Karnataka persecution continues unabated

Hindu radicals beat up a Pastor unconscious in Kolar

Karnataka, October 16, 2012:  Pastor John Samuel Kim, 33, is in charge of Jerusalem Prayer House, a house church, in Dharmarayanagar in Kolar Town in Karnataka. He has 40 believers in his congregation, and he has been spreading the message of Christ during the last two years in Kolar and the surrounding villages.

On Thursday, October 11, he was returning home at about 6 in the evening after a prayer meeting at a believer’s house at Kannur village, a few kilometers away from Kolar when RSS and Bajrang Dal activists – Venkatesh, Prasanna, Papanna, Manju, Anand and Ramesh waylaid and beat him up very badly falsely alleging that he had been forcibly converting Hindus to Christianity. They left him unconscious on the roadside and disappeared from the scene. He was found lying unconscious on the roadside and taken to Devaraj Urs Medical College Hospital. The Hindu radicals had beaten up him so badly that a couple of his ribs were fractured.

Three months earlier, when the pastor had similarly gone for a prayer meeting at the residence of a believer, Venkatramanappa, there was an altercation between the pastor and the same Hindu fundamentalists who had warned him not to enter their village and convert people. On that occasion, both the pastor and the Sangh Parivar activists had gone and lodged police complaints against each other in the Kolar police station.

Protest march against Church compound wall demolition in Gulbarga

Karnataka, October 15, 2012: Christians of Wadi in Glbarga district in Karnataka took out a huge protest march on Friday, October 12, against the high-handed behavior of the Chief Municipal Officer of Wadi town municipality, Ramesh Pattedar who had demolished the wall on Monday, October 8. A larger number of protesters surrounded the officer and took him to task for his unilateral decision and high-handed behavior in demolishing the church compound wall without either marking on the compound wall or giving them the mandatory legal notice, if and when such an action was contemplated by the municipal corporation. The demolition of the compound wall as reported in the local newspapers seems to have been done in a very sly manner by the officer concerned by using some local muscle men late in the evening when nobody would be around.

There were heated arguments and exchange of words between the protesters and the officer. The protesters alleged that the officer was deliberately and mischievously trying to disturb the communal harmony in the town. The officer’s argument was that the wall was encroaching upon five roads in the town since it is situated at the junction of the town and the wall had to be demolished. The land for the church was donated by a well-wisher long ago and accordingly the church was built. Since the town is growing, traffic, too, is increasing. But then the officer concerned should not have taken steps on his own, on the quiet and in a sly manner, as some of the senior Christian leaders felt.

When the situation was turning quite serious, the local police Sub Inspector S.S. Doddamani , took the initiative and held a meeting of the Church Committee members and the municipality officers and arrived at an amicable settlement and only after that the situation was brought under control.

The Church Pastor, Rev. Devkumart Anand, and the Church Committee members – Solomon Rajanna, Vijayakumar S.V.K, S.R.Bhaskar, Arunkumar Huggi, K.S.Samuel , Suresh Mathew, Sumithra Rajann, Samson Hosur,Vinodkumar Huggi, Shobha Bhaskar, Martha S. Mantri, Suryakanthamma Badigera, Rathnamma John, Jaishheela Bhaskar, Grace Nangera, Alice Rajanna, and Ruthamma Prakash besides a large number of Christians, participated in the protest march. The very next day of the incident, a letter was sent to the Union Labour Minister Kharge, by the Church Pastor Devkumar Anand, briefing him about the high-handed behavior of the Chief Municipal Officer and that he should be immediately kept under suspension.

– persecution.in