Manipur has been struck with the Kuki and Meitie clashes for the past few years and now new information is coming to the fore that Western Christian missionaries have been busy fueling the fire in the region.
Worryingly, a number of NGO’s especially those linked to the US Baptist Church have been found inciting ethnic tensions between the communities. Pointing to a foreign hand bent on destabilizing the region.
“The biggest project of the US Baptist Church in India right now is ‘Nagaland for Christ’, which is supported by banned militant groups like Nationalist Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN) and other separatist organisations,” stated the Foreign Evangelists’ Cyber Monitoring Desk (Kohima), part of the Indian non-profit Legal Rights Observatory (LRO), in an interview with Sputnik India.
“Dozens of Western missionaries, including those from the US and other Western countries, are present in Nagaland. Many of them have in the past have disregarded tourist visa norms and engaged in religious work.”
The LRO group reported that another notorious organisation based in the US, the Sudan Interior Mission (SIM), has also been busy conducting preaching events in India.
LRO reported that it had been monitoring the movement of a certain Daniel Stephen Courtney, a blacklisted preacher from America. Courtney a former US army veteran had delivered incendiary sermons at a Kuki refuge camp in Churachandpur district, Manipur. Only weeks after violent clashes erupted between the Meitei and Kuki communities.
Courtney was deported from India in 2017 for violating the terms of his tourist visa by engaging in missionary activities, which foreigners are prohibited from doing in India, the group said. The street-preacher was deported again via Delhi last August, after authorities took note of his controversial speech, LRO said. Currently, he is believed to be in Nepal, according to a social media status update from last week.
The Indian government has resorted to stricter regulations for foreigners seeking a missionary visa due to the rising concerns about “illegal religious conversions” in tribal and other vulnerable regions of the country. Insipte of these measures, Western preachers continue trying to make a way into the country.
These constant incursions from such dangerous individuals point to the fact that these preachers and groups are operating at the behest of the US Deep State, former Indian intelligence officers told Sputnik India.
Western NGOs and governments have been engaged in pushing what many suggest is a one-sided narrative of the Manipur tensions, as they seek funds globally for so-called “persecuted Christians” there.
In July 2022, India criticised a European Parliament resolution that called for an independent investigation into the situation in Manipur. The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) dismissed the resolution as “unacceptable,” arguing it reflected a “colonial mindset” typical of Western overreach.
Similarly, in May of this year, India condemned a report from the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) that alleged human rights abuses in Manipur. The MEA characterised the report as “deeply biased,” pointing to a constant wave of Western meddling seeking to run down India’s sovergnity and interfering in its internal affairs.
