On 5th July 2026, a couple, identified as Abel Murmu and Sarodini Soren, forcibly entered Raju Bauri’s house in Gorsai village under the Barabazar police station area. Taking advantage of the illness of Bauri’s children, Murmu and Soren attempted to convert the family to Christianity.
According to the complaint filed by Bauri, the two accused were living in a rented house in a Purulia village. They started approaching his family after learning about his children’s illness and attempted to persuade them to change their religion by offering different inducements. Bauri bluntly refused to convert.
However, Bauri stated in his complaint that the duo forcibly entered his house carrying religious books and other material, restrained him and made his children touch a religious book while reciting prayers.
When he objected, the duo assaulted him and issued death threats. Hearing the noise, the villagers gathered outside his house and detained the couple until the police arrived. The couple was arrested based on Bauri’s complaint and presented before a Purulia district court, where they were granted bail. Chapter 1 accessed the FIR registered in the case.
Just two months after the incident, another house, this time more than 300 km away in the Sundarbans-facing Hingalganj area of North 24 Parganas, became the centre of similar accusations. These are not isolated cases and present a much larger picture of rampant conversions that have been taking place in the state of West Bengal for years.
Bengal has seen a rise in “house churches” over the past few decades. Missionary organisations have been openly flaunting dozens of such “house churches”. One Kolkata-based organisation has claimed to have established 1,200 of them. Another international mission flaunts tutorial centres for poor children as tools for evangelism.
An American church’s annual report mentions the infamous The Timothy Initiative (TTI) conducting church-planting training in West Bengal. There have been research papers documenting conversions among Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in Purba Medinipur and among Santals. Several media reports from Bengal’s tribal belt state that families themselves admit to moving to Christianity, and sometimes later returning to Hindu practices, during periods of illness, poverty and dependence on outside support.
There is enough material available which, when seen together, presents a picture of a distinct network of churches and missionaries that may not be connected to each other but may be working towards the same goal in West Bengal, that is, to convert Hindus and other communities to Christianity. The question here is how deeply the house-church and church-planting models have rooted themselves in West Bengal, how they work, and whether Bengal is showing signs of patterns that have been visible in Punjab, where such house churches have led to mass conversions of marginalised communities.
On 2nd September 2026, tensions erupted around a house in Sandelerbil in Hingalganj of North 24 Parganas district. Local residents stated that the property was being used as a base to convert tribal Hindus and other marginalised residents to Christianity. Hindu Jagran Manch workers reached the area after the allegations surfaced, and police subsequently arrived and took people from the house to the police station for questioning.
Speaking to the media, neighbours said that the property looked like an ordinary family home. However, there were a number of small rooms with beds, and visitors from Kolkata, other parts of the state and foreign countries frequently visited. Hindu Jagran Manch member Sushobhan Das demanded action and said the organisation would continue its protest. The investigation into the matter is underway.
In another case, Hindu Jagran Manch busted another house church and accused a woman named Rina Mondal of using a Christian school in Rupmari market for conversion activities over several years. The Hindu organisation staged a protest outside the institution and demanded that it be shut down.
These cases have not appeared in isolation. In neighbouring districts, Christian prayer gatherings in houses had already become a subject of dispute among locals.
On 23rd August, around 60 men and women were gathered in a rented house in Uluberia, Howrah. According to media reports, a Christian group managed by Pastor Mithun Hazra had rented the house for its prayer meetings every Sunday. Members of the Hindu organisation Singha Bahini learnt about the prayer meetings and reached the premises. They accused the pastor of indulging in forced conversions. The pastor claimed that the attendees were assaulted and the property was damaged.
Speaking to the media, president of Singha Bahini Debdutta Majhi said that his organisation believed forced conversions involving monetary inducements were taking place in Uluberia and other areas. His organisation has been protesting against these activities, demanding a curb on them.
West Bengal Tribal Development and Minority Affairs Minister Kshudiram Tudu said people were free to pray, but added that if forced conversion was taking place, the law would take its course.
Two days after the Uluberia incident, another house church was busted by Hindu organisations. According to media reports, Pastor Suraj Saroj of Church of the Grace was running a house church in Ghusuri, Howrah. Based on a complaint by Hindu organisations, Suraj was detained by the police for questioning about the church, funding and credentials.
