Omar Rashid 
This is the third article in a series of reports on people who won their legal battles after being falsely charged under the anti-conversion laws brought in by BJP governments in Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Jharkhand. Part 1 | Part 2
New Delhi: It was meant to be a prayer service to celebrate a child’s birthday, but ended up landing three Dalit men in jail under a special law against religious conversion in Uttar Pradesh.
One of them was Durga Prasad*, 41. A resident of Amroha in western UP, Prasad and two other men were arrested in February 2023 after a member of the controversial extremist Hindutva outfit Bajrang Dal lodged a complaint against them for converting poor Hindus to Christianity using allurement. It was in Amroha that the UP recorded its first conviction in 2022 under the new law against unlawful conversions introduced in 2020. A Muslim man was sentenced to five years in jail for trying to marry a Hindu girl under a false identity by concealing his religion.
Bajrang Dal activist Kushal Chaudhary’s complaint against Prasad and two others was built on general and vague accusations. But it was enough for the police to lodge a First Information Report against them. The three men, all of whom belong to the Jatav Dalit community, were eventually cleared of all charges – but only after a 21-month-long uncertain legal battle. Last year, courts in Amroha trashed the allegations of unlawful religious conversion against them and acquitted them in a connected case of allegedly threatening Chaudhary.
A disrupted birthday party
The day was February 20, 2023. Prasad was visiting the house of a local resident, Azad Singh, for a prayer service, along with his associate Shiv Kumar. “We were in the village to attend a birthday party at Azad Kumar’s house. We were just leaving after eating when all of it happened,” Prasad told The Wire.
Right-wing activists associated with the Bajrang Dal stormed the event and created a ruckus. They accused Prasad and Kumar of trying to lure poor people in the neighbourhood to convert to Christianity by propagating misleading ideas and offering them allurements. An FIR was lodged on Chaudhary’s complaint. The three men were booked under Sections 3 and 5 (1) of the Uttar Pradesh Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Act, 2021.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.
It is common in many parts of the country for people, especially those from the marginalised castes, to continue living with their Hindu identity but attend prayer meetings, festivals and sermons dedicated to Jesus Christ and Christianity. They do not formally convert to Christianity but claim to have ‘faith’ in the powers of Christ, and invite ‘healers’ and ‘pastors’ to their homes on special occasions, Sundays and Tuesdays, and listen to their sermons and prayers. Many Dalits who commit to Jesus continue to live as Hindus and hold Hindu caste certificates, due to the fear that if they convert to Christianity they might lose their caste-based reservations and other entitlements that are not granted to Muslims and Christians of the same caste status.
These complex religious beliefs have been rampantly exploited by right-wing activists after the Bharatiya Janata Party government introduced the new law against conversions in 2020. These ‘third-party elements’ have intervened by force and illegally got cases under the law registered when they were not aggrieved by the alleged offence.
In his police complaint, Chaudhary, a resident of Dhakia village in Bachhrawan area of Amroha, said that on February 20, 2023 he happened to be in Shahpur Rajheda village where he had gone to meet some of his relatives along with two friends, Abhishek and Gaurav. Referring to Prasad and Kumar, he said that “some Christian missionaries” were conducting “changai prarthna” or healing prayer meetings at Azad Singh’s house. Out of curiosity, Chaudhary said, he went inside the premises and found that Durga Prasad and Kumar, who had come from a church in Hasanpur, were coaxing some local residents to give up Hinduism. They encouraged people to convert to Christianity and promised them that if they accepted the faith and “get into the service of Isa Masih”, their organisation would provide them with all kinds of financial and social assistance, and provide for the education of their children, health services and employment, alleged Chaudhary. “They told them that Isa Masih would cure all their ailments and provide them relief from their sufferings,” said Chaudhary.
An additional charge of criminal intimidation (Section 506 of the Indian Penal Code) was slapped against the three men as Chaudhary alleged that when he confronted them for trying to convert Hindus, they threatened him. Durga Prasad and Kumar spent less than two weeks in jail before being released on bail. Singh, their host, was granted bail after six weeks.
Prasad says the trouble started after one of Singh’s drunkard neighbours demanded liquor from him at the party. When he refused, an argument broke out between them. “The man then went and called someone from the Bajrang Dal, who filed a case against us,” said Prasad.
Since the right-wing activists were aware of their prayer meetings and programmes, Prasad feels that the ruckus provided them with a gateway to lodge false allegations of conversion. “They were lying in wait to pounce,” said Prasad, who used to run a school and manage prayers at a church in Hasanpur when the incident took place.
High court refused to quash case
The three men approached the Allahabad high court praying that the entire proceedings in the case against them, including the chargesheet and the summoning order of January 1, 2024, be quashed. Their lawyers informed the court that they had reached a compromise in the case on February 13, 2024 with the complainant when it was pending before the additional CJM.
A bench of Justice Prashant Kumar in March 2024 dismissed their application, observing that it was devoid of merit. “A perusal of the record showed that they were involved in unlawful conversion of the religion of the people of the area, which is a crime against the society and the said act of the applications cannot be compromised,” said the judge. Justice Kumar continued, “I do not find any reason to grant any indulgence to the applicants on the basis of alleged compromise, hence, the present application deserves to be dismissed.”
