A Catholic priest in a small village in India’s Rajasthan State has lodged a complaint with police after his Mass was disrupted on Sunday by a group of some 50 people who accused him of engaging in forced conversion.
Father Rajesh Sarel told Crux he and his flock experienced intimidation and threats during Sunday Mass on December 14th in his church of St. Joseph in Bichhiwara village, Dungarpur District, Rajasthan.
“I descended from the altar – still vested – and went up to them as they were shouting and creating a ruckus,” Sarel said of the disruptors. “They questioned me,” he said, “asking why I was converting tribal people.”
Sarel told them no conversions were taking place.
“I told them clearly that we would continue our religious activities and that they had no right to stop us,” Sarel said, while his people “also began to speak up.”
“They said they were coming to the church of their own will to attend Mass,” Sarel told Crux, “and that no conversions were taking place.”
Church leaders say stringent anti-conversion laws have emboldened Hindu nationalists in Rajasthan and elsewhere.
“These instances have increased after passing of the anti-conversion bills in states like Rajasthan,” the Archbishop of Bangalore and vice-president of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India (CBCI) told Crux.
“Priests and religious are arrested and humiliated with false complaints of conversion, charging high fees in school,” and other similar things, Machado also said.
Bishop Devprasad Ganawa of Udaipur, Rajasthan, said police were present when the December 14 disruption took place, “but they were just onlookers, there was no manhandling, just commotion.”
The December 14 incident in Bichhiwara was just one of several similar incidents reported across India in recent weeks, including another on the same day in the Mirzapur district of Uttar Pradesh, in which police detained 10 Christians – several of them women – following a complaint from a local resident alleging violations of the anti-conversion law in that state.
Through the CBCI, the Catholic bishops of India are among several parties challenging Rajasthan State’s anti-conversion law in the nation’s supreme court, saying the law grants excessive and arbitrary powers to administrative authorities.
Religious minorities who are challenging the law won a procedural victory earlier this month when the Supreme Court raised constitutional questions over the law in question and asked the Rajasthan government to respond formally to a petition challenging the law’s constitutionality.
