By The Wire Staff
New Delhi: In a fresh twist to the arrest of two nuns from Kerala in Chhattisgarh, one of the women who they have been accused of converting to Christianity and thereafter trafficking, has told The Indian Express that she was “coerced to give an adverse statement against them.”
The arrest of the two Malayali nuns – Preeti Marry and Vandana Francis – along with another person, Sukhman Mandavi, by police at Durg railway station on July 24, based on the complaint of a local Bajrang Dal worker that they were forcibly converting three women from Narayanpur and were attempting to traffic them, has created a nationwide uproar, and also caused an attack on minority communities.
The Indian Express report said that one the three persons, a 21-one year old tribal woman, told the newspaper that she was “threatened and assaulted by Jyoti Sharma, a woman associated with a right-wing outfit, to change her statement, and the police based their FIR (First Information Report) on what members of the Bajrang Dal told them”.
The woman, who had returned to her home in Narayanpur on July 30 after spending five days at a shelter home in Durg, told the daily on phone, “Please release all three (the arrested accused), they are innocent.”
Recounting the sequence of events on July 24 that led to the arrest of the nuns at the Durg railway station, the woman said she had gone to the station to travel “with the nuns of her own will” and with her “parents’ consent.”
She alleged that “Sharma assaulted her”, and the Government Railway Police (GRP) in Durg “did not record her statement”.
Instead, she alleged, the police based the FIR on a statement given by Bajrang Dal members.
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