Pastor Bryan Nerren leads the International House of Prayer Ministries in Shelbyville, Tenn. Photo: Facebook/ International House of Prayer Ministries Members of Congress are demanding that the government of India release a Tennessee pastor who continues to be detained in the country even after he resolved a customs case brought against him for allegedly not paying duty on money he brought into the country. "We write to bring your attention to the case of Bryan Kevin Nerren Sr. of Shelbyville, Tennessee. We are immediately concerned with the health of the Nerren family, including Mr. Nerren's daughter with special needs, who has been hospitalized with pneumonia as Mr. Nerren remains in India without a clear point of return," Sens. James Lankford, R-Okla., and Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., and Reps. Scott DesJarlais, R-Tenn., and Jody Hice, R-Ga., wrote in a letter to the Indian Foreign Secretary last week. Pastor Nerren, who leads the International House of Prayer Ministries in Shelbyville and operates a nonprofit organization called Asian Children's Education Fellowship, which has been training Sunday School teachers in India and Nepal for 17 years, was targeted and arrested as he stepped off a flight in Bagdogra, India, last October. "We request that India uphold their end of the offer, as Mr. Nerren has

The Delhi High Court on March 13 asked BJP leader and lawyer Ashwini Kumar Upadhyay to withdraw his petition that called for a ban on religious conversions. A bench of Chief Justice D. N. Patel and Justice C. Hari Shankar asked Upadhyay himself to withdraw the petition instead of rejecting it and stated that professing a religion was a matter of personal belief and to convert to a different faith was an individual's choice. In his petition, Upadhyay claimed that many individuals/organizations have started conversions of SC/STs in rural areas and "the situation is very alarming." "The mass religious conversion of the socially economically downtrodden men, women and children, and, in particular of the scheduled caste and scheduled tribe community, is on the rise in the past 20 years," the petition said. Furthermore, Upadhyay claimed in his petition that if these mass religious conversions are left unchecked, "Hindus will become a minority in India." The bench rejected Upadhyay's argument and said, "If someone is threatening someone or intimidating someone, it is an offense under the Indian Penal Code" and to convert to a different faith was an individual's choice. According to 2011 census data, Christians only made 2.3% of the country's population. There is not a

On March 2, a Christian hospital in Mandya was attacked by a group of radical Hindus who claimed that the public relations officer and the hospital administrator denigrated Hindu deities. The attack took place after an elderly Hindu patient at Sanjo Hospital with high blood pressure questioned Simon George, the public relation officer, about the Bible that was in his room. Simon answered him saying that he could read the Bible if he was interested. On the very next day, after the elderly was discharged from the hospital, members of RSS stormed into the hospital and attacked Simon and Sister Nirmal Jose, the hospital administrator. When local police arrived at the place of incident, they took both the Christians into custody instead of helping them. "There is nothing criminal or illegal about keeping a Bible in a hospital room," said Sajan K George, president of the Global Council of Indian Christians (GCIC). "No Hindu deity has been offended," he added. According to George, the hospital was attacked because it is run by Christians, even though it served everyone, regardless of faith or caste. "Christian missionaries who work in the medical and educational field are targeted every day by extremists who try to discredit their altruistic work,

The Preamble to our Constitution and Articles 25 and 26 dealing with freedom of religion guarantee equality to all individuals and groups irrespective of their beliefs American statesman and prominent attorney Daniel Webster once said, “Justice is the greatest interest of man on Earth. It is the ligament which holds civilised beings and a civilised society together.” We, the people of India, were gifted with one of the most significant Constitutions ever written, on January 26, 1950 and are fortunate to have our freedoms and rights acknowledged and defined in it. The framers of the Constitution recognised that people have inherent fundamental rights that are inalienable and constitutionally-enforceable through courts, subject to reasonable restrictions. They are universally recognised and include the right to equality, freedom of expression, freedom of conscience and religion and the right to approach courts to enforce them. These rights are contained in Part III of the Constitution. Part IV deals with the Directive Principles of State Policy that act as instruments of instruction for the implementation of fundamental rights in Part III. Unlike the Indian Constitution, the American Constitution written in 1787 was probably flawed at first. It did not have a written provision or a “Bill of Rights” which

Church members forced to pose like Christ on the cross during beating. Forcing them to pose like Christ on the cross, police last week beat Christians in custody on baseless charges in northern India’s Uttar Pradesh state, sources said. On March 15 a church of 200 people was immersed in a Sunday service when 30 Hindu extremists brandishing hockey sticks and steel rods arrived with police at the worship hall built on the premises of the pastor’s home in the Kunda area of Pratapgarh District, sources said. “Once I saw them armed with hockey sticks and steel rods, I understood that they had come to attack us,” Pastor Indresh Kumar Gautam, 24, told Morning Star News. “I got down from the pulpit and decided to face them before they cause nuisance or attack any of the members of the congregation.” He could see they were young men of the Hindu extremist Bajrang Dal from his and neighboring villages, he said. The pastor said they accused the church of increasing conversions to Christianity in the area. “I told them clearly that we do not convert anyone, and that we had only accepted Christian faith and would be only praying for everyone,” he said. “If anybody

