Peace activists from various religions have launched a series of interreligious prayer services at different parts of Varanasi as sectarian tension over the Gyan Vapi mosque controversy gripped Hinduism’s most sacred city.
“These prayers are taken from ten different religious sources namely Hindu, Tao, Jewish, Zoroastrian, Jain, Buddhist, Christian and Muslim faith tra-ditions. They were sung regularly by Mahatma Gandhi in his ashrams along with his disciples and satyagrahis,” Father Anand Mathew, a cultural activist in Varanasi, told on May 23.
The Indian Missionary Society priest further said they use the Hindi version of those hymns translated by renowned Gandhian Narayan Desai. Father Mathew also distributed among the public those songs printed in a pocket size booklet
The prayer campaign was first launched May 20 in the cam-pus of Benares Hindu University on, with students who support peace, secularism and dialogue as participants. Later prayer meetings were also held in Maidagin and Shaheed Udyan Sigra.
Jagriti Rahi, a Gandhian who attended the prayer meetings, says common people of Varanasi do not want any more riots and curfews. The entire city now debates whether a stone found in the pool of ablutions in the mosque premise is a shivling (the phallic image of Lord Shiva) or an abandoned fountain.
She recalled the experiencing the pain from the wounds of riots immediately after the Babri Masjid violence and the consequent month-long curfew three decades ago.

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.

Some Catholic leaders in Uttar Pradesh have welcomed a government drive to remove loud speakers from religious places in the northern Indian state. “If the government is doing it in a non-partisan way and without religious prejudices, it is to be appreciated,” says Father Anand Mathew, who quoted some reports to point out that majority of the loudspeakers removed in the past decades were from the Hindu temple tops.
The Uttar Pradesh government on April 25 began a statewide drive to remove unauthorized loudspeakers from religious places and set the volume of others within permissible limits.
Additional Director General of Police (Law and Order) Prashant Kumar told re-porters that by May 1 morning they have removed a total of 53,942 loudspeakers and set the volume of 60,295 loudspeakers within permissible limits.
Kumar clarified that they are removing the loudspeakers from all religious places without any discrimination.
Meanwhile a senior home department official confirmed that the drive will continue in the coming days.
Those loudspeakers which have been placed without taking due permission from the district administration or the ones which are placed in excess of the permitted numbers are categorized as unauthorized, Kumar explained.
He said the administration also considered the High Court order regarding loudspeakers. After a 2017 government order on the matter, the High Court had asked it if loudspeakers at religious and public places were installed after taking permission in writing from authorities referring to the Noise Pollution (Regulation and Control) Rules, 2000.

People in Karnataka began from May 9 to get up at 5 am to pray, sing or curse.
Muslims in the southern Indian state start their day with Azaan announced through loud-speakers fit atop mosques. Hindus, on the hand, use the public address system to counter the Muslim call to prayer with “Suprabhata” and “Hanuman Chalisa” (hymns in praise of Lord Hanuman).
Pramod Muthalik, founder of the Sri Ram Sena (army of Lord Ram), on May 9 opened the Hindu prayer at 5 am in temples of Mysore temples. More than 1,000 Hindu temples in the state also did the same, he claimed.
A controversy over Muslim using loudspeakers to announce Azaan was reported from states such as Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra. They have enacted laws to control the use of loud-speakers by any religious group. The Uttar Pradesh government of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has removed 54,000 unauthorized loudspeakers from religious places.
The Karnataka government, led also by the BJP, is yet to en-act a law on loudspeakers. How-ever, it has succeeded in controlling Muslim girl students wearing veil in schools. Muslim traders are reportedly barred from Hindu festival while people are urged to avoid food prepared according to Muslim customs or Malls owned by Muslims.

The demand for a Dalit Rite in the Catholic Church in India was reiterated at a conference of theologians, biblical scholars and canon law experts from the community. Caste is a stark reality and caste-based discrimination is rampant in the Catholic Church’s hierarchy, parishes and institutions, bemoans Reverend Vincent Manoharan, a theologian, while introducing the April 28-29 conference at St. Thomas International Centre, Chennai.
Dalits, he pointed out, are totally neglected in the Church despite the Dalit Empowerment Policy of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India that demanding to set it right.
The bishops issued the policy on December 13, 2016, that acknowledged that “caste discrimination is a grave social sin” and committed to ensuring that the practice of untouchability will not be tolerated within the Church. Reverend Manoharan also added that the Dalit representation is abominable in the Catholic Church and their voices are not heard adequately.

