DOWN THE DARK ROAD

BLOCK HOSPITAL
Baliguda
The hospital is crowded. On the floor lie injured youth from the neighbouring Barakhamba village. Group clashes and shooting in Barakhamba on August 27 left one dead and many injured.
8220;They surrounded our houses in the evening and started firing. They had sharp weapons and entered our houses. I tried to flee but they caught me and hit me with an axe on my thigh. I managed to escape and kept running till I fell into a ditch,8221; says 18-year-old Prasanta Digal.
Malini Digal, a class IX student of Barakhamba High School, was fortunate to have escaped the mob8212;and also to have found a bed in the hospital. 8220;They surrounded my house and set it on fire. My family managed to escape but I was trapped,8221; she says feebly, as her father Namri Digal looks on.
We leave the hospital, but the despair of the injured stays with us.

A TEA STALL
near the Baliguda CRPF camp
Four men sit together, sipping tea at the only open tea stall in this area. They work as drivers with the CRPF convoy. 8220;The other shops are closed due to curfew. Luckily for us, this one8217;s open,8221; says one of them.
8220;The CRPF cannot enter the villages. There is no proper road. They have to walk for hours. By the time they get to the villages, the attackers would have left. This work is really hectic and I haven8217;t eaten since last night,8221; says another.
As we continue our journey, convoys of the CRPF pass by. In some areas, the CRPF and the Orissa Police conduct a flag march in local bazaars. The road to the ashram in Jalespeta stretches out before us. The beauty of the valley and the winding roads is unsettling, an unlikely backdrop to the burnt houses that stand all along the route.
The road takes a final turn before coming to the heavily guarded Kanya Ashram in Jalespeta. To the spot from where it all started: the murder of the Swami and the following cycle of revenge and hate.

THE ORISSA FAULTLINE
Lakshmanananda Saraswati8217;s killing on August 23 triggered the fire that has spread through south Orissa8217;s Kandhamal district. But the battelines had been drawn much earlier
ON the night of August 23, the Kanya Ashram in Jalespeta, a village in the tribal-dominated Kandhamal district, was celebrating Janmashtami. But the celebrations were short-lived. At about 8 p.m., a group of 30 assailants entered the ashram and opened fire on its chief, Lakshmanananda Saraswati. The 84-year-old Saraswati fell to the 22 bullets fired at him.
The shots shattered not just the peace at the ashram, they also broke the fragile calm in the area. As news of the murder of the Swami and four others spread, agitated tribals in Kandhamal, among whom Lakshmanananda worked, attacked police stations and the houses of Christians, whom they held responsible for the attack. The violence has spread to other districts as well, and has left 10 people dead and several injured.
Orissa is no stranger to religious violence. Nine years ago, the state was swept by communal violence after a mob led by Bajrang Dal8217;s Dara Singh set Australian missionary Graham Stuart Staines and his sons Philip and Timothy on fire, as they lay sleeping in their station wagon in Manoharpur village of Keonjhar district. It was also the year that Dangs district in Gujarat witnessed attacks on Christian chapels and houses after the VHP accused missionaries of illegal conversion.
After several years of relative peace, violence returned to Orissa in December 2007 and the Swami was at the centre of it then too. His vehicle was stoned at Darsingbadi village8212;home to Congress Rajya Sabha MP Radha Kant Nayak8212;allegedly by a group of Christians. The provocation: the previous day, tribal Hindus in neighbouring Brahmanigaon village had objected to local Christians building temporary gates to celebrate Christmas. The Hindus allegedly said that since they had celebrated their last Durga Puja here, the Christians couldn8217;t hold their celebrations at the same place. This led to a fight between the Dalit Panas, who had converted to Christianity, and the Kondh tribals, Christians whom the Swami was trying to re-convert to Hinduism. Three people died in the clash, several were injured and hundreds of houses were burnt in the December 2007 riots.
Having arrived in Kandhamal in the late 1960s, Saraswati set up an ashram in Chakapada village and then scaled up his anti cow-slaughter movement and anti-conversion activities. This endeared him to the Sangh Parivar but pitted him against the missionaries who had set up base in the impoverished district 30 years ago.
Saraswati set about conducting yagnas in the tribal heartland with the help of the VHP and organised reconversion programmes. The pastors, he claimed, were trying to convert Kandhamal into a 8220;Christa Sthan8221;.
Karendra Majhi, BJP leader of the district and MLA of Baliguda, says, 8220;The tribals are obviously Hindus. They follow Hindu rituals. It is logical that they are with us and against the Christians. We don8217;t want violence but people will react if religious leaders are killed.8221;
With deep-rooted poverty and massive illiteracy among the 38 per cent SC/ST population of the state, Orissa has been the hunting ground of religious groups. Though it was the first state in Independent India to enact its Freedom of Religion Act, 1967, that prohibited conversions by inducements, the Act was not implemented till 1989 as its rules were not fully framed. The first case under the Act was lodged in 1993, when a superintendent of police booked 21 pastors in tribal Nowrangpur district for breaking the law.
In the last 15 years, with Christian and Hindu groups fighting for the tribal heartland, the battlelines have grown deeper. The religious divide has led to frequent clashes as villagers egged on by self-styled religious leaders burnt houses and places of worship in Kandhamal, Gajapati, Bolangir and Sundargarh districts of the state.
Suresh Pujari, president of the BJP in Orissa, accuses Christian missionaries of converting people illegally, a charge they deny. 8220;We never did forcible conversion,8221; says Vicar-General, Father Joseph Kalathil of the Cuttack-Bhubaneswar Diocese.
_Debabrata Mohanty

