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.
This story was originally published in stream.org. Read the full story here.