Why are some Hindu’s seemingly fearful of Christians?
Women arrested in India for preaching Christianity on Easter Sunday
Police arrested two women in central India on Easter Sunday for allegedly violating state laws on the preaching of Christianity, police said. “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 objectionable pamphlets have also been seized from their possession.” The official said that under a state law anyone planning to preach religion must get permission first from authorities. “The offenders had not sought any permission,” Rao said. The arrests are the latest in a series of similar moves by police in the state, where the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been in power for more than two years.
Last year the Madhya Pradesh government set up a panel to look into reports of what right-wing parties call “forced conversions”. The panel said in its report that in another state district, the Christian population had gone up by 80 percent in the past two decades. Christians make up just over two percent of India’s 1.1 billion population, but some have been criticised for aggressively recruiting converts among the country’s majority Hindu population. A Christian leader in the state said the group is a target of the BJP. **“Christians in this state have been under pressure for long and such atrocities on them have increased further under the BJP rule,” **said Anil Martin, general secretary of the Madhya Pradesh Christian Association. A BJP government in the western desert state of Rajasthan this month approved a law aimed at checking religious conversions, and the party has advocated a similar law nationwide.
