CHENNAI: Locations of Christian worship proceed to come back below assault in Dakshina Kannada and different elements of BJP-ruled Karnataka. In a contemporary incident on Thursday morning, a 160-year-old St Joseph’s church was attacked and the statue of St Antony disfigured in Chikkaballapur district, mentioned sources.
Greater than every week in the past, a pro-Hindu mob burnt Christian spiritual books in Hanumanapalaya in Srinivasapur within the Kolar district alleging they have been being distributed among the many native folks by the Christian neighborhood.
In Hubballi someday in the past, a mob entered a church and shouted slogans and chanted Hindu spiritual songs. Surprisingly, the pastor who lodged a grievance with the police was arrested below costs of “outraging the spiritual emotions of any class,” the BBC stories.
A report by the Evangelical Fellowship of India (EFI) listed 39 instances of threats or violence in opposition to Christians from January to November this yr in Karnataka, the BBC report additional mentioned including, these embody alleged assaults on pastors by members of right-wing Hindu teams and even cases the place they reportedly bodily prevented them from holding spiritual companies.
The assaults come amid protests by civil society organisations in opposition to the Karnataka Safety of Proper to Freedom Invoice 2021 tabled by the federal government within the ongoing meeting session.
President of the Folks’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) Prof Y J Rajendra reportedly mentioned that the invoice is in opposition to Article 25 of the Structure and is trampling upon the constitutionally assured rights to freedom of faith, privateness, and dignity.
The invoice, amongst different issues, would empower the state to deem interfaith marriages involving conversion as “null & void.” The federal government, aided by the invoice, intends to ban conversion by “misrepresentation, power, allurement, fraudulent means, or marriage.”
The Invoice reportedly proposes a most punishment of 10 years of imprisonment for forcible conversion of individuals from Dalit and ST communities, minors, and ladies to a different faith.
Comparable legal guidelines are reportedly in power in Arunachal Pradesh, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, and Uttarakhand.
