Category: From The States

Eight Christians were injured and hospitalized when Hindu radicals attacked them and accused them of religious conversion in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh.
More than 150 Christians were praying in a house church on March 8 in Dantewada district when the Hindus attacked them with axes, stones and wooden clubs, injuring several of them, local media reported.
“We heard on March 9 about the attack on Christians who belong to the Pentecostal church in Dantewada district. As of now the police have not filed a first information report because most of the time they try to solve the problem amicably,” Bishop Joseph Kollamparampil of Jagdalpur told.
“This is a communally sensitive area, so the administration tries to handle the situation carefully and avoid creating any communal tension in the area.
“There are several reasons Christians are attacked in that particular area and one of the main reasons is both the parties try to provoke each other. Both Christians and Hindus should respect each other to avoid the unnecessary situation.
“There are more than 70 denomination churches in the area and we have no control over them. We have a united Christian forum, a platform where all Christian leaders come and share their views and discuss things, and I hope this will help us clear our differences.”

Experts have expressed serious concerns over the downgrading of India’s status from ‘the world’s largest democracy to an ‘electoral autocracy’ and from a “Free Country” to a “Partly Free Country” in the international reports.
They expressed their views in a group discussion held by Jamaat-e-Islami Hind (JIH) here on the topic of the impact of the upcoming Assembly Elections in five states and the responsibilities of voters.
Initiating the discussion on the topic, JIH Secretary Malik Motasim Khan has said that elections are very important to a democracy. “Through the elections, people can show their power by choosing their favourite representatives and rejecting the undesirable ones. The people use their voting power to correct their past mistakes and throw out incompetent representatives and this is a great opportunity for them,” he added. Pointing out that elections are now using as a tool to divide the people rather than unite them, the JIH Secretary talked about the present atmosphere where sedition charges are being slapped on trivial matters, students and journalists are being put behind bars, people are facing troubles only for speaking out on the issues and even questions are being raised on the judiciary.
Malik Motasim said, “the atmosphere created by some political parties in recent years, seems that attempts are being made to disintegrate the people and the country under the guise of elections. This is very harmful to our country. Therefore, recent international reports have branded India as partly free which is heading toward the democratic autocracy.” He was referring to the annual report of Sweden’s V-Dem Institute, which has downgraded India from ‘the world’s largest democracy to an ‘electoral autocracy’ while just days before the US watchdog Freedom House’s report graded it from a “Free Country” to a “Partly Free Country”.
Expressing serious concerns over the international reports related to India, senior journalist Prashant Tandon said, “we can neither deny them nor call them biased reports as the gravity of the situation of the country is obvious. Democracy is an institution that runs based on public opinion. Raising issues before voting is very important in forming a government. Instead of voting on the issues like education, health, cleanliness, employment, human rights, development and industry, we vote in the name of religion and caste. Now the politics of polarization has emerged based on hatred for some years. This is not good for a democratic country. In such a situation, this is the prime responsibility of the citizens to be alert while voting, keeping in view the interest and development of the country and elect only honest representatives.”

United Nations has nominated a Catholic activist and educationist from the eastern Indian Jharkhand state as the indigenous languages’ representative for Asia.
Anabel Benjamin Bara was selected on March 19 from Asia by UNESCO for the Global Task Force of International Decades of Indigenous Languages (IDIL) 2022-2032.
The appointment letter signed by Xing Qu, UN Deputy Director-General for Communication and Information, said “members were nominated by the respective electoral groups of UNESCO’s member states, indigenous peoples and indigenous peoples’ organizations from each socio-cultural region.”

The denial of bail to Father Stan Swamy continues to evoke condem-nation even as the court claimed it has found evidence to prove the 83-year-old Jesuit tribal activist had conspired to overthrow the government.
Special judge D E Kothalikar of the National Investigation Agency (NIA) court rejected Father Swamy’s bail plea on March 22 but his order was made available a day later.
The order says the bail was refused based on the material on record that indicated Father Swamy was a member of the banned Maoist organization that had hatched a “serious conspiracy” to create unrest in the country and to overthrow the government.

A Catholic priest died March 26 after falling from the terrace of a major seminary near Chennai where he was teaching for the past several years. According to a message from Monsignor L John Robert, administrator of Vellore diocese, Father Velanganni Vinothraj died because of a fall from the terrace of Sacred Heart Seminary at Poonamallee. He was 46.

