Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu on Dec. 19 said that he would stand by the Christian community till the Dalit Christians are accorded the status of Scheduled Castes.

Speaking at the Christmas celebrations held at Lutheran English Medium School here, Mr Naidu said that Dalit Christians have lost many opportunities as they do not have reservations.

Earlier, the Chief Minister cut the cake in the presence of several church heads. “Our children are able to speak fluent English due to the Christian missionary schools. Missionaries started hospitals and schools paving the way for development of society,” Mr Naidu said.

The CM said that he would allot 6 crore for completing Christian Bhavan in the city.

Earlier, Mr Naidu laid the foundation Stone for Mother and Child Hospital at Government General Hospital which would be built at a cost of 65 crore.

Odisha Chief Minister Navin Patnaik joined a Christmas program in Bhubaneswar organized by the Archdiocese of Cuttack-Bhubaneswar on December 21, 2018.

“This is the fourth time he is joining the programs organized by the Archdiocese of Cuttak-Bhubaneswar. Three times for Christmas and once to name a road after Mother Teresa,” said Benjamin Simon a Catholic leader, the Master of Ceremony on the December 21 program.

Patnaik, fourth times Odisha Chief Minister, attended the Christmas program at St Vincent’s Pro-Cathedral in Bhubaneswar. Around 2,500 people, including members of state legislative assembly, officials and Christians attended the program.

“Thank you, A Merry Merry Christmas and A Happy New Year,” Patnaik wished the gathering in Odia language.

Archbishop John Barwa of Cuttack-Bhubaneswar in his welcome address said, “Our joy has not doubled but it has multiplied with your presence. Glory to God in the highest and peace to people of good will on earth.”

The Divine Word prelate thanked the Chief Minister for allotting 1-acre land for a burial ground in Bhubaneswar, the capital city of Odisha where some 20,000 Christians of various denominations live.

Beer bottles were smashed on the heads of churchgoers who formed a ring around the rest of the congregation: to protect them from an armed group that had barged into a church in Maharashtra two days before Christmas, some of the victims and the pastor said on Dec. 24.

The 40-strong congregation attending the Sunday service was attacked with swords, iron rods and the bottles at the New Life Fellowship Church in Kolhapur’s Kowad, around 474km from Mumbai and close to the Karnataka border.

Eight of the injured were admitted to two hospitals in Karnataka’s Belgaum, around 20km away from the attack site. Four are still admitted in the intensive care unit. Sachin Baghde, 20, had a clot removed from his brain.

The prayer service at the church had started around 11am, and the attack took place some 45 minutes later.

“Around 15-20 people came on motorbikes, armed with iron rods and swords. They hurled stones at the church building and then barged inside,” said Arjun Muttekar, one of the victims.

“The group of armed men accused us of holding conversion programmes before starting the assault,” said Anil Bhonsale, the pastor. The assault went on for some 30 minutes, following which police arrived and the attackers fled.

Catholic and other church leaders have joined journalists and rights’ groups in demanding a detailed investigation into the murder of an investigative reporter – a tribal Christian – in India’s eastern Jharkhand State.

The body of Amit Topno, who extensively covered a local tribal resistance movement, was found under a bridge near the state’s capital, Ranchi, on Dec. 9. An autopsy found that he had been shot through the head, media reports stated.

Investigating officer Ramesh Kumar Singh called it a murder. But police had not arrested anyone as of on Dec. 19.

“We want a free and fair investigation into his murder,” said Father Davis Solomon, a Jesuit social worker based in Ranchi.

Topno, a member of the Gossner Evangelical Lutheran Church, provided exclusive television coverage of tribal oppression through his freelance video journalism, the priest said.

The Ahmedabad-based Swaminarayan Gadi Sansthan has bought a 30-year-old church in Portsmouth of Virginia, United States, and plans to convert it into a Swaminarayan temple.

According to reports, the Swaminarayan Gadi Sansthan has already converted eight churches across the world into Hindu temples. Five of them are in the US. The temple trust has converted churches in California, Louisville, Pennsylvania, Los Angeles and Ohio in the US. Two churches, one in London and another near Bolton in Manchester, UK have also been converted into Hindu temples.

The Portsmouth Church will be the sixth church in the US to be converted into a Hindu temple by Swaminarayan Sansthan. It is report-ed that the Swaminarayan Gadi Sansthan has also acquired a 125-year-old property in Toronto, Canada to build another temple.

Bhagwatpriyadas Swami, mahant of the Sansthan said, “It is under the guidance of our spiritual head Purushottam Priyadas Swami that the 30-year-old church was acquired to be refurbished into a Swaminarayan temple. Not many changes would be mandated in the church at Portsmouth, as it was already a spiritual place of another faith. This would be the first temple for Haribhakts in Virginia.”

Christianity is as Indian a religion as those that originated in the country, says former President Pranab Kumar Mukherjee.

“Indigenization, adaptation and respect of local customs and traditions have made Christianity as Indian a religion as the ones that originated in its ancient geographical boundaries,” Mukherjee asserted on December 13 while addressing Christmas celebrations organized by the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India (CBCI) in New Delhi.

