One of the three women whom two nurses from Kerala have been accused of targeting, allegedly to carry out forcible religious conversion, told The Indian Express that she was coerced by a person associated with a Hindutva group into giving an adverse statement.

The nuns – Preeti Mary and Vandana Francis – were arrested at the Durg railway station on Saturday along with a man, identified as Sukhman Mandavi. The first information report against them was registered based on a complaint by a member of the Hindutva group Bajrang Dal, reported The Indian Express on Thursday.

The two nuns and Mandavi were accompanying three women from Chhattisgarh’s Narayanpur district. Sebastian Poomattam, vicar general of the Raipur Archdiocese, said that the nuns were taking the women to Agra, where they had been offered jobs as kitchen helpers at a convent.

“Please release all three [two nuns and Mandavi], they are innocent,” one of the three women told The Indian Express.

The woman alleged that she had been threatened and assaulted by Jyoti Sharma, who is associated with a Hindutva group, to give a false statement against the nuns, the newspaper reported.

“They took us to the railway police station,” the woman was quoted as saying by The Indian Express. “Jyoti Sharma hit me twice on the face. She said that if you do not follow what we say, we will put your siblings in jail and assault them.”

She added: “They wanted us to say that we were brought here forcibly.”

The woman said she had told Sharma that she came to the railway station on her own will and with the consent of her parents.

“I said this inside the police station in the presence of two to three policemen,” she said.

She added that the Government Railway Police did not record her statement and instead filed the FIR against the three nuns.

The three women had been sent to a government-run shelter home after the arrests. The woman who spoke to The Indian Express returned to her home in Narayanpur district on Wednesday after spending five days at the facility in Durg.

Rishi Mishra, the Bajrang Dal’s Chhattisgarh coordinator, said that Sharma was part of the Vishva Hindu Parishad’s women’s wing Durga Vahini.

The Bajrang Dal and the Vishva Hindu Parishad are among Hindutva groups led by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the parent organisation of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

Sharma was quoted by The Indian Express as describing herself as a “Hindutvawadi who appears wherever Hindutva needs saving”.

When asked about the allegation that she had hit one of the women, Sharma told The Indian Express: “I did not touch any of them.”

Sharma claimed that she only met the women inside the police station. “Will the police allow me to touch them?” the newspaper quoted her as saying. “I am hearing this for the first time: earlier, they were saying I beat a nun, which is false.”

She added that she learnt that the women were at the railway station when “one of the workers” called her and said that a woman on platform number 1 was crying and wanted to go home.

Mishra told The Indian Express that a rickshaw driver associated with the outfit had “overheard a conversation between the nuns and the women and suspected they were being trafficked”.

He added that the Bajrang Dal workers reached the station and filed a complaint with the Government Railway Police.

According to The Indian Express, Chhattisgarh Director General of Police Arun Kumar Gautam declined to comment on the Narayanpur woman’s allegations, saying the matter is sub judice.

The nuns are members of the Assisi Sisters of Mary Immaculate, a congregation under the Syro-Malabar Church in Alappuzha district’s Cherthala town and were working at a hospital in Agra.

The nuns and Mandavi were remanded to judicial custody till August 8. They were charged under Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita sections pertaining to human trafficking and the Chhattisgarh Religious Freedom Act.

A sessions court in Durg has since disposed of their bail petitions, saying that the case falls under the National Investigation Agency Act and should be heard by an NIA court.

‘I had never met the nuns before’

The woman from Narayanpur told The Indian Express that she lives with her parents and four sisters and earns Rs 250 a day as a daily wage worker.

She said that she had learnt about a job opportunity from Mandavi, who attends the same church and is like a brother to her.

“I used to cycle nine km every day for work,” she said. “I have studied up to Class 10. Mandavi offered me a job as a cook for the nuns and to look after patients [at a hospital in Agra]. They promised Rs 10,000 apart from food, clothes and shelter. I was happy.”

According to her, she and two other women from Orcha in Narayanpur district arrived at Durg railway station around 6 am on the day the nuns were arrested. They were accompanied by Mandavi.

Around 9 am, the two nuns, whom she said she had never met before, joined them. Soon after, a Bajrang Dal worker and personnel from the Government Railway Police arrived and began questioning them, she told The Indian Express.

“I had met the nuns for the first time,” the woman said. “When we were being assaulted, one of the nuns told me, ‘Do not worry, I am here with you.’ She told the person beating us, ‘Hit us, but not them.’”