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A fact-finding report by civil rights campaigners recorded 305 attacks against Christians in mostly small towns of 21 states between January and September 2021. Almost every incident is followed by a police case against the pastor alleging religious conversion. We take you to Roorkee, Uttarakhand, where over 200 people, including familiar faces and neighbours, attacked a church during Sunday prayers on 3 October. Instead of the attackers being arrested, the late pastor’s family faces a criminal case.
Roorkee (Uttarakhand): On 3 October, while in church for Sunday prayers, Pearl Lance, 34, was shoved in the chest by a man she knew.
The attacker was one of 242 identified and unidentified men and women who attacked a church and roughed up the small congregation in Solanipuram colony in the old cantonment section of Roorkee, according to a police first information report (FIR), filed later that day.
“I knew most of the people. When I asked why they were attacking the church, they shouted we were converting followers,” said Pearl, the older of two daughters of the church’s late pastor D R Lance, who died of Covid-19 in September 2020. “One young guy snatched my phone. I ran after him. That’s when this man came in front and pushed me on my chest.”
Pearl’s mother, P Sadhna Porter, 65, said the church only held prayers and there had been no official pastor since her husband died after being the pastor here for 40 years. “The conversion rumours are all false,” she said. “But since his death, we have faced hostilities.”
The attack during Sunday prayers was widely reported, the congregation allegedly assaulted by local Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) members and supporters. Some 30 km west of pilgrim town Haridwar, Roorkee is famous for Asia’s oldest engineering institute, now an Indian Institute of Technology, and an army cantonment.
Read more- https://article-14.com/post/pastors-attacked-churches-ransacked-but-uttarakhand-police-file-cases-against-victims-61a59a9b934f7