Miracle Cures, Street Protests and a Silent Fault Line in Punjab

December 10, 2025

When Jalandhar Police picked up Punjab Bachao Morcha president Tejasvi Minhas before dawn on December 8, it looked at first like a small law-and-order story. Officially, the FIR was about blocking a road and disobeying prohibitory orders at an earlier gathering. But the context was much bigger: Minhas had just led a noisy campaign against “illegal conversions” and “miracle healing” by pastors in Punjab, and had publicly targeted one of the state’s most visible Pentecostal leaders, Pastor Ankur Narula. Minhas and fellow activists had recently held a press conference in Jalandhar, announcing that their newly formed Punjab Bachao Morcha would pursue legal action against what they call “illegal” conversions using miracle cures.

He alleged that as many as 65,000 pastors are working in Punjab and claimed that the Christian population has risen from the official 1.26% to an estimated 15%. The group demanded an anti-conversion law, a ban on “magic miracle” promotions, and tougher enforcement of the Drugs and Magic Remedies (Objectionable Advertisements) Act, which already outlaws miracle-cure advertisements. A few days later, Minhas and others took their protest to the Enforcement Directorate’s office, burning effigies of Pastor Ankur Narula and his wife and submitting a memorandum seeking a probe into his ministry’s finances.

That was the trigger for a sharp counter-mobilisation. The Global Christian Action Committee and supporters of Narula announced a blockade of Jalandhar’s PAP Chowk; Punjab State Minorities Commission chairman Jatinder Masih “Gaurav” went live on social media, condemned the effigy-burning as deeply offensive, demanded police action, and said Minhas should be “thrown in jail.” By early morning Sunday, Minhas was under arrest; by evening, a local court had ordered his release. He has since accused the police of acting under political pressure and vowed legal action. Strip away the personalities, and you see the outline of a much deeper conflict: between a rapidly expanding, miracle-centred Pentecostal movement and sections of the Sikh and Hindu majority who fear that it is quietly altering Punjab’s religious and social landscape.

The rise of “miracle ministries”
To understand the anxiety, you have to look at what is happening around Khambra village on the Jalandhar–Nakodar road. Here stands the Church of Signs and Wonders, the headquarters of Ankur Narula Ministries. Founded in 2008 with a handful of followers, it is now widely described as a prosperity megachurch following Pentecostal Christianity, practising exorcism and claiming miraculous healing. Weekly congregations are reported in the tens of thousands. An in-depth feature in Outlook this year described Khambra on a Sunday as if all roads were leading to the church: loudspeakers blaring “Hallelujah,” vast courtyards packed with the devout, and a steady stream of people coming forward to be baptised. Every month, hundreds of people—many of them Dalits and turbaned Sikhs—are said to opt for baptism.

