Villagers meet in Bhandardigi, Kanker District, Chhattisgarh state, India to decide fate of families who refuse to renounce faith. (Area resident)
NEW DELHI (Morning Star News) – A family in India has decided to leave their ancestral home rather than renounce Christ after police allowed a mob of more than 150 Hindu extremists intent on killing them to severely beat them, sources said.
The injuries that Vikas Salam and three others received in Bhandardigi village, Durgukondal Block in Chhattisgarh state’s Kanker District on Sept. 21 required hospital treatment, as the assailants beat women, children and the elderly while police ignored their pleas for help.
The mob attacked and beat three Christian families with sticks, vandalized their homes and threatened to expel them from the village because they refused to renounce their faith in Christ. Local officials also later pressured the families to recant their faith.
“We have been following Jesus for the last 10 years,” Salam, 24, told Morning Star News. “The villagers told us to either return to the Hindu fold or leave the village.”
The three Christian families, 18 members in all, are related to each other and are the last remaining Christians in the village. They remained steadfast in their faith despite severe opposition over the past several years, but opposition has intensified in the last three years, incited by local Hindu extremists, Salam said.
Though tribal people are not Hindus, decades of campaigning by right-wing Hindu groups in Chhattisgarh have intentionally blurred the lines between tribal religion and Hinduism, creating a syncretic faith, leaders say. Hindu nationalists call the conversion of Christians who were originally followers of tribal religion “ghar wapsi” (homecoming), claiming the tribals are returning to Hinduism, but Christian leaders maintain that it is forced conversion to Hinduism.
“There were other Christian families in the village, but they [all tribal people] have all been forcibly converted to Hinduism,” Salam said. “But we have been holding on despite extreme pressure.”
The Christians previously gathered at Salam’s house for worship, but after facing much opposition they were forced to build a room outside the village in their own farmland and began to gather there.
“They were not letting us sit in our house and pray,” Salam said. “So, we constructed a room in the farmland and began to meet there and pray. But the villagers came there as well and began to trouble us.”
The pressure intensified when a mob of villagers disrupted the Christian gathering on three consecutive Sunday’s beginning Sept.6, he said. The Christian families were summoned six times before the village head and the council between Sept. 13 and Sept. 20, he said.
“All six times, I explicitly told them that wherever we live, we will live with Jesus Christ,” Salam said. “If we are not allowed to live in this village, we will spend our life somewhere else but will not renounce our faith in Christ.”
Each time the Christians were abused with foul language and threatened with being beaten, ostracized and expelled from the village unless they renounced Christ and accepted Hinduism, he said.
“We were prohibited to avail the subsidized government ration which is distributed every month,” added Salam, whose family is dependent on this ration allotment of rice, wheat, cooking oil and other staples.
On Sept. 20, the day before the attack, a mob disrupted their worship service and pressured them to renounce their faith.
“They warned us and threatened us to renounce, but I refused,” said Salam.
The following day, the mob of about 150 people attacked the three Christian families unprovoked and without warning. Carrying wooden sticks, the assailants entered the area where the three families lived and began to assault them.
“They spared nobody,” hitting hit women, children, men and the elderly, Salam said. “I was hit the most.”
He was strangled, slapped, and kicked. He sustained injury to his ear and received several blows to his back, “till the extent that the stick broke.” His entire back turned blue with the beatings, he added.
Salam’s uncle Somji Nureti, 40, was choked by the throat and neck. He sustained injuries to his ear, throat and back. Salam’s cousin, Pradeep Uike, 25, is very tall, so the attackers could not reach his neck, Salam said.
“The focus on the assault on him was his back,” Salam said. “He took multiple blows on his back and sustained severe back injuries.”
Somji Nureti’s 11-year-old son, Rohan Nureti, was also beaten.
“They brutally hit him on his legs with sticks, so much so that the poor boy was not even able to walk,” he said. “They did not spare my wife, Pradeep’s mother and Rohan’s mother. Several of them pounced on one member of the family, assaulted each one with sticks, hands, legs mercilessly.”
