Tag Archives: Country: India

Religion Clause: The High Court in the Indian state of Gujarat today ordered the state government to pay compensation to over 500 religious structures that were damaged in riots in 2002 . . .

Asia News: The attack on the colleges of St. Joseph Anegal (40 km south of Bangalore) occurred on January 27. Reason for the assault, failure to display the Indian flag during celebrations for the national holiday.

BBC News : UK author Sir Salman Rushdie says he is “sad for India” after threats of violence prevented him from addressing an Indian literary festival.

Religion Clause: In India last week, the Delhi High Court, in response to a complaint about the noise from loud speakers at a temple and a mosque, placed limits on use of sound amplification by houses of worship.

Independent: It’s a girl, a film being released this year, documents the practice of killing unwanted baby girls in South Asia. The trailer’s most chilling scene is one with an Indian woman who, unable to contain her laughter, confesses to having killed eight infant daughters.

Hindustan Times: Cases of Christians being attacked have more than doubled in the past three years in India with Karnataka and Orissa being the worst according to a report released by a Christian organisation on Wednesday. Maharashtra is among the ten worst states . . .

CSMonitor.com: Salman Rushdie’s plans to attend literary festival in India have prompted protests from members of the Muslim community.

News from The Associated Press: Forty-two percent of children in India younger than 5 are underweight and nearly 60 percent are stunted, a new survey found.

LifeNews.com: On Christianity Today’s Her.meneutics blog, BreakPoint editor Gina Dalfonzo wrote a post about girls in India participating in a ceremony to rid themselves of names that mean “unwanted” in Hindi.

UCANEWS.com: Unidentified assailants burned nativity crib, pelted prayer hall with stones

Religion Clause: The Times of India on Saturday reported on a case in which parents in Ahmedabad (in Gujarat state in India), unhappy with their daughter’s choice of husbands, are attempting to use Gujarat’s Freedom of Religion Act that aims at coerced conversions to undo or undercut the marriage.

Religion Clause: Over the last ten days, the press in India has been filled with commentary on the Indian government’s December 22 decision (CNN) to create a 4.5% sub-quota for economically and socially disadvantaged non-Hindu minorities– Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists and Zoroastrians– within the existing 27% Other Backward Classes (OBC) quota.

The Economist: Now, however, comes evidence that India may in fact be succeeding. In a pair of articles in the Indian Express, Surjit Bhalla, an economist, and Ravinder Kaur, a sociologist, use a different set of figures to get a different result. On the basis of the national sample surveys (NSS), they calculate that India’s sex ratio at birth swung from 924 females per 1,000 males in 2004-05 to 977 in 2011, a stunning turnaround in favour of girls.

Catholic Culture: Catholics in India’s troubled state of Orissa have been encouraged to celebrate Christmas “with prudence and vigilance,” and a local prelate has asked police for protection, because of new threats.

Religion Clause: In New Delhi, India yesterday, a court issued an ex parte restraining order requiring 22 social networking websites to remove videos, text and photos with anti-religious or anti-social content that promote hatred or communal disharmony.

ADF Attorney Benjamin Bull at Townhall : All Domenic Johansson really wants for Christmas is his life back . . . In this season, as so many of us are thinking – as we should – of the children who don’t have toys or a turkey for Christmas, let us also remember those children who long not just for something to eat or play with, but for the freedom to honor the deepest convictions of their souls.

LifeNews: The ABC 20/20 news story is riveting — a revealing look at why there are so many fewer women than men in India. Reporter Elizabeth Vargas traveled to India to bring this story of what is called “Gendercide” home to a stunned American audience.

Pamela Geller at Human Events: Harvard University has dropped courses on economics taught by a Hindu professor, Subramanian Swamy, president of the Janata Party of India and a former Union Cabinet minister—not because they were poorly taught, or because Swamy advocated discredited economic theories (such as, say, socialism), but because he wrote an editorial last summer that Muslims find offensive.

