The former spokesman of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India said this week that a new anti-conversion law in India is a “ready-made tool” for those who wish to persecute Christians.
On March 8, Madhya Pradesh became the third Indian state to pass a so-called “Freedom of Religion” bill, which increases punishments for “forced conversions,” a term critics say is interpreted loosely by authorities to harass Christians and other religious minorities in the mostly Hindu nation.
The new legislation stipulates up to 10 years in jail and a fine of up to $1,375 as punishment for religious conversion through “coercion, force, allurement and fraudulent means and misrepresentation,” including marriages solemnized through fraudulent means, local media report.
“This Act has the potential to create social disruption since it discriminates against and criminalizes interreligious marriages,” Father Babu Joseph, the bishops’ former spokesman, told Crux, a U.S.-based online Catholic news service. “In a multi-religious country like India interreligious marriages have been taking place for millennia and they had produced some outstanding examples religious harmony but all that now come under the veil of suspicion.”
“The MP freedom of religion Act 2021 is revamped version of the earlier Act which was already in operation in the state,” the priests said. “The new Act has added more stringent provisions that will come in handy for the state to arrest and prosecute people on flimsy grounds of mere allegations.”
“What is more, the onus is on the accused which turns the well-established norm in law that a person is innocent until proven otherwise on its head,” Joseph said.
The priest went on to insist that the wording of the legislation is so vague it will be easily manipulated by those who harbor hostility toward Christians.
“What is worse in the new Act is the possibility of wide-ranging interpretation of allurements, fraudulent means and coercion in religious conversion that can easily be misused against anyone who may do a small act of charity to his fellow human being,” he said. “It means not only the outcome but even the process however innocuous is prosecutable – a ready-made tool in the hands of mischief mongers.”
As Breitbart News reported, in January nine Christians were arrested in Madhya Pradesh after a Hindu nationalist group complained of forced conversions under the previous government ordinance.
Police arrested the parents of a girl along with seven other Christians charging that the parents had taken her to the Christian community center for a prayer meeting under the pretext of taking her to visit her grandmother.
The nine Christians were held without bail, after presiding Judge Yatindra Kumar Guru declared that “it does not seem appropriate to grant bail to the accused, looking into the facts and circumstances.”
The arrest drew criticism from human rights advocates, who said that the move was an act of hostility against Christians.
“The new draconian anti-conversion legislation is a tool for majority vigilante groups to make false complaints and harass the small Christian community,” said Sajan K. George, president of the Global Council of Indian Christians (GCIC), at the time.
The Freedom of Religion Ordinance “is deliberately misused by right-wing groups and vested interests to exploit existing communal tensions in which Christians are a minority,” he said.
Christians make up just 2.3 percent of the Indian population and only 0.29 percent of the population in Madhya Pradesh.
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