Raipur: The general perception is that people embracing Christianity in Chhattisgarh have been on the rise. Missionaries and other organizations are playing a key role in carrying out religious conversions in different parts of the state. What is the ground reality? Is it merely a political issue blown out of proportion? Arun Pannalal, president of Chhattisgarh Christian Society, tries to analyse this while talking to ETV Bharat.
Pannalal said that Christian community was in no way involved in religious conversions in the tribal dominated Bastar region of the state. "Whenever election draws closer, political parties rake up 'forced religious conversions' issue. But the fact is that the tribal community does not belong to any religion, they are the nature worshippers. Even then we were held responsible and subjected to harassment by authorities for indulging in religious conversions," he said.
Read: Uttarkashi people on boil over religious conversion, stage protest
"Anyways we are totally fed up with both the political parties, Congress and BJP. We stood with Congress for the past seventy years. They (Congress) don't need our 12 lakh votes. So we will rethink, whom to give our precious votes. We don't want to waste our vote any longer," Pannalal added.
Delving into demographic data, Pannalal explains that a previous internal census showed two lakh twenty-five thousand people were Roman Catholics. "If we talked about surveys conducted by the mainstream churches then we had one lakh twenty-five thousand faithfuls. Whereas polls conducted by para-churches we found nine lakh voters. This shows the strength of the community," he said.
Pannalal further said that overall Christian population in Chhattisgarh was stated to be around twelve lakh seventy-five thousand. "If we take constituency wise profiling then four districts in north Chhattisgarh where 100 percent votes belonged to the Christian community and their vote matters the most in the winning chances of a candidate."
Explaining the figure more elaborately, he said, "In about twelve Bastar seats in the tribal dominated areas of Chhattisgarh, Christian vote plays an important role. Christian vote ranging from 12,000 to 60,000 in these areas is of utmost importance for a candidate to secure victory. Besides, the four seats in north Chhattisgarh where Christian community vote plays the role of a gamechanger."
