Crucified in Orissa

Crucified in Orissa

A hindu fanatic gunned down Mahatma Gandhi while he was on his way to attend a prayer meeting in New Delhi on January 30, 1948. He was one of the greatest pacifists the world had seen about whom the great scientist Albert Einstein said, "the future generations will scarcely believe that such a man in flesh and blood, had tread this earth."

Yet, not a single Hindu was attacked in retaliation by those who held the Mahatma in high esteem. In fact, in anticipation of violence and to scotch rumours, All India Radio, which was at that time headed by a British bureaucrat, had mentioned in all its first reports that Gandhi’s assassin "was not a Muslim".
We all know what happened when the same AIR and its cousin Doordarshan announced that Indira Gandhi’s assassins were her Sikh bodyguards. Nearly 3,000 Sikhs were killed and their houses and establishments destroyed in the national Capital alone. Even the small Sikh community in Ranni in Pathanamthitta district in Kerala was not spared.
It would be sacrilegious to compare either of these killings to the murder of Vishwa Hindu Parishad leader ‘Swami’ Lakshmanananda Saraswati on August 23. I put the word ‘Swami’ in single quotes as he never measured up to the essentials of a Hindu ascetic, who wants to seek God.
Lakshmanananda came into prominence after reaching Kandhamal in Orissa where he never disclosed his previous identity. The little information I have about him is that he was from Uttar Pradesh and was a married man. In Orissa, he became an active worker of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the more militant wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), founded in Bombay on August 29, 1964.
Very soon, Lakshmanananda became a darling of the VHP as his commitment to Hindutva was never in question. He immersed himself in the "reconversion" of Christians. He adopted violent means in reconverting Christians. Another pet project of Lakshmanananda was to stop people from eating beef and trading in the animal. He had a band of dedicated storm troopers who would do anything at his bidding.
For the VHP leadership, he was as dear as Dara Singh, who engineered the burning alive of the Australian missionary Graham Steins and his sons Philip and Timothy in Orissa on January 23, 1999. Two days after the gruesome murder, then Home Minister and now Prime Minister-in-waiting Lal Krishna Advani gave a clean chit to the VHP and the Bajrang Dal when he said that he knew the two organisations well and they could not have organised the horrendous killing. It is a different matter that Dara Singh, for whom the VHP arranged the best legal aid, was convicted and he is now undergoing life imprisonment.
Lakshmanananda had many things in common with Dara Singh – his congenital hatred for Christians. Naturally enough, he antagonised many people. Alas, nobody ever told him about the Biblical saying that "all those who take the sword will come to death by the sword".
He did not change his ways. He brushed aside all allegations of moral turpitude against him. The parents of the poor girls in his ‘ashram hostel’ did not have the courage to expose the dirty old man. Instead, they suffered in silence. The State Government provided him security. But on the fateful day when the Naxalites attacked him at his ashram and shot him dead in the bathroom where he was hiding, his security guards were the first to bolt.
The killing was the handiwork of the Naxalites. While owning up responsibility for the killing, they described the ‘Swami’ as a "Satan". They said, "he was a rabid anti-Christian ideologue and persecutor of innocent Christians who was responsible for the burning down of over 400 churches in Kandhamal district alone".
"In fact, this Hindutva leader was known for his fierce resentment of the success of Christian missionaries in winning over people with healthcare, education, food and dignity in this desperately poor tribal area" as Antara Dev Sen noted in her column in The Asian Age(September 4)
Yet, the subterfuge was used to target the whole Christian community in Kandhamal district. Till the time of writing, as many as 16 people have been killed and hundreds of churches and thousands of houses have been burnt down. The ground situation in Orissa is worse than it is portrayed in newspaper reports. A journalist friend who is now visiting the affected area was sobbing when she described to me what she saw there. Village after village have been decimated by the marauding Hindutva mobs. Let me quote her:
"The government figures of deaths are an understatement. I have myself come across at least 30 cases of death. When the attack came, many Christians ran into the forests. Some of them were hounded and killed in the forests and their bodies thrown into pits where they are decomposing.
"The VHP did a thorough job in destroying houses and churches. It was done very systematically. First they would cut huge trees to block the roads and thereby block entry of police and then target Christian houses, which would be either burnt down or demolished. In many cases, they used cooking gas cylinders in the houses to cause explosions.
"The Christians have nothing to fall back upon. Whatever they had have been destroyed. Most of them are in the jungles or in refugee camps. The VHP leaders are contemplating a strategy for the future. In secret meetings held in the area, they are spreading word that the Christians would be given one last chance to return to their villages if they give it in writing to the local VHP office that they would renounce Christianity and become Hindus".
Thus the whole game plan is to "reconvert" the Christians. Given such an objective, it would not be surprising if, as some people believe, Lakshmanananda had been done away with in the larger interests of the VHP. How has the Orissa government been reacting to the mayhem in Kandhamal? The Biju Janata Dal and the BJP rule the state.
