Income tax raids held on premises of 2 Jalandhar pastors

Tribune News Service

Deepkamal Kaur

Jalandhar, January 31

The Income Tax teams on Tuesday conducted raids on the various churches and premises of two pastors from the Doaba region —  Harpreet Deol from Khojewal village of Kapurthala and Bajinder Singh from Tajpur village in Jalandhar.

The raids started around 6 am on all the premises belonging to the two pastors. While Deol runs a huge church — The Open Door Church — in Kapurthala, Bajinder Singh has set up many offshore centres too and several across the whole of Punjab, including those at New Chandigarh and Amritsar, in the name of ‘The Church of Glory’ and ‘Wisdom’.

Both of them are Pentecostal pastors and were engaged in miracle healing, involving a huge number of followers mostly from Dalit community and poor sections of society.

Both of them had been using social media on a massive scale to broadcast their prayers and increase their reach within India and abroad.

The I-T sleuths who have been conducting the raids have come here from Bathinda, Amritsar, Jammu and Haryana. The teams reportedly had some clues about huge foreign fundings, violations in the transfer of the funds and evasion of taxes. As the raids were being carried out, paramilitary forces remained on guard and sealed the buildings from all sides.

Pastor Bajinder has courted several controversies even in the past. A Haryanvi Jat, he had got converted to Christianity about a decade back after which he became a self-styled preacher too.

He had got embroiled in a rape case at Zirakpur in July 2018 and had been arrested from IGI Airport while he was about to fly to London.

Another controversy had broken out in September last year as a family from Delhi had alleged that Pastor Bajinder had taken money from them for treating their daughter suffering from cancer through prayers but failed as she passed away.