URGENT TASKS IN KHANDAMALA DISTRICT, ORISSA IN THE WAKE OF THE CHRISTMAS WEEK ANTI CHRISTIAN VIOLENCE 2007

[Dr. John Dayal]

A postcard from the Kandhamala, Orissa 10th January 2008

Dear Friends

Thank you very much for your support.

I returned home to New Delhi a couple of hours ago after spending
fourteen days in Orissa - six days in two phases in the hills of the
Kandhamala district of Orissa in the week of the Christmas 2007
violence against Christians, and unfortunately four days in an
Intensive Care Unit of a Bhubaneswar hospital after a diabetic
ketoacidosis collapse. I am grateful to Doctor Neeraj Misra of Kar
Hospital, and Father Bernard and his brother priests at Bishops House
in Bhubaneswar who nursed me back so I could travel home. I had gone
to Orissa on 289th morning, after meeting Union Home Minister Shivraj
Patil and his officers in North Block, New Delhi.

Kandhamala still shivers under a mist laden with a foreboding - that
something dark and violent may happen on what is called Makar
Sankrati, a pleasant and happy occasion that should mark the beginning
of spring, but which, in this part of Orissa, marks the season when
the Vishwa Hindu Parishad maverick resident abbot Lokhmananda
Saraswati, the man at the root of all trouble, who reserves his most
vituperative fulminations against Christians for this occasion. The
gentleman is currently in Cuttack-Bhubaneswar but threatens to go back
in the next three four days to his forest ashram.

The Orissa Government's own blanket of darkness over Kandhamala does
not help. No one really knows the full plight of the Christians in the
refugees' camp at Barakhama village-town. Relief groups and civil
society are still barred from the area, despite repeated pleases by
organizations of the stature of CARITAS, EFICOR and the like, and
personal appeals by Archbishop Raphael Cheenath.

There has been an unreported death - the death of civil society in
Orissa. There is no Digant Oza, no Teesta Setalvad, and Javed Anand,
no Harsh Mander and Harsh Sethi, no Shamsul Islam-Neelima Sharma and
their street theatre Nishant, no ANHAD and SAHMAT equivalents in
Orissa, and the above name too are yet to come to the State and to the
national Press. In their absence, mischief and white lies have a field
day. Television News anchors quote Lokhmananda and speak of debates on
conversion. Not one paper calls for relief and assistance and legal
aid.

I intend to go back to Orissa after about a week or so after regaining
health and writing out the White Paper. I released the preliminary
report in Bhubaneswar, just before I took ill.

The following needs to be urgently done in Kandhamala, other than the
work of relief and rehabilitation.

1. Re-building civil society. We need to, and I hope to be able to,
organize at least four national seminars - one each in Calcutta and
Hyderabad, which have had an organic relationship with Orissa in the
past, and one each in Delhi and Mumbai to focus attention on the
growth of fascism in hidden parts of India and how to meet the
challenge as collective civil society, and not as a response only from
the victim communities.
2. Organizing legal assistance: This has to be on a par with the
organized legal assistance that helped put the trauma of the Gujarat
victims in the lap of the legal system. This has to be multi tiered.
We need par algal activist to help villagers file FIRs for their burnt
houses and shops and their displaced families. We need legal
assistance to trace out culprits. We need legal assistance to defend
innocents that are being trapped by the police in the guise of
`parity' between communities. We need this before evidence is lost or
false `evidence' manufactured by a governance system that has totally
sold itself out to its Coalition Dharma with the Bharatiya Janata
Party. And we need to investigate issues of impunity in the matter of
the mysterious police firing in Braminigaon.
3. We need to tell Civil Society in India and abroad that the attack
on Christians in Orissa is at par with the repeated mauling of Muslims
in Gujarat and other states, and an integral part of the Sangh
Parivar's ideology.

I hope to be able to analyze some of threes issues in larger essays
soon.

I am sorry to record that till the film maker Mahesh Bhatt came to
Bhubaneswar and addressed a press conference with Maharashtra
Minorities Commission vice chairman Abraham Mathai to denounce the
Sangh Parivar and warn of its designs, no other worthy had dared do
so.

And till All India Christian Council president Dr Joseph D Souza and
New Methodist Bishop Joab Lohara shared the stage with Dalit leader
Udit Raj, there had been no visible protest of any magnitude in the
capital of Orissa.

I regret that Union Home Minister Patil did not visit more places even
more than I regret that the National Minorities Commission did not
visit any place other than the town of Phulbani.

In a way, I thank the handsome and smug Inspector General of Police
Kapoor, who had me escorted out of Phulbani on 29-30 December 2007 and
the sarcastic Divisional commissioner, the subdivision police office
and the circle inspect tor of Braminigaon whose language and
behaviour, in a flash, made me understand that the apparatus of
governance stood firmly on the side of a particular ideology.

I wish to close with my thanks, and those of my family, once again to
the Catholic Fathers of Orissa, in particular Fr Bernard, Fr Nicholas
Barla, Fr Mrtiyunjay and Fr Madan, Rev Pran Patrichha, Dr Anna and the
MC Sisters for their love and care.

I salute the brave Nuns, Pastors and Priests of the Kandhamala,
tribal, Dalit and always rooted in the soil of their mother hills.

And I wish to salute Archbishop Raphael Cheenath, SVD, who defies his
73 years, to provide Orissa the sort of leadership the late Archbishop
Alan de Lastic provided us all in 1998 and later.

Happy New Year


John Dayal
New Delhi