A 34-year-old missionary, along with 13 prayer partners and short-term missionaries, was praying with a Christian family in a village in the disputed northern state of Jammu and Kashmir on October 23 when eight police officers interrupted the fellowship.
The cops informed the group, who were from Tamil Nadu in South India, that local Palal villagers had complained about the gathering and were preparing to attack them. The cops instructed them to leave immediately and offered protection to get them out of the village safely. While initially scared, the missionary was relieved that the police had offered to help them. The missionary asked CT not to name him and his organization as he could be arrested for his work.
The group followed behind the police vehicle in their white minibus. But only 500 meters into the ride, about 40 young men armed with iron rods and sticks blocked the one-lane dirt road. They pulled the minibus doors open to beat and kick the passengers, smashed its windshield and windows, and shouted slurs.
The mob of Hindu nationalists accused the group of forcibly converting local Hindu residents to Christianity.
Of the eight police officers who had driven ahead of them, only one tried to help the victims, the missionary recalled, while the rest stood and watched. At the time, he wondered if police had conspired with the mob to enable the attack.
The beating left at least four members of the mission team, including one woman, injured. After the attack, the head of local police department, Mohita Sharma, arrived and helped the victims reach their lodgings safely. She advised the local family that hosted the missionaries to register a formal complaint against the attackers.
The next day, the police department suspended the eight officers for negligence of duty. Authorities also arrested the two lead attackers, Ravindra Singh Thela and Rohit Sharma, but soon released them on bail.
Thela is a leader of the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and is known for engaging in extremist cow vigilantism, a form of mob violence to protect cows, which are considered sacred in Hinduism. He currently has several criminal cases open against him, including attacking a journalist covering protests in Jammu and Kashmir earlier this year.
Ivan Albert Pereira, Catholic bishop of the Jammu–Srinagar diocese, appreciated the support the head police officer had extended. “Such incidents have not happened in Jammu and Kashmir, and the action of [Ms.] Sharma will serve as a warning to both officials and perpetrators of communal incidents in [the] future,” he told Crux.
After their release, the attackers filed a complaint against the missionary group and the local families that had invited them, accusing them of luring residents into embracing Christianity with food and money. The missionary CT spoke to said that police detained three families and kept them in custody for a day, but the judge concluded they lacked proof of religious conversion and acquitted them the next day.
This missionary has been working in Jammu and Kashmir for the past ten years. He and the other short-term workers visited Palal because a local family had invited them over for prayer and lunch. He has been visiting the village almost monthly for the past five years at the invitation of the two Christian families in the village. But contrary to accusations, he said he’s never preached the gospel in that village.
Besides meeting with isolated Christian families, the missionary also pastors a small church of 40 congregants about 80 kilometers away from Palal. After completing his theology training in Tamil Nadu, he felt led to be part of an indigenous mission to spread the gospel in the northern belt of India.
Christians compose a mere 0.28 percent of Jammu and Kashmir’s population, while Muslims make up 68 percent of the population and Hindus 28 percent, according to India’s latest census taken in 2011. Christians have faced increased persecution in recent years.
In September, a group of Hindu nationalists protested a Christian worship meeting in the state’s Samba district, alleging that the Christians were using the event as a tool to convert Hindus. In 2018, a mob of 1,000 Hindu extremists burned down a church building, holding the church responsible for the death of a congregant whom they presumed had been forcefully converted to Christianity.
Evangelism has become more difficult in the state, especially after the BJP-led central government took greater control of Jammu and Kashmir in 2019, the missionary noted. “The village leaders in the area have become very hostile,” he said, noting the increase in Hindu nationalism. “They threaten to ban local families who engage in Christian activities.”
Mehbooba Mufti, the former chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, met with a delegation from the Christian community on November 1 and condemned the attack. “I urge the authorities, especially [the Jammu and Kashmir Police], to take immediate action as Christmas is approaching, before fear becomes the new normal,” she said on X.
The attack has not deterred the missionary, who believes persecution is inevitable.
“We are here because we came for God,” he said. “We believe that he is leading us. Persecution is normal; it was normal in the Bible as well. God was strengthening us and continues to do so.”