On 26th August, another prayer meeting was being held inside a house at Check Milepost village in Purba Medinipur. Hindu organisations accused Pastor Joy Sutradhar of forcibly converting marginalised Hindus. Based on their complaint, Sutradhar and his wife were detained by the police and taken to the police station for questioning. They were released after their lawyers intervened. A cross-complaint was filed from the pastor’s side, which was confirmed by Herod Mullick of Bangiya Christiya Pariseba.
These reports follow the standard pattern seen in conversion networks of Christian organisations in other parts of the country, including Punjab and Uttar Pradesh.
The “house church” model is not something that is hiding in plain sight. Christian organisations have been flaunting them for decades. Kolkata Christian Fellowship’s website currently lists nine house churches in North 24 Parganas. The organisation claims that its partners in those house churches minister to around 550 children. It separately lists eight house churches across Howrah, South 24 Parganas and Midnapore, alongside work involving around 200 children. It also lists churches and outreach in Sonarpur, Madhyamgram and North Bengal.
Those numbers are modest compared with what another mission reported in 2023. Evangelical Friends Mission said its West Bengal operation had 23 churches and around 60 house churches. Its own prayer letter said the ministry worked among Bengali, Santali, Muslim and Dalit communities and in a red-light area. The organisation said its ministry in Bengal was expanding each year.
A more detailed update from the same organisation broke the network down further. It reported eight Bengali-speaking churches and 33 house churches among Bengali Hindus. In Murshidabad and Nadia, it listed three churches and five house fellowships among people from Muslim backgrounds. In North and South 24 Parganas, it reported three churches and 11 house churches among Dalit communities. In Malda, it claimed five churches and 23 house churches among Santals.
This is not an outside organisation labelling ordinary Christian homes as churches. The missionary organisation itself describes them as house churches and house fellowships, and identifies the communities among whom they operate.
Behala Human Care Mission, based in Joka, Kolkata, goes much further. It describes itself as an “indigenous and inter-denominational church planting and mission organization” formed in 1994 with a vision to reach Bengalis. Its website claims that it has trained 5,000 pastors, 9,000 children’s workers and established 1,200 house churches since its formation.
Its future-plan page is equally explicit about where different activities sit within the organisation’s work. Under “Church”, its goal is a church in every community and the Gospel for every person. It also separately lists development work, education for poor and needy people, health awareness for villagers and slum dwellers, disaster relief and leadership training based on Christian teaching.
By this point, one part of the picture becomes clear that the house-church model in Bengal is neither a new term nor a theory invented around the recent disputes. Christian organisations themselves describe establishing and supporting such networks.
The next question is how people are brought into them.
In a 2023 report, Evangelical Friends Mission said that it operated five tutorial centres in poor village churches. Two were in Malda among Santals, one in Nazat among Dalits, one in Shyamnagar among Hindus and another in Murshidabad among Muslims. More than 200 children were receiving educational assistance, according to the mission. Along with their school lessons, the children were being taught Christian material and songs.
The report then explains the purpose in its own words. The mission calls the tutorial centres “very good tools for evangelism”. It says children and their parents are invited to prayers and church programmes and that people have come into the Christian faith through the centres.
The same document names Seed Welfare Society as the mission’s “sister organisation”. According to to EFM, Seed works with poor and orphaned children, while EFM Kolkata was providing Christian teaching to 56 children staying in a hostel. The report also describes work among women associated with a red-light area and says 11 women had joined the Christian faith through that ministry.
The document clearly shows that education and welfare overlap with evangelisation. That becomes more important when another kind of network enters the picture, organisations whose stated purpose is not merely worship or charity, but planting new churches.
In the annual report of Wooddale Church, a US-based church, one page from 2016 stands out. Under the heading “Wooddale Asia 2016, The Timothy Initiative”, the report carries a photograph of men at a training session. The accompanying text says it was a West Bengal training and that the participants received a new leadership-training manual. On the same page, Wooddale Asia listed its three objectives: develop leaders, train church planters and plant new churches.
The report says 3,644 church planters were trained and 945 churches planted during 2016, with 4,725 new believers across Asia. While the figures were not Bengal-specific, the report does prove that The Timothy Initiative’s church-planting training had reached West Bengal by 2016.
The Timothy Initiative, or TTI, is equally clear about the model it follows. TTI, which is facing legal consequences for attempting to fund evangelism while bypassing the FCRA, has been active in several parts of the country for decades.
