By Matters India Reporter
Bengaluru, March 1; 2023: Archbishop Peter Machado of Bangalore says the Church will continue to do its good works without fear.
“Even if a case is filed against me, accusing me of indulging in conversion, for providing education and healthcare to the Dalits and the marginalized, I would continue with those good works,” Archbishop Machado asserted.
The archbishop is the leader of the Catholic Church in the southern Indian state of Karnataka that has enacted anti-conversion law last year. He also heads the All Karnataka United Christian Forum for Human Rights, an ecumenical body.
“No government can stop us from doing good works; no one can challenge us,” the 68-year-old prelate asserted.
He challenged the government to come out with the data on the number of children converted in Christian educational institutions.
The archbishop was speaking at a function to felicitate Baselios Marthoma Mathews III, the Catholicos of the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church, in Bengaluru, the state capital.
With a few months left for the Assembly elections in Karnataka, the archbishop’s speech is seen as a sign of the community’s approach to the ruling party and the government’s policies against Christians.
Archbishop Machado slammed the fundamentalists for playing petty politics and spreading fake news that teaching the Bible has been made compulsory at Clarence school in Bengaluru.
Earlier, the archbishop had called the anti-conversion law “dangerous” and termed it a “sad chapter for the Christian community.”
He had also written to Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai appealing not to promote the “undesirable and discriminatory” Bill.
According to the new law, any converted person, his parents, brother, sister, or any other person who is related to him by blood, marriage, adoption, or in any form associated, or colleague may lodge a complaint of illegal religious conversion. The offense is non-bailable.
The bill prohibits unlawful conversion of religion, providing protection to those who were forced to convert from one religion to another by misrepresentation, force, undue influence, coercion, allurement, the promise of marriage, or by any fraudulent means and for the matters connected therewith or incidental thereto.
Further, the bill states, “No person shall convert or attempt to convert, either directly or otherwise, any other person from one religion to another by use or practice of force, undue influence, coercion, allurement or by any fraudulent means or by any other means or promise of marriage, nor shall any person abet or conspire such conversion.”
The anti-conversion bill was introduced by the BJP government in the Karnataka assembly in 2021, sparking a major controversy. Karnataka was the latest state to enact the anti-conversion law. Other states are Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Gujarat, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, and Jharkhand.
(Based on a report in Indian Currents weekly.)