CASTE CONUNDRUM
THE trigger to the violence in Kandhamal may have been Saraswati8217;s murder but it has been stoked by a simmering resentment between the district8217;s two main communities: the Kondhs and the Panas. At its heart lies a tale of caste equations and a fight for land.
Though both the tribal Kondhs and the Dalit Panas converted to Christianity, the distance between the two has grown in the last decade. The Kondhs may be more in number but the Panas are more prosperous and that has now become a major cause of conflict. Matters have worsened in the last few years with the Panas demanding more rights. According to the law, the Kondhs who converted to Christianity continue to have a right to their land but the Dalit Panas who converted to Christianity, lose their SC status.
The Christian Panas have been demanding the same status and rights as the Christian Kondhs. The Panas say that since they speak the tribal language Kui, they too should get the benefits given to the tribal Kondhs. The Panas8217;s fight got a fresh impetus when in 2002, an amended Presidential order in Orissa declared the 8216;Kuis8217; to be STs. In June 2007, an NGO called the Phulbani Kui Janakalyan Sangha filed a petition in the Orissa High Court, seeking tribal status for Dalits since they speak the local tribal language, Kui. The organisation forwarded a certificate from the then minister for coal and mines, Padmanava Behere, to press for their cause.
Brahma Behera, president of the Pana Samaj, says, 8220;The Panas speak the same language as the Kondhs and should get the same rights. The recent tension was just waiting to happen as land rights and religion are being mixed up.8221; On July 12, 2007, the HC asked the government to look into the matter and make the necessary corrections. The state government, however, said that speaking tribal language was not enough to give a community a tribal status. The state government8217;s explanation came too late for the Kondh tribals, who, opposed to the tribal status for Panas, launched a protest under an umbrella called the Zilla Kui Samanvaya Samity. The Kondhs also grudge the Panas their prosperity.
In fact, in the disgruntled Kondhs, Saraswati, the Kendriya Margdarshak of the VHP who had been working here for the past 40 years, saw an opportunity for re-conversion and he set about trying to woo them back into the Hindu fold.
And with his killing on August 23, the string of conversions, reconversions and competing for rights in Orissa8217;s tribal heartland snapped.
_Ravik Bhattacharya