The former president, who was the chief guest of the program held at the downtown Diocesan Community Centre, noted that the Church’s 2000 years of existence in India has been “more Renaissance and Reformation and rarely about Evangelism.”

For Mukherjee, “the most enduring images of the Catholic Church in India” are millions of Indians, who study in its educational institutions, and hundreds of thousands of patients who get healed in its hospitals.

“The Catholic Clergy in India is personified by the priest or nun in a habit, the very image of whose brings to one’s mind, discipline and dedication. It is the heartening images of Missionaries of Charity led by Mother Teresa, tending to the last person on the margin of society that personifies the Church in India,” he added.

Mukherjee’s assertion comes in the backdrop of calls from some rightwing groups to cleanse India off Christianity by 2021.

“Aberrations of a crusade, a jihad or violent struggles between sects in India, were always defeated in the favour of longer reigning brotherhood, peace and resultant prosperity of mankind,” he added.

Every religion, he noted, “strove to direct human endeavours towards the three basic tenets of Truth, Compassion and Righteousness. It was these tenets that comprised the Ram Rajya of Hinduism, Dharma of Buddhism, the Holy Kingdom of Christianity and many more.”

Mukherjee, who served as India’s 13th president during 2012-2017, agreed that the country was going through troubled time. “Divisive tendencies, intolerance and prejudiced ‘fear of the other’ seem to be defining us.”

Beating their drums, some 200 socially poor Dalit people marched through the streets of Indian capital New Delhi on Dec. 4 in a novel form of protest to demand that they be given social benefits denied to them because of their Christian faith.

Participants in “the drum, dance, demonstration” played their drums near parliament to demand that the government withdraw a 1950 presidential order that said only Dalits of Hindu religion should be given social security benefits meant for Dalit people’s advancement.

“Government comes and goes, and we get only false promises. Several protest rallies and marches in the past were useless. Now we play our drums to wake up the sleeping government,” said Father A. Arputharaj, a protest organizer from Pondicherry and Cuddalore Archdiocese in Tamil Nadu.

The Indian constitution has special provisions to assist Dalit people’s educational and social advancement with financial aid and reserved seats in jobs and educational institutions.

Justice Joseph, the controversial but ‘compassionate’ judge who has retired from the India’s Supreme Court, was seen to have held views in line with the Church — particularly on abortion and divorce.

“If someone is to take a vote on who is the nicest judge, Kurian Joseph will win,” Attorney General K.K. Venugopal said to a huge crowd gathered on the Supreme Court lawns to bid farewell to the judge on November 29.

In his five-year-eight-month tenure as an apex court judge, Justice Joseph always had a trademark smile on his face even during the many the watershed moments for India’s judiciary. But the “compassionate judge” has never made any bones about taking on the government. From quashing the Narendra Modi government’s ambitious National Judicial Appointments Commission in 2015 to holding a press conference against then Chief Justice Dipak Misra in January 2018, Joseph has constantly been at the centre of controversy.

However, his first ‘controversy’ happened in April 2015 when he wrote to Modi expressing his inability to attend a conference of judges and chief ministers that was held on Good Friday.

“Secularism is being tinkered with,” Joseph had said objecting to holding official events on festivals of religious minorities. While Hindu radical websites attacked the judge, the church rallied behind him.

“There are judges who have political affiliations to far-right organizations. So while it is unfair to single out Justice Joseph for his views, judges must certainly have a code of conduct governing their affiliations,” said senior advocate Colin Gonsalves.

As a matter of principle, Joseph never delivered a death sentence in his 18-year career as a judge. The controversial 2015 ruling in which the top court awarded the death penalty to terror-convict Yakub Memon turned dramatic after a two-judge bench of Justices Joseph and Anil Dave delivered a split verdict.

“There have been many judges who have taken a principled anti-death penalty stand. Some may have been influenced by their religious views but I don’t see anything wrong with that,” said senior advocate Sanjay Hegde.

“Justice M.B. Shah, a Jain, was known as a judge who would never award the death penalty. Lawyers would deliberately try and get their cases listed before him,” he added.

When one such case was before a bench headed by Joseph in July, he gave away what he thought of abortion in a single word — murder.

“You should make the mother hear her child’s heartbeat,” Joseph said.

A Protestant pastor, Rev Sojan, was arrested last on December 8 in Bakhtiyarpur, a village in Patna District (Bihar), for screening Yeshu Masih (Jesus Christ), a film about the life of Jesus. “The Rev Sojan was just showing a movie,” Sajan K George, president of the Global Council of Indian Christians (GCIC), told Asia News. Unfortunately, “in this pre-election period, minorities are even more vulnerable and intimidated by the majority and its false accusations.”

The incident shows that tensions between Hindu radicals and Christians are far from ending.

Villagers tried to stop the clergyman from showing the film and wanted him out of the village the GCIC activist said. When he came back the next day he was accused of forced conversion, which led police to detain him for a few hours, before they took him back to his home village of Barh. Before they left, the agents told him not to return to Bakhtiyarpur.

As is often the case in India, charges of forced conversion are made against Protestant and Catholic clergy to prevent them from doing their work.