By Matters India Reporter
Bhopal: Cardinal Oswald Gracias, one of Pope Francis’s advisors, on February 5 will release a book on justice to victims of the worst anti-Christian violence in modern India.
The book, “Kandhamal: introspection of Initiative for Justice 2007-2015,” is written by noted lawyer Vrinda Grover and law academic Saumya Uma. Its release is on the sideline of the Conference of Catholic Bishops of India’s plenary assembly now underway in Bhopal, capital of the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh.
The two had earlier written the book “Kandhamal -The Law must Change its Course,” which analyzed and brought to the world’s attention the miscarriage of justice in the Kandhamal district of Odisha.
The latest 304-page book, published jointly by Media House and United Christian Forum, is the first comprehensive investigation of the justice process in one of the most traumatic cases of communal violence targeting the Christian community in India.
Kandhamal witnessed unprecedented attacks on Christians during Christmas season in 2007 and then in the second half of 2008. Human rights groups estimate that the worst anti-Christian violence in modern India claimed nearly 100 lives and rendered more than 54,000 homeless.
More than 600 villages were ransacked; 6,500 houses looted and burnt, 395 places of worship destroyed in the violence triggered by the killing of a Hindu religious leader in Kandhamal on August 23, 2008. The violence that lasted for four months targeted Christian educational institutions and social service centers.
About 30,000 people were uprooted and lived in relief camps and continue to be displaced. During this period about 2,000 people were forced to renounce their Christian faith.
There is a strong movement to urge Pope Francis to declare the Kandhamal victims as martyrs.
Attacks against Christians in India have been in the form of killings of priests, sexual assault of nuns, and the physical destruction of Christian institutions. The attacks mainly aim to exploit communal clashes to increase political power base of certain vested interests.
The authors claim the book examines whether nine years later, closure and justice have any resonance in the lives of the victims of the anti-Christian violence in Kandhamal, one of the poorest districts in Odisha.
They find the impunity and injustice meted to the Kandhamal victims as both striking and disturbing. What happened to Christians in Odisha resembled the massacre of Muslims in Assam’s Nellie in 1983, anti-Sikh pogrom in 1984 and attacks on Muslims in Mumbai in 1992 and in Gujarat ten years later.
The uncertain jurisprudence reflected in these earlier cases of mass crimes discloses that the courts are yet to fully comprehend the distinct nature of mass crimes; the diabolical complicity of the State in a ‘riot’; the lethal intent of the mob; the sexualized targeting of women’s bodies; the partisan and compromised investigations; the destruction of properties and assets of the victim community; all of which reveal the collaboration of the Sate and the genocidal intent of the violence.
The authors bemoan that justice eludes the victims, their families and the targeted Christian community even after nine years. “Fear and insecurity haunts their daily existence, as their religious identity continues to erode their equal right to exercise of citizenship.”
They also note that in August 2008, the ‘collective guilt’ for the murder of the Hindu preacher Laxmananand Saraswati was thrust on the Christian community in Kandhamal, providing not just an occasion, rather a justification for the targeted violent attack.
Even though the Maoists claimed responsibility for the killing of Saraswati, the Christian community suffered an egregious loss of life, limb, property, displacement, education, employment and a permanent social breach in the district, the authors add.