Source: Religion News Service, November 29, 2024
While they purport to protect poor Hindus from being exploited, anti-conversion laws have been found to have a more demonstrable effect of generating violence against Christians.
In July, more than two years after a Christian prayer service at his home was raided by police, a court in Uttar Pradesh in northern India acquitted Abhishek Gupta, a 41-year-old radiologist, of violating the state’s anti-conversion law.
Legally, his victory was more than a win; it was a rout: The judge in the case cleared Gupta and a co-defendant of trying to recruit Hindus into Utter Pradesh’s tiny Christian minority but further ruled that the complainant, a member of a Hindu nationalist activist group, was not eligible to file the case and that police investigators were “the real culprits.”
But personally, the case has ruined Gupta, he said. “My entire family is Christian. I pray on Sundays. I don’t know why anyone would think I was converting anyone,” Gupta told RNS by phone from his home village in Gorakhpur, where he moved after he and his wife, a nurse, were asked to resign their jobs for fear their employers would be harassed by vigilantes. “We exhausted our life savings, and our life was turned upside down,” he said.
Read or listen to the full story, which provides more context on these laws and recent developments and reports that there have been 733 incidents of violence against Christians [in India] in the past two years, most spurred by false allegations of conversion.
See also Christians in Vietnam Arrested Before Christmas (International Christian Concern) and 25 Christians Killed During Christmastime Celebrations in Nigeria (various sources, via The Roys Report).