The ministry also runs an online prayer facility, a marriage bureau for Christian couples, and even helps arrange visas for young people hoping to go abroad. Narula’s ministry is not an isolated case. Across Doaba and other parts of Punjab, lay Pentecostal pastors hold mass “healing” services and exorcisms, offer blessed oil or water, and stream it all live on social media. A Times of India ground report from 2022 on faith-healing and conversions noted that these new-generation churches have outnumbered older Catholic and Protestant institutions, drawing huge crowds and donations, while provoking unease among Sikh bodies like the SGPC. Supporters see these ministries as places of hope for the poor, the sick and the socially marginalised. Critics see them as aggressive proselytising machines, preying on desperation with promises of miracle cures, jobs and foreign visas.
Money, land and the question of transparency
The Punjab Bachao Morcha’s rhetoric taps into another deep worry: who is funding this rapid expansion, and how much land and wealth is quietly changing hands? In April 2023, the Income Tax Department conducted coordinated raids on around a dozen premises associated with Pastor Ankur Narula—his church at Khambra, his residence, relatives’ homes and business associates in Jalandhar, Phillaur, Kapurthala and beyond. Media reports described the action as an investigation into “money transactions,” foreign funding and alleged money laundering. A later report in Outlook noted that Narula was among several Punjab-based church ministries whose premises were searched by tax authorities over complaints related to foreign donations. Separately, a legal advocacy group claimed in a complaint that an evangelist NGO linked to Narula had violated FCRA norms through a shell company, though these remain allegations, not judicial findings. On the other side, Narula and his supporters have publicly rejected the insinuation of wrongdoing and projected the raids as scrutiny that they are prepared to face. Christian groups frequently argue that accusations of “conversion mafia” and “black money” are part of a larger campaign that stigmatises an already small minority.
The facts that are clear are limited but important:
•The Church of Signs and Wonders is a very large, fast-growing Pentecostal ministry that explicitly centres miraculous healing and exorcism.
•It has amassed substantial physical infrastructure and land over a relatively short period.
•Tax authorities and complainants have raised questions about money flows and foreign funding, leading to multiple raids. Outcomes of those probes are not yet public. Given this, it is reasonable in a democracy to demand financial transparency and regulatory scrutiny—just as it is reasonable to insist that such scrutiny be even-handed, and not a cover for targeting one religious group.
Sikh anxieties and the cost of looking away
For many Sikhs, especially in rural Punjab, the rise of miracle ministries isn’t a distant issue—it is visible in their own families and villages. Journalistic reporting from Majha and Doaba has documented how large numbers of Dalits and some Sikhs attend church services, sometimes without formally converting on paper, and how this has triggered calls for an anti-conversion law and sparked violent attacks on churches. Groups like Punjab Bachao Morcha frame this as nothing less than a civilisational threat: if Sikh institutions and leadership remain complacent, they fear, the demographic and cultural balance of Punjab could change in a generation. That fear is often overstated in numbers and couched in inflammatory language. But it is also rooted in real failures:
• Gurudwaras and panthic institutions have not always addressed the economic desperation, illness, addiction and migration dreams that make miracle ministries so attractive.
• The state has been slow to enforce existing laws against fraudulent medical claims, which would apply to any “healer,” regardless of faith.
• Political parties have treated the new churches either as convenient vote banks or as fodder for polarising rhetoric, rather than as actors to be regulated firmly but fairly. Ignoring these issues will not make them disappear. It will only push more people—especially the poor and the sick—towards whoever seems to offer them the quickest relief, whether through medicine, “anointed oil” or the promise of a visa.
What waking up should look like
“Waking up,” from a Sikh or broader Punjabi perspective, cannot mean demonising every Christian or attacking churches. That path has already led, in recent years, to vandalism and violence that only deepen mistrust. It must mean something more mature and strategic:
• Demand full financial transparency from all large religious institutions—gurudwaras, deras, temples, mosques and churches alike—on land holdings, donations and foreign funding.
• Strictly enforce existing laws against fraudulent medical claims and misleading miracle-cure advertisements, irrespective of which religion or organisation is involved.
• Reinvest in social service through Sikh institutions—health camps, de-addiction centres, legal aid, skill development—so that the panth speaks to the same pain that miracle ministries currently tap into.
• Keep protest within the bounds of law, avoiding symbolic humiliation that can be used to justify crackdowns, as happened with the effigy-burning episode and Minhas’s arrest. The stakes are high. If Punjab’s mainstreamparticularly its Sikh leadershiptreats the rise of miracle ministries and mass faith-healing as a fringe curiosity, it risks waking up a decade from now to find that both belief and land have quietly shifted. But if the response is only anger and scapegoating, the state could slide into a new cycle of communal confrontation.The challenge is to hold two commitments together: to protect the constitutional right of every Punjabi to practise and propagate their faith, and to insist that no one—whether pastor, granthi or sant—builds empires on opaque money, false promises and regulatory blind spots. That balance will not be easy. But it is the only way to ensure that what is now a “silent” fault line does not become Punjab’s next open fracture