Police in the northern Indian village of Hariharganj recently arrested 26 local Christians for alleged “forced religious conversion” after the group of Christians was held against its will inside a church by a Hindu mob, the British Christian Asian Association (BCAA) reported on its website Monday, noting the Hindu mob faced no criminal charges in connection with the incident.
Detailing the series of events on April 18, BCAA wrote:
55 Christians including women have been booked for alleged illegal conversions in India.
35 parishioners were taken to a Police station after a mob of around 200 Hindus, locked over 100 Christians in the 19th Century building of the ‘Evangelical Church of India’ (ECI) in Uttar Pradesh, during Maundy Thursday prayers [sic].
At the [police] station 9 women were allowed to leave and go home and 26 men were arrested and put in a cell, after being charged for unlawful conversions.
Despite rioting and holding over 100 Christians against their will in a building, none of the mob of at least 200 Hindu radicals were arrested.
Hariharganj village is located in India’s Uttar Pradesh state, which, along with the rest of India, is majority Hindu. Uttar Pradesh’s government in November 2020 passed a law establishing a prison term of up to 10 years for any person found guilty of forcing someone to change religions.
Police walk along a street in Jahangirpuri area in New Delhi on April 17, 2022, after clashes broke out between members of two communities on April 16 during a ‘Hanuman Jayanti’ religious procession. (MONEY SHARMA/AFP via Getty Images)
The “Prohibition of Unlawful Religious Conversion” act punishes anyone “found guilty of conversion done through ‘misrepresentation, force, undue influence, coercion, allurement or by any fraudulent means [with fines and prison time],” the Indian Express reported on December 5, 2020.
The governments of other Indian states — such as Madhya Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Gujarat, Jharkhand, and Uttrakhand — have recently passed similar anti-religious conversion legislation.
Critics of the legislation say it provides a legal basis for anti-Christian and Muslim persecution in India, which is currently ruled by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). A delegation of Indian Christian leaders voiced this argument when meeting with federal Indian government officials in September 2021 to lobby for the repeal of the anti-religious conversion laws. The delegation said it believed the legislation violates India’s constitution, which allows for freedom of religion.
Police in the central Indian city of Indore, located in Madhya Pradesh, arrested nine local Christians in late January for alleged forced religious conversion.
“On the basis of the Madhya Pradesh’s new anti-conversion law, police arrested the parents of a woman and seven other people for allegedly forcing her to embrace Christianity,” AsiaNews, an official press agency of the Roman Catholic Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions (PIME), reported February 5.
“Police station in-charge Santosh Kumar Dudhi said that the 25-year-old woman’s complaint says that her parents, under the pretext of taking her to her grandmother’s home, took her to a Christian community centre in Indore for a prayer meeting,” the news outlet detailed.
“Some women pulled my hands and legs and beat me up there (at the centre). I was forced to sit in a hall. I was born a Hindu and I practice the same religion … but my mother and those present forced me to leave my religion,” AsiaNews quoted the woman as saying in a police report she filed to document the incident.
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