Bangalore: An investigative book on Kandhamal conflagration by veteran journalist Anto Akkara is a wakeup call for the nation, says Advocate-General of Karnataka Ravivarma Kumar.
“The content of the book has grave implications for Indian democracy,’ Kumar said while releasing the book ‘Who killed Swami Laxmanananda?’ in Bangalore on July 23 along with Gauri Lankesh, editor of ‘Lankesh Patrika’, and Fr Ambrose Pinto, eminent social commentator.
According to him, a disaster is unfolding on the nation. “We need to wake up, even if just five of us or a handful, and we must fight any injustice so that justice is upheld,” he cautioned.
The eminent jurist also says the Judiciary has become “the last bastion of hope for the nation” since the legislature and the executive have lost their credibility.
The book that carries a foreword by nonagenarian journalist Kuldip Nayar dissects the questionable judgment that awarded life term to seven Christians for the murder of 81-year-old Swami Laxmanananda Saraswati on August 23, 2008.
Kumar says that there was ‘no eyewitness to the murder and hardly any evidence.’
The judgment was based on a ‘very weak testimony’ of a student of Sanskrit in the Swami’s ashram, who was 13 at the time of the incident and was examined 3½ years after it. The judge accepted it as credible because “being a student of Sanskrit her memory would be very good”, Kumar added.
The murder triggered widespread violence in Kandhamal for three months killing nearly 100 Christian and displacing more than 56,000 others. The rioters also destroyed 300 churches and plundered 6,000 Christians houses.
Gauri, who also spoke said, “Even on a cursory reading (of the book), it is clear that there has been an abuse of the judicial process. We look to the judiciary for some semblance of law to be upheld but the situation is now very worrying.”
She commented Akkara “for bringing the shocking facts about Kandhamal to the national with his arduous research.”
“There are many similarities between Godhra and Orissa incidents. Both had Praveen Togadia as a common factor. There was organized violence targeting the minorities. They claimed that in both cases the response was a spontaneous reaction from the mobs to the incidents that provoked the violence,” Gauri pointed out.
The Sangh Parivar, she noted, targets “Muslims, Christians, Dalits, Leftists, Women….anyone who doesn’t fit their idea of Hindu. Our faith is in our secular Constitution.”
Jesuit Father Pinto says the book lays out the agenda of hate of the Sangh Pariva. The author, he says, has proved that the Swami’s murder and subsequent conflagration was a well-planned conspiracy.
“The Sangh Parivar acquires power through hate. This is a struggle between the forces of hierarchy and equality. Those in power are trying to retain it through spreading hate,” remarked Fr Pinto, former director of Indian Social Institute in New Delhi.
He recalled that the Sangh Parivar had been associated with anti-national activities and the spreading of hate since pre-Independence times. They had cooperated with the colonisers, were active in anti-Muslim violence during Partition of the Indian subcontinent, and later in Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination.
“Anto’s book is part of the struggle between powerful vested interests promoting inequality and hierarchy versus equality,” he noted.
Akkara, using multimedia, presented chilling facts about the Kandhamal fraud with the ‘supari’ murder of the swami and seven innocent Christians – six of them illiterates – being convicted to life imprisonment by a trial to perpetrate the fraud that the swami’s murder was a Christian conspiracy.
“The conviction of the seven innocents without a shred of evidence against them is a blot on the judicial system of the country,” lamented Akkara urging all present to sign the online petition for their release at www.release7 innocents.com.
Though Maoists had claimed responsibility, the book points out, prosecution chose to indict Christians. The book shows how the Sangh Parivar had engineered the violence, hoping the federal government would dismiss the Odisha government in which the BJP was a coalition partner then. That would have given them advantage in the national elections in 2009.
The author said he wanted the truth to prevail and that the seven men serving a life sentences for a crime they did not commit must be released.
HD Deve Gowda, former 84-year old Prime Minister who had confirmed his attendance even on July 23 morning to release the book did not turn up due to ‘indisposition.’