India (International Christian Concern) — Many Christians in the Kandhamal district of Central India’s State of Odisha have fled their homes to neighboring provinces, while those who remain are living in fear and uncertainty. The reason? Hindu nationalist organizations announced a massive rally to commemorate the death anniversary of a Hindu ascetic this weekend. Promoters of the rally, set to take place from this Saturday through Monday, Aug. 26, have made public announcements designed to whip up Hindu nationalistic fervor, asking people to gather in large numbers and bring weapons with them to rally, which will observe the 16th anniversary of Swamy Lakhmananand Saraswati. The weapons are the main cause of alarm and the reason for the temporary exodus of Christians, including pastors from the district, who fear being targeted. This rally is expected to bring about half a million Hindus to Saraswati’s 8-acre retreat center, located in the dense forest area of the tribal-dominated Kandhamal district of Odisha. Unknown assassins murdered Saraswati on Aug. 24, 2008. Right-wing Hindus have maintained that it was the work of Christians, an accusation that Christians have vehemently denied. Saraswati’s murder led to massive violent riots and reprisals against Christians in the Kandhamal district in 2008. More than 50,000

As an Indian you do not have the right to choose your religion. This is the bizarre rationale behind the draconian anti-conversional laws currently terrorizing evangelists, pastors, priests, nuns, and faithful lay Christians of all denominations in India. You can choose a different gender as an Indian, but you and your posterity are condemned to be forever fossilized in the religion of your ancestors. Since India’s Hindu supremacist government has decided that the ancestral religion of all Indians is Hinduism, you can choose to “come home” from Christianity (or Islam) to Hinduism, but a reverse journey is strictly forbidden. It’s worse if you are called to “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19-20) because anti-conversion legislation in 12 of India’s 28 states compels you to obey unjust laws that violate both the Great Commission of Jesus and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Sting Operations Most egregious is the blatant weaponization of the anti-conversion laws by militant Hindu organizations in collusion with the Hindu supremacist authorities — now embedded at the highest levels of the executive and judicial branches of the government as a

New Delhi: In a scathing, and perhaps unprecedented, indictment of the Uttar Pradesh police, a court in Bareilly, while acquitting two Hindu men of unlawful conversion charges, has ordered legal action against a bunch of police officers in the district for falsely implicating the duo on the basis of a baseless complaint by a self-styled Hindutva cow activist. The Wire is in possession of the court verdict and case FIR. One of the accused men, Abhishek Gupta worked as a CT scan technician at the Rohilkhand Medical College in Bareilly from 2007 till his arrest in 2022, causing him to lose his job. The Bareilly court has directed the senior superintendent of police of the district to take “appropriate legal action” against the then station house officer, two case investigating officers and the circle officer (deputy superintendent of police) for lodging the FIR against the two men “under some pressure,” on the basis of a “baseless, unfounded, fabricated and fantastical” story. Additional sessions judge Gyanendra Tripathi held the police guilty of making a “failed attempt” to give the fabricated story a “legal form”. The “actual culprits” in the unlawful conversion case were the complainant, his associated witnesses, the station house officer who authorised

India (International Christian Concern) — During the last four years, 1,682 people have been arrested, and 835 cases have been registered under the Uttar Pradesh Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Act in the North Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Most of those arrested have been Christians, including pastors. The Uttar Pradesh government, led by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), began a fierce crackdown from 2020 onwards after bringing into force the Uttar Pradesh Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Act. This anti-conversion law is the most stringent and draconian as compared to other unlawful conversion of religion acts prevalent in nine other states across India. Uttar Pradesh is led by Yogi Adityanath, an ascetic hardliner who has cracked down on minority communities in various ways. According to a report, charges have been filed in 818 of the 835 cases registered under the anti-conversion law so far. However, according to a prominent law firm operating in North India (name withheld for security reasons), no one has been convicted under the anti-conversion law because there has never been a shred of hard evidence against the religious conversions. “If there had been even a single conviction under the anti-conversion law, the pro-government mainstream media would

