Indian bishops hail move to assist interfaith couples

Panel of experts to track couples marrying outside their faith, caste in the western state of Maharashtra

Catholic bishops have welcomed a decision by an Indian provincial government to monitor couples in interfaith and inter-caste marriages, calling it a “good initiative and a good mission” to reach out to women in distress.

The initiative by the government in the western Indian state of Maharashtra also proposes to be in touch with the estranged families of women who marry outside their faith or caste.

“It’s a good move to reach out to distressed women, who get into great difficulties due to such marriages,” Archbishop Elias Gonsalves of Nagpur and the Apostolic Administrator of Amravati in Maharashtra told UCA News.

Maharashtra’s Minister for Women and Child Development, Mangal Prabhat Lodha, said the government aims to help families reconcile and avoid tragedies like women being harmed or even getting killed by their partners.

“Assistance can be provided, if necessary”

The reference was to the recent case of Shraddha Walkar, a 27-year-old Hindu woman, who was murdered by her live-in partner, Aaftab Poonawala, a 29-year-old Muslim, in the capital Delhi in May this year.  Walkar’s family was against the relationship and had cut off links with her.

The murder shocked people across the nation as Poonawala strangled his partner and cut her body into pieces, which he kept hidden inside a fridge for nearly three weeks, dumping them over the next several days at various locations across the city.

An Inter-caste/Interfaith Marriage-Family Coordination Committee in Maharashtra will be headed by Lodha himself. It will locate and keep tabs on married and live-in couples belonging to diverse faiths or Hindu castes, along with their families, “so that assistance can be provided, if necessary.”

According to the Dec. 13 government order, the 13-member committee of experts will serve as a platform for women and their families to seek counseling and resolve conflict issues.

The committee will hold regular meetings with district officials and collect information about registered and unregistered interfaith and inter-caste marriages, or even elopement by couples in the respective jurisdictions, the order stated.

Archbishop Gonsalves told UCA News that similar initiatives were launched in Nagpur archdiocese as also in neighboring Amravati diocese, where he was previously the bishop.

“Our Holy Cross nuns in Amravati are engaged in reaching out and counseling distressed and battered women,” he said.

“The Catholic Church has never opposed or denied a woman’s right to marry according to her choice”

The prelate said the initiative started at the police commissioner’s office in Nagpur with “our nuns engaged in counseling and reconciliation to save marriages” but had been discontinued.

“I am trying to revive it,” Archbishop Gonsalves said.

Archbishop Felix Machado of Vasai also hailed the government decision, recalling that when he was the under-secretary of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue, a church document was published at the end of the 1990s to serve as a guide for pastors to help interfaith married couples live in harmony.

The document was appreciated and taken up by the World Council of Churches in Geneva, he added.

“The Catholic Church has never opposed or denied a woman’s right to marry according to her choice. In fact, when a Catholic girl wants to marry outside her faith, I guide her on the likely challenges ahead,” he said.

The government’s move though has invited criticism from opposition parties.

Jitendra Awhad, a former minister from the Nationalist Congress Party, said in a tweet: “What’s this rubbish of a committee to check inter-caste/religion marriages? Who is the govt to spy on who marries whom? In liberal Maharashtra, this is a retrograde, nauseating step.… Stay away from people’s private lives.”

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