As an Indian you do not have the right to choose your religion. This is the bizarre rationale behind the draconian anti-conversional laws currently terrorizing evangelists, pastors, priests, nuns, and faithful lay Christians of all denominations in India.

You can choose a different gender as an Indian, but you and your posterity are condemned to be forever fossilized in the religion of your ancestors. Since India’s Hindu supremacist government has decided that the ancestral religion of all Indians is Hinduism, you can choose to “come home” from Christianity (or Islam) to Hinduism, but a reverse journey is strictly forbidden.

It’s worse if you are called to “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19-20) because anti-conversion legislation in 12 of India’s 28 states compels you to obey unjust laws that violate both the Great Commission of Jesus and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).

Sting Operations

Most egregious is the blatant weaponization of the anti-conversion laws by militant Hindu organizations in collusion with the Hindu supremacist authorities — now embedded at the highest levels of the executive and judicial branches of the government as a result of strategic planning by Hitler-inspired outfits like the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).

Thousands of Christians have been arrested under anti-conversion laws. Penalties range from one to ten years’ imprisonment and fines from 100,000 rupees ($1,200) to 300,000 rupees ($3,600). The Evangelical Fellowship of India reports that 648 Christians were arrested under these laws in 2023, with 440 arrests occurring in the state of Uttar Pradesh alone, as I wrote here in The Stream.

Hindu militants are using the fascist laws to conduct sting operations and trap pastors, evangelists, and lay Christians. Take the case of a pastor in Uttar Pradesh who was approached by a Hindu woman: She pleaded with him to pray for her sick daughter’s healing and told him the family was drawn to Christianity.

The pastor visited the family and prayed for the daughter. The next day he was arrested and charged with attempting to convert the Hindu family by fraudulent means (healing is deemed to be a fraudulent means of converting Hindus.) The members of the family testified against him. They were handsomely paid and planted by the RSS.

Landmark Victory

However, this week came with good news for Christians. In an unprecedented indictment of the Uttar Pradesh police, a court in the capital city of Bareilly acquitted two Christians of false conversion charges and ordered legal action against the police for falsely implicating the duo on the basis of a complaint by a Hindu “cow activist.”

“It is clear that the police acted under pressure on the complaints made by persons like the plaintiff for their desire for publicity and took action in a futile attempt to give legal form to a baseless, fabricated and imaginary story which wasted valuable time, labor and money of not only the police but also the court,” Judge Gyanendra Tripathi ruled.

The Christians were charged under sections 3 and 5 (1) of the Uttar Pradesh Prevention of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Act, 2021.

The case dates back to May 29, 2022, when Himanshu Patel, district president of the militant Hindu Jagran Manch, accused Abishek Gupta, a CT scan technician at a medical college, of leading a conversion program with a team of eight. Gupta, who regularly attended Christian prayer meetings, was accused of converting 40 Hindus at a cottage prayer meeting through various allurements.

Patel said that copies of the Bible were recovered from Gupta and others. Gupta was arrested and fired from his job. Later, Kundan Lal also was arrested. Gupta’s lawyer said his client had been illegally detained by police for more than four months. Gupta’s children, aged seven and nine, were forced to relocate to a new school after the family was evicted from the two-room apartment allotted to them by the medical college.

Laws Trigger Persecution

In a groundbreaking ruling in May, India’s Supreme Court noted that “some parts [of the anti-conversion law in Uttar Pradesh] may seem to be violative of the fundamental right to religion guaranteed under Article 25 of the Constitution.”

“This Supreme Court observation gives us great hope,” said Bangalore Archbishop Peter Machado. “The court observation highlights the primacy of the fundamental right of freedom of conscience. There is certainly a clear link between atrocities on Christians and anti-conversion laws. Even secular human rights groups have pointed out this link.”

Heiner Bielefeldt, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief from 2010 to 2016, notes that violations of the right to convert have “become a human rights problem of great concern.”