The United Christian Forum, a human rights group with countrywide presence, has opposed the ‘draconian’ amendments to the anti-conversion law in Uttar Pradesh, saying it will further encourage misuse of the law. The Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion (Amendment) Bill, 2024 was passed in the legislative assembly last month. The forum has presented a seven-point memorandum to UP governor Anandiben Patel and urged her not to notify the amendment law. The forum has argued that the proposed new law goes against the right to religious freedom guaranteed in the Constitution and that its provisions are opaque and prone to widespread misuse. At a media conference held in Lucknow on August 19, A.C. Michael, a functionary of the forum, said the existing anti-conversion law of the state was by itself under misuse. “There have been widespread instances of its misuse. People have been harassed due to personal enmity and with malicious intention, leading to unnecessary burden on the courts in terms of cases,” he said. Those who attended the media conference included former Lucknow University professor Ramesh Dixit, a renowned scholar of constitutional law and politics; human rights activist Meenakshi Singh; Father Denis Naresh Lobo, vicar general of the Catholic Diocese of Lucknow;

As the issue of the Uniform Civil Code (UCC) has been appropriated by communal right wing politics, discussion around it in the public sphere has lost the larger emancipatory intention with which it was discussed and defended by the members of the Drafting Committee in the Constituent Assembly. Recent advocacy for a ‘secular civil code’ by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his Independence Day speech has reinvigorated the debate, placing UCC at the forefront of public discourse. Whereas the right wing ruling dispensation sees UCC as a tool to punish Muslim men, the other side has largely only reacted to the arguments made by the ruling dispensation, without delving into the larger case that UCC presents. This article seeks to take UCC out of the cage of narrow religious politics and set it free into the larger realm of liberating values. It does so by presenting a case for the implementation of UCC by looking into the constitutionality of such a law and checks if UCC is a threat to the cultural plurality of India. The UCC has had its own share of history in Indian jurisprudence. It was heavily debated in the Constituent Assembly, found mention in reports of Law Commission and

The skies were blue over the 42nd Annual India Day Parade in New York City on 18 August, yet the entire event was overshadowed by over a week of protest surrounding a single one of the over 40 floats that flooded the streets of Manhattan. Controversy centered on the parade’s “centerpiece float,” which featured a replica of a new temple to the Hindu deity Rama. The temple, inaugurated in Uttar Pradesh’s Ayodhya in January 2024 by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), was built after a prolonged court battle over a site where a 16th-century mosque, the Babri Masjid, once stood. In 1992, a mob of 150,000 Hindu nationalists swarmed the mosque to destroy it. Uproar over the float came to a head on the eve of the parade. On 17 August, thirteen groups released a letter urging top U.S. law enforcement officials to investigate parade organisers and the hosts of the float for possibly violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) by failing to disclose how their choice to promote the controversial temple advances the interests of the BJP, particularly considering New York’s Indian Consulate co-sponsored the parade. The same day, Indian Muslims of North America withdrew their float “since the integrity of the parade

In a significant ruling, the Allahabad High Court recently denied bail to a man charged under multiple sections, including the stringent Uttar Pradesh Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Act, 2021. The court underscored that the primary objective of the Act has been to ensure religious freedom for all citizens. This Act, the court observed, was necessary to ensure social harmony and upholding the secular fabric of the nation. Justice Rohit Ranjan Agarwal, who presided over the case, emphasized in his order that while the Constitution grants every individual the fundamental right to profess, practice, and propagate their religion, this right does not extend to a collective right to proselytize. He stated, "The right to religious freedom belongs equally to the person converting and the individual sought to be converted," highlighting the balance between individual rights and societal interests. The case that the Allahabad HC was hearing involved an accused named Azeem, who was charged under various sections of the Indian Penal Code, including 323 (voluntarily causing hurt), 504 (intentional insult with intent to provoke breach of peace), and 506 (criminal intimidation). The charges also included violations under the UP Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Act. Azeem had been in jail