Govt. stops Reconstruction of Churches in Orissa

August 23, 2011: As we approach the third anniversary of the massacres in the Indian state of Orissa, the local Christian community continues to face harassment and violence of all kinds, on a political, legal, economic and social level. On 24 August, the symbolic day chosen to remember the massacres of 2008, the Christians in Orissa will pray and come together to commemorate the victims and to raise their voice against the injustice that still affect them. As sources of Fides in Cuttak-Bhubaneswar diocese say, the local government is patently violating the religious freedom of Christians, forbidding them to rebuild the demolished churches during the violence or building new ones in the Christian "colonies" formed in the aftermath of the massacres.
The local government in the district of Kandhamal (the one most affected by the massacres) sent a letter to the pastor of the Catholic Church of "Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal", in Mondasoro, and ordered an immediate stop to the work of reconstruction of a chapel in the Padunbadi village, claiming that the land is state property.
"The church in the village - says the local parish priest, Father Laxmikant Pradhan, has been there for over two generations" and therefore the government order, which prevents the reconstruction of the church, is a clear injustice to the Christian faithful, already put to the test by displacement, hunger and poverty.
The case in Mondasoro is not the only case: a few days ago the government stopped the construction of another Catholic church in Nadagiri, also in the district of Kandhamal. Nandagiri is a neighborhood where a number of Christian families were relocated, who after being displaced after the violence of 2008, were not able to return to their villages of origin, occupied by Hindu extremists.
In the colony there are 54 Catholic and 17 Protestant families of Pentecostal denomination, who continued to celebrate the cult in improvised places and had begun to build a chapel. The government has ordered the blocking accepting the complaints of the radical Hindus, but violating the principle of religious freedom guaranteed in the Constitution of India.
Thousands of faithful Christians in Kandhamal are still under evacuation, they are camped on the outskirts of cities, have lost all their possessions, live in poverty and suffer from problems of unemployment.