“Hindus belonging to higher castes inflict severe retribution on Christians.”
NEW DELHI Every morning at 3 a.m. on July 8, Pastor Sushil Kumar and his spouse would rise from their village in northern India to pray. Ninety minutes later, they emerged from their home to discover the body of their 22-year-old son dangling from the animal shed nearby’s bamboo ceiling.
Pastor Kumar claimed that Nilesh Kumar had been tortured and strangled to death in Satpura village, Arwal District, Bihar State. According to the results of a medical examination, the attackers broke his arms before suffocating him. The pastor claimed that afterward, to depict it as a suicide, they hung his body and wrapped a cloth around his neck.
It is crucial to remember the following details: Pastor Kumar’s suffering profoundly saddens us.
Manohar Sharma, suspected of participating in the murder with accomplices, has been taken into custody as investigations continue.
A couple of years prior, he had confronted Nilesh Kumar, a higher-caste Hindu, for his audacity in opposing the lower-caste Hindu crossing his yard, where the local custom had recently resulted in the spread of cow dung.
According to a fellow pastor, Pastor Kumar and his wife, Ravita Devi, discovered their son’s body and sobbed so much that day that they passed out by evening.
“Their condition was so bad that we had to call for an ambulance and send them to the district hospital,” said Pastor Pintoo Kumar, adding that their condition was so severe that a doctor decided to hospitalize them.
The parents of the deceased were not allowed to leave the hospital until July 10, even though a Christian organization had planned a funeral for the evening of July 8.
Dad claimed that Nilesh Kumar was killed in an attack while he was sleeping alone. As the family had no mobile phone signal at their house, Nilesh Kumar would sleep at a distance on a veranda with a signal.
The family last saw him at 8 p.m. on July 7 at dinner.
The death occurred around midnight.
Twenty-two years ago, the family was the first in the village to convert to Hinduism.
The family was the first to convert from Hinduism in the village 22 years ago.
The pastor said that Nilesh Kumar objected to Sharma crossing over their yard two years ago, which his mother had smeared with cow dung.
Reviling him for being of a lower caste and for accepting Christ, Sharma rebuked him for talking to him with such impudence, Pastor Kumar said. Since then, Sharma and his Hindu friends had threatened the Kumar family, leading to Sadar police arresting and jailing Sharma on Pastor Kumar’s complaint that he regularly threatened to kill his son.
Despite the unresolved case, the minister reported that Sharma posted bail after one month.
Even though the Christian thought Sharma’s thirst for vengeance had diminished, he never missed an opportunity to threaten Nilesh Kumar after that.
He said, “Nilesh had grown accustomed to it.” “He was developing into a mature Christian. He had just returned from a youth camp and was excited about it. We could have never imagined that for a trivial matter as such, and two years later, Manohar would kill our son for revenge.”
Pastor Kumar said the village would have intervened in the squabble two years ago if they were still Hindus and asked Sharma to stop overreacting.
“Nobody intervened for us; our lives do not matter to the Hindus,” he said in tears.
His son faced scorn, ostracism, and intentional targeting since childhood for being a Christian.
“The village boys teased him by addressing him, ‘Hey hallelujah, come here,’” Pastor Kumar said, describing his entire family’s opposition. “We became vulnerable targets. The villagers knew we were in the minority; we had no one to stand with us.”
Pastor Kumar has agricultural land and livestock to sustain the family. Four other Christian families live in the village and attend his church.
Additionally, Nilesh Kumar has two sisters, who are 12 and 17.
“But our lives will never be the same without Nilesh,” said Kumar, requesting prayer. “He is gone too soon, and we did not get to say our last goodbye.”
India ranked 11th on the Christian support organization Open Doors’ 2024 World Watch List of the countries where it is most challenging to be a Christian. The country was 31st in 2013, but its position worsened after Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to power.
Since Modi took office in May 2014, religious rights advocates claim that the National Democratic Alliance government’s hostile rhetoric toward non-Hindus has given Hindu extremists the confidence to attack Christians in various parts of the nation.