By Matters India Reporter
New Delhi: A web portal claiming to be a 61-year-old independent media start-up wants Cardinals Baselios Cleemis and Oswald Gracias to offer public apology for allegedly blaming the Narendra Modi government for the rape of an elderly nun in an eastern Indian town.
The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India (CBCI) “and its cardinals and archbishops should publicly apologize and retract their intemperate and hurried statements about attacks on minorities in the country,” swarajyamarg.com demanded after a Kolkata court convicted a Bangladesh Muslim for the nun’s rape and awarded him life term.
The Jesus and Mary congregation nun was the superior of a convent at Gangnapur in Ranaghat sub-division of Nadia district of West Bengal. Her rape mid-March, 2015, during a robbery, sparked countrywide outrage.
“The immediate verdict by the church, opposition political parties, commentators and the so-called Left-liberal cabal was that the alleged rape, and the looting and desecration of the (convent) was a hate crime and yet another attack on minorities after the Narendra Modi government came to power,” the portal recalled.
It also noted that the Nadia incident occurred when “large sections of the media, the opposition parties and others were already conducting a high-decibel campaign against the new National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government, accusing it of orchestrating and supporting attacks on minorities and minority institutions.”
The allegations, which the portal said were later proved fake, were given credence by minority organizations such as the CBCI.
“In the Nadia nun rape case, too, the CBCI alleged it was a hate crime. Dripping sarcasm, CBCI president Cardinal Baselios Cleemis told the media before visiting the nun and the convent in Bengal that ‘not only cows, but human beings too need to be protected.’ The cardinal was alluding to the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) proposed cow protection measures.”
The portal also accused Cardinal Cleemis of indirectly blaming Modi and the BJP government for alleged attacks on minorities.
“His colleague, cardinal Oswald Gracias, one of the eight cardinals from across the world appointed by Pope Francis on his advisory board to help him govern the Catholic church, repeated the false allegation of “frequent attacks on Christians in the country” and said he was worried about “the future of the country.”
The portal said articles voicing such sentiments appeared in many publications “severely criticizing and condemning not only Modi, but also the BJP, the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh and their leaders.”
The Bengal police arrested one of the accused from Mumbai in less than two weeks after the Nadia incident. “Far from being a Hindutva foot soldier, as the CBCI, the media, commentators and the opposition had alleged, the man was a Muslim and, that too, a Bangladeshi. His interrogation by the police in Bengal (ruled by the vehemently anti-BJP Mamata Banerjee) revealed that the perpetrators of the crime were all Bangladeshis and the motive was dacoity,” portal noted.
According to the portal, the court verdict is “a resounding slap on the faces of those who gave a communal color to what was a case of dacoity. Moreover, the nun was not gang-raped, as was alleged. And also, contrary to the false accusations of the CBCI, there was no deliberate desecration of the chapel inside the convent.”
In the wake of the verdict, the portal wants the two cardinals to apologize for “communalizing the Nadia incident and leveling false allegations against the BJP and the NDA government. It is only fair that they publicly retract their earlier statements about the Nadia incident being another in a series of attacks on minorities in India. They should apologize to Prime Minister Modi for criticizing him,” it added.
The portal bemoans that false statements feed a false narrative about India having become unsafe for minorities post-May 2014. And that only serves to defame the country. “The Catholic Church, least of all, has no business defaming India,” it asserts.