Catholic Culture: The All India Christian Council–an ecumenical organization that defends Christians’ religious freedom–is expressing concern about the implications of the arrest of Rev. C. M. Khanna, a Protestant pastor who baptized Muslims in Jammu and Kashmir, a largely Muslim state.

WSJ.com: Decades ago, Siraj Gazi’s grandfather changed his last name of Chowduli to the higher-caste Gazi. He hoped it would erase the social stigma of his low-caste roots.

LifeSiteNews.com: The southern Indian state of Kerala might be the next in a long line of governments attempting to destroy their own greatest resource: their people.

Catholic Culture: Police in largely Muslim Jammu and Kashmir, India’s northernmost state, arrested Protestant pastor C.M. Khanna on November 19 on charges of fomenting religious enmity and converting Muslims through financial allurements.

The Times of India: The number of pregnancies terminated in south Mumbai is higher than in the rest of the city. While some health experts feel this could be a reflection of better access to healthcare in the city’s older and well-established parts, others were of the opinion that it could be an oblique indicator of gender-selected abortions.

Asia News: Activists of the Bajrang Dal (Hindu ultra-nationalist movement) have attacked members of two different Christian communities, engaged in a prayer service, accusing them of practicing forced conversions.

News from The Associated Press: A court sentenced 31 Hindus to life imprisonment Wednesday for killing dozens of Muslims by setting a building on fire during one of India’s worst rounds of communal violence nine years ago.

The Times of India: Worried over the ” missing girls”, red cross societies in Haryana will train over 11,000 college students, preferably girls, as “save girl sainiks” to launch a campaign against female foeticide in the state known for a skewed gender ratio in the country.

TheHill.com: This strange fact occurs almost entirely because of our tax laws. If a company wants to bring back money it has made in China or India, it must pay a 35 percent U.S. tax on that repatriation.

LifeSiteNews.com: Reports from some northern Indian states that have the worst gender imbalance in the country due to sex-selective abortion say that “wife-sharing” among brothers is becoming a common occurrence.

Hindustan Times: Forty years after the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act, abortion is now increasingly being used to kill unborn daughters. The situation is grim and United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) says 7,000 fewer girls are born everyday in India than should be.

Catholic Culture: Religious fundamentalists raised a Hindu flag over the site where a ruined Catholic church is being rebuilt in the troubled Kandhamal district of India’s eastern Orissa state.

Religion Clause: In India, Muslims and Catholics are strongly criticizing the Women’s Code Bill that is being proposed by the government in the state of Kerala.

LifeSiteNews.com: Religious leaders in the Indian state of Kerala are fighting a bill proposed by the government that would crack down on families with more than two offspring, as well as ban religious leaders from encouraging families to have more children.

Asia News: A petition of the Global Council of Indian Christians in the National Commission for Human Rights draws up a long list of crimes, injustices and complicity of local and state authorities to the detriment of the victims of anti-Christian pogroms of 2008. The Hindu radicals continue to persecute Catholics and Pentecostals, aided by the police.

LifeNews.com: A new book by Scott Carney called the The Red Market: On the Trail of the World’s Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers, and Child Traffickers takes a critical look at international surrogacy especially in India.

Catholic Culture: Police have arrested ten members of an armed gang for damage done to a church in the southern Kerela state, as well as for attacks on nearby homes.

India Today: Terror struck Delhi when a powerful bomb placed in a briefcase ripped through a crowded reception area at the entrance of the Delhi High Court on Wednesday morning, killing 11 people and leaving more than 80 injured. This is the second blast outside Delhi HC since May.

Catholic Culture: Twenty masked men destroyed the altar, confessionals, and vestments in a parish in the southwestern Indian state of Kerala on the evening of September 4.

