A Christian woman in central India suffered a miscarriage this month after relatives who practise their traditional tribal religion beat her and strangled her, sources said.
The 25-year-old Kunika Kashyap, of Bade Bodal village, had gone to visit a Christian relative who was ill, about 150 metres from her home. Tribal headman Ganga Ram Kashyap, brother-in-law of the sick woman and a cousin of Kunika’s husband, spotted her entering the house and followed her in. Ganga Ram Kashyap began recording her on his mobile phone.
“He suspected that Kunika might pray with her sick relative and wanted to capture it as proof on his phone,” sources report. Kunika objected, but Ganga Ram refused to stop recording.
“When he continued filming even after my protests, I swatted his hand away,” Kunika told sources from her hospital bed.
“Ganga Ram kicked my belly with his foot, strangled me and hit me violently,” she told sources. “His wife and daughter joined him in beating me with a thick wooden bamboo, kicked my chest, my stomach, my head and my whole body brutally.”
“It was only God’s doing that enabled her to escape from three people continuously beating her from all sides,” said her husband, who works as a mason and daily wage labourer 25km from their village.
Kunika was in severe pain when her husband rushed her to the government hospital in Jagdalpur, where treatment began at around 5pm, he said.
Medical records state that she was admitted with “neck pain, pain over right leg, pain over temporo-occipital and swelling, abdomen pain and chest pain, contusion over neck region,” and that she was six weeks and six days pregnant. The couple has been married for two years, and this was her first pregnancy.
“The initial ultrasound showed that the foetus was alive,” said her husband, “but by 6:30 in the evening she suffered a miscarriage.”
Husband Mandu Ram Kashyap, who along with church elders approached the local police station and filed a written complaint against Ganga Ram Kashyap on 2 January, said he suspects officers have not registered a First Information Report (FIR), as he has received no copy of one.
“Though the police said that they would register an FIR after initial investigation, the police never called us for any inquiry, nor recorded my wife’s statement,” Mandu Ram Kashyap said.
The police visited him and his wife only once, on 7 January and asked them about the precise area of the house where the assault had taken place, which they showed them, he said.
Mandu Ram Kashyap and his wife are one of 50 Christian families in the village of about 120 families. Children of Christian parents, each has been a Christian for more than 20 years. They attend the Episcopal Methodist Church.
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