follow-up story to:
02/13/2005: Extremists Attack, Beat Six GFA Students
Police have arrested five men in the wake of Sunday’s vicious attack against six GFA Biblical Seminary students. The attackers were arrested after a raid conducted by the Deputy Superintendent of Police. The police also seized the three-wheeler taxicabs used in the abductions.
The Hindustan Times reported that those arrested were affiliated with the RSS, an armed militant Hindu group hostile to Christianity and other religious minorities. Formed even before India’s independence, its leaders call for “national reconstruction” and seek to establish “uncompromising devotion” to a purely Hindu nation.
The seminary students had been regularly visiting a community of laborers on previous weekends, praying for the sick, caring for the needy, sharing the love of Christ and offering hope. Seventy percent of the family problems in this community are directly related to poverty, drug use and alcohol addiction. As a result of their regular visits and compassionate outreach, people’s hearts were beginning to respond.
“The ministry there was bringing fruitful results due to our students’ continuous visits,” reports a GFA field correspondent.
In the weeks before the attack, RSS men had previously warned the seminary students to stop witnessing in this area. When the students arrived at a bus stop last Sunday, a gang of men began abusing and assaulting them before pushing them into auto rickshaws (three-wheeled taxis) and driving them to a secluded location, where they were repeatedly beaten. All the students suffered from internal pain and headaches, some severe. One was diagnosed with a broken left eardrum and facial bruising.
The students continue to recover from their injuries in a local hospital.
“Their heads are still hurting from getting hit so hard,” said one GFA pastor who visited them there. “The brother whose eardrum was broken is doing better. He has lost about 30 percent of his hearing in that ear, but it should come back as his ear heals.”
In response to the arrests, the Chennai Online news service reported that India’s National Commission of Minorities (NCM) will investigate the attacks.
The students are expected to return to the seminary later this week and rejoin their classes.