Life in India’s Christian-majority northeastern states is often full of individual idio-syncrasies — and the focus keeps shifting between the pro-tagonists, particularly when politics seeks shelter under the shadow of church communities. Former Nagaland chief minister Vamuzo (he uses only one name) has said the Church in his Christian-majority state “is often like the air we breathe. It is everywhere but mostly nowhere.”
Such statements come into focus for Mizoram, another Christian-majority state, where a prominent Congress party leader recently apologized for opening alcohol outlets when his party ran the government between 2008 and 2018.
“We opened shops and issued alcohol permits against the interests of churches and NGOs, which was the main reason for our defeat” in the state polls in 2018, Congress leader Lal Thanzara has said. It shows the political clout the Christian community wields in Mizoram, where they form 87% of the state’s 1.1 million people. The majority of them are Presbyterians and Baptists.

The Madhya Pradesh High Court on March 16 granted anticipatory bail to a Catholic nun accused of violating the central Indian state’s anti-conversion law.
Sister Bhagya, a member of the Sisters of the Destitute, was asked to furnish personal bond of 10,000 rupees and with one solvent surety of the same amount to avail the interim bail. The single judge bench has posted the case to April 7 for the next hearing.
The nun, who is the principal of the Sacred Heart Convent High School in Khajuraho of Chhatarpur district, has been booked under sections 3 and 5 of the Madhya Pradesh Freedom of Religion Ordinance, 2020.
The allegation against her is that she attempted to convert a former staff member who functioned as an Assistant Librarian in the said school and whose services were terminated subsequently on account of poor performance.

The Catholic diocese of Miao has rushed its social service team to a village where a massive fire accident killed two persons and rendered 500 homeless. “This was the biggest fire accident I have witnessed in my life,” Sethok Thinyan, a youth leader and member of the Church team that visited the affected village, told Matters India. According to him, all houses in Longliang village in Tirap district are made of bamboos with thatched roofs and built adjacent to one another. “A small spark aided by the usual strong wind could spell a doom for the whole village. The fire tenders too could not arrive due to the remoteness of the village,” the youth leader explained. The fire on March 18 also destroyed the food grains saved for the rest of the year, he added.

The Assam Christian Forum, representing all denominations in the north-eastern Indian state, has appealed to the people to vote for candidates who work for an inclusive and secular society and uphold the Constitution. In the first such pre-election appeal, the forum also warned against the victimization of people if the Citizenship (Amendment) Act is promulgated. The Act seeks to fast-track the citizenship of non-Muslims who reportedly fled religious persecution in Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakis-tan and took refuge in India till December 31, 2014.

The Latin Church in Kerala has lashed out at the state government over the scrapped deal with US-based EMCC International for deep sea fishing and research, stating that the Fisheries and Industries Departments made serious mistakes and that they would have to take responsibility for the issue, instead of blaming bureaucrats.
Bishop Joseph Kariyil of the Cochin Diocese said that he didn’t believe that the Chief Minister was kept in the loop and that the actions of departments concerned were condemnable. The bishop was speaking to the media after a meeting of the Kerala Regional Catholic Council (KRLCC) in Kochi on March 7.
“The CM might have relied on the departments to act responsibly. However it was not for them to sign the pact without studying the issues properly,” the bishop said, the Times of India reported.
The controversy relates to two Memorandum of Understandings signed with EMCC International India, one by the Kerala Shipping Inland Navigation Corporation Limited (KSINC) and one by the Kerala State Industrial Development Corporation Limited (KSIDC). The one by KSIDC was signed in February 2020 while the one with KSINC was signed in February 2021.
The EMCC International, according to the MoUs, will invest Rs 5,324 crore in fisheries research and development for upgrading and promoting the deep sea fishing industry in Kerala.
The government cancelled the MoUs signed with KSINC after the opposition raised allegations of corruption in the deals and also highlighted the concerns of the fishing community, who have warned that foreign trawlers would impact fishermen and lead to unscientific deep fishing that could adversely affect the environment.
“The evidence in my possession or in the hands of opposition leader (Ramesh Chennithala) is a private matter and it’s up to us to decide on when to bring it out. The deal was something that affects everyone, so why didn’t (the government) furnish proof and clear their names, instead of kicking the ball to the opposition’s court, demanding evidence from them,” media reports quoted the bishop as saying.