New Delhi: A prominent Church leader in India bemoans that a central Indian state often harasses Christians under the pretext of preventing unlawful religious conversions.
“Madhya Pradesh seems to be in a habitual practice of jailing kids, stopping weddings and disrupting funeral, all in the name of conversion,” says Reverend Vijayesh Lal, the newly appointed Executive Director of the Evangelical Fellowship of India.
Reverend Lal, who monitors incidents of atrocities against Christians in various parts of India, was reacting to an Indian Express news item on police and Hindu radicals stopping a wedding ceremony in a Pentecostal church in Satna, a major town in eastern Madhya Pradesh.
“This is not the first wedding sabotaged by the combined efforts of the police and the right wing ‘fringe’ as they call it,” the 42-year-old Church leader says in his Facebook page.
He says the police “justifies its actions on the grounds of preserving social harmony and ends up troubling the victims instead of arresting and taking to task the attackers and violent trouble makers.”
In an earlier interview with World Watch Monitor, Rev. Lal, said Hindu radicals have used the bogey of conversion to justify violence against Christians since the middle 1990s. “What worries me is the total impunity with which the violence and hate speech is being carried out now.”
Rev. Lal earlier served as the national director of the Religious Liberty Commission of the Evangelical Fellowship of India. He has been at the forefront of religious freedom issues for nearly two decades with intensive grassroots experience.
He initiated the ministry of Open Doors International in India in 1999 and served as its executive director until January 2014. Rev. Lal is involved in training, socio-economic development, advocacy, and research initiatives in and outside India.
He is a member of the National United Christian Forum, which is made up of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India, National Council of Churches in India, and the EFI. He also played a role in the formation and strengthening of the Christian Legal Association of India, serving as its first coordinator from 2001 to 2003.