Orissa, India - Hundreds of families in a remote region of
the eastern Indian state of Orissa remain homeless and without
support after a wave of violence swept the region
last month.
The minority Christian community
in Kandhamal district, many of whom are forest tribal people
and low-caste Dalit converts from Hinduism to Christianity,
say they've been targeted by radical Hindu nationalist organizations
seeking to put an end to the church and its activities in
the region.
This is rejected by the Hindu
groups who say the violence is the consequence of local issues
unconnected with their presence in the area.
The district has remained
under night-time curfew since the tensions erupted and has
been largely inaccessible to foreign journalists until now.
Repeated pattern
Father Ravi Samasundar stands
amid the burned out ruins of his church in the town of
Bamunigan.
"They brought oil, and
kerosene, piled everything they could find in the middle of
the
Church and set fire to it. They destroyed or looted everything."
Across this remote region,
deep in the highland forests, the pattern was repeated over
and over.
Churches were ransacked,
entire villages razed and their inhabitants forced to flee
into the forests.
The violence, which began
on Christmas Eve, has now largely abated, but the plight of
the people has not.
Many are now living in the
shells of their burned out homes, all their possessions lost.
The conflict has pitted Hindu
against Christian, tribal against non-tribal.
All share some responsibility
for what has happened, all have suffered. Years of relatively
peaceful co-existence of these communities, living a fragile
rural existence, has been shattered.
Seething
The Christian community blames
the virulently anti-Christian rhetoric of Hindu nationalist
organizations; and one person in particularly, a revered local
holy man, Lakhanananda Saraswati.
Father Ravi Samasundar seethes
with anger at what has been happening. "Saraswati speaks
against Christianity, against the priests, against the nuns,"
he says.
Hindu activists accuse the
local Christian community of stirring up trouble by making
"unreasonable" demands - a reference to their attempts
to be granted the same preferential access to jobs and education
given to low-caste Hindus and tribal communities.
"Political parties or
organizations have nothing to do with this. It is a clear
social problem", says Jagabandhu Mishra, editor of Rashtra
Deepa - a newspaper in the local Oriya language, which reflects
the more extreme views of the Hindu nationalists.
When I met Mr. Misra in his
office, the front page of a recent addition of the paper lay
on the desk between us.
It accused the 'Sons of Jesus'
of attacking Hindus, and reported on a Christian mob brutally
injuring the local Hindu leader Saraswati, an event which
triggered much of the worst violence, and which subsequently
turned out to be entirely false.
Was there, I asked, a campaign
of conversion, or re-conversion of Christians to Hinduism
in the area? "If those Hindus who converted to Christianity
want to come back," he told me, "the door is now
open to them."
Christian mob
No side is left blameless
in this conflict. After the initial attacks on church institutions
and the shops and homes of Christian families, Christian mobs
responded in kind.
In the village of Gadapur,
Hindu families, standing amid the charred rubble of their
homes, told me how a mob of tribal Christians had descended
on them, forcing them to flee into the forest, before destroying
every shop and dwelling in the village.
For those now living in makeshift
tents, or in the ruins of their old homes, aid from the state
government has been limited: a few tents, some plastic sheeting,
food and cooking utensils.
But far more is needed on
a sustained basis.
Ministers from the Hindu
nationalist BJP-controlled state government have toured the
area, made promises, but pledged little constructive support
for those in most need.
Perhaps more alarmingly,
NGOs and church organizations have been banned from offering
direct assistance. The official reason given is that by helping
one community and not another, they may provoke further violence.
Interest rates
Church and other aid organizations,
desperate to help their local communities see sinister motives
at work.
"This conflict is fought
in the name of religion," says NGO worker Kailash Chandra
Dandpath, "but the real motives are economic and political.
"The business communities
here, with its links to the Hindu nationalist organizations,
were once in complete control here. They'd lend money to the
tribal and the Dalits at incredibly high rates of interest,
up to 120% per year, and then the debtor would have to sell
his farm produce to the lender at a price controlled by the
businessmen."
Mr. Dandpath is describing
the system still widely practiced in India, of bonded exploitation,
where a family might well be indebted to the lender for generations.
"What's happening now",
says Mr. Dandpath, "is that the farmers, the most marginalized
of whom are from tribal and Christian communities, are being
linked by the NGOs to local banks, lending at perhaps 10%
interest a year - ten times less.
"This is clearly a threat
to the businessmen. And they are trying to break this link,
using religion as an excuse... in India, the easiest method
of politics is to take religion to divide and rule."
The dynamics of conflict
are rarely easy to dissect.
There are always economic
and social divisions within society to be exploited by those
more rich and powerful, particularly when the existing order
is threatened.
And there's no doubt
that the diverse communities in Kandhamal district have suffered
a terrible tragedy in recent weeks, which threatens to break
down the existing delicate social order there forever.
Source: All India Christian
Council, for Dalits
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