Team News Riveting
Raipur, August 10
Even as ruling Congress and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had locked horns on the issue of religious conversion in Chhattisgarh, a senior minister today claimed that devgudis had been funded to stop tribals from embracing Christianity.
The sacred groves of Chhattisgarh known as devgudi date back a long time when the villages first came up and communities settled down. The devgudi or groves, which play a vital role in the lives of tribals, were established by the ancestors. The tribals visit them only thrice a year, but offer worship at the village matagudi, a religious shrine for the goddess.
“To ensure that tribals do not visit Churches and convert the religion, the state government has provided Rs 5 lakh to the devgudis,” Chhattisgarh’s excise minister and a prominent tribal leader in Congress from Bastar Kawasi Lakhma said. The prominent figures and the intellectuals in the tribal societies are convincing and creating awareness among the tribals about the rich tribal culture and policy, he added.
The minister, who comes from a tribal predominated pocket of Bastar’s Sukma district, was responding to reporters on the issue that assumed political proportions after a senior police official alerted about the conversion activities being carried out by Christian missionaries in the interior areas.
“BJP is politicizing the issue (of religious conversion) and provoking the people,” he said, adding that he can claim that no conversion has taken place at least in his home district of Sukma. “I have checked it with the District Collector and also conducted a survey,” Lakhma said.
He said during the 15 years rule of BJP in Chhattisgarh, 30 Churches were built in Sukma while not a single one came up in the last two years of Congress rule.
