The raging violence in Manipur appears to have effectively ended the Catholic Church’s relationship with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Kerala.
Interestingly, it is once again the Metropolitan Archbishop of the Thalassery Archdiocese of the Syro-Malabar Church Mar Joseph Pamplany, earlier accused of co-opting the national party on the pretext of ensuring better prices for rubber, who has taken the plunge by openly disapproving the silence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi over Manipur.
The Kerala Catholic Bishops’ Council (KCBC), the apex body of Catholic Churches in Kerala, has followed suit with it sharp criticism of the ruling party and its parent organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.
“Over 300 institutions under the Church have been vandalised and Christians belonging to both the Meitei and Kuki tribes are being selectively targeted. The ongoing violence in Manipur forms part of a larger plot by the Sangh Parivar to eliminate the Christians in India,” says Jacob G. Palackapilly, official spokesperson of the KCBC.
Helping hand
To relay its distress over the developments in Manipur, the Church has organised various programmes across the State while looking for ways to extend all possible support to the victims of violence. “All Catholic dioceses in Kerala will be donating the money to be collected from the parishes in the form of Sunday donations to Manipur through Caritas India,” adds the KCBC spokesperson.
The development marks an important new facet for the relationship between the two sides, which soared over the perceived threats from “jihadists” and touched a crescendo with Prime Minister Narendra Modi chairing a meeting with top bishops in Kochi a couple of months ago.
What makes these verbal sorties so significant, however, is that it will radically alter the Church’s relationship with the Congress-led and CPI(M)-led coalitions that exercise temporal power in Kerala. A purported incremental strategy adopted by the Church in Kerala in raising the perceived threats that it faced from different sides, including the jihadists, recently caused an unprecedented mobilisation of various Christian groups in favour of the BJP, which lent political legitimacy to their concerns.
