Uttar Pradesh: 1,500 People Convert To Buddhism In Mass Ceremony At Subharti University In Meerut

More than 1,500 people converted to Buddhism in a single mass ceremony held at a university in Uttar Pradesh’s Meerut district on Wednesday (24 October), reported The Times of India.

The ceremony happened under the aegis of Mahayana Theraveda Vajrayana Buddhist Religious and Charitable Trust and took place at Meerut’s privately-run Swami Vivekanand Subharti University. The mass conversion on Valmiki Jayanti was led by Dr Atul Krishan Bhatnagar, the founder of the university and the event’s convener.

Though the event was termed apolitical, the monk who presided over the mass conversion, Dr Chandrakirti, told media that such events surely assert pressure on the government as so many people leave one religion for another. The media also reported that the event was organised with support from international Buddhist organisations engaged in promoting the religion, with whose help the university’s Buddhist school was founded earlier this year.

Subharti School of Buddhist Studies’ founding director, Dr Heero Hito, is a former chief executive of International Buddha Education Institute, an organisation engaged in promotion of Buddhism. The institute is also the Indian affiliate of the World Fellowship of Buddhists, Thailand.

It was mostly the villagers around the university who underwent the conversion, and barring a Muslim, most were Dalits. One of them, Mamla Singh, told media that he was converting to Buddhism as he was a follower of Dr Bhim Rao Ambedkar and since Ambedkar followed Buddhism, it was his moral duty to follow it too. Another convert said that since they are from a scheduled caste, people want to push them back, and converting to Buddhism would make them a distinct group and they would then be secure against injustice.

Dr Atul Krishan Bhatnagar, the university’s founder and the event’s convenor, is a deeply controversial figure. He has numerous cases on him, ranging from financial frauds and admission scams to that of murder. His Subharti University has also been in controversies. A few years before, anti-India and pro-Pakistan slogans were raised in the campus after a cricket match and the university administration tried to cover it up rather than report it. The university has also featured in scholarship and admission scams earlier.

Dr Bhatnagar runs another university, Ras Bihari Bose Subharti University, in Dehradun, Uttarakhand, which has also been mired in controversies.

His name also figured in the murder of Subharti’s accountant Nirmal Sharma in 2006. The Central Bureau of Investigation had framed Dr Bhatnagar and five others in their chargesheet in 2010. The case is still going on.

Those who have followed Dr Bhatnagar’s controversial life shared with Swarajya that he had been propagating Buddhism and aiding conversions for some time and his personal conversion was merely a formality as he has practically been one for some time.