they mark out an arena in which legal, gender and religious redefinitions have converged, and suggest that given such intersections and other contradictions, both issues now need to be jointly addressed. It may no longer be tenable to defend personal law from feminist positions and at the same time to denounce the anti-conversion campaign as an attack on freedom of religion. If both are invested in kindred primordialisms is it possible to assent to the denial of change of religious identities in personal laws but defend it when conversion is at issue? Or, can we honour religious diversity by 'legally' blocking the mechanisms for a pluralisation of religions that exceeds the five-religion schema?
The first section of this essay revisits and reworks my analysis of conversion in an earlier intervention in the debate on uniform versus personal laws.1 The second section looks at the implications of the anti-conversion campaign vis a vis its definition of religious identity, voluntary conversion, 'reconversion', inter-religious marriage, national belonging, stratified citizenship, and its apparently contrary rhetorics of particularism and universalism. The concluding section suggests a rethinking of the contradictions between partial or 'inauthentic' conversion and the social and legal fixation of religious identity, especially hindu identity, in the interests of reconstructing a more substantive secularism.
RECAPITULATING THE DEBATE
Should personal law based on religion be maintained or should a uniform civil code be instituted? The debate stretches back to the nationalist and early feminist agendas of the 1940s and 1950s. It has remained a fraught and urgent issue, in part because gender justice has not yet been written into the law, and in part because following on the Shahbano judgement the hindu right not only appropriated this demand for a uniform civil code, but also reshaped it as a weapon with which to attack the continuance of Muslim personal law. Though it has occasionally put the demand on a backburner, the question of a uniform civil code is by now heavily overdetermined by communalism, muddied by its deployment as a hindu majoritarian device (manifestly more rhetorical than substantive), and by the hindu right's mimickry of some of the liberal and feminist arguments