NEW DELHI — Not even a judge’s reprimand of police spared an impoverished pastor in India from being jailed on baseless claims of fraudulent conversion, one of the latest examples of how Hindu extremists misuse “anti-conversion” laws.
Pastor Bajarang Rawat, a 47-year-old convert from Hinduism in Mohanlalganj, Lucknow District in Uttar Pradesh state, faces charges of converting people by “allurement” even though police could find no witnesses against him, and the only evidence they presented was his Bible, the pastor said.
“Reprimanding the policemen, the magistrate told them that it was not a crime to possess a Bible and that he himself has a Bible at home,” Pastor Rawat told Morning Star News. “The policemen stood silent, but even after this conversation, I was sent to jail.”
Released on bail on Aug. 7, Pastor Rawat was arrested on July 16 and charged at the Loni Katra police station under the Uttar Pradesh Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Act, 2021 for “attempt to convert … by use of misrepresentation, force, undue influence, coercion, allurement or by fraudulent means.”
The next day police drove him to the District and Sessions Court, Barabanki, where the judge asked the reason for his arrest and was told they had confiscated a Bible from him.
The following weeks left his wife and two daughters, ages 3 and 10, near starvation, but police had received intense pressure from Hindu nationalist, government authorities to prosecute him, he said. Pastor Rawat has yet to find a source of income after Hindu nationalists ruined his sales stall and he was forced to leave the area.
Police and the news media and Hindu nationalists who accompanied officers could not find a single witness testifying of any kind of allurement. But the extremists blamed Pastor Rawat for brainwashing people, “so much so that they stop worshiping idols,” they said. One Hindu nationalist told officers, “He has been preaching about a foreign God and spreading a foreign religion,” the pastor said.
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