Bangalore, India, Mar 31, 2025 / 06:00 am (CNA).
A team of half a dozen Catholic nuns and lawyers have warned of increasing incidents of opposition to Christian funerals and hate campaigns against the Christian community in an eastern Indian state.
The group sounded the alarm after making a fact-finding visit to several remote areas under the Balasore Diocese in the state of Odisha.
“What we heard from the people in the villages was shocking to us,” Sister Clara D’Souza, a member of the Handmaid of Mary Congregation, told CNA on March 27.
“Our fact-finding report has details of incidents of tribal Hindu groups protesting and objecting to Christian funeral services and even Sunday Mass, starting [before Christmas],” she said.
“As we released the fact-finding report, a third case of a Christian funeral obstruction happened on March 22,” D’Souza added.
Father Ajay Singh, a member of the fact-finding team, said the trouble for Christians in the Hatigarh area began on Dec. 18, 2024, when Hindu tribal activists demonstrated against the funeral service for a local Catholic, claiming that Christian funeral rites and prayers are against “tribal tradition.”
“However, the timely intervention of the police helped the conduct of the funeral,” said Singh, the former director of the social forum of the local Church.
Later, the Hindu group — called Mahji Pragaon — created a commotion during a Sunday Mass and the police had to intervene to disperse the aggressors, who alleged that “new people are being converted” when prayer services were held in the church.
The recent fact-finding study found the Hindu group alleged in local newspapers that local Christians were “destroying the traditional culture by embracing and practicing the Christian faith.”
“This group did not even attend the meeting government officials called to address the issue,” Singh pointed out.
Meanwhile, he said, the anti-Christian campaign spread to the village of Siunaguda in the neighboring Nabarangpur district.
When 70-year-old Kesab Santa, an evangelical tribal Christian, died on March 2, the Hindu villagers insisted that they would allow “only tribal burial” and that “no Christian funeral [would] be held.”
Singh said mourners were “unable to take the body for burial in a remote Christian village” and elected to bury the deceased “in the village in tribal tradition.”
When Siban Murmu, a 55-year-old Baptist of Rangmatia, died during a hospital stay on March 20, the body was brought to the village house the next day in the Catholic parish area of Hatigarh.
“Soon a local Hindu group arrived and started protesting against holding a funeral service for Murmu within the village,” D’Souza said. “They said that Murmu had been practicing the Christian religion and therefore should not be buried in the village.”
“Even after senior government officials arrived, the Hindu group did not relent and the dead body remained in the courtyard of the house for two days,” she said. “Finally, officials suggested taking the body to the Baptist church cemetery” about 10 miles away.
The report warned that recent elections in Odisha have “escalated further vulnerable situations of the Christians.”
Singh pointed out that “the sudden spurt in unprecedented anti-Christian propaganda is very much rooted” in the Hindu nationalist BJP winning the state election in Odisha last June.
“Maybe they are trying to create a Kandhamal-like situation by spreading hatred against Christians,” Singh said, a reference to the Kandhamal district, which saw orchestrated anti-Christian violence in 2008 when dozens of Christians were killed, over 300 churches destroyed, and 6,000 Christian houses plundered and torched, rendering 56,000 Christians homeless.
“We are now living in fear in this area, which had perfect harmony among Hindus and Christians until recently,” Father Francis Kannampuzha, vicar of St. Paul’s Parish in Hatigarh, told CNA.
“There is certainly a clear conspiracy to create trouble and divide among the people on religious lines,” Kannampuzha said.
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From womb to tomb, life is sacred and a precious gift. A dead human being needs to be provided with a respectful farewell. Grave injustices and grave wrongs cannot be dignified ways of proceeding.