The Income Tax department Tuesday began raids on the premises of two pastors in Punjab — Baljinder Singh from Jalandhar and Harpreet Deol from Kapurthala.
It was learnt that both the pastors have their centres in Amritsar, Bathinda, Mohali, and several other districts of the state and the IT department teams from Punjab, Haryana and Jammu were conducting parallel raids at these centres and collecting records.
The pastors have been running church ministries, which are self-styled churches, receiving huge funding from foreign countries. These are registered either as independent religious bodies or under some society run by a pastor.
The number and the followers of these ministries have been increasing rapidly and now all of these churches are competing amongst themselves to increase followers. They are allegedly baptising” people in huge numbers, claiming miraculous cures to relieve people of their sufferings, diseases and ailments like cancer, AIDS, kidney failure and heart failure. They also reportedly claim to fulfil any wish of an individual like providing jobs to the jobless, blessing the childless with children, visas to seekers and so on.
