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.
During the course of the trial, the prosecution managed to produce only four witnesses. There were: Yadav (the complainant) himself; his friend Divyanshu Singh, who claimed to be an eyewitness; constable Kamal Kumar Yadav who drafted the FIR in the police station and sub-inspector Jagdish Prasad Vishwakarma, the investigation officer in the case.
In December 2020, just weeks after the Yogi Adityanath-led government in UP had brought in a new law, then in the form of an ordinance, against unlawful conversion, Yadav approached the Didarganj police station in Azamgarh and got an FIR lodged against the three accused persons.
Yadav alleged that Jaisawar, Prajapati and Kumar had visited the house of Tribhuvan Yadav, who lived in his native Dih Kaithauli village, with the intent of converting Hindus to Christianity. This was being done under the garb of a prayer meet, alleged Yadav.
On December 20, 2020 – it was a Sunday – at around 7 am Yadav said that he went to Tribhuvan Yadav’s house after he had found out they were going to hold a prayer meeting in the premises. He alleged that when he reached there, the accused persons asked him to join in the prayer and convert from Hinduism to Christianity.
When he refused, Yadav further claimed, the accused persons threatened and abused him. However, nowhere did Yadav mention what kind of pressure or monetary allurement they deployed in an attempt to get him converted.
Yadav claimed that the accused persons were rattled after he raised alarm and tried to escape from the spot but were caught by him and some neighbours. Police said they recovered a Bible and a document related to Christianity – Shri Mata’s New Lal Gulab exercise book – from the accused persons.
Jaisawar, Prajapati and Kumar were arrested by police and an FIR was lodged under sections 3 and 5 (1) of The Uttar Pradesh Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Act, 2021 and sections 504 (intentional insult of a person with the intent to provoke a breach of the peace) and 506 (criminal intimidation).
Jaisawar, a driver by profession, is a resident of Jaunpur, while Prajapati hails from Varanasi and Kumar, who worked as a construction labourer, is a native of Phoolpur area of Azamgarh.
During the trial, the district government counsel (criminal) argued that the accused persons had attempted to convert Yadav from Hindu religion to Christianity by using malpractices and misrepresentation.
Government lawyers cited judge’s statement that has been banned from citation by SC
What’s notable is that the state government lawyers reproduced the controversial statement made by an Allahabad High Court judge recently about conversions to Christianity causing the country’s Hindus to become a minority one day.
“If this process is allowed to be carried out, the majority population of this country would be in minority one day, and such religious congregation should be immediately stopped where the conversion is taking place and changing religion of citizen of India,” the state government counsels submitted, repeating the exact words used by Justice Rohit Ranjan Agarwal on July 1 when he rejected bail to a person accused in an unlawful conversion case.
The Supreme Court on September 26 – the same day on which the Azamgarh court pronounced its verdict – barred the usage and citation of the controversial remarks. The apex court also ordered that the observations made by Justice Agarwal “shall not be cited in any other case or proceeding in the High Court or in any other court.”
The accused persons submitted in the trial court that the case had been falsely lodged against them only for political gains and “cheap popularity.” Jaisawar and Prajapati even submitted their caste certificates as evidence that they were in fact Hindus and not Christians. Jaisawar is a Dalit while Prajapati belongs to an Other Backward classes community.
Back in 2021, when this reporter had spoken to Jaisawar and the family of Tribhuvan Yadav which had hosted him in Dih Kaithauli village, had strongly refuted the charges of unlawful conversion and said that they had not organized any such religious ceremony.
Tribhuvan Yadav worked as a security guard in Mau district. His family had told this reporter that they have invited Jaisawar and others to conduct a prayer service in their house for the wellness and peace of the family. It had nothing to do with the change of religion, they said.
It is not unusual in these parts of the country for people to belong to a Hindu community and be a Hindu on paper and yet attend prayer meetings and festivals dedicated to Jesus Christ and Christianity. Many such Hindu families who have ‘faith’ in the powers of Christ, invite ‘healers’ like Jaisawar to their homes on special occasions and listen to their sermons and stories. They however, do not officially convert to Christianity. It is in the context of these complicated religious beliefs, we must view the Azamgarh criminal case.
“Technical flaws”
A lawyer who provided legal help to the accused persons, talking to The Wire on the condition of anonymity, said there were several technical flaws in the Azamgarh court’s verdict. For instance, the lawyer said they were disturbed by the court’s decision to convict the accused persons for mass conversion, when the case itself was only about the allegations made by Yadav accusing them of trying to convert him and forcing him to repeat a Christian prayer.
In his verdict, Shukla concluded that the prosecution had proven beyond reasonable doubt that the accused persons had asked the complainant and others to convert their religion and pray.
The second point, the lawyer said, was that in his verdict Judge Shukla misrepresented Section 12 of the 2021 Act to put the burden of proof on the accused persons.
Section 12 of the 2021 Act says that the burden of proof as to whether a religious conversion was not effected through misrepresentation, force, undue influence, coercion, allurement or by any fraudulent means or by marriage, lies on the person who has caused the conversion.
In his verdict, judge Shukla said that while in general criminal jurisprudence, it is the prosecution that has to prove its case beyond reasonable doubt while the accused person is always presumed to be innocent. Citing section 12 of the UP unlawful conversion Act, Shukla said under this special law, the burden of proof was on the accused persons.
The lawyer for the accused persons strongly contested this view, arguing that section 12 would have been applicable had the victim, in this case, Yadav, actually converted his religion.
“The section says, ‘if such a conversion is effected’. When there was no actual conversion, the question of burden of proof does not arise,” the lawyer said.
The counsel for the accused persons also questioned the fact that though they were convicted for mass conversion, the prosecution did not produce any independent witnesses, relying only on the complaint, his friend and two policemen. Judge Shukla, in his 18-page judgment, touched upon this point and said that “in such cases, independent witnesses avoid supporting the prosecution story.”
“Somewhere in their minds, there is a hidden fear of their own and their family’s safety. It would also be relevant to mention, that the statement of police officers is to be burdened with distrust right from the beginning is not a fair approach (sic),” said Shukla.
The judge also took note of the defence counsel bringing up “some contradictory statements” of the complainant Yadav but said that “small contradictions in the statements of witnesses” prove that “he was not taught” and that he cannot be “expected to repeat memorised things like a parrot.”
Complainant former zila prachar pramukh of RSS, regional secretary of BJP
Ashok Yadav, who was a former zila prachar pramukh of the RSS and Gorakhpur regional secretary of the BJP when he had lodged the complaint, today says he is just a farmer. His Whatsapp display picture, however, still shows him in an undated photograph where he is bowing and touching the feet of Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath.
Yadav was quite ecstatic by the court’s verdict, saying it had validated his legal battle against the Christian missionaries “who target the poor sections” of the society to convert them through allurements. “I welcome this judgment,” he said.
When I asked him if he actually participated in the Christian prayer under any sort of pressure or renounced his faith, Yadav said, “I refused. I said, ‘I will not pray’. They were insisting that since I had entered the meeting I would also have to pray. They were conducting Christian prayers. Why would I pray when I am not a Christian,” asked Yadav.