A presumably Hindu mob of some 30 people stormed the Catholic Nazareth Hospital in Mokama, northeast India, and assaulted patients and staff members, Crux reported Wednesday.
The mob “terrorized the working staff, the watchman and the patients,” said the hospital administrator, Sister Anjana, in reference to the July 15 raid.
The assailants beat up a staff nun named Sister Aruna Kerketta, kicking her as she tried to inform the administration about the situation, Sister Anjana said in rendering her report of the incident, and also “beat up an old female patient.”
During their assault, members of the mob brought a man on a stretcher into the ward who had been shot while riding his motorbike. The man was pronounced already dead by the doctor, even though the mob insisted he still had a pulse.
“Out of fear for their lives, the nurses locked themselves in the nurses’ station along with the doctor and called for the on-call sister. The mob kept banging on the door,” Sister Anjana said.
The sister also noted that the assault “all happened under the watchful eye of a handful of Mokama police personnel who were onlookers along with the mob.”
“How is it possible to function in such a hostile environment?” she asked.
The Catholic archbishop of Patna, Sebastian Kallupura, said it was “very saddening that this incident took place in such a hospital where a lot is being done to help the poor and deprived people, especially women and children.”
The archbishop said he would pray for the hospital staff “as well as the people who did this atrocity.”
As Breitbart News reported Tuesday, India has been suffering from widespread anti-Christian violence, which one watchdog group asserts is aggravated by a “sense of impunity generated in India’s administrative apparatus.”
There is “an environment of targeted hate” toward Christians in India, the Evangelical Fellowship of India (EFI) said in its semi-annual report this month, chronicling 145 recorded incidents of anti-Christian persecution during the first half of 2021.
The incidents included the murder of pastors, attacks on Christian churches, physical violence, threats, and religiously motivated harassment and discrimination.
Christians make up slightly more than 2 percent of India’s population, but are victims in 14 percent of cases of religiously motivated violence, and these assaults have spiked since the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) took power in 2014.
The attacks range from assaults on churches and prayer spaces, even those located within homes, to violence against priests, nuns, and ordinary members of the Christian faithful.
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