A mob viciously assaulted a family of Jehovah's Witnesses in India's southern state of Karnataka. The family of five, which included an infant 18-months old, and a 60 year-old woman was severely beaten in a village near Dharmasthala.
According to report from the Jehovah's Witnesses official website, the family was returning from visiting a neighbor who had shown interest in learning about the Jehovah's Witnesses religion when a mob accosted them and accused them of forcibly converting people to the Jehovah's Witnesses religion. The mob severely beat two male members of the family with fists and sticks and struck the 18 month-old baby in its mother's arms. The mob also verbally abused the women and threatened them with rape.
The police, according to report, initially refused to accept complaint by the Witnesses while accepting complaint lodged by the attackers who said that the Jehovah's Witness family had tried to forcibly convert non-Jehovah's Witnesses. The police allowed the Jehovah's Witnesses to lodge complaint only after they had detained the family for seven hours in spite of the fact they had suffered injuries during the attack.
The police placed the witnesses under arrest on charges of "maliciously insulting the religion or religious beliefs of [another] class," while the attackers were charged with "voluntarily causing hurt." The court magistrate granted bail to the attackers but the Jehovah's Witness family spent the night in jail and not till the next day were other witnesses allowed to post bail for the family and take them to hospital for medical treatment.
Jehovah's Witnesses have been victims of mob violence on several occasions in Karnataka and according to J.R. Brown, spokesman of the Jehovah's Witnesses at the New York Headquarters of the organization:
These mob attacks on innocent people in India are deplorable, especially attacking a family…No one should be victimized for sharing a peaceful Christian message out of love for God and love of neighbor.
There have been persistent news of attacks and violations of the civil rights of Jehovah's Witnesses, especially in Asian countries, Russia and independent states of the former Soviet Union. While Jehovah's Witnesses are generally identified pejoratively as "cult" by mainstream faiths, the rights of individuals in enlightened societies include freedom of conscience, religious belief and association. Persistent reports of violation of civil rights of Jehovah's Witnesses are disheartening and we daresay that the level of religious tolerance in a country is a good measure of the degree of enlightenment of its citizens.
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