DM Monitoring
A damaged painting hanging on a wall of a church at a relief camp, photographed on 10 April 2009, in the village of Mondesore, in Odisha. Violence against Christians has increased under the Modi administration, with at least 328 violent incidents documented by activists in 2019 alone, often related to accusations of forced conversions.
According to a pastor from Sukma district in rural Chhattisgarh who wished to remain anonymous a mob attacked the home of two Christian Adivasi families in the Kokkar Pal village on 20 May. Ravi Kumar, a coordinator of Persecution Relief, an organisation which monitors violence against Christians in India, confirmed this. “The beatings started around 11 pm,” the pastor told me. “They hid in the jungle in the dark of the night. The women lost their way and got separated from their husbands. They were beaten so badly and crawled for three kilometres to reach us.” Ravi told me that the family could not return to their village. “They were in a hospital and are now living in somebody else’s house. We told them not to return to their village because it is not safe there,” he said. The Caravan is in possession of a first-information report filed by the pastor on behalf of the families that were attacked.
The two families, from the Koitur and Mauria communities, respectively, were not able to recognise their attackers, the pastor said. “Clothes were thrown out of their house. They were told to leave if they refused to leave the religion,” the pastor said.
According to the pastor, local members of the Bharatiya Janata Party and the BJP and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad had been organising a consistent campaign to forcefully convert Christians, particularly Adivasi Christians in the district, to Hinduism. “Since November 2019, they have been facing attacks,” he added, referring to the Adivasi families who were attacked in May. In late 2019, after the first attack took place, the pastor told me, the families decided not to file an FIR, hoping the violence would seize. But they faced a second attack in January 2020. The pastor accused the sarpanch of the village, who was elected in January 2020, of supervising locals from the village who targeted the family.
He said that the sarpanch is associated with the BJP. “After panchayat elections, a mob arrived with a tractor to demolish the church, saying that Adivasi people visit your church,” he said. “It was on Sunday during prayer service. The local Hindus have abused and harassed me continuously for three years now.” The houses of the two families were attacked again on 20 May.
The attack in Kokkar Pal fits a pattern that multiple reports by foreign and Indian human-rights groups have noted, of a growing number of anti-Christian attacks in India during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s second tenure, and even during the nationwide lockdown to contain the novel coronavirus. In the past two years, a large number of such attacks have occurred in states such as Uttar Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, where religiously discriminatory anti-conversion laws have been drafted or promulgated.
