A 29-year-old nun was forced off a train by suspected Bajrang Dal activists and detained for 18 hours at a police station in Odisha on charges of trafficking in women and illegal conversions that an investigation later proved false.

Nun Rachana Nayak was released after she proved that her six young companions — two men and four women — were all Christians by birth and were travelling for enrolment in training courses.

In an indication of the insecurity among minorities, Catholic Church authorities advised members travelling with girls from the community to carry written consent from their parents and village pradhans, as well as baptism certificates proving they are Christian.

The incident comes a year after the BJP assumed power in Odisha, and weeks after it released one of the killers of missionary Graham Staines and his two young sons, who were burnt alive in 1999 by a mob led by a Bajrang Dal activist.

Nayak, a nun with the Holy Family Convent in Bhopal, and her companions were surrounded, threatened and forced off the train by a group of 30 at Khurda Junction, about 20km from Bhubaneswar.

They were detained by the Government Railway Police (GRP) and allowed to leave only on Sunday evening following the intervention of three women human rights lawyers.

“They had boarded the Rajya Rani Express from Berhampur on Saturday evening. One of the young men happened to be the nun’s younger brother,” Sujata Jena, one of the women lawyers, told The Telegraph.

“They were headed for Jharsuguda, from where they planned to travel to Chhattisgarh where the girls would have received training in various skills and in spoken English.”

Jena said the four young women had been selected through a rigorous process of career counselling, and all of them were Catholics.

“Some people began heckling them on the train and accused the nun of involvement in religious conversions,” she said.

Religious conversions, unless conducted through inducement, fraud or force, are not illegal.

“As soon as the train reached Khurda Junction around 11pm on Saturday, around 30 people gathered and began abusing the nun and the four girls. They forced the entire group off the train,” Jena said.

“Apart from religious conversions, they accused the nun of trafficking in women. The Railway Protection Force intervened and took all of them to the police station.”

Jena added: “They pleaded they were all Christians and that the nun had nothing to do with religious conversions, but no one listened to them.”

She said the women lawyers got to know about the matter on Sunday morning and rushed to Khurda.

“During the investigation, it came out that all those detained were aged above 18 except for one girl, who was 17. All of them are literate,” she said.

“All of them have now been released with full security and without any charges. The police treated them with dignity.”

Jena said the women’s parents arrived at the police station and took them back to their villages, unwilling after the ordeal to let them go on to Chhattisgarh. The two young men too left for home.

A GRP team escorted Nayak up to Bhubaneswar.

Shankar Rao, inspector-in-charge, GRP Khurda, said: “The nun and the four girls know each other. All of them are Christians. The nun hails from Berhampur. She was involved neither in religious conversions nor trafficking. No FIR has been registered by the nun (against the hecklers).”

Sources said the nun belongs to the Holy Family order, a local congregation founded in Kerala.

Catholic Church sources in Delhi said that apart from written parental consent and baptism certificates, members travelling with girls had been advised to carry “a letter of admission to a senior secondary school to prove they are travelling for higher education”.