Expelled and homeless in jungle, 9-year-old girl is attacked and threatened. Tribal animists in central India drove a Christian family into the jungle last week, with one later intercepting their 9-year-old girl and threatening to kill her if she went to school again, her father said. On Wednesday (March 11), two days after an attack expelling the Christians from Bilood village in Madhya Pradesh state, the wife of the primary assailant stopped the girl (name withheld) as she returned from school to her makeshift refuge in the jungle, her father said. The woman’s husband, identified only as Laxman, had led the March 9 attack on the family of pastor Lalu Kirade, with the assailants later demolishing their home in Khandwa District. “Holding her by her hair, Laxman’s wife asked her how dare she enter the village,” Pastor Kirade said. “[Name withheld] told her that she cannot miss school as her annual examinations are taking place. But Laxman’s wife pulled my daughter’s hair and threatened her that she should not been seen in the village or she would be beaten to death.” His daughter walked back to their jungle site crying the entire way, Pastor Kirade said. “I cried before the Lord for hours, asking

The intervention doesn’t touch upon the sovereignty of Parliament. It may be prudent for the SC to allow it, Under the Indian law, the SC is bestowed with fairly wide discretion on whether to allow an intervention. In this context, given the limited nature of intervention — international law implication of the CAA and the status of the HC within the UN system — it may be prudent for the apex court to allow the application of the HC to intervene.(HTPHOTO)ANALYSIS CAA: Reading the UN body’s intervention in Supreme Court | Opinion The intervention doesn’t touch upon the sovereignty of Parliament. It may be prudent for the SC to allow itBy Jay Manoj SanklechaUPDATED ON MAR 16, 2020 12:20 PM IST On March 4, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet Jeria, filed an intervention in the Supreme Court on the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 (CAA). She sought to intervene as an amicus in a petition challenging the constitutionality of the CAA. This move raises some interesting questions such as the locus of international law actors to intervene in domestic proceedings, and the extent to which international law influences the interpretation of domestic legal provisions. More generally, the intervention and the government’s

Police officials and radical Hindu nationalists disrupted a Christian congregation of 150 and detained four Christians in a police station for over eight hours in Uttar Pradesh's Dhamayapur village on March 15. According to Mohit, one of the four detained Christians, a dozen police officers and a mob of over 30 Bajrang Dal activists attacked the regular Sunday worship where around 150 Christians had gathered. "I saw a crowd advancing towards us. I was so frightened. I was also really worried for my congregation," Mohit to International Christian Concern (ICC). The assaulters broke into the worship hall and started to hit the Christians. "The Bajrang Dal activists told us that we are converting people in the name of casting out evil spirits and spreading a foreign faith," Mohit said. The police raided the hall and seized Bible and other religious literature, and took four Christians, including pastor Raja Gowthan, Mohit, Akash and Vihesh, under custody. According to Mohit, the police tortured the four from twelve in the afternoon until eight at night. "We were cruelly beaten up with police sticks. They beat us so badly that our fingers got slits and our legs got marks all over. The pain is so bad that I cannot even sit

Modi government is in concluding phase to make a database to track every aspect of 1.2 billion citizens’ lives Modi government is in concluding phase to make a database to track every aspect of 1.2 billion people lives, according to a report in Huffington Post India. According to a previously undisclosed government document, the government is planning to create an all-encompassing, auto-updating, searchable database to track each and every resident of the country. If this project becomes a reality, it will automatically track when a citizen moves between cities, changes jobs, buys a new property; when a new member of a family is born, dies or gets married and moves to their spouse’s home. According to the report in HuffPost, Interoperability of modern database systems means there is no technical limit to the extent of data that can be collected and indexed by this master database of databases. In a meeting on October 4, 2019, for instance, a special secretary of the NITI Aayog even proposed geo-tagging every single home and integrating it with Bhuvan, a web-based geospatial portal developed by the Indian Space Research Organisation. So far, National Social Registry has been described as a routine exercise to update the 2011 Socio-Economic Caste

More than being a reward for a retired judge, the offer of a cushy post-retirement job is a message to judges who are still working. The President Ram Nath Kovind on Monday nominated former Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi to the Rajya Sabha. Gogoi will become one of the “eminent members” of the Upper House of Parliament sent by the Centre but has six months to decide if he wants to affiliate himself to a political party. With this appointment, the concept of judicial independence, the core of the separation of powers mandated by the Constitution, is on ventilator support. In 2018, Gogoi, while heading a five-judge bench, had remarked that post-retirement jobs for judges are a scar on the idea of judicial independence. Last year, when he conducted an extraordinary hearing on a Saturday morning following accusations of sexual harassment against him by a woman employee of the court, Gogoi firmly declared that all that a judge had was his reputation. He noted that his relatively low financial savings were evidence of his independence as a judge, claiming that his peon made more money than him. On Monday, these lofty declarations came to naught. Post-retirement jobs are used by the political establishment like a carrot on

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