Indian Catholic devotees offer the way of the cross prayers after an Ash Wednesday service at Saint Mary's Basilica in Secunderabad, the twin city of Hyderabad, on March 5, 2014. AFP via Getty Images/Noah Seelam The chief of a Hindu nationalist group has launched a nationwide campaign against "forcible" conversions to Christianity. In a media interview, Milind Parande, the General Secretary of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, or World Hindu Council, claimed that Hindus were being forced to convert to Christianity and Islam. "They (Christian missionaries) are destroying the ancient culture and indigenous religion of the tribals (aborigines)," Parande told the Times of India. "They are resorting to trafficking of their children. The VHP will not allow this heinous conspiracy to succeed." "Issues like love jihad, where Hindu girls are lured to marry Muslims, are also being brought back. Every year, we bring back at least 2,000 people who have got converted." Several Indian states have had draconian "anti-conversion" laws, termed as Freedom of Religion Acts, for decades but no Christian has been convicted of "forcibly" converting anyone to Christianity. Most attacks on Christians are launched under the pretext of the alleged "forcible" conversion of Hindus. According to India's own population data, the conspiracy of mass conversions to Christianity does

The government should have anticipated how a nationwide lockdown would impact the urban poor.  The largest lockdown in history is not, to put it mildly, going as planned. Within a few days of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announcing on national television that the country was being shut down for three weeks, hundreds of thousands took to the country’s highways, marching long distances back to their home towns and villages. Others thronged bus stations—the trains are not running—hoping for a bus back home. At least 22 people have reportedly died in the mass migration, exhausted and hungry. The point of India’s lockdown, as elsewhere, is to prevent transmission of the novel coronavirus. But, if anything, this vast movement of people likely means the virus will find its way to the poorer rural parts of India where it could do the most damage. There’s certainly little social distancing in evidence in the photos of thousands of people jostling each other waiting for buses. All this could—and should—have been avoided. There was no need for the government in Delhi not to prepare citizens for what a lockdown would entail. Nor was the government itself anywhere near prepared for what the crisis would ask of its own

Washington, DC April 1, 2020 The Federation of Indian American Christian Organizations (FIACONA) is pleased to learn that 2.9 million dollars is allocated for India to fight the Coronavirus issue in the stimulus package. However, due to the complete lockdown of the country, all private traders and grocers in India had to shut down their shops and outlets leaving the public at large with no options to buy even vegetables from anywhere, for their day to day survival. The Indian government wants to take the sole responsibility of distributing all vegetables and groceries for each family in the whole country for the remaining 2 weeks of the 21-day lockdown or until the lockdown is lifted. Mr. Koshy George, the President of FIACONA in a letter to President Trump said, "It is an effort that was never tried at this scale before. The entire population of 1.3 billion people will need such deliveries when they run out of basic groceries soon if they have not already run out". He further said, "We doubt the government has the manpower to achieve this task on its own. We see that the failure of the government to plan properly ahead of this kneejerk reaction to SARS-CoV-2 has made a

Catholic bishops of Ranchi, eastern India, have appealed their fellow prelates to reach out to millions of migrant laborers stranded in the country by the 21-day national lockdown. “These are difficult times and even as we live in lockdown and make every attempt to keep ourselves safe, thousands of migrants are stuck where they are, not knowing where to go or have hit the road with their families and children without transport, monetary means or alimentary provisions,” says the March 28 appeal from Jesuit Archbishop Felix Toppo of Ranchi and Auxiliary Bishop Theodore Mascarenhas. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at 8 pm on March 24 ordered the nationwide lockdown from the midnight of that day as way to prevent spread of the Covid-19. It limits the movement of the country’s 1.37 billion people for 21 days. The lockdown was preceded by a 14-hour voluntary public curfew on March 22. India_MattersIndia-Archbishop Felix Toppo The lockdown has caught millions of migrants and daily wagers off guard, leaving them no time to return home. Hundreds of thousands of them are now seen stranded at bus or railway stations or walking to their villages hundreds of kilometers away. The bishops of Ranchi, who made the appeal a day after Pope

Police in southern India’s Tamil Nadu state rushed to a slum where Christians were providing food and other aid earlier this month and detained them on false charges of forcible conversion, sources said. Marakkanam police in Viluppuram District humiliated the Christians, including the presbyter of the Viluppuram Church of South India, accusing them in coarse language of trying to fraudulently convert the poor in the guise of providing basic necessities, said the church’s pastor, the Rev. Perumal Kanagaraj. Shortly after Pastor Kanagaraj and about 30 young adults from the church arrived from Viluppuram to the nearby slum area of Anumandai village on March 8, a member of the Hindu Munnani extremist group showed up and began uttering obscenities at them, the church leader said. “The Hindu Munnani activist soon lost his cool and started beating the youth missionaries while he continued abusing them in extremely foul language,” Pastor Kanagaraj said. “Within no time the crowd started gathering, and he held us up there and was not letting us move.” When the Christians began to call police, the Hindu nationalist told them he had already filed a police complaint against them, and that he would put them behind bars at any cost, he said. “We told