http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/13/world/asia/13india.html?hp=&pagewanted=print
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
BOREPANGA, India — The family of Solomon Digal was summoned by neighbors to
what serves as a public square in front of the village tea shop.
They were ordered to get on their knees and bow before the portrait of a
Hindu preacher. They were told to turn over their Bibles, hymnals and the two
brightly colored calendar images of Christ that hung on their wall. Then, Mr.
Digal, 45, a Christian since childhood, was forced to watch his Hindu
neighbors set the items on fire.
“ ‘Embrace Hinduism, and your house will not be demolished,’ ” Mr. Digal
recalled being told on that Wednesday afternoon in September. “ ‘Otherwise,
you will be killed, or you will be thrown out of the village.’ ”
India, the world’s most populous democracy and officially a secular nation,
is today haunted by a stark assault on one of its fundamental freedoms. Here
in eastern Orissa State, riven by six weeks of religious clashes, Christian
families like the Digals say they are being forced to abandon their faith in
exchange for their safety.
The forced conversions come amid widening attacks on Christians here and in
at least five other states across the country, as India prepares for national
elections next spring.
The clash of faiths has cut a wide swath of panic and destruction through
these once quiet hamlets fed by paddy fields and jackfruit trees. Here in
Kandhamal, the district that has seen the greatest violence, more than 30
people have been killed, 3,000 homes burned and over 130 churches destroyed,
including the tin-roofed Baptist prayer hall where the Digals worshiped.
Today it is a heap of rubble on an empty field, where cows blithely graze.
Across this ghastly terrain lie the singed remains of mud-and-thatch homes.
Christian-owned businesses have been systematically attacked. Orange flags
(orange is the sacred color of Hinduism) flutter triumphantly above the
rooftops of houses and storefronts.
India is no stranger to religious violence between Christians, who make up
about 2 percent of the population, and India’s Hindu-majority of 1.1 billion
people. But this most recent spasm is the most intense in years.
It was set off, people here say, by the killing on Aug. 23 of a charismatic
Hindu preacher known as Swami Laxmanananda Saraswati, who for 40 years had
rallied the area’s people to choose Hinduism over Christianity.
The police have blamed Maoist guerrillas for the swami’s killing. But Hindu
radicals continue to hold Christians responsible.
In recent weeks, they have plastered these villages with gruesome posters of
the swami’s hacked corpse. “Who killed him?” the posters ask. “What is
the solution?”
Behind the clashes are long-simmering tensions between equally impoverished
groups: the Panas and Kandhas. Both original inhabitants of the land, the two
groups for ages worshiped the same gods. Over the past several decades, the
Panas for the most part became Christian, as Roman Catholic and Baptist
missionaries arrived here more than 60 years ago, followed more recently by
Pentecostals, who have proselytized more aggressively.
Meanwhile, the Kandhas, in part through the teachings of Swami Laxmanananda,
embraced Hinduism. The men tied the sacred Hindu white thread around their
torsos; their wives daubed their foreheads with bright red vermilion. Temples
sprouted.
Hate has been fed by economic tensions as well, as the government has
categorized each group differently and given them different privileges.
The Kandhas accused the Panas of cheating to obtain coveted quotas for
government jobs. The Christian Panas, in turn, say their neighbors have
become resentful as they have educated themselves and prospered.
Their grievances have erupted in sporadic clashes over the past 15 years, but
they have exploded with a fury since the killing of Swami Laxmanananda.
Two nights after his death, a Hindu mob in the village of Nuagaon dragged a
Catholic priest and a nun from their residence, tore off much of their
clothing and paraded them through the streets.
The nun told the police that she had been raped by four men, a charge the
police say was borne out by a medical examination. Yet no one was arrested in
the case until five weeks later, after a storm of media coverage. Today, five
men are under arrest in connection with inciting the riots. The police say
they are trying to find the nun and bring her back here to identify her
attackers.
Given a chance to explain the recent violence, Subash Chauhan, the state’s
highest-ranking leader of Bajrang Dal, a Hindu radical group, described much
of it as “a spontaneous reaction.”
He said in an interview that the nun had not been raped but had had regular
consensual sex.
On Sunday evening, as much of Kandhamal remained under curfew, Mr. Chauhan
sat in the hall of a Hindu school in the state capital, Bhubaneshwar, beneath
a huge portrait of the swami. A state police officer was assigned to protect
him round the clock. He cupped a trilling Blackberry in his hand.
Mr. Chauhan denied that his group was responsible for forced conversions and
in turn accused Christian missionaries of luring villagers with incentives of
schools and social services.
He was asked repeatedly whether Christians in Orissa should be left free to
worship the god of their choice. “Why not?” he finally said, but he warned
that it was unrealistic to expect the Kandhas to politely let their Pana
enemies live among them as followers of Jesus.
“Who am I to give assurance?” he snapped. “Those who have exploited the
Kandhas say they want to live together?”
Besides, he said, “they are Hindus by birth.”
Hindu extremists have held ceremonies in the country’s indigenous belt for
the past several years intended to purge tribal communities of Christian
influence.
It is impossible to know how many have been reconverted here, in the wake of
the latest violence, though a three-day journey through the villages of
Kandhamal turned up plenty of anecdotal evidence.
A few steps from where the nun had been attacked in Nuagaon, five men, their
heads freshly shorn, emerged from a soggy tent in a relief camp for
Christians fleeing their homes.
The men had also been summoned to a village meeting in late August, where
hundreds of their neighbors stood with machetes in hand and issued a firm
order: Get your heads shaved and bow down before our gods, or leave this
place.
Trembling with fear, Daud Nayak, 56, submitted to a shaving, a Hindu sign of
sacrifice. He drank, as instructed, a tumbler of diluted cow dung, considered
to be purifying.
In the eyes of his neighbors, he reckoned, he became a Hindu.
In his heart, he said, he could not bear it.
All five men said they fled the next day with their families. They refuse to
return.
In another village, Birachakka, a man named Balkrishna Digal and his son,
Saroj, said they had been summoned to a similar meeting and told by Hindu
leaders who came from nearby villages that they, too, would have to convert.
In their case, the ceremony was deferred because of rumors of Christian-Hindu
clashes nearby.
For the time being, the family had placed an orange flag on their mud home.
Their Hindu neighbors promised to protect them.
Here in Borepanga, the family of Solomon Digal was not so lucky. Shortly
after they recounted their Sept. 10 Hindu conversion story to a reporter in
the dark of night, the Digals were again summoned by their neighbors. They
were scolded and fined 501 rupees, or about $12, a pinching sum here.
The next morning, calmly clearing his cauliflower field, Lisura Paricha, one
of the Hindu men who had summoned the Digals, confirmed that they had been
penalized. Their crime, he said, was to talk to outsiders.
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