The villagers were intoxicated, he added.
Salam managed to escape from the crowd for a few minutes and call police before the mob dragged him back. Though the local police station is less than two miles away, officers did not come, he said.
Salam escaped again and called the superintendent of police for Kanker District, telling him that the Christians would be killed if officers did not come. Police then immediately arrived, he said.
The mob had not allowed the Christians to record the assault on their phones, and without such evidence police took no action against them, though their injuries were plainly visible, Salam said. When he tried to tell a police officer about the brutality of the assault, “the village elders quickly interrupted and said that they just slapped us two or three times and that’s all,” Salam said.
Police chose to ignore their complaint despite the extent of their injuries, he said. Salam, Somji Nureti, Pradeep Uike and Rohan Nureti had to be rushed to the hospital for immediate medical attention.
“My pain was unbearable – I was rolling on the grass with pain,” Salam said. “The police picked me and took me to the hospital along with the other three. They injected pain killers to reduce my pain and when the pain subsided, we were asked to go back home.”
Besides the four hospitalized, others went to local village doctors for medical treatment. Five weeks after they were attacked, the Christians still suffer body aches, hearing problems and throat pain, said Salam.
“When I sleep under a fan or ride a motorbike, the air enters my ear with pressure and causes excruciating pain,” he said.
On returning from the hospital, the Christians found that their belongings were lying on the road, and they were ordered to leave the village.
“We overheard from the villagers that they had planned to beat us till we die,” said Salam. “We were adamant that we will not renounce our faith. They assaulted us, threw our belongings out of our house and forced us to leave the village and we still maintained that we will not renounce.”
After the Christians returned from the hospital, the village head, head constable, secretary and the president of the village council, sub-district revenue magistrate, sub-divisional magistrate, land record officer, additional superintendent of police, and officer in-charge of three police stations, besides others, gathered in the village and began to pressure the three families.
“The entire team of high officials began to persuade us to surrender to the demands of the village and forgo our faith,” said Salam.
Salam’s father, 50-year-old Ram Salam, who lives and sleeps in the field to watch over the agricultural land, was summoned before the officials along with the representatives of the other two Christian households.
“They told us that they will confiscate our farmland. ‘You want land or Jesus Christ? You have to choose one,’ they said,” Salam added.
Ram Salam and the representatives of the other two families gave in to the pressure, and on behalf of their respective families agreed to convert to Hinduism.
“We have to save ourselves, our land and property,” Ram Salam told his son.
The villagers also demanded a religious offering from the three families, and they had no choice but to give it, Ram Salam told him.
Distressed as he spoke, Vikas Salam said, “If we were willing to renounce Christ, there would have been no need for these high officials to come and pressure us. They came, because we were not ready to renounce.”
Since then, the villagers have been calling Salam and the others to join with them in the rituals towards their deities, but they have not complied, he said.
“We will not deny Christ, because since the day we started to believe, our lives have changed,” he said. “We lived a life where we drank alcohol, got into fights, and arguments. It was a pathetic life that we lived. Now we are out of it; we don’t live the same way we used to.”
Until they are able to leave, the family remains in the village under constant pressure and threat that they could be attacked anytime. Since the father and the other two representatives of the other families were pressured into abandoning their faith, the villagers are waiting for compliance from Vikas Salam and his family.
“Initially we started to follow Christ because we received physical healing, but when we read the Bible, we found out that the Lord gives us eternal life,” he said. “So, we do not want to forsake Christ. We have decided to leave our land, our property, our home and our ancestral village. We will live in a far-off city, where we have freedom to attend church and worship Jesus, even if we must work as a daily wages’ laborer.”
Though the Indian National Congress (INC) was in power in Chhattisgarh from 2018 to 2023, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) candidate has held the Member of Parliament seat in the Kanker Lok Sabha constituency continuously since 1998. The BJP was again voted to power in December 2023.
India ranked 12th on Christian support organization Open Doors’ 2026 World Watch List of the 50 countries where it is most difficult to be a Christian.
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