Its current mission is to multiply disciples and “disciple making churches”, while its stated vision is “a church in every village, everywhere”. Its history says that its core training material was developed with the expectation that each disciple would plant a church by the end of the training. TTI says that local believers are trained to establish churches within their own communities.
TTI has since come under the scanner of the Enforcement Directorate in India. In an official statement on 24th April 2026, the ED said it conducted searches at six locations in several states as part of a FEMA investigation concerning activities associated with TTI and people connected with it. The agency alleged that foreign debit cards linked to Truist Bank in the United States were brought into India and repeatedly used to withdraw money from ATMs, with the cash then used for expenses connected with TTI activities. The ED said TTI was not FCRA registered. OpIndia’s detailed reporting on TTI can be checked here.
A recent study from Purba Medinipur takes the story closer to the people converting. Soumi Dey, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Bidhannagar College, spent April to June 2024 studying Christian conversion among marginalised Hindus in Purba Medinipur. Twenty-five people participated in the ethnographic study and ten were interviewed in depth. The paper was published in June 2026.
One finding is particularly relevant to the stories emerging from Bengal today. Dey found that health crises often became the starting point. People facing illness or distress sought new spiritual options. From there could come Christian prayer, deeper contact with a congregation, conflict with family or community, baptism and eventual integration into a new religious group.
While the sample size mentioned in the paper was small, the process it records matters. Illness, prayer and entry into a Christian congregation are not merely claims appearing in a political speech. They appear in interviews with converts studied by an anthropologist in the same district that has since appeared repeatedly in disputes around Christian prayer gatherings.
Dey also found that conversion did not always produce an immediate, neat break with the old social identity. Some converts continued negotiating between earlier Hindu practices and their new Christian life, particularly when complete separation could lead to ostracism. That question becomes important later when official Census identity is compared with actual religious practice.
A 2024 paper by Jogendranath Murmu, Assistant Professor in the Department of Santali at the University of Burdwan, looked at Christianity among Santals in West Bengal. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, it recorded changes in religious practices, social structures and cultural identity after conversion, while also finding that some Santal practices survived inside newer Christian identities.
Long before those papers were written, families in Birbhum were describing remarkably similar journeys to reporters.
In January 2015, The Times of India travelled through the stone-quarry belt of Birbhum while reports of conversion and ghar wapsi were emerging.
In Bhatina, Bahaputi Hembram told the newspaper that her father had fallen ill around a decade earlier and the family did not have money for treatment. They approached a Don Bosco church around six kilometres away. Hembram said a priest assured them of help and wanted the family to embrace Christianity. The family became Christian. Her father died within a year. The family later returned to Hindu practices and began performing Kali Puja at home.
The priest, Father Agapit Minze of Don Bosco School, gave his version of how people entered the church. He claimed people came voluntarily. He acknowledged that some of them came with immediate needs such as education for their children. He said the church scrutinised prospective converts, had their children trained and baptised them after they were considered ready.
A VHP leader quoted by the media accused Christian organisations of using facilities to attract tribal residents. Sunil Soren of Birbhum Adivasi Gaota separately stated that Baropahari Christian Mission extended facilities only to Christians, while also saying his organisation opposed reconversion and wanted Santals to preserve their own culture.
Don Bosco Church at Baropahari told The Indian Express in January 2015 that it worked among tribal communities in 73 villages spread across four panchayat areas. According to church records cited by the newspaper, at least 164 families had converted to Christianity in the previous two years.
Father Agapit Minj explained the process to the newspaper. The church first asked people to begin attending services and sent their children to schools and hostels. He said that baptism followed when the church considered them spiritually and mentally convinced. Whatever view one takes of that method, the important point is that the figure of 164 converted families came from the church’s own records, not from the VHP or another group opposing conversion, which makes the accusations of forced conversion more authentic.
The reason the records became public was a ghar wapsi programme in which around 17 Christian families and two Muslim families were reported to have undergone Hindu rituals. Police later registered separate cases against VHP leaders Pravin Togadia and Jugal Kishore. A senior police officer told The Indian Express that one case related to an allegedly communal speech and the other involved allegations of hate speech and use of force against tribal people.
Notably, this was not the first time Bengal saw a “Ghar Wapsi” programme. By then, Malda and Birbhum had already seen such programmes for more than a decade.
