By Anto Akkara
Kandhamal, an obscure jungle district in Odisha –one of the least developed among 766 districts in India– is now known all over the world. The credit goes to the poor but valiant Christians who embraced martyrdom like the ‘Early Christians’ when they were threatened with death to forsake their faith in Christ.
I was thrilled when Apostolic Nuncio to India Archbishop Leopoldo Girelli announced the news of the Vatican granting green signal for initiating the beatification process for 35 Catholic martyrs of Kandhamal. The October 18 ‘nihil obstat’ from the Vatican Dicastery for Causes of Saints has cleared the path “to initiate the process of beatification for the Servant of God Kantheswar Digal and companions, martyrs of Kandhamal” from the 2008 persecution of Christians.
Encounters with these martyrs’ kins and thousands who survived martyrdom over the past 15 years have changed the course of my life. I have visited the ‘holy land of India’ sanctified by the blood of heroic Christians35 times.
Now the roads are clear for Archbishop John Barwa of Cuttack Bhubaneswar that covers Kandhamal, to set the canonization process in motion. The first step is an Archdiocesan council meeting to decide the date and plans for officially initiating the process. It needs huge planning.
How did Kandhamal achieve this unique status in the annals of Christian history even beyond India? In August 2008, the sprawling district, 200-350 km southwest of Bhubaneswar, the capital of Odisha state, witnessed the worst anti-Christian violence in modern Indian history following the mysterious murder of 81-year-old Swami Lakshmanananda Saraswati in his Ashram in Kandhamal.
Touting the murder instantly as a ‘Christian conspiracy,’ the body of the slain Swami was taken across Kandhamal in a funeral procession for two days calling for revenge on Christians. Sangh Parivar outfits declared that Christianity was ‘banned’ in Kandhamal. So, the Christians were ordered to troupe into temples to recant their faith in Christ, chasing them and even pulling them out of moving buses.
The valiant Christians who defied were burnt alive, buried alive or chopped into pieces. Nearly 100 Christians were killed instantly. More than 300 churches and 6,000 houses were plundered in an unabated violence rendering 56,000 homeless.
St Stephen of Kandhamal
Young evangelical pastor, Rajesh Digal was returning from a convention in Hyderabad when anti-Christian violence erupted in Kandhamal. His bus from Berhampur to Kandhamal was stopped on August 26 by a mob on the lookout for Christians.
“Are you a Christian?” they questioned Rajesh. Unsatisfied with his evasive reply, they checked his bag and found a copy of the Bible in it.
“Christianity is banned in Kandhamal because you Christians have killed our Swami. You have to attend the reconversion ceremony and forsake your faith,” they told him.
“I have the fundamental right to be a Christian in this country. I will not come for reconversion,” Rajesh shot back.
Furious over his defiant response, they beat him. They dragged him to a nearby pit and made him stand in it. Soil was filled up to his neck and he was given a ‘final chance’ to recant his faith.
When pastor Rajesh refused again, they crushed his head with a big boulder.
Pastor Rajesh embraced martyrdom like St. Stephen, the first martyr of Christian faith, who had been stoned to death.
Tunguru Mallick, a Hindu youth who was accompanying Rajesh, recounted this tragedy to the pastor’s wife Asmita.
“Since the violence was widespread during those days, I could not go to the area. The body was not there when our relatives went there after three days. They went to police who refused to file a murder case, asking them to find the body,” recounted Asmita with tears rolling down her cheeks.
Asmita shared her dreadful ordeal when I met her in Bangalore at a gathering of a dozen Kandhamal widows who had been brought there in early December 2008 by Global Council of Indian Christians led by Sajan George.
Though I had visited Kandhamal twice earlier, the encounter with the distraught widow in Bangalore got me sucked into the Kandhamal ocean.
The name of pastor Rajesh had not figured in the list of 32 Christians killed, presented by the Odisha government to the Supreme Court.
Moved by the ‘injustice’ several widows had shared with me, I proceeded to Kandhamal for Christmas 2008.
Deputy collector Vineel Krishna came to oversee the Christmas celebration in the camp at Nuagam where refugees were shockingly treated like beggars.
“Glad to find the government organizing Christmas celebrations for the refugees. But I have a serious concern. Police have not registered FIRs even in murders,” I told the deputy collector, when he was leaving after cutting Christmas cake ahead of the Christmas service in biting cold.
“These are cooked-up stories,” the deputy collector shot back.
“No… I have come across a few cold-blooded murders. Why don’t you conduct proper investigation and register cases?” I reminded him.
“We have investigated and found no evidence.” As the collector was adamant, I decided to do something to expose this cover-up to whitewash Kandhamal bloodshed.
By refusing to register murder cases, police had saved the butchers of Kandhamal from prosecution besides denying dependant families 500,000 rupees in compensation – 200,000 from the Odisha government and 300,000 from the Prime Minister’s Relief Fund.
My passion for human rights did not allow me to overlook this blatant injustice with the connivance of state machinery. So, I made three more quick trips to Kandhamal and brought out an investigative book – venturing beyond journalism in the 7th month.
