By Mohammad Ali
NEW DELHI (RNS) — 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.
A study by Article 14, a watchdog group, revealed that in the first year after the original 2021 statute passed, half of the 101 reported violations came from third parties. Most of the third parties were Hindu nationalist outfits that were using the law to harass Christians.
Gupta plans to file a civil case against the police and the Hindu nationalist group, called Hindu Jagaran Manch, that accused him. But the day Gupta was acquitted, the Uttar Pradesh government passed a series of amendments to the conversion statute, making converting others a crime punishable by life imprisonment, and empowering third parties to file complaints.
This story was originally published in religionnews.com. Read the full story here.