Thousands of Catholics have attended the Delhi archdiocesan consultation meetings to prepare for the Rome Synod that began more than six months ago.
While Jesuit Father Stanislaus Alla, a theology professor, finds the process “truly historic,” Abp Anil J Couto of Delhi, who initiated it, says the Church in the archdiocese will not be the same after the exercise ends.
Father Alla, who teaches in Delhi’s Vidyajyoti College of Theology, has read through hundreds of pages of reports from various groups in the archdiocese and drafted the “Diocesan Syn-thesis” with his colleague, Presentation Sister Shalini Mulackal.
The latest archdiocesan Pre-Synodal meeting at the cathedral campus in New Delhi was attend-ed by 8-month-old Ayston Jez and 85-year-old Emeritus Abp Vincent Concessao of Delhi among more than 200 participants.
Archbishop Couto opened the April 29-May 1 with a prayer and inaugural address. Auxiliary Bishop Deepak Tauro of Delhi presented an overview of the proceedings. The meeting ended with a Mass on May 2.
8-month-old Ayston Jez with Leena Sunny, a Core Committee member, and Archbishop Anil Couto of DelhiThe archdiocese launched the Synodal process October 17, 2021, with a Mass led by Archbishop Couto.

Itanagar diocese in the north-eastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh May 7 ordained its first priest of indigenous origin
Bishop John Thomas of Itanagar ordained Father Roshan Bamin Peter, a member of the Apatani tribe, at Mary Immaculate Church, Hapoli, Ziro, his home parish in Lower Subansiri district.
“It is a proud moment for all of us in the diocese especially to the people of Apatani tribe,” Nani Yase Teresa, the president of Apatani Catholic Women Asso-ciation of Itanagar diocese. “It will inspire many young people of all tribes to become priests and nuns,” she added.

An aging Catholic nun, who adopted Hindu ascetic life during the movement for inculturation of the Indian Church some five decades ago, now lives under the care of a parish priest in western India.
The 88-year-old Sister Prasanna Devi lived alone for around 40 years in a forest around the sacred hill of Girnar in Junagadh district of Gujarat known for its Jain and Hindu temples dating back to centuries.
The surrounding forests happen to be the only natural habitat of the Asiatic lions and are home to leopards, jackals, striped hyena and the Indian fox besides several species of mammals, birds and reptiles.
Sister Prasanna Devi lived in the midst of this wildlife inside a hut-like hermitage from 1974 until September 2014 when she had a fall that caused her to move out of the forest to the annex of St. Ann’s Catholic Church, located six kilometers away and falling under Rajkot Diocese.

Hindu nationalists in India want Christian chaplains banned from visiting prisons, claiming they are trying to convert the prisoners.
The Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and Bajrang Dal groups complained to police in the southern Indian state Karnataka about the distribution of Bibles to the prisoners in the Gadag district jail and demanded the immediate suspension of all Christian prison chaplains in the state.
The April 6 declaration came after a Hindu chaplain had met a prisoner and seen a Bible in the jail. According to the complaint, a seven-person team of Christian evangelists visited Gadag District Prison on March 12 to pray with prisoners and distribute copies of the New Testament.The Hindu activists alleged Christian chaplains were trying to carry out religious conversions and said they should not have been permitted to distribute religious texts, despite the fact that Hindu religious literature is often distributed in jails. Archbishop Peter Machado of Bangalore said the complaint looks like a double standard.
“If Hindu preachers are allowed to meet Hindu prisoners, what is wrong with Christian preachers meeting Christian prisoners. If there’s evidence of forceful or fraudulent conversions of others, let them take action according to the law, with proofs of conversion at hand,” he told Crux. Karnataka is ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has also ruled India since 2014. The BJP is linked with the the Rashtriya Swayam-sevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu nationalist group.Hindu nationalists often accuse Christians of using force and surreptitious tactics in pursuing conversions, and such “illegal conversions” can be punished with fines and jail time.Christians leaders have noted that despite the fear-mongering of some Hindu groups, the percentage of Christians is actually going down in the country. According to the government’s census data, the percentage of the Christian population in India in 2001 was 2.34%, but in 2011 it had dropped to 2.30%. A similar decrease was noted in Karnataka, where the percentage dropped from 1.91% to 1.87%.

Archbishop Peter Machado of Bangalore on April 26 dis-missed as false and misleading the media reports that some Catholic schools in the southern Indian city force children to buy Bibles and bring them to class.
According to an ndtv.com April 25 report a row erupted in Karnataka after a Catholic school in Bengaluru, the state capital, had allegedly taken an undertaking from parents that they would not object to their wards carrying the Bible to class.
The news portal also said the Hindu Janajagruti Samiti (Forum to awaken Hindus) accused Clarence High School of making it mandatory for students to carry the Bible.
The group’s state spokesperson Mohan Gowda alleged that the school has asked non-Christian students to compulsorily carry and read the Bible adding that it violated Articles 25 and 30 of the Constitution.
“It has been brought to my notice that the Christian Institutions are once again being target-ed for conversion in the allegation of the children being forced to buy Bibles and bring them to Schools in Bangalore. This allegation is false and misleading,” asserts Archbishop Machado in a press statement.
The prelate says Clarence High School’s management has clarified that such a practice existed in the past but since last year, no child is required to bring the Bible to the School or asked to read it by force.