Logically, the VHP should have turned its anger against the Orissa police for its failure to protect Lakshmanananda. Or, better still, against the Naxalites. Why did they choose to target the Christians? Was it because some of the Naxalites have Christian names? In that case, a large majority of the Naxalites have Hindu names. Does that mean that every time the Naxalites attack a police station or a landlord, Hindus of the area should be attacked in retaliation?
There is enough reason to believe that all this was premeditated. Otherwise, how would the government allow a person like Praveen Togadia to tour the area and incite violence against the Christians? The police was nowhere when the Christians were systematically targeted.
Considerable planning seems to have gone into the whole operation like in Gujarat in 2002. There, too, the killing of the karsevaks at Godhra was used as a ruse to attack innocent Muslims. Till today it has not been proved that the attack on the Sabarmati Express at Godhra was a premeditated attack. In fact, a Commission appointed by the Railways came to the conclusion that it was more an accident than an attack. Yet, thousands of Muslims in distant Ahmedabad were attacked while nothing happened in Madhya Pradesh, which is closer to Godhra.
The Orissa government did nothing to prevent the spread of violence. Ask any police officer worth his salt and he will tell you that the rioter is a coward who will run away the moment he is challenged. The poor Christians who were taught that if someone struck them on the right cheek, they should turn to him the other also, could not be expected to stand up to them. But if security forces were deployed in time and the rioters rounded up, the tragedy could have been averted.
However, such stern measures are beyond the capability of the Naveen Patnaik government. In June last, 38 policemen belonging to an elite group trained to tackle the Naxalites were killed by the latter in a single operation. A month later, the Maoists attacked the police in Malkangiri district. Seventeen policemen were killed when the Naxalites blew up an anti-landmine vehicle in which the victim policemen were traveling.
Despite such provocation, the Orissa police has not been able to retaliate. And in this case, the government is complicit. The Biju Janata Dal may have secular credentials but the BJP, its partner in the state, has a vested interest in exploiting the murder of Lakshmanananda. On September 4, soon after a BJP minister visited Kandhamal, a group of women, instigated by the Sangh Parivar, attacked the refugee camp at Kandhamal.
They were ostensibly protesting against the inconvenience caused to them by the curfew. Had they succeeded, many more Christians would have been killed. In Jammu, the same Sangh Parivar forces organised protests for over a month over the Amarnath issue. The resultant curfew and other restrictions greatly inconvenienced the people of both Jammu and the Valley but that did not bestir the Parivar.
While newspapers have generally been critical of the violent methods of the Sangh Parivar in Kandhamal, some sections of them seem to believe that it is all because of conversions. Let there be no mistaking, some tribals have indeed converted to Christianity. Orissa is one of the states where there is an anti-conversion law in force. Why is it that till today there has not been a single complaint against the Christians of forcing the tribals to convert to their religion?
The Christians were the first to bring education to the area. Small wonder that the first tribal IAS officer from Kandhamal is a Christian as pointed out by John Dayal (IC, September 1-7). Decades ago when I visited Jharkhand, I was told by a local person: "You can easily make out a Christian from a non-Christian and a Christian home from a non-Christian home. A Christian may not be rich but he will be better dressed and he will keep his house cleaner than his animist brother".
Education brings self-dignity in its wake and that is something the entrenched feudal elements cannot accept. The latter is happy so long as the tribals remain poor and accept whatever is given by way of wages. The moment the tribals become aware of the Minimum Wages Act and other enabling legal provisions, they become expendable.
It is not the first time that the Christians in Kandhamal are feeling the heat of Hindutva. Last year, in December, they came under the Hindutva fire. The provocation was the putting up of a shamiana to celebrate Christmas. The orgy of violence left "half a dozen Christians and one Hindu dead, 107 churches burnt and a thousand houses destroyed".
Had the police taken tough action against the perpetrators of violence, surely what Kandhamal is experiencing now would not have happened. At that time, many newspapers fell for the misleading report that it was all on account of conflicting demands for reservation. It was an out and out anti-Christian campaign.
Biswamoy Pati is the author of Identity, Hegemony, Resistance: Towards a Social History of Conversions in Orissa, 1800-2000. His competence to write on the issue is beyond question. In an article in The Hindustan Times(September 2), he says, "It is indeed amazing that most of the reports on Kandhamal wrongly assume that tribals are Hindus. In fact, what the Sangh Parivar has been attempting in Orissa — their post-Gujarat laboratory — is large-scale conversion of tribals to Hinduism".
Pati hits the nail on the head when he concludes his article, "The real problem in Kandhamal is related to the aggressive drives to convert tribals to Hinduism, including terror directed at Dalit Christians, who are the stumbling blocks in the path of the Sangh Parivar and the VHP".
Civil society in Orissa is dead. Sections of the State Government have a hand in the orgy of violence in Kandhamal and the Central Government is more bothered about the nuclear deal with the US than about protecting secularism.
Did it occur to UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi that while her daughter Priyanka was performing bhoomi puja for her new house at Charabra near Shimla last week, thousands of poor Christian Dalits were unable to return to their own homes? Whatever be the case, it is time to mourn the death of secularism in Orissa.

(by Bharat Putra retrieved from http://www.indiancurrents.org.in/bharat.htm)