India

Tribal villagers in eastern India assaulted three Christian families and destroyed their homes on Easter Sunday (April 17), sources said.

Christians falsely charged with crimes related to an act of vandalism in central India five years ago spent five days in jail and are fighting the case anew after it mysteriously resurfaced, sources said.

Still recovering from injuries at the hands of a Hindu extremist-led mob that beat him unconscious in January, a pastor in central India faces death threats, landlords who refuse to rent to him and baseless charges of forcible conversion, sources said.

Six masked men in central India this month killed one of 22 Christians a Maoist group had warned to “leave the pastorship,” sources said.

Hindu extremists in the National Capital Territory of Delhi last month tied a pastor to a post at a busy intersection and beat him before hundreds of people, but police have yet to make arrests, sources said.

Pastor Rakesh Babu was about to go to bed one night earlier this year in northern India when eight Hindu extremists broke into his house, beat and choked him and slit his wife’s throat, he said.

A Hindu extremist mob on Jan. 28 attacked two pastors in northern India, setting the Bible of one on fire as he blacked out from the beating, he said.

Intense opposition to Christianity grew in an area of northern India in the past month as a Hindu mob invited news media to record them reviling a house church gathering, and another pastor and his family were driven from their home, sources said.

Hindu extremists in northern India launched an attack on a house church service on Dec. 25 that seriously injured a pastor’s son, one of at least 10 cases of aggression in Haryana state that stopped Christmas celebrations for hundreds of Christians.

Incited by false information on YouTube, a mob of hundreds of Hindu extremists last month threw stones that smashed through the glass of a Christian-run school in Madhya Pradesh, India where 12^th-grade students were taking critical exams, sources said.