Hindu, Muslim conversion to Baha'i

The lady's surname was Patel but she was not a Hindu. She was a Bahai, those who believe in Baha'ullah and their most prominent place of worship in this country is the Lotus Temple in Delhi.

[They have feast every 19 days and assemble at the local Haziratul Quds. In every city they have a local spiritual assembly.] There were Mishra, Patil and Ghosh. All of them were Bahais. People with seeming Muslim names also.

That confuses many of us. Because in India, we generally associate names and surnames with religions. If someone is Rahmat Ali, he ought to be a Muslim and Ramesh Joshi should be a Hindu.

Some Christians have Hindi/ Sanskrit/ Arabic names but most of the people can be identified. Even Jains are often distinguishable due to their surnames--either Jain or Khandelwal/Shah/Kasliwal/Singhai etc.

I find many Hindu and Muslim converts to Bahai faith. The Bahais are under intense religious persecution in Iran. They are not allowed to run schools and kept under state surveillance. That's really unfair. Many consider them as a sect of Muslims, which they are not--an independent religion.

However, a journalist got irked with Bahais. 'You hide your identity', he charged them at a gathering they organised to highlight persecution in Iran. 'We don't", they said. The journo asked, 'If you believe in all religions equally then why you convert?', the debate continued.

I don't have any thing against Bahais. If anyone wants to get converted to the faith, he has every right to do so. What I didn't exactly like is incidents like the recent marriage of a Muslim orphan girl to a Bahai family of Muslim names.

The organisers, all very highly educated deliberately mispronounced the name of the girl and hid her surname to conceal that she was a Muslim. At orphanages such things do happen routinely. As far as preaching to an adult is concerned, I am not too much interested but incidents like the one mentioned above are disturbing.

The Bahais claim to have followers in every country except Vatican. However, their claims of numbers seem exaggerated. In India they claim a population of 20 lakh (2 million) and tens of millions in the world. I don't think these are correct.