Also read: How the False Conversion Case Against This Dalit Labourer Fell Apart
Meanwhile, the three men filed an application under Section 227 of the Code of Criminal Procedure for discharge of the case in a local court. They believed that the case against them had no basis, and in court argued that Chaudhary was a politically active man who had falsely implicated them for political publicity. They also pointed out to the court that they belonged to the Jatav Dalit caste and were falsely being called Christians. They objected to the fact that Chaudhary had lodged the FIR in the case, since Section 4 of the 2021 Act says that only “any aggrieved person, his or her parents, brother, sister or any other person related to him or her by blood, marriage or adoption” would be considered competent to lodge a complaint.
The government counsel opposed their discharge application and defended Chaudhary’s right to lodge the complaint, saying that any citizen could register a complaint as the accused persons were offering allurements to convert people from the majority community.
On July 10, 2024, additional sessions judge Amroha Sanjay Chaudhary ruled in favour of Durga Prasad and others. Judge Chaudhary concluded that framing of the charges against the three men were not justified as per the law. The chargesheet filed against them was itself based on an “unlawful FIR”, noted the judge. The court found that there was no evidence suggesting that there was any allurement given to Chaudhary to convert, or even to prove that he was invited to the event.
The law is clear on ‘third party’ complainants
Judge Chaudhary, while providing relief to the accused persons, referred to two significant observations made by different benches of the Allahabad high court in 2023, clarifying that a person who was not aggrieved or related to an aggrieved person was not legally competent to lodge an FIR against unlawful conversion in the state. This has been a major point of controversy regarding the law, as ‘third-party elements’ continue to intervene and lodge cases against individuals from marginalised communities on the behalf of other alleged victims who, in most cases, don’t even exist.
On February 17, 2023, a high court division bench of Justices Anjani Kumar Mishra and Gajendra Kumar, hearing a petition filed by one Jose Prakash George and 36 others from Fatehpur, who were booked under the unlawful conversion law, ruled that the embargo under Section 4 of as to who can lodge an FIR under the offence of unlawful conversion (Section 3) was absolute. Two FIRs had been lodged against George and others in the same matter; one in January 2023 by an alleged victim of unlawful conversion and the second by an office-bearer of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad in April 2022. The FIRs related to an alleged offence of mass conversion.
Also read: A Dalit Mechanic in UP Spent 15 Months Fighting a False ‘Conversion’ FIR – and Won
The court ruled that the VHP activist was not a competent person to lodge the FIR. The court said that the phrase “any aggrieved person” was qualified by the subsequent categories and the words his, her parents, brother, sisters or blood relations by marriage and adoption included. “Therefore, the words ‘any aggrieved person’, if taken by themselves, are extremely wide. The scope of the said term is completely whittled down by subsequent categories and therefore, it has to be said that any aggrieved person would be a person but is personally aggrieved by his or her fraudulent conversion be it an individual or in a mass conversion ceremony. Any interpretation to the contrary would render the remainder of Section 4 after the words ‘any aggrieved person ‘ wholly redundant and also render the Section itself completely meaningless,” the bench said.
In another case, in the matter of Jose Papachen, Justice Shamim Ahmed in September 2023 ruled that BJP district secretary of Ambedkar Nagar district Chandrika Prasad, who had lodged the FIR on alleged unlawful conversion, was not a competent person to do so. In the FIR, Chandrika Prasad had alleged that Papachen and another person, a woman, were converting Dalit people through various inducements and allurements. Justice Ahmed said that the complainant had “no locus” to lodge the FIR as provided under Section 4 of the law. Judge Chaudhary used these references to decide Durga Prasad’s case, as it involved the same argument of the FIR itself being rendered illegal.
While discharging them from the case, the court said that it was clear that Kushal Chaudhary, the complainant, was not the one who was allegedly being pressured to convert to Christianity, and nor were any of his relatives being converted. Chaudhary, who was not even a resident of the village where Durga Prasad had gone, was not authorised to get the FIR lodged.
Winning a long legal battle
Durga Prasad denies the charge of converting people or deceiving them. He says he had been working in the service of Jesus Christ for over a decade because he felt a connection. “Ab anand hain, now jyoti, pehle andhkar tha (Now there is joy and light. Earlier, it was all darkness),” he said. Prasad defends people’s right to organise or attend such prayer meetings. “People come due to love and respect. Nobody is forced to attend these meetings,” he said, dismissing the allegations that they lure people to convert. “One can maintain a faith in anyone. The Constitution gives us the right to follow the faith we want.”
The criminal case disrupted his life and financial situation, as he ended up losing work. The legal woes did not end with the discharge of the application against unlawful conversion. For a while longer, the three men still faced charges under criminal intimidation, as the sessions court found it worthy of a trial. The prosecution produced only one witness against them – none other than Kushal Chaudhary, the Bajrang Dal activist and complainant in the case.
Civil judge junior division Naseem Ahmad noted major contradictions between Chaudhary’s statements made in his chief examination and cross examination. The judge ruled that the incident appeared to be doubtful. Chaudhary retracted his statement. In his chief examination affidavit, Chaudhary said that a social event was going on at Singh’s residence and that there was no instance of him being threatened. On November 21, 2024, judge Ahmad acquitted Durga Prasad, Singh and Kumar of the charges of criminal intimidation.
*Names changed to protect victims’ anonymity.