Having a picture of Jesus Christ at home does not indicate conversion: High Court

The Bombay High Court’s Nagpur bench has ruled that a person’s conversion to Christianity is not indicated by the presence of a portrait of Jesus Christ in their home.

On October 10th, a 17-year-old girl’s petition contesting a September 2022 order given by the Amravati District Caste Certificate Scrutiny Committee rejecting her caste as “Mahar” was granted by a split bench of Justices Prithviraj Chavan and Urmila Joshi Phalke.The committee’s vigilance officer’s report must be rejected at the threshold since it is evident that the petitioner’s family practices Buddhism, according to the report.

Following an investigation by the committee’s vigilance cell, which revealed that the petitioner’s father and grandfather had become Christians and that a portrait of Jesus Christ was discovered on display in their home, the decision was made to invalidate her caste claim.

The committee had stated that since they became Christians, they fall under the heading of Other Backward Classes.

The teenager who filed the petition stated that they had recently hung the image of Jesus Christ in their home, which they claimed was a gift from someone.

In order to support the committee’s claim that the petitioner’s family had become Christians, the high court bench stated in its order that it could not find a single piece of evidence, either from the grandfather, the petitioner, or the father, proving that any of them had been baptized.

“No sane man will accept or believe that merely because there is a picture of Jesus Christ in the house, it would ipso facto mean that a person has converted himself to Christianity,” the judge stated.

“Baptism is a Christian sacrament by which one is received in church and sometimes given a name, generally involving the candidate being anointed with or submerged in water,” it stated.

The top court ruled that the vigilance cell officer’s assumption that the petitioner’s family practices Christianity was based solely on the fact that he saw a portrait of the Lord Jesus Christ during his visit to the petitioner’s home.

The petitioner’s family is obviously a Buddhist household, so the vigilance officer’s report should be thrown away at the threshold, as stated.

The petitioner cited the ‘Mahar’ caste certificates that her father, grandfather, and other blood relatives had previously received.

In addition, she had provided proof of her scheduled caste membership (‘Mahar’) by the submission of an excerpt from a pre-constitutional document.

The pre-constitutional document had been deemed “otiose” by the committee, according to the bench.

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“What more proof was required to be considered by the Committee, who appears to have turned a Nelson’s eye to this glaring document apart from three validity certificates that have already been granted by it in favor of blood relatives of the petitioner?” the court stated.