When ‘Kandhamal a blot on Indian Secularism’ was released in New Delhi on April 9, 2009, by Kuldip Nayar, patriarch of journalism, along with other celebrities, media took note of the ‘uncomfortable questions’ raised by the book.
Within three weeks, an embarrassed Odisha government acknowledged in the Supreme Court six more murders including that of pastor Rajesh and four others graphically described in the book, and paid the compensation.
I firmly believe “Mysterious are the ways of God.” The unforgettable encounters with the kin of martyrs and the unimaginable suffering of thousands of valiant Christians of Kandhamal keeps inspiring me to speak up for them in the 16th year of violence.
The political conspiracy behind the anti-Christian violence has been elaborated in my book ‘Who Killed Swami Lakshmanananda?’ and visualized in the documentary ‘Innocents Imprisoned’ released on the 10th anniversary of Kandhamal.
Father Purushottam Nayak, who put together the dossier of the ‘martyrs’ in five years from 2018, on prodding from the Vatican, visited the houses of each of the 105 martyrs in remote villages and prepared the list of 105 martyrs – two thirds of them non-Catholics. (Among the 36 Catholics, the Vatican Dicastery has approved the beatification process for 35 of them – 14 of them were killed on the spot while others died of injuries.)
The Conference of Catholic Bishops of India (that groups 132 Latin rite dioceses in India) in its plenary in January this year approved the list of martyrs submitted by the archdiocese, and forwarded it to the Vatican Dicastery for Causes of Saints.
The Vatican Dicastery’s ‘nihil obstat’ mentions only one name: ‘Kantheswar Digal’ and his companions’ among the 35 Catholic martyrs for his outstanding witness.
Kantheswar Digal, a catechist of Shankarakole, refused to attend a reconversion gathering in which Christians were forced to burn the Bibles a week ahead of the Hindu swami’s murder.
When he heard of the Swami’s murder, he sensed trouble and tried to flee to Bhubaneswar where his wife and son Rajendra lived in a slum. Local bigots called up others to block the road by cutting down trees and he was pulled out from the bus.
On August 26 evening, Kantheswar was killed along with a Christian couple Meghnath Digal and his wife Priatama, a nurse who was even gangraped, their bodies were cut into pieces and thrown into the river. Kanthewar’s only son Rajenda had shared with me how he rushed to identify the body (pieces) after he saw on the TV visuals of these floating in the river.
Another martyr in the list of 35 is Father Bernard Digal, procurator of the Cuttack Bhubaneswar archdiocese who was travelling to Kandhamal to review the construction of a new church in his native parish Tiangia.
The violence that engulfed Kandhamal started when Father Digal halted for the August 23rd night with an elderly priest from Kerala Father Alexander Charalankunnel.
After the church was attacked and his van burnt, Father Digal’s bid to search for a motorbike to take out Father Charalankunnel outside Kandhamal landed him in the hands of assailants. They chased him in the night and he tried to escape them inside a roofless burnt church. But they caught him, stripped him and beat him. A hit on the head with an iron rod left him semi-conscious in the jungle.
“I was worried if I would get a funeral as I could hear jackals howling and feared that they would eat me. I was extremely thirsty and I had to drink my urine with my hands while lying there,” Father Digal shared his ordeal with me at Holy Spirit Hospital in Mumbai.
Dozens of such unearthly testimonies I have come across inspired me to title my chronicle of Kandhamal’s incredible witness as that was released by Cardinal Fernando Filoni, Vatican prefect for Evangelization of Peoples in February 2013 at the CCBI Silver Jubilee at the Marian Shrine of Vailankanni.
The ‘Blood of the Martyrs is the seed of Christianity’ – goes the famous dictum of church historian Tertullian who recorded the persecution of ‘Early Christians’ under Roman Empire until emperor Constantine embraced the ‘banned’ Christianity in 313 with the Edict of Milan.
It is being repeated in Kandhamal now. I was asked to address a big Catholic gathering in central India during 2002 Lent. When I finished, an enthused senior nun heading her congregation’s national formation house, approached me and requested: “We have several novices from Kandhamal. Could you come and address us.”
When I went there, I had another thrilling Kandhamal revelation: of the 29 novices at the national center, 28 were from Kandhamal! The boys and girls who fled to jungles with their parents and lived in refugee camps to escape humiliation are today nuns, priests and pastors. Indeed, Kandhamal has proved Tertullian right.
In the ‘Good News of Kandhamal’ released in New Delhi to mark the 15th anniversary on August 23, I have illustrated how Kandhamal is no more a tragedy but Good News for the Christian world to rejoice as the mighty Hindu nationalists could not force any Christian to recant the faith in Christ. On the contrary, hundreds of Hindus including Sangh Parivar leaders have embraced the Christian faith they tried to banish from Kandhamal.
(Anto Akkara is a journalist with international media for 33 years. For his ‘stellar advocacy on Kandhamal’ with investigative books and social media campaigns, Akkara was conferred the prestigious journalism award instituted in memory of St Titus Brandsma, who was injected with poison for speaking up against Hitler in the Nazi Dachau concentration camp in 1942.)