By Matters India Reporter
Mangalore: The author of several books on the 2008 anti-Christian violence in Odisha has urged India’s Catholic youth to speak up for the persecuted church of Kandhamal.
“I shared with youth participants on the plight of seven innocents, who are languishing in jail for allegedly killing a Hindu leader. Let there be more volunteers to speak up for the voiceless,” Anto Akkara, a veteran journalist told the national assembly of the Indian Catholic Youth Movement (ICYM) now underway in Mangalore, a southern Indian town.
Akkara, who spoke the group on January 20, has made extensive visits to Kandhamal district of Odisha that witnessed unprecedented attacks on Christians during Christmas time in 2007 and then for several months after the Hindu leader’s death on August 23, 2008.
More than 5,000 Catholic youth delegates across the country are attending the Jan 18-22 assembly organized by the Youth Office of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India.
Akkara urged the participants to “stand up and speak up for the voiceless and sign the online petition for their release at www.release7innocents.com with graphic display of how to sign the petition to demand their release.”
The 52-year-old author also urged them to read the book ‘ who killed swami Laxmananamda that reviewers have said reads like detective novel.
Giving a short background to the Kandhamal pogrom, Akkara said the seven people languishing in jail are living martyrs. They are in jail to perpetuate the Kandhamal fraud.
Seven Christians from remote Kandhamal are behind the bars following the mysterious murder of Swami Laxmananda Saraswati. These Christians, six of them illiterates, were convicted in 2013 for the murder touted as a Christian conspiracy.
Following the Hindu leader’s murder, nearly 100 Christians had been killed and 300 churches and 6,000 Christian houses plundered and torched in unabated violence that continued for weeks. Hindu masses – most of them illiterate-had been incited to take revenge on the Christians after the slain Swami’s body was paraded across Kandhamal for two days along zigzag routes.
A third judge of the trial court-after two judges were transferred-convicted the accused Christians and sentenced them to life imprisonment on the basis of a fabricated Christian conspiracy theory despite hardly any credible evidence brought before the court. In mid 2015, two top police officials-who had relied upon the same conspiracy theory to ensure the conviction of the accused-have testified before the Kandhamal judicial Inquiry commission that the allegations were false.
Yet, the hearing on the appeal of the innocent convicts has been repeatedly postponed by the Odisha High Court. So, Akkara has urged the Chief Justice of India and other constitutional authorities to end the travesty of justice and release the seven innocents.