Kerala: Union govt froze Church accounts over Adani port protest

In Kerala, the Latin Catholic Church's archdiocese in Thiruvananthapuram revealed in a letter read out to parishioners on Sunday, 21 April that they were short of funds because their bank accounts were frozen by the Union government.

The reason? A fishermen’s protest against the Adani group’s under-construction seaport at Vizhinjam, near Thiruvananthapuram. Not a lot of the mainstream media took note of it, but both the Indian Express and the Scroll published reports on the pastoral letter.

Vizhinjam has witnessed strong protests against the seaport, leading to violence in November 2022. The community represents a significant vote bank in the Thiruvananthapuram Lok Sabha seat, where union minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar is contesting against sitting Congress MP Shashi Tharoor.

The local fisherfolk's community, backed by the Latin Catholic diocese of Thiruvananthapuram, had been protesting against the Rs 7,500-crore project led by billionaire Gautam Adani’s ports business since September 2022. They alleged that the project would cause coastal erosion and damage their livelihoods.

The protest saw violence on 26 November 2022, when demonstrators tried to prevent the Adani Group from resuming construction at the project site, where work had been suspended for four months. Construction resumed at the port site on 8 December on the Kerala High Court's directions.

Subsequently, demonstrations continued for 138 days before the agitation was called off.

The Church alleges that its bank accounts have been frozen by the union government since those initial protests.

Metropolitan archbishop of Trivandrum, Thomas J. Netto, in a pastoral letter read out in all churches of the parish, expressed the archdiocese's struggle to meet its routine expenses and the cost of training seminarians due to the frozen accounts.

“As the accounts were frozen, the archdiocese is facing difficulty in receiving even ordinary aids for mission work. The situation remains unchanged,’’ he said, urging the laity to contribute to the archdiocese's expenses.

In 2022, during the Vizhinjam protests demanding rehabilitation packages for affected fisherfolk, the spiritual leaders of the archdiocese had clashed with the local BJP leadership.