Two Christian women arrested for preaching Christianity

Bhopal: On April 16, police arrested two Christian women in the Jabalpur district of Madhya Pradesh for allegedly violating state laws on the preaching of Christianity.

They were arrested after police were informed that they were distributing pamphlets promoting Christianity.

“The women were distributing pamphlets telling people how they may overcome their problems by following the Bible,” said D Srinivas Rao, police chief of Jabalpur district in Madhya Pradesh state.

“Several other objectionalble pamphlets have also been seized from their possession,” an official said.

"According to the Madhya Pradesh Religious Freedom Act, anybody campaigning about his or her religion or organising religious functions needs to seek permission from the district collector. However, the offenders had not sought any permission," Rao said.

The women were identified as Mariamma Mathew, 36, and B. Godwil, 65.

The police acted on a tip–off from a youth who had received a pamphlet and approached them. The Madhya Pradesh Christian Association condemned the police action.

Anil Martin, general secretary of the body, said: "Christians in this state have been under pressure for long and such atrocities on them have increased under the BJP rule."

Christian activists said this was not an "isolated case of arrests" on the charge of forcible conversions. Since the BJP came to power some two and a half years ago, several such arrests, including that of a priest in the tribal dominated Jhabua district and a pastor in Indore town, have been made.

In state capital Bhopal, Christians were beaten up for allegedly holding a meeting to convert some children brought from outside the city, the activists said.

The Narendra Prasad Committee, set up by the state government to look into charges of conversions, said in its recent report that the Christian population in Jhabua district alone had gone up by 80 percent in the past two decades.

Indira Iyengar, president of the Madhya Pradesh Christian Association, has said the Christian community was being implicated in false cases.

Referring to the arrests in Jabalpur, Iyengar questioned how the two women were apprehended when senior police officials had said they were yet to ascertain whether there was anything objectionable in the pamphlets distributed by them.

ICC feels that, the real problem is that the Christian population is exploding and the radical BJP (Hindu nationalists) are threatened by this and are attempting to stop the spread of Christianity, hence the anti–conversion legislation passed by the BJP.

Christians make up less than 3% of India’s 1.1bn population, but some have been criticized for aggressively recruiting converts among the country’s major Hindu population.