A US State Department report on religious freedom recorded a VHP claim that 42 tribal Christians were reconverted in Malda in 1999. It also recorded reports that 245 tribal people, most of them Christians, were reconverted in Birbhum in February 2000. Interestingly, these numbers came from organisations and not from a state register of conversions.
In April 2005, The Telegraph reported another programme at Popra in Malda. 102 people from 45 tribal families were reported to have returned from Christianity to Hinduism at a ceremony organised under the banner of the Akhil Bharatiya Sanatan Santhal Samaj. The report said five families had gone to court to make affidavits concerning their decision.
In April 2008, The Times of India reported another ceremony at Habibpur in Malda involving 19 tribal Christians from six families. VHP leaders said at the time that the programme was part of a broader reconversion effort in the Malda-Dinajpur Adivasi belt.
More than a decade later, Bengali newspaper Anandabazar Patrika travelled through Habibpur during the 2021 Assembly election and found the marks of this religious churn still visible on village walls. Its reporter described houses carrying faded crosses alongside newly painted Om or lamp symbols. One man, Sitaram Oraon, told the newspaper that he had become Hindu again two years earlier but had never removed a cross pendant hanging from his vehicle. Another villager, Francis Khokon Hansda, had dropped “Francis” from his name and begun attending weekly Hari Sabha and kirtan, although the cross his father had painted on their house remained.
The RSS functionary accompanying the reporter said his organisation had been working for years on ghar wapsi among tribal residents. The newspaper also noted that missionaries had been active in the area for a long time and had undertaken development work in villages, which can be seen as an attempt to lure marginalised communities living there.
Malda is particularly important because it appears on both sides of the timeline. It featured repeatedly in ghar wapsi reports from the late 1990s onwards. Then, in 2023, Evangelical Friends Mission said its biggest West Bengal group was its Santal ministry in Malda, where it claimed to operate five churches and 23 house churches. The recurrence of Malda in conversion, reconversion and present-day house-church records makes it one of the districts that needs closer examination.
The conversion debate has now reached the West Bengal government. In August 2026, Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari said his government was planning legislation against religious conversion. Speaking in Bankura, he specifically referred to the Jangalmahal belt covering Purulia, Bankura and Jhargram. Adhikari said the government had seen a trend of conversion involving foreign funds and people in poor economic conditions and said it needed to be stopped. That was the Chief Minister’s assessment, not the finding of a court or completed investigation.
But Jangalmahal is not a random geography for such a statement. Christian missionary engagement with the tribal belt has a long-documented history. A 2026 research paper by Madhumita Setua of Midnapore College and Sajijul Islam of Srikrishna College examined Christian missionary involvement in healthcare among tribal communities of the Jungle Mahals during the twentieth century. The study looked at missionary work among groups including Santals, Bhumij, Mundas, Koras, Mahalis and Lodhas and traced how missions entered areas where healthcare and state services were weak.
The historical paper gives context to why the south-western tribal belt repeatedly appears in conversion debates, from older missionary work to modern ghar wapsi programmes and the Purulia criminal complaint that opened this story.
There is an even older Bengal story that has resurfaced in discussions around modern conversion. On 25th November 1800, a carpenter named Krishna Pal dislocated his arm in Serampore. Dr John Thomas, a Baptist missionary and physician, treated him. Missionary accounts preserved by William Carey University’s Carey Center say Thomas and Joshua Marshman spoke to Pal about Christianity, and that William Carey baptised him in the Hooghly on 28th December 1800. Pal later became a preacher himself.
Another history of the Serampore mission records that Thomas was called specifically to set Pal’s dislocated arm and used the encounter to speak to him about Christian doctrine. Pal continued meeting the missionaries afterwards. Missionary literature later treated his baptism as a major breakthrough after years in which Carey and his colleagues had failed to secure an Indian convert.
The earlier evidence of luring vulnerable Hindus to convert to Christianity has been repeated over and over again to date. Illness and poverty have always been a target for missionaries to lead people to conversion. The case of Krishna Pal shows how healthcare, language, education and evangelisation became intertwined very early in Bengal’s Protestant missionary history. Two centuries later, some modern organisations’ own records again show education, welfare and evangelism operating side by side, although through very different institutions and under a completely different legal system.
West Bengal’s official Christian population remains small as a share of the state. But between the last two religion Censuses, it grew considerably faster than the state population as a whole.
The 2001 Census recorded 5,15,150 Christians in West Bengal. The state’s total population was 8,01,76,197. By 2011, the Christian population had increased to 6,58,618, while West Bengal’s total population reached 9,12,76,115.
