Unidentified vandals destroy-ed statues of Mother Mary, Infant Jesus and the Sacred Heart of Jesus at a hill shrine in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh causing shock among the local Catholics. The incident happened on the intervening night of May 14 and 15. “We came to know about it through some Catholics who had been there early morning,” said Father Bala Subash Chandra Bose who is in charge of the shrine.
The newly constructed shrine complex at Edlapadu in the Guntur district was being readied for an inauguration, Father Bose told on May 18.
“Christians here are in a state of shock and disbelief,” the Guntur diocesan priest said. “We organized a protest march on May 15 evening to press for speedy investigations.”
However, three days after no one had been arrested and the priest said a peace march had been planned on the morning of May 19 to be followed by another protest march on May 22.
The shrine had become an unlikely religious flashpoint in 2021 with the pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) claiming it was being illegally erected at a spot where a carving of the Hindu deity Narasimha and footprints of Sita Maa (the wife of Hindu god Ram) existed originally. The claim made by Sunil Deodhar, BJP’s national secretary in charge of Andhra Pradesh, on Twitter was debunked by the Guntur district police, which also issued a video showing how the Catholic shrine and the Hindu deity existed on “two different hillocks” located around half a kilometer away from each other.