By Omar Rashid
New Delhi: A Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) worker, his friend and two policemen – based on the testimonies of these four men, a court in Uttar Pradesh’s Azamgarh district has convicted three persons for the offence of “mass conversion” and sentenced them to undergo rigorous imprisonment of six years.
But as it turns out, nobody had his religion converted from Hindu to Christianity. In fact, the case did not have any actual independent witnesses.
“I didn’t convert. I would never do it. I am a Hindu. I will remain a Hindu,” Ashok Kumar Yadav (35), the Bharatiya Janata Party member on whose complaint the FIR in the case was lodged, told The Wire after the Azamgarh court’s judgment.
According to the Uttar Pradesh Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Act, 2021, mass conversion means the unlawful conversion of two or more persons through misrepresentation, force, undue influence, coercion, allurement or by any fraudulent means such as impersonation. It is punishable by a jail term of up to 10 years.
Prosecution produced only four witnesses
In Azamgarh, sessions judge Sanjeev Shukla convicted the three accused persons – Balchand Jaisawar, Gopal Prajapati and Neeraj Kumar – on September 26 for mass conversion, even though the case centered around allegations by Yadav that they had attempt to convert him to Christianity and when he refused, abused and threatened him.
This story was originally published in thewire.in. Read the full story here.