That works out to an increase of about 27.8 per cent in the Christian population, compared with roughly 13.8 per cent growth in West Bengal’s total population. Christians consequently went from around 0.64 per cent of the state population in 2001 to about 0.72 per cent in 2011.
Among the districts repeatedly appearing in conversion, house-church and ghar wapsi reports, and whose boundaries remained comparable between the 2001 and 2011 Censuses, the Christian population increased across the board. In Malda, it rose from 8,388 to 13,209, an increase of about 57.5 per cent, while Birbhum recorded a rise from 7,382 to 10,906, or 47.7 per cent.
In Howrah, the number increased from 6,284 to 8,666, about 37.9 per cent, while North 24 Parganas saw an increase from around 20,500 to 26,933, about 31 per cent. Bankura recorded an increase from 3,018 to 3,865, around 28.1 per cent, followed by South 24 Parganas, where the Christian population rose from 52,835 to 66,498, about 25.9 per cent. In Purulia, it increased from 7,008 to 8,646, around 23.4 per cent, while Nadia recorded a comparatively smaller rise from 29,563 to 33,835, about 14.5 per cent. Purba Medinipur, Paschim Medinipur and Jhargram have been excluded from this comparison because their district boundaries changed between or after the two Census exercises.
While the numbers include births, deaths and migration, apart from people changing religion, they do give us a measurable starting point. Another aspect of the numbers is that those who convert to Christianity do not always change their name and religion on government records. It is next to impossible to determine how many people have converted between two Census exercises.
However, the Census religion tables are available down to district, sub-district and town level. They provide a base structure to determine where the Christian population grew and by how much. They give an overview of the areas that overlap with the districts now appearing in house-church records, missionary reports, conversion complaints and ghar wapsi histories.
North and South 24 Parganas, Malda, Nadia, Purba and Paschim Medinipur, Bankura, Purulia and the Jhargram belt therefore need to be analysed separately rather than hidden inside a statewide figure.
There is, however, a large hole in the data. The latest available religion Census is from 2011. The missionary records describing dozens of house churches are considerably newer. Whatever has happened during the past 15 years will not be visible in those religion tables.
There are fewer Bengal court judgments directly involving Christian conversion than the public debate might suggest. But one Calcutta High Court judgment offers an unusual window into how such a dispute had entered a family in Paschim Medinipur more than a decade ago.
Budhi Murmu disappeared in June 2014. Her body was found in a pond. Her brother subsequently lodged a written complaint and an FIR was registered at Kharagpur Police Station under Sections 498A, 302, 201 and 34 of the IPC. The prosecution alleged that Budhi wanted to convert to Christianity and that her husband, Biru Murmu, opposed her decision. This was presented as a possible motive for her murder.
The court record showed that Christianity had already reached the extended family. One of Biru Murmu’s brothers had converted. Budhi’s brother testified that the couple had quarrelled over her desire to convert. Another witness from the husband’s family also spoke about the conversion issue. Other family members, however, attributed the marital conflict to drinking, refusal to work and demands for money.
When the High Court examined the case in 2025, it did not accept the conversion motive as clearly proved. The Bench said the prosecution case on motive was divided and it remained unclear whether the marital disputes arose from Budhi’s wish to convert or from her husband’s other behaviour. The conviction was ultimately set aside because the prosecution’s case had wider evidentiary weaknesses.
While the case involved a family dispute that led to an unfortunate death, it is useful for a different reason. A desire to convert to Christianity had become significant enough within one Paschim Medinipur family to appear in an FIR, witness statements, a murder prosecution and, eventually, a Calcutta High Court judgment.
In February 2017, the Evangelical Fellowship of India recorded a case involving Pastor Chandra, who ran Crown of Life Ministries Church and an orphanage in Supur village of Bankura. According to EFI’s account, a couple complained that child trafficking and forced conversion were taking place in the orphanage. The Child Welfare Committee and local police subsequently took custody of 12 children living there. EFI called the allegations false.
A year later, another investigation pointed towards a Christian-run facility in Bengal. In December 2018, Dhenkanal SP Santosh Nayak said Odisha Police had received information that religious conversion of inmates might be taking place at a Good News India shelter home in Salgadia, West Bengal. He said police intended to send a team to Bengal to verify the information.
