MUMBAI – Two incidents involving Catholic priests in recent days illustrate the increasingly complex situation for Christians in India facing a rising tide of Hindu nationalism, with one priest arrested under the country’s controversial anti-conversion laws and another suspended for joining the right-wing BJP party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
In one case, a priest in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh was detained and eventually charged after going to a local police station to inquire about a church employee who’d been arrested after a complaint from a member of a militant Hindu nationalist group regarding prayers being offered in a private home.
According to observers, local police were originally looking for the employee’s brother, who is also a Christian pastor, based on a complaint from a member of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad organization. Eventually four members of the family were arrested, and, when they phoned Father Sebastian Francis Babu for help, he too was taken into custody.
Bishop Gerald Mathias of Lucknow, the capital city of Uttar Pradesh, told Crux that the arrests amount to “sheer harassment of Christians.”
“The accusation of conversion is baseless,” Mathias said, ascribing the arrest of Babu to “sheer high-handedness of the police, who are simply under control of the right-wing BJP party.”
“The fundamentalists are going around as vigilantes to prevent even prayer meetings and worship of the faithful,” Mathias said. “Police simply arrest Christians without verifying facts, with no evidence just because someone has complained.”
Founded in 1980 though with roots in earlier Hindu nationalist movements, the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, stresses the importance of preserving and defending India’s Hindu identity, an ideology sometimes described by observers as a “saffron wave.” Since the party came to power under Modi in 2014, Christians and other religious minorities in India, especially Muslims, have complained of increasing harassment and marginalization.
This story was originally published in cruxnow.com. Read the full story here