France 24: US auto giant Ford has started construction on a $1 billion manufacturing and engineering complex in India as it bets on the country to help drive global growth, a company statement said on Tuesday. The new manufacturing facilities in Sanand in the western state of Gujarat will create 5,000 jobs

LifeNews.com: The UN’s new fertility forecasts could have significant implications for predicting which nations will wield global power in the 21st century, especially predictions about the coming power shift in Asia where Indians will outnumber Chinese by 2025.

The Times of India: The Union government’s decision to drop the proposal for a separate Sikh Marriage Act has come under severe criticism from various political as well as religious quarters in Punjab. If Akal Takht jathedar on Tuesday exhorted Sikhs to put pressure on UPA government to revoke the decision, ruling SAD (B) slammed the Centre for its “anti-Sikh posture”.

Catholic Culture: A Bapist minister has been murdered in Orissa, the eastern Indian state that was the site of massive anti-Christian persecution in 2008.

Asia News: According to the police they were proselytizing among the Dalits and poor Hindus. Sajan K George, president of the Global Council of Indian Christians: “The situation is alarming. The Dalits are empowered by Christian prayer and Hindus are afraid of this.

Catholic Culture: Vandals broke into a Syro-Malankara Catholic church in the southeastern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, setting fire to the altar, Bibles, and other sacred objects.

Catholic Culture: The federal Supreme Court of India, in a historic ruling, has upheld compensation for a pregnant woman who gave birth to a stillborn child following an accident.

Catholic Culture: Three years after an anti-Christian rampage left an estimated 100 dead and 50,000 homeless, the government of the Kandhamal district in the eastern Indian state of Orissa is forbidding the construction of new churches and the rebuilding of churches that had been destroyed.

Catholic Culture: In the northwestern Indian state of Rajasthan, the ministry of health in the Jhunjhunu district has set a goal of sterilizing 1% of the population and is paying people to be sterilized.

CNN.com: According to the 2011 census, the sex ratio of the country’s children has dipped from 927 females per 1000 males to 914, a 60-year low. Ratios in the northern states are particularly alarming: only Himachal Pradesh now has a ratio of girls to boys above 900.

Charisma: Four months after a recent convert to Christianity from Islam in eastern India’s West Bengal state was stripped and beaten, about 50 Muslim extremists yesterday disrupted a prayer meeting held in her home, threatening to burn it down if she did not return to Islam, area Christians said.

Catholic Culture: A gang of 50 Muslim extremists disrupted a prayer meeting at a Christian woman’s home in West Bengal, an Indian state that borders Bangladesh.

Religion Clause: In the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, the government has ordered schools to incorporate “Gita Sar”– the essence of Gita– into the curriculum. According to yesterday’s Indian Express, the Catholic Bishops Council last month filed suit asking the Madhya Pradesh high court to order the government to instead include a summary of all religions in the curriculum, and not to favor a particular faith.

The Times of India: Most would have expected it to be ‘big news’, but the opposite happened when a runaway lesbian couple, Beena and Savita, (from Khekada village in Baghpat) was given recognition of their marriage by a Gurgaon court, along with police protection.

Guardian.co.uk: Half a million girls a year are being aborted in India, equal to the total number of girls born in the UK. The scale of sex selection in Asia is extraordinary, yet it has not attracted the attention it deserves in the west. This is the age of “missing women” – an estimated 30 to 70 million of them. The number of girls born has dropped significantly because of sex selective abortions, and the sex imbalance has been aggravated by higher mortality rates as boys receive better care.

AP: India’s health minister has derided homosexuality as an unnatural “disease” from the West, drawing outrage Tuesday from activists who said the comments set back the country’s campaign for gay rights and its fight against HIV.

Telegraph: Indian doctors have been accused of conducting sex change operations on young girls whose parents want sons to improve the family’s income prospects.

Catholic Culture: The bodies of nine aborted babies, all girls, were discovered in a drain in India’s western Maharashtra state, in one of regions where sex-selection abortion is most commonplace

Asia News: Hennur police have arrested three men on false charges of forced conversions in Karnataka, reported by 20 Hindu activists.

