Tribal Christians in the western state of Gujarat say they are not enthused by a forthcoming visit to their province by India’s first indigenous woman all set to become the nation’s president.
Draupadi Murmu is scheduled to be in the home state of Prime minister Narendra Modi on July 13 to pay homage to the late Sardar Vallabhai Patel, an iconic national leader from Gujarat credited with uniting India after independence.
Murmu is the candidate of the ruling alliance led by the pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and is expected to sail through the July 18 contest against Yash-want Sinha, a former BJP veteran politician and ex-federal minister pitted against her by a united opposition.
India’s president is not elected directly but chosen by an electoral college comprising parliamentarians and legislators across the provinces.
The tribal people including Christians in Gujarat say they do “feel good that someone amongst them will become India’s first citizen.”
However, they say her visit isn’t of any interest to them because they will not be allowed to go near her because of VIP security protocols for important political figures.
Gujarat’s lone Christian legislator Punja Gamit says Murmu’s election as president may help the right-wing agenda of “delisting converts [to Christianity] from the list of Scheduled Tribes recognized officially across India.”
Gamit was referring to ongoing debates in India, pushed forth by Hindu right-wing groups, over attempted exclusion of tribal people who converted to Christianity from special education, job, social welfare and legislative quotas reserved for them.
Gamit said he and his Congress party will be endorsing Yashwant Sinha in the hope that he will refuse to be a “rubber stamp” and stall the anti-tribal Christian moves, such as the delisting of converts by Modi’s ruling BJP government.
Raj Vasava, a young tribal activist in Gujarat who recently joined the opposition Congress party, said Murmu’s nomination as a presidential candidate was a matter of pride but there was also fear.
She is known for projecting herself as pro-Hindu rather than as an indigenous person and had chosen to visit a temple after her nomination, he noted.

Lucy D’Souza was desperate. She lost her husband to cancer in 2020, and the pandemic took away her job as a housemaid. However, she managed to rebuild her life with what she says is “timely support” from some Catholic nuns.
“Today, I make my living by selling pickles in the local market,” said the Catholic mother of two as she packed mango and pickled vegetables into small bottles.
D’Souza is among the more than 200 Christian, Hindu and Muslim women who through local self-help groups have ta-ken up trades and self-employment projects to overcome pandemic trauma in Mangaluru, a port city in the southern Indian state of Karnataka. Another 200 women have done the same in Bengaluru, the state capital, some 220 miles east of Mangaluru.
They all are assisted by four congregations of women religious.
“People suffered a lot with no jobs, business or any means of livelihood during the COVID lockdowns,” said Sr. Joel Lasrado, a member of the Missionary Sisters of the Queen of the Apostles who helped D’Souza start her business.
Other congregations that have helped people like D’Souza are the Sisters of the Little Flower of Bethany, Sisters of Charity of Sts. Bartolomea Capitanio and Vincenza Gerosa, and Sisters of St. Joseph of Tarbes.

Father Stanley Kozhichira, a Limca World Record holder for theatrical production, was on July 14 elected the Asian president of Signis, the global network of Catholic communicators.
“My personal thoughts are for working together as a team to build a strong Catholic communication network in the Asian region and to make Signis a brand among the youngsters,” the 50-year-old priest of the archdiocese of Delhi told Matters India soon after his election.
He also said he would like to bring into the organization a collective decision-making concept as a professional street theater person.
The online election was attended by delegates from all member countries of Signis Asia. Father Kozhichira, who is currently the president of Signis India, succeeds Father Joseph Anuch Chadeja of Thailand.
He has been in theater for more than 30 years. He has written and directed over 110 plays and street plays. An expert in street theater, he has conducted workshops in street theater for 22 years. He has produced documentaries and telefilms for Doordarshan, the national television network, and other production houses as director, assistant director, senior producer and script writer.

