May 2016
A Tannersville couple, who had dumped a severed cow head at a Hindu man’s property in Jackson Township, Stroudsburg, USA, hoping it would scare the victim into moving away, have been charged with ethnic intimidation harassment, loitering and prowling at night, criminal trespassing, disorderly conduct, scattering rubbish and criminal conspiracy, according to reports published on May 2, 2016.
The Northdale Siva Nyana Sabha in Chetty Road, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, was desecrated by callous burglars who made off with more than R50 000 worth of items. Burglars smashed down the wall of a local temple and stripped the building of copper pipes, kitchen items and significant brass Hindu idols, as per reports published on May 3, 2016.
Tension prevailed near Hindustan Photo FIlm (HPF) area in the tourist town of Udhagamandalam (Ooty), following damage to eight idols of different gods in a temple, as a 40-year-old woman was taken for interrogation in this regard on May 3.
Pankaj Sarkar (57), Hindu Priest of ISKCON, was attacked and assaulted on May 5, 2016, at about 2 a.m. at his residence (Near Gher) at Satkhira District, after he refused to pay extortion money of Taka three lacks to the extortionists.
Thieves have decamped with three 50-year-old idols from a Hindu temple in Netrokona town on May 4.
More than 20 miscreants attacked on six Hindu houses, holy places and looted these houses at Para-Bajitpur of Niklee Upazila of Kishoreghonj District, Bangladesh, according reports published on May 6.
The Christian-majority Kanyakumari district saw a horrendous case of temple desecration by its majoritarian Christian police on May 13, 2016. After some Hindu teens, who were unaware of the prohibition on firecrackers, burned fire crackers, the Christian police officers entered the temple, smashed up the murtis and pooja ornaments, and beat up the devotees, including children and women.
Hindu Murtis were vandalized in Christian Missionary affected tribal Dang district of south Gujarat. Unidentified persons entered inside the Purneshwar Mahadev temple late in the night and vandalized various murtis, according to reports published on May 13.
An elderly Buddhist monk was found hacked to death on May 14, 2016 in Bangladesh. The incident happened in the remote southeastern district of Bandarban and bore a resemblance to several recent murders by suspected Islamist militants.
A Hindu headmaster of a school in Narayanganj, Bangladesh was on May 13, 2016, beaten up and made to do sit-ups by holding ears by locals for allegedly insulting Islam.
A BJP worker from Kerala, who was injured in an attack by CPM workers, succumbed to his wound on May 20, 2016 at a private hospital in Thrissur. Thirty-three year old Pramod was brutally attacked in the Marxist sponsored strife in Kayappamangalam, following victory of the local LDF candidate.
Hours after assembly election results which swayed in favor of LDF, violence erupted in various parts of Kannur. RSS and BJP workers suffered serious injuries on Thursday in the attack by CPM goons. Similar attacks are being reported from Kasaragod, Thrissur, Calicut and Thiruvananthapuram districts, as per the reports published on May 20, 2016.
A Christian priest and his two women associates were arrested by police today after a man accused them of “forcibly converting” him and two others by offering them job and money. The complainant, Prashant Gupta stated the trio had invited him and his two associates– Rambhan Adivasi and Hemraj Verma–to Aber Church where he was offered job and money. The arrested have been identified as A B Anthony, the priest attached to Aber Church under Kotar police station area, and his women assistants P Anthony and Prabha Anthony.
On May 21, 2016, three men were killed by the members of Communist Party of India – Maoist (CPI-Maoist) on the border of Bihar and Jharkhand, for allegedly being police informers.
A Hindu businessman was on May 25, 2016 hacked to death in Bangladesh after he allegedly refused to pay extortion money to drug addicts. Debesh Chandra Pramanik, 68, a shoe store owner, was murdered inside his shop in Gaibandha of north-western Gobindaganj Upazila. The victim’s family claimed that some local drug addicts tried to extort money from Pramanik a few days ago and when he refused to pay, an argument broke out at the shop.
Officers of the Idol Wing–CID attached to the Economic Offences Wing (EOW) claim to have unearthed yet another idol smuggling racket with the arrest of three persons who allegedly helped in hiding ‘antique’ stone idols in a house in Alwarpet, in Tamil Nadu on May 31.
Unidentified people stole an Ashtadhatu idol of Lord Vansupujya at a Jain Temple in Trimurty Nagar area, Madhya Pradesh on the night of May 30.
June 2016
A century old Muthumariamman Temple in Seberang Perai Central (Penang) was vandalized damaging some statues of deities on the night of June 1. This was second such desecration, after similar incident at Sree Muneeswaran Amman Temple in Ipoh (Perak) on April 24 where some statues were desecrated.
