India

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.

Attacks on India’s Christians have increased in recent weeks since the ruling government in one southern state proposed an anti-conversion law, according to a new report.

According to sources, Hindu extremists in northern India disrupted a house church service, interrogated a pastor and signalled police to arrest him and his wife on baseless charges of fraudulent conversion.

According to sources, tribal animists influenced by Hindu extremists in central India last month forced Christians to exhume the body of a 25-year-old man buried on relatives’ private land because they didn’t want a Christian interred in their village.

Hours after a Hindu nationalist mob assaulted and held more than 60 Christians against their will in central India under accusations of forcible conversion last month, police detained the Christians rather than the assailants, sources said.

 Pastor Raj Masih and his three children have not been able to return home to their village in eastern India since Sept. 28, when Hindu extremists attacked him.

According to a recent report by human rights groups in India, more than 300 incidents of Christian persecution have taken place in the country in just the first nine months of 2021.