Catholics in India have applauded Pope Francis for nominating three women to the Vatican office that vets bishop appointments.
“Pope Francis is no doubt a visionary, who is treading gently to create space for women to become actively engaged in the life and mission of the Church,” Presentation Sister Dorothy Fernandes, national convener of the Forum of Religious for Justice and Peace, told Matters India July 14, a day after Pope named the women to the Dicastery for Bishops.
The Vatican office oversees the work of most of the Church’s 5,300 bishops, who run dioceses around the world.
The new members are Sister Raffaella Petrini, a member of the Franciscan Sisters of the Eucharist who already holds a high-ranking Vatican position as the secretary general of the Vatican City State, which runs the Vatican Museums and other administrative parts of the territory.
Also named was Sister Yvonne Reungoat, former superior general of the Daughters of Mary the Helper, also known as the Salesian Sisters. The lay woman is Maria Lia Zervino, president of a Catholic women’s umbrella group, the World Union of Female Catholic Organizations (WUCWO).
Sister Fernandes says the Pope is following Jesus, who was sensitive to women entrusted the Church to them beginning with Mother Mary. The Pope “is breaking new paths much to the opposition from within. Synodality is being unfolded, by inclusiveness by enabling women to take their rightful place,” she says.
Kochurani Abraham, a feminist theologian, says by naming the three women Pope Francis is apparently breaking the gendered glass ceiling of the Catholic Church.
Capuchin Father Suresh Mathew, editor of the Indian Currents weekly, sees these appointments as the sign of the Pope “going all out with his sweeping changes in the Church.”

The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India (CBCI) on July 13 mourned the death of devotees of a Hindu pilgrimage center.
“The CBCI mourns the loss of lives of the devotees and prays for their families left behind. It also prays for those injured and hopes that they may be healed quickly,” says a press release issued by conference of president Cardinal Oswald Gracias.

Christians in India are concerned after a federal government report recorded a decline in the fertility rate among the community leading to a further reduction in their population. According to the latest National Family Health Survey (NFHS) report, the total fertility rate (TFR) among Christians declined to 1.88 percent in 2019-21 from 2.87 percent in 1992-93. Christians make up 2.3 percent of the more than 1.3 billion population, according to the 2011 national census, but the community fears that their population will decline further.
Archbishop Sebastian Kallupura of Patna in Bihar state in eastern India said many families are going nuclear. “We generally see a trend among the educated people from the community to opt for small families, unlike in the past when larger families were the norm,” Archbishop Kallupura, chairman of the family commission of the Conference of Catholic Bishops of India (CCBI), told. “The high cost of living coupled with lack proper employment has forced families to restrict their number of children.”

Tribal people including Christi-ans in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh are up in arms about attempts by Hindu nationalist forces to rob them of reservation benefits. Reservations form a system of affirmative action in India that provides representation in education, employment and politics for historically disadvantaged groups such as tribal people, Dalits and backward cast-es. Tribal people in Chhattisgarh are alarmed by Janjati Suraksha Manch (JSM) or tribal protection forum, which is affiliated with the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), undertaking a concerted campaign to remove tribal Christians and Muslims from the list of reservation beneficiaries.
Demands to delist Christians and Muslims have been raised for the past 15 years or so but Hindu nationalists start-ed holding rallies in support of the move for the first time in May.”
The demand and the public rallies in support of it are motivated by political gains,” Bishop Emmanuel Kerketta of Jashpur told on June 15
There is currently no religious bar to tribal people being eligible for government-run welfare schemes, but Christian leaders fear the campaign, if successful, could deny the faithful their constitutional right.

Pope Francis has invited the youth of the Syro-Malabar Church to follow Jesus by saying “yes” to a life of service and responsibility, and “no” to one of superficiality and dissipation.
The Pope said on June 18 during a meeting with the pilgrims of the “Syro-Malabar Youth Leaders Conference.
The Syro-Malabar Catholic Church is one of the two Eastern Catholic autonomous (sui iuris) Churches in India, in full communion with the Pope, the other one being the Syro-Malankara Catholic Church. The Syro-Malabar is the third largest sui juris Church of the Catholic Church, and the second largest Eastern Catholic Church after the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, with some 4.25 million faithful worldwide.
Over half of them live in the Indian state of Kerala, where the Church dates back to the first century following the preaching of Saint Thomas the Apostle and where the Church is still based.

June appears to be the cruelest month for India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), although the former seems unfazed if his silence is any indicator.
The Islamic world is furious with a BJP spokesperson’s re-marks on the Prophet Muhammad while US Secretary of State Antony Blinken also called out India for rising attacks on religious minorities.
What the world and the nation aren’t aware of is the challenge facing the Indian prime minister on his home turf.
The Patidars or Patels, who form the backbone of the BJP’s political support base in Modi’s home state of Gujarat in we-stern India, are furious with him.
The members of this financially and politically influential agrarian caste who claim to have descended from Lord Ram are also staunch followers of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, a former federal home minister credited with securing India’s unity in the aftermath of independence preceded by a bloody partition.
The sardar or chieftain of the Patel peasants thus came to be known as India’s “Iron Man” and his name was given to a cricket stadium originally built on the outskirts of Gujarat’s principal city of Ahmadabad in 1982.