The Thiruverumbur police recovered several stone idols of Hindu deities from Cauvery river near Othakudi on June 4, 2016. Suspected to have been stolen from temples in the region, police say that smugglers could have abandoned them due to the recent crackdown on idol smugglers in Chennai.
A Hindu priest has been killed in Bangladesh, in the latest attack by Islamist militants on June 7, 2016. The body of Ananda Gopal Ganguly, 70, was found in a field near his temple in western Jhenaidah district. His head had been nearly severed from his neck.
An elderly Hindu ashram worker was today hacked to death by suspected Islamists in Bangladesh. Nityaranjan Pandey, 60, who was working as a volunteer for the past 40 years at the Thakur Anukul Chandra Satsanga Paramtirtha Hemayetpurdham Ashram, was murdered on June 10 morning in Pabna’s Hemayetpur Upazila.
The Sri Dharma Munisverar temple in Malaysia’s Penang state was reported to have been damaged by unidentified persons on June 10. This is the second such incident involving a Hindu temple in Butterworth town. Previously, Muthumariamman Temple in Penanti Estate, Ara Kuda was vandalized on June 4, 2016.
At least 346 Hindu families have migrated from Kairana, located 124 kilometres from Delhi in Uttar Pradesh’s Shamli district, due to goondaism and extortion threats. As per the 2011 Census, Kairana had 30% Hindus while the percentage of Muslims was at 68%. However, the figure now stands at only 8% Hindus and 92% Muslims, as per the local administration. A video report here
An elderly Hindu man was badly beaten by a police constable named Ali Hassan in Pakistan for reportedly eating and selling food items during Ramadan, the month considered holy by Muslims.
The incident occurred on June 9, 2016 in Ghotki, in northern Sindh province, where Das was selling Iftaari items before Iftaar and Hassan claimed he also saw him eating a banana. The constable thrashed the old man, who was later rescued by citizens.
The Patna Police took two people into its detention on a woman’s complaint that alleged that she was forced to consume cow meat and adopt Islam. The incident is said to have taken place in Phulwari area in Patna on June 13.
A Hindu college lecturer was seriously wounded after being hacked by three men in Bangladesh on Jun 15. Ripon Chakrabarti, 50, a mathematics lecturer was attacked at the door of his home in the southern town of Madripur at around 5pm.
The alleged desecration of an ancient temple in Jammu triggered violence as protesters torched vehicles and threw stones at cops, who responded with lathi charge and teargas shells late on June 14 night.
Trouble started when Mohammad Yasir, reportedly a mentally challenged youth, allegedly barged into the temple, threw stones, ransacked the premises, and desecrated the idols. Violence broke out after worshippers rushed to a nearby police station where head constable Rehmat-Ullah allegedly refused to register a case and instead misbehaved with them.
One more temple was allegedly desecrated on June 16 in Jammu, leading to tension briefly in parts of the city which was recovering from the fallout of a similar incident just a few days earlier. “A man entered a temple in the Nanak Nagar area and tried to vandalise it. The man has been identified and arrested,” Deputy Commissioner of Jammu Simrandeep Singh told PTI.
In yet another case of kidnapping and forced conversion from Pakistan, a jirga (traditional assembly of leaders that makes decisions according to the teachings of Islam), forcefully remarried an already-married Hindu girl to an elderly man in Tharparkar district of Sindh province in Pakistan.
Wadia Bai Meghwar had married her cousin Suresh in a Karachi court on May 4, 2016. However, a few days later someone from an influential family of the area took Wadia from their home, promising to marry the couple in a traditional wedding. But to Suresh’s surprise, Wadia never returned to him and was instead forcibly married off to a 56-year-old man.
After BJP MP Hukum Singh alleged that Hindu families in Kairana and Kandhla had to “flee” due to fear of persecution, the Bajrang Dal and Vishwa Hindu Parishad issued a fresh list of 40 Hindu families that have supposedly fled from Deoband in Saharanpur district.
Vikas Tyagi, regional secretary of the VHP, said, “The issue of exodus that Hukum Singh raised is not just limited to Kairana. Hindu families across western UP are living in constant fear. They are oppressed by criminals from another community. The reason for the exodus is the lawlessness. The state government has been giving political patronage to goons of a particular community. If this is not stopped, UP will become like Kashmir. In Deoband itself, hundreds of Hindu families have fled over the years. We have prepared a list of 40 families so far. Soon, we will have a comprehensive list and present it to the administration.”
In a major breakthrough in the sensational Jisha murder case, an Assam native has confessed to killing the dalit law student at her house near Perumbavoor on April 28. The police formally arrested the 23-year-old Ameerul Islam on June 16 and said that identification parade and other formalities will follow.
