Indian court remands 5 Christians on conversion charges

Critics say police acted on Hindu activist complaints although law says such complaints should only come from relatives

A court in northern India’s Uttar Pradesh state has remanded five Protestant Christians in custody, a day after police arrested 10 of them, including an 18-month-old baby, for allegedly violating a state law that criminalizes religious conversions.

State police on April 23 detained several Christians attending Sunday services at two different churches in Kasimabad town in Ghazipur district following complaints from right-wing Hindu activists, who said the gatherings were attempting mass religious conversions.

“The detained Christians were interrogated inside the churches. The Christians denied the accusation and asserted that the gatherings were part of routine Sunday services,” Pastor Dinanath Jaiswal, a local cleric and social worker, told UCA News on April 24.

The police later took them to the police station and continued the interrogations. However, the women and children among them were released but 10 people were charged with violating the provisions of the state’s anti-conversion law.

The detained — including a pastor who only goes by the name Kirubendra, his wife and their one-and-half-year-old daughter — were locked up in the police station for more than 24 hours, Jaiswal said.

Later on April 24, the police released five more people, and the other five appeared before the district court. The court remanded them in custody.

“Police acted on it without finding any prima facie evidence”
“The police disrupted the Sunday prayer services in two locations, accompanied by Hindu activists. They accused the Christians of conducting religious conversions,” said Jaiswal.

He said police acted on false complaints by the Hindu activists amid anti-Christian sentiment spreading across the state, where the pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) runs the government.

Bupendra Singh, who identified himself in the complaint as an official of the social organization Akhil Bharatiya Kshatriya Mahasabha (All India Warriors Forum), accused the Christians of promising to pay 50,000 rupees (some US$625) to each villager if they converted to Christianity.

The complaint also accused Christians of promising employment to prospective converts and healing their sick through miracles. It also accused them of making objectionable comments against those following the Hindu religion.

The complaint said Singh and some others with him overheard the promises.

“The complaint is false and baseless,” but still police acted on it without finding any prima facie evidence against Christians.

“A well-orchestrated strategy to harass us”
Christian leaders say the BJP government in India’s most populous state ignores the persecution of Christians on allegations of religious conversion. Christians make up just 0.18 percent of the state’s 200 million people.

Violence against Christians in the state increased after the state enacted the anti-conversion law in 2020 purportedly to check converting Hindus through allurement, force, coercion and love jihad — a term used to accuse Muslim men of luring Hindu women into marriage and conversion.

The state government, under its monk-turned-politician chief minister, Yogi Adityanath, has registered more than 150 cases against Christians since the enactment of the anti-conversion law.

The law mandates only close relatives of those allegedly converted to file complaints. But “the police accept false complaints from right-wing Hindu activists and put Christians behind bars,” said a Christian leader, who did not want to be named.

“This seems to be part of a well-orchestrated strategy to harass us,” he said. “There would not have been any complaint against us if the police properly followed the law and stopped accepting fake complaints,” he said.

The United Christian Forum, which records atrocities against Christians in a recent report, said Uttar Pradesh recorded 149 incidents of persecution in 2022 and topped the list of Indian states where Christians witnessed persecution.

This story was first published on https://www.ucanews.com/