Remember Staines

On Tuesday, this paper reported the case of Brother Ramesh, a Catholic priest from Tamil Nadu working in Gujarat. Brother Ramesh was attacked a few days earlier in Kwant, a tribal town in Vadodara, by “activists” who alleged that he was involved in “conversions”; four fingers of his right hand have had to be amputated since. Strangely, though, the police has registered an FIR against the victim, while the assailants are still absconding. Brother Ramesh’s predicament appears to point to the vicious circle of impunity within which attacks on minority communities, including Christians, continue to take place in parts of our country. The attack on churches and large-scale violence between Hindu and Christian groups that has followed in the wake of a reported attack on a VHP leader who leads the anti-conversion movement in Orissa’s Kandhamal district, must be seen in the same grim context.

Both Gujarat and Orissa have a recent history of violence against Christian missionaries by groups that subscribe to an ideology of militant Hindutva. On the night of January 22, 1999, in Manoharpur village of Keonjhar district, Australian missionary Graham Staines and his minor sons were burnt alive by a mob as they slept in their station wagon. That case had rightly sparked country-wide outrage. At roughly the same time, a 10-day spate of violence against Christians in the Dangs district of Gujarat had also stirred the nation’s conscience. Both events have been seared into collective memory and this, in itself, should have ensured that such hate crimes did not recur.

Yet the latest episodes of violence in Narendra Modi’s Gujarat and Naveen Patnaik’s Orissa frame a continuing failure of both civil society and the state. In a diverse and plural polity like India, both must be vigilant against forces of intolerance. The onus is especially on the government. The message must be sent out that violence will not be tolerated and that all its perpetrators will be brought to book. Only when justice is done and is seen to be done will goons and criminals acting in the name of their faith be dissuaded.