NYTimes.com: M. is an ebullient girl, age 10, who ranks near the top of her fourth-grade class and dreams of being a doctor. Yet she, like all of India, is at a turning point, and it looks as if her family may instead sell her to a brothel.

India Times: Child marriages are rampant in the rural areas of Rajasthan. Before the Akshya Tritiya (a day considered auspicious for marriages) observed on May 5 this year, the state government had threatened to take action against anybody involved in organising child marriages, including priests, catering firms and photographers.

AP: More and more Indian families with one girl are aborting subsequent pregnancies when prenatal tests show another female is on the way, according to a new study published Tuesday.

AP: More and more Indian families with one girl are aborting subsequent pregnancies when prenatal tests show another female is on the way, according to a new study published Tuesday.

Catholic Culture: An Indian man beat his wife to death in the southern Andhra Pradesh state, after learning that she was pregnant with a female baby . . .

Christian Science Monitor: “Lawyers welcomed ruling by India’s Supreme Court Monday that suspended a ruling on the Ayodhya holy site. The ruling last year had divided the disputed site between Muslims and Hindus.”

Isobel Coleman at Council on Foreign Relations Blog: Currently trailing China by more than 100 million people, India is projected to overtake its neighbor by 2025, according to the medium variant. Indeed, China’s population is projected to peak around that same year and, thereafter, to experience an eye-popping decline. By 2100, China will have 400 million fewer people than it does today—a reduction larger than the entire current U.S. population.

AP: The starving girls in this hospital ward include a 21-month-old with arms and legs the size of twigs and an emaciated 1-year-old with huge, vacant eyes. Without urgent medical care, most will not live to see their next birthday.

Catholic Culture: Hindu extremists in Madhya Pradesh beat a Protestant pastor until he was unconscious; radicals in Maharashtra prevented tribal Christians from holding services; and extremists in Kerala beat Christians who were distributing copies of the Gospel.

iNewsone.com: A doctor here was on the run after a 29-year-old woman died Friday following a botched abortion that has sparked mass anger in the Taj Mahal city.

NY Times: Free speech advocates and Internet users are protesting new Indian regulations restricting Web content that, among other things, can be considered “disparaging,” “harassing,” “blasphemous” or “hateful.”

Hindustan Times: The Supreme Court on Tuesday deferred its hearing on the issue of legalisation and decriminalisation of gay sex among consenting adults in private. A bench headed by Justice G S Singhvi adjourned the matter without specifying the date of the next hearing . . .

Guardian: “Economic growth hasn’t brought gender justice, as sex-selective abortion means more boys than girls are born every year.”

AP: In a crowded courtroom on the city’s outskirts, the once unthinkable is reality: dozens of couples – rich and poor, educated and barely literate – seek divorce for reasons as varied as domestic violence to a simple inability to live together.

CBC.ca: . . . 914 girls for every 1,000 boys under the age of six, compared to 927 for every 1,000 in the last census. “This is a matter of grave concern,” Chandramauli said.

HinduStanTimes: “The police on Tuesday arrested 14 persons, mostly tribals, in Mayurbhanj district of Orissa on the charge of unlawful religious conversion.”

Reuters: “China, with Russia, India, Brazil and other developing countries have condemned the U.S.-led air strikes on Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi as risky and unwarranted overreaching by the West.”

Catholic Culture: “Pratibha Devisingh Patil, the president of India and the first woman to hold the office, has expressed grave concern over reports of a steady decline in the number of young women in the country.”

Eureka Alert: “In the next 20 years in large parts of China and India, there will be a 10% to 20% excess of young men because of sex selection and this imbalance will have societal repercussions, states an analysis in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal) (pre-embargo link only) http://www.cmaj.ca/embargo/cmaj.101368.pdf”