Indian Catholic school sacks nun accused of insulting Hindu deities

Sister Mary Selvaraj was teaching a poem by Rabindranath Tagore, India’s poet laureate who won the Nobel Prize in 1913

A Church-run school in a southern Indian Karnataka state has removed a Catholic nun from her teaching job after she was accused of making derogatory remarks against Hindu gods in her class.  

Sister Mary Prabha Selvaraj was a teacher at St. Gerosa English Medium Higher Primary School in Mangaluru, run by Sisters of Charity.

She was removed from her job on Feb. 12 following protests from Hindu groups in the city, a stronghold of hardline Hindu organizations in southern India.

“We decided to remove her [Selvaraj] permanently to avoid law and order problems,” said Sister Irene Menezes, provincial superior of the Sisters of Charity.

She said the nun had been a teacher for 16 years and worked in St. Gerosa for the past five years.

“There was never any such complaint” against the school staff in the past, Menezes said.

The school established some six decades ago has more than 1,000 pupils.

Selvaraj was accused of insulting Hindu deities and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi based on a video clip circulated by a parent. 

The protest in front of the school was led by D. Vedavyas Kamath, a lawmaker from Modi’s pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The protesters wanted the nun to be removed from her job.

Father Rupesh Madtha, the editor of Mangalore diocesan weekly news magazine, said the video clip was circulated “by a parent and unfounded charges were leveled against the nun and others, including students, to create a huge uproar.”

The nun was stressing the importance of work in life while teaching a poem Work is Worship by Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian poet who won the Nobel for literature in 1913. The poem stresses that God is not confined to a particular religious place of worship. 

“It is a baseless [charge] that the nun made defamatory remarks against Hindu deities or the prime minister,” Menezes told UCA News on Feb. 13.

We were “compelled to remove her” after the legislator threatened us “with dire consequences,” she added.

The district officials also advised to keep the nun away from the school “for peace and harmony” in the area, a Church official said.

The education department in the state, where the BJP was running the government until May 2023, has launched a probe against the nun. The rival Congress party runs the state government now.

The entire coastal district of Mangaluru is known for its network of pro-Hindu groups and their collective influence on government machinery including police, and even the media.

Mangaluru, formerly called Mangalore, also has a strong presence of Catholics with several Church-run educational and healthcare institutions. Christianity arrived in the coastal region with Portuguese missionaries in 1521.

Mangalore diocese has produced many missionaries and over 50 bishops, who work across India. Currently, 29 bishops and three archbishops from Mangaluru work in Indian dioceses.

Church leaders suspect the controversy around Sister Selvaraj was meant to tarnish the image of Christian education institutions.

Christians form 1.87 percent of Karnataka’s 61 million people and 80 percent of them are Hindus.

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