By Matters India Reporter

Bakingia, Nov 28, 2019: Kadamful Nayak, widow of Samuel Nayak who was martyred during the 2008 Kandhamal violence, died in the early hours of November 28.

She was 55. She is survived by her son and daughter.

Nayak was hospitalized for diabetes in Cuttack, the former capital of Odisha. Due to high diabetes, she became weak; it got complicated and could not eat anymore, said family members.

She hailed from Bakingia village, some 8 km from Raikia block of Kandhamal village in Odisha. From the same village, three people were killed during the 2008 Kandhamal pogrom. She is the first among the three widows to die.

Kadamful’s husband was beaten up, shoveled and was asked by the Hindu radical mob to give up Jesus and the Bible, but he did not and welcomed death instead.

Kadamful used to manage by herself after the murder of her husband, who was about 50 years in 2008.

Before death, the two children took care of Kadamful in her last days, as she fell ill due to lack of proper care, food and medical support.

“Kadamful was sociable, pious, and God-fearing. What I could see was that she was feeling lonely and helpless,” Father Augustine Singh, a Cuttack-Bhubaneswar Archdiocese psychologist, who attended the funeral, told Matters India.

Above 250 people, most of them the relatives and villagers, were present for the funeral.

Father Singh used to offer psychological guidance and counseling to Kadamful, other widows and victims of the Kandhamal violence.

According to him, the compensation from the government and the other support system like counseling and sharing sessions with other widows and violence-affected people were helpful in her coping with demands in living.

The anti-Christian persecution was the worst violence in 300 years of India’s history. It started in the aftermath of killing Swamy Laxmananda Saraswati, a nonagenarian leader of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, on the night of August 23, 2008, in a Kandhamal village.

Maoist extremists active in the Odisha jungles had claimed responsibility for the killing.

However, Hindu extremist groups used as the murder as a pretext to unleash unprecedented anti-Christian persecution that killed more than 100 people and displaced 50,000 local Christians.