Calls have been made for Prime Minister Narendra Modi to guarantee religious free-dom after the Indian elections saw a land-slide victory for the nationalist BJP.
Attacks on Christians have more than doubled since the BJP came to power in 2014. An attitude appears to hold that to be Indian is to be Hindu – and that minorities, including Christians, are not to be tolerated.
Gornath Chalanseth, one of seven Christians jailed for life for the murder of a Hindu man in 2008, was freed on bail by India’s Supreme Court on 21 May.
Gornath said: ‘I happy with my free-dom but there are other innocents in jail.’ Chalanseth thanked God for his freedom saying ‘my joy has no words’. After greeting his family, Chalanseth was ushered into a nearby church and shouted his thanksgiving, tears of joy running down his cheeks.
Like Joseph
‘I found solace in prayer. Prayer gave me peace of mind and I always remained disciplined in the jail’, Gornath said. Impressed by his conduct, jail officials made him ‘wall guard’ to watch over 40 prisoners in jail. As the news of the bail from the Supreme Court came, the jail chief asked Gornath: ‘How will we find a replacement for you as wall guard?’
Background
He, along with six others, was convicted to life imprisonment by the third judge on their case, after the first two had been trans-ferred away from it. Nearly 100 Christians were killed, and 300 churches and 6,000 Christian homes damaged in the Kandhamal district of Odisha, after the killing of Swami Laxmanananda Saraswati in August 2008.
A website devoted to the seven Christians claims that they were convicted on the basis of a fabricated conspiracy theory as little cred-ible evidence was brought before the court.
