India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi (center) along with Chief Minister of Assam Himanta Biswa Sarma (center left) waves to Bharatiya Janata Party supporters during a public rally in Guwahati, Assam on Feb 4, 2024. (Photo: AFP)
A Christian group has decried the arrest of two US nationals on charges of religious conversion in a northeastern Indian state on Jan. 31.
The allegation that John Matthew Boone and Michael James Flinchum "indulged in religious conversion is baseless and there is no truth in it,” Allen Brooks, spokesman of the Assam Christian Forum, told UCA News on Feb. 5.
Police in eastern Assam state detained Boone and Flinchum on Jan. 31 for participating in a religious meet while in India on a tourist visa in Assam’s Sonitpur district.
According to the police, they were present at the inauguration of a Baptist Christian association. India's visa rules prohibit people on tourist visas from engaging in other activities.
“The building itself is incomplete. So, we have to say that they had come for conversion activities,” Madhurima Das, assistant police superintendent in Sonitpur, told the media after the arrest.
Brooks denied the allegations. “It was not a prayer service. It was the inauguration of an office building.”
The spokesman said that the US nationals were invited as guests and there was a prayer service before the lunch.
“That [prayer service] might have been mistaken for religious conversion by the state administration,” ruled by the pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, he observed.
Assam state, bordering Bangladesh and Myanmar, is headed by Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma whose government is against conducting missionary activities among the state’s tribal and socially poor Dalit people, who are grouped under Hinduism in India's Census.
At a recent function in Assam's Dibrugarh district Sarma stressed the need for protecting “indigenous faiths” from missionary activities.
Missionary activities can "result in a decline" in the tribal population, Sarma said on Jan. 30.
A fine of US$500 each was imposed on 64-year-old Boone and 77-year-old Flinchum and released on Jan. 31, Das said.
Indian news outlets said that the US nationals will be deported soon.
Groups affiliated with the BJP are claiming that foreign Christian missionaries visit India’s seven northeastern states, known for their diverse indigenous population, as tourists to propagate Christianity by flouting visa norms.
In October 2022, seven German and three Swedish nationals were detained in Assam for allegedly conducting missionary activities.
Christian missionaries reached India’s northeast in 1626. In 1819, ruling Britain encouraged Christian missionary work to protect peace in the region.
The region is now divided into seven states and Christians are a majority in three states -- Nagaland, Mizoram, and Meghalaya. The other four states are Assam, Manipur, Tripura and Arunachal Pradesh.
Since coming to power in 2014, Modi’s BJP has been running a nationwide campaign to prevent religious conversion.
Brooks said missionaries serve work "for all, irrespective of faith” primarily through their educational and health care facilities.
“If there were religious conversions in Christian institutes, former Assam Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal and many others who studied in missionary schools would have become Christians.”
