By Matters India Reporter
New Delhi, July 5, 2024: The United Christian Forum (UCF), an ecumenical group, has expressed anguish over what it calls “saffron-tinged” ruling of the Allahabad High Court.
Justice Rohit Ranjan Aggarwal, while rejecting the bail application of a person accused under Uttar Pradesh state’s anti-conversion law, stated that if unlawful conversion at religious gatherings continued the country’s majority population would become minority one day.
Such religious congregations, it asserted, “should be immediately stopped where the conversion is taking place and changing religion of citizen of India.”
Reacting to the July 1 court ruling, the Christian forum asks, “Are courtrooms being ‘Converted’ into majoritarian theaters?”
The New Delhi-based forum, in its July 4 statement, urged the court to expunge “the sweeping allegations made against the entire Christian community” in its order.
The forum asserts that Christians are “as much citizens of India as anyone else and deserve equal protection under the law.”
The court, the forum says, should limit its focus to the case’s criminal law aspect rather than making “sweeping statements” swayed by “majoritarian religious considerations.”
Such observations, the forum warns, could expose Christians to further persecution.
The bail application was filed by a person named Kailash who was accused of taking people from Uttar Pradesh’s Hamirpur to Delhi for “conversion” to Christianity. The judge dismissed the bail plea under the UP Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Act, 2021.
The forum laments that Christians face targeted violence in several states, including Uttar Pradesh. The High Court, it adds, has failed to distinguish between voluntary and forced conversions.
It says the Article 25of the Indian Constitution guarantees citizens the freedom to change their religion according to their conscience. “The court’s judgement suggests that conversion is against religious freedom, which contradicts various Supreme Court decisions upholding the right to change one’s faith. Additionally, the constitutional validity of several “anti-conversion” laws is currently under challenge before the Supreme Court,” the forum points out.
The forum statement issued by A C Michael, its national coordinator, points out that many cases have been filed under anti-conversion laws in Uttar Pradesh although no conviction has taken place under the law in the northern Indian state.
“In 2023, 733 hostile acts against Christians were reported to the UCF Helpline alone, and nearly half came from Uttar Pradesh,” the forum explains.
It quotes a People’s Union for Civil Liberties report titled Criminalizing Practice of Faith that documented police collusion with self-described “Hindutva” groups to frequently disrupt Christian practices.
“Such mobs typically mobilize attackers, alert police about purported ‘forced conversions,’ and vandalize churches, recording and circulating videos of these actions,” the forum says and adds, a petition calling for stringent measures against such vigilante groups is pending before the Supreme Court.
“Several ‘anti-conversion’ legislations mandate that only an affected person register a complaint. However, police often arrest Christians based on complaints from these self-ascribed ‘Hindutva’ groups claiming prior knowledge of ‘forced conversions’,” it adds.
The forum also points out that Article 14, a legal research group, analyzed more than a hundred First Information Reports filed under the anti-conversion law in Uttar Pradesh and discovered that 63 of them were based on third-party complaints, including 26 from organizations affiliated with the “Hindutva” political ideology.
“Researchers have documented how anti-conversion laws are used to target religious minorities. False cases can persist for years, justifying brutality and violence against Christians accused of conversion, violating their rights to life and liberty,” the forum bemoans.
Opportunities in the guise of forced conversions take priority. False accusers from different radical groups take the upper hand to disrupt,attack and vandalize Christian gatherings.Never any person is coerced to convert. In this pretext gatherings of Christians are targeted that need to be stopped. Christians too are citizens of the country. Courts and judges must act in accordance with the law.