Bielefeldt warns that “abuses are perpetrated in the name of religious or ideological truth claims, in the interest of promoting national identity or protecting societal homogeneity, or under other pretexts such as maintaining political and national security.”

According to Anti-Conversion Laws and the International Response, a white paper from the Alliance Defending Freedom:

In effect, the laws are selectively enforced and therefore ban conversion from the majority religion to a minority religion. The mere existence of an anti-conversion law in a state or country usually gives license to nationalist religious extremists to persecute members of minority religions.

After gaining its independence from Britain, India’s national parliament considered several anti-conversion bills, but rejected all of them. But because of India’s federal structure, several state legislatures have been able to pass anti-conversion bills, and the trend is growing under the Hindutva government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Violating International Law

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) published an Anti-conversion Laws Compendium in 2023 and in a separate briefing, explained why India’s laws “are inconsistent with freedom of religion or belief under international human rights law,” especially Article 18 of the UDHR. This provides that everyone has the right to freedom of religion or belief including “freedom to change” their religious beliefs.

International human rights law also protects “the right of an individual to persuade or support another individual to convert voluntarily to a different religion or to no religion at all,” according to the USCIRF briefing. But several of India’s anti-conversion laws “prohibit conversions under circumstances that go beyond coercion, using broad and vague language that can be used to target voluntary religious conversions.”

Anti-conversion laws in ten states, such as the euphemistically named Karnataka Protection of Right to Freedom of Religion Act, 2022, require potential converts to notify the District Magistrate, who then publishes a notice calling for any objections to the conversion. If an objection is lodged, the District Magistrate organizes an investigation.

Seven states provide that individuals accused of violating anti-conversion laws must prove their innocence, and are otherwise assumed to be guilty. Section 12 of Madhya Pradesh’s Freedom of Religion Act, 2021 states that the burden of proof as to whether “a conversion was not effected through misrepresentation, allurement, use of force, threat of force, undue influence, coercion or by marriage or any other fraudulent means … lies on the accused.”

Christianity Threatens Hinduism’s Caste System

One reason different states are rapidly enacting anti-conversion legislation (with more preparing to do so) is the fear that the Hindu population is plummeting for the first time in Indian history as significant numbers of Hindus turn to Christ. In 2015, Tarun Vijay, a member of the Rajya Sabha (Upper House) of India’s parliament, insisted, “It is very important to keep the Hindus in majority in the country.

“We have to take measures to arrest the decline,” he added, noting that that the recently released census had indicated that, “for the first time, the population of Hindus has been reported to be less than 80 percent.”

Western human rights activists who are campaigning for the abolition of these draconian laws fail to recognize that the fundamental reason such legislation exists is India’s caste system, which stratifies Hindu society into Brahmin (priest), Kshatriya (warrior), Vaishya (tradesmen), and Shudra (menial worker), with the Dalit (untouchable) at the very bottom of and even outside the caste system.

According to the Hindu canonical text, the Manusmriti,, caste is determined by birth. It is impossible for a person to change his or her caste and the progeny of a person is entombed in the caste of his ancestors for all eternity. The caste system is intrinsic to Hinduism and inextricably intertwined with the Hindu mindset.

Consequentially, if you cannot change your caste, it is preposterous to imagine you can change your religion. Above all, Christianity poses a fatal threat to the caste system (and by implication, to Hinduism) because it categorical insists that all human beings are “created in the image and likeness of God.”

Converting to Christianity is like a nuclear bomb exploding at the very heart of Hinduism. The good news is that Indian churches have not acquiesced to the anti-conversion laws. On the contrary, for the first time in India’s history, hundreds of thousands of Hindus are surrendering their lives to Jesus — a miracle that can be attributed only to the Holy Spirit and to the dedication and perseverance of India’s faithful missionaries.

 

Jason Jones is a senior contributor to The Stream. He is a film producer, activist, and human rights worker. He is also the author of three books, the latest of which is The Great Campaign Against the Great Reset.