NEW DELHI, May 26, 2020 (Morning Star News) – Tribal mobs armed with clubs went to the homes of 16 families of a church in Jharkhand state, India every night for nearly three weeks, threatening to kill them if they didn’t return to their animistic Sarna religion, a pastor said.
“The persecutors were going with batons and wooden sticks, not giving the Christians any chance to say no, but emphasising that either they reconvert to the Sarna fold or they would kill them right then and there,” Pastor Sarabjit Bharati of Kirpa Bhavan Salom Church, outside Banjari Patan village in Palamu District, told Morning Star News. “They went to the extent of saying, ‘If these Christians do not accede, leave Christianity and return to our Sarna fold, we will kill them and consequently go to jail for it. We do not mind.’”
Of 16 church families (about 130 people) threatened in one area, Pastor Bharati said two families were terrorized into returning to their ancestral Sarna religion, which involves worship of a creator god called Dharmes and a goddess identified with nature. Including Christian worshippers from surrounding villages, about 250 to 300 people attend Pastor Bharati’s independent church.
The mobs ignored all social distancing and shelter-in norms in place to contain the spread of the novel coronavirus, the 33-year-old pastor said.
“They purposely went in the dark so…
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