India: Brutally beaten pastor faces eviction amid continuing Hindu extremist persecution
by Karen Faulkner, Worthy News Correspondent
(Worthy News) – A Christian pastor who is still recovering after Hindu extremists beat him almost to death in India’s Madhya Pradesh state in January is now facing eviction after his assailants told his landlord to throw him out of his home, Morning Star News (MSN) reports. Christians in India have come under increasingly intense persecution since the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party came to power in 2014.
Pastor Kailash Dudwe, a Christian leader in Pastor Dudwe’s area of Dhar District, Madhya Pradesh was hospitalized for 2 weeks after a mob of around 20 Hindu extremists attacked him, his wife, and four others who had gathered for prayer in Kukshi village on January 14, MSN said.
A video recording was made of the incident, and it can be seen that Christian women are pleading with the attackers to stop beating the pastor as he lay bleeding and losing blood. Not content just to beat him, the attackers also wanted to make a spectacle of him by parading him through the neighborhood, MSN said. “Hit them, hit them, they do religious conversion,” the attackers shouted. “Strip his clothes and we will parade him,” video recordings show. Police arrived but did not arrest any assailant. They only took the pastor unconscious to the Kukshi police station, from where he was transferred to the hospital.
Since the attack, the pastor has received death threats from the assailants, MSN reports. The attackers have also threatened Dudwe’s landlord, telling him to evict the pastor’s family or face his own trouble. The landlord has now asked Dudwe to leave.
The Bharatiya Janata party campaigns on a “Hindus first” basis, and this has emboldened radicalized Hindus to not only violently attack Christians and Muslims but also to have them jailed under harsh “anti-conversion” which are repeatedly abused for the purposes of persecution.
India now ranks 10th on the US Open Doors Watch List 2022 of the top 50 countries where Christians are persecuted. Prior to 2014, it had ranked 31st.
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