In a major development, tension gripped a village in Jammu region’s Poonch district on Monday over use of loudspeakers in a Hindu temple. Reportedly, members of the majority Muslim community objected to the use of loudspeakers in a Hindu temple situated in Poonch’s Jhulas village.
Officials of the Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowment (HR&CE) in Tiruchi region, who inspected the idols seized by the State Idol Wing CID Police from a house in Chennai, found two idols matching those stolen from the region.
After the explosives unearthed by bomb disposal squads at Machilipatnam town on June 18 night in an isolated place nearby a temple, there raised many doubts on the suspected attack that whether it was planned to kill the Supreme Court judge and legal adviser for four Southern state governors, Vikas Bhansuwada or indications of Left Wing Extremists (LWE) to show their presence in the district.
The Tamil Nadu Police has seized around 500 stolen antique idols of Hindu deities from an alleged smuggler, masquerading as an art collector. Many of the idols are over a thousand years old. The idols recovered include 254 ancient stone idols, 54 panchaloha idols, 28 wooden artefacts and 151 antique art works on canvas.
Once a thriving minority, only a handful of Sikh and Hindu families remain. Many have chosen to flee the country of their birth, blaming growing discrimination and intolerance.
According to Avtar Singh, chairman of the national council of Hindus and Sikhs, the community now numbers fewer than 220 families, compared with around 220,000 members before the collapse of the Kabul government in 1992. Once spread across the country, the community is now mainly concentrated in the eastern provinces of Nangarhar, Ghazni, and the capital Kabul.
Police arrested an octogenarian art dealer for possessing hundreds of artefacts thought to have been stolen from Hindu temples, as they probe possible links to international smuggling rackets, officers said on Wednesday. G Deenadhayalan, 85, was formally arrested on June 21 after police carried out multiple raids on his properties in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, leading to the recovery of the cache of idols.
Vishwa Hindu Parishad on June 23 submitted a list of 354 families of Agra to the district magistrate here, claiming that they have all migrated after receiving “threat from Muslims”. VHP, which had embarked upon an exercise to conduct surveys in nine localities of mixed population to assess “migrations” of Hindu families across Agra, claimed that in the past decade, not a single family of Muslims has left the locality while hundreds of Hindus have.
A group of teenage vandals filmed themselves smashing up the inside of a Sikh temple and then gloated about their mindless destruction on social media. The yobs targeted the Gurdwara in Gravesend, Kent, yesterday evening – wrecking glass cabinets, throwing plates at walls and hurling sacred Sikh symbols in a show of shocking disrespect.
An Ayurvedic practitioner and medicinal herbs supplier named Sulal Chowdhury from Rauzan, Chittagong was beheaded by suspected Islamic terrorists during Ramadan 25th June, 2016 as reported in Bangladesh internet news media Eibela.
A Christian school in Bengaluru expelled a 3 year old LKG student because the child had a shikha (long tuft or lock of hair on the top or back of the head) as part of his family’s Hindu religious traditions. The case is from St. Vincent Pallotti School, Baabusaab Palya (Bengaluru), where Vishnu BM a student of LKG was expelled on June 6. His father, Manjunath BC was called to school by the Principal Fr. Paul D’Souza and was told that boys were not allowed to have a ‘ponytail’ in the school and his hair needs to be cut if he wants to continue studying in the school.
Manjunath’s family offers the shikha of male children to their family deity Malleshwara at a temple in Bagepalli in Chikballapur. When Manjunath tried to explain the religious significance of his son’s ponytail, as it is a family custom for them to not cut the shikha till the boy reaches the age of five after which the lock of hair is offered to their family deity, the Principal refused to understand and told the father not to hold such ‘superstitious beliefs’.
The SFI goons, who were responsible for the loss of vision of ABVP activist and Guruvayur Sree Krishna College union chairman KS Sanoop, have been directed by the Court to pay a compensation of Rs 4.20 lakh. In 2008, Sanoop was brutally attacked by SFI activists while he was writing his exam, which resulted in total loss of vision in left eye. The dastardly act was the Left’s response to the victory of ABVP in the college elections.
A day after the National Investigation Agency (NIA) busted an alleged Islamic State (IS) terror module in Hyderabad by arresting five suspected sympathizers and detaining six others, a report on June 30, 2016 revealed shocking details.
The “IS sympathizers” had planned to place cow and buffalo meat at the Bhagyalakshmi temple at the base of the iconic Charminar with an aim to trigger communal violence. One airgun, two .9 mm pistols, nails, two airgun target boards and other material like chemicals used for making explosives and Improvised Explosive Devises (IEDs) were seized during the raids. Cash totalling Rs 15 lakh, 23 mobile phones, three laptops and seven pen drives were also seized.
IndiaFacts Staff articles, reports and guest pieces