Police were examining video footage of a baptism ritual and said there were indications it might have been recorded at the Bengal facility rather than at the NGO’s Odisha homes. The SP also said Good News India was registered in West Bengal and received substantial overseas funding.
Punjab offers a picture of what a decentralised Christian ecosystem can look like when it becomes much more visible.
In April 2026, The Indian Express travelled through Punjab’s newer Christian ministries. At Sadiq village in Faridkot, it found independent pastor Barkat Singh running Ishwar Satya Bhawan from a hall that was part of his house. Around 50 followers attended the congregation, according to Singh. The village had four churches, three Roman Catholic and one belonging to his independent ministry.
Elsewhere in Punjab, the scale is far larger. Independent pastors have built congregations around preaching, music and claims of miraculous healing. The report described buses, autos and tractor-trolleys carrying families to Ankur Narula’s large gathering at Khambra near Jalandhar.
Punjab also exposed a demographic problem that an ordinary Census comparison cannot easily solve. People can attend Christian congregations and consider Christianity their faith without necessarily changing their religion on official records. In 2022, an OpIndia investigation had already examined this problem through Christian leaders and churchgoers who spoke about Christians continuing to be counted officially under their old religious or caste identities. The April 2026 Indian Express ground report again found a Christian landscape considerably more complex than the 2011 Census figure alone would suggest.
This is where the Bengal parallel becomes worth testing. Bengal has Christian organisations openly reporting house churches among Bengali Hindus, Dalits, Santals and people from Muslim backgrounds. It has an international organisation documenting church-planter training in the state. A Bengal mission openly describes educational centres as tools for evangelism. Academic work from Purba Medinipur records illness and prayer as stages in some conversion journeys. Birbhum church records showed 164 families converting within two years across a mission covering 73 villages. Ghar wapsi reports show that religious movement among tribal families has been continuing for decades.
However, the scale at which conversions have been happening and documented in Punjab is lacking in the case of Bengal. But it does not mean large-scale conversions are not happening in Bengal. With whatever material is available, it would not be an exaggeration to say that Bengal is indeed moving fast on the path that Punjab walked over the years.
Some of the machinery visible in Punjab is also visible in Bengal, including small home-based congregations, local pastors and church planters, faith and healing as points of entry, missionary outreach among economically vulnerable communities, and religious practices that may be harder to measure than formal affiliation.
While a single prayer meeting inside a house does not show the bigger picture, when the available records are put together, the Bengal story becomes considerably larger.
In North 24 Parganas, residents and Hindu Jagran Manch have alleged conversion activity from a house in Hingalganj. In Purulia, a written complaint alleging attempts to convert a family led to two arrests and a court appearance. Christian organisations themselves report house churches across North and South 24 Parganas, Howrah, Midnapore, Malda, Nadia and Murshidabad.
One of those organisations says it operates around 60 house churches. Another claims to have established 1,200 over three decades. A mission working among Bengali Hindus, Santals, Dalits and Muslims openly says tutorial centres for poor children are useful for evangelism. The Timothy Initiative’s own partner report shows church-planter training taking place in West Bengal.
In Purba Medinipur, researchers have documented Hindu-to-Christian conversion and found illness to be one of the recurring starting points. In Birbhum, Don Bosco’s own records showed 164 families converting in just two years across 73 villages. In Malda, reports of conversion and ghar wapsi stretch back more than two decades, while missionary records now show a substantial network of Santal house churches there.
The Census adds another question rather than answering it. West Bengal’s Christian population grew by about 27.8 per cent between 2001 and 2011, almost twice the rate of the state’s population growth. But the Census cannot tell us how much of that increase came from conversion, and data since 2011 are still missing. Another gap concerns those individuals who do not change their religion on official records.
All these cases simply cannot be joined into one central conspiracy. While Kolkata Christian Fellowship, Evangelical Friends Mission, Behala Human Care Mission, The Timothy Initiative, Don Bosco and the pastors appearing in local disputes may not all be part of one organisation or programme, some may have connections with each other and might be working together behind the curtains.
The BJP-led state government is planning to bring in a law against forced conversion. Hindu organisations are working extensively against forced conversions in their respective areas. But is that enough? Larger “prayer meetings”, often known as “changai sabhas” in Punjab, are missing in Bengal so far. However, the house churches that have sprung up in the state do raise alarm among local Hindu activists, as these are the places where initial conversion activities take place before taking a massive and uncontrollable form.
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