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n 27 August 2008, Kanaka Rekha Nayak fled home with her family, driven out by a violent mob. While she and her two young children managed to hide, the horde caught her husband, Parikhit, and demanded he renounce his Christian faith and become a Hindu. He refused. From their hiding place, Mrs. Nayak and her two young children could only watch as the rioters stabbed him to death, hacked at his limbs and finally burned his remains. Seven years later, Mrs. Nayak, now in her 30’s, still trembles recalling the scene. Her husband was among more than 90 people killed in Odisha’s Kandhamal district, in what is considered to be the worst episode of anti-Christian violence India has ever witnessed. The attacks rattled Kandhamal for four months, triggered by the 24 August 2008 assassination of Lakshmanananda Saraswati, a nonagenarian Hindu religious leader, and his four associates in another part of Kandhamal. Mr. Saraswati, a member of the World Hindu Council, had denounced the work of Christians among tribal and Dalit (members of the “untouchable” caste) villagers in Kandhamal. Although Maoist guerillas opposed to the government of India had claimed responsibility for the murder, Hindu radical groups nevertheless scapegoated Christians and embarked on a campaign of terror against the minority community. Frenzied mobs looted and burned more than 6,500 Christian houses — leaving 56,000 homeless — torched 395 churches and shrines, and destroyed 35 schools and social service institutions. The violence z Demonstrators in Bangladesh protest anti-Christian assaults throughout the Indian subcontinent.
disrupted studies of some 10,000 students. Attackers sexually assaulted women, including a Catholic nun who was raped by a gang of men while nearby police did nothing to intervene. With that violence — and with the horror of her husband’s killing still haunting her — Kanaka Rekha Nayak traveled to New Delhi in early September, seeking justice from the central government after having little success in her native state of Odisha. When she arrived in the Indian capital, she did not come alone, but as part of a delegation seeking to draw the nation’s attention to the plight of Kandhamal survivors. Members shared their pain with President Pranab Mukherjee and journalists from national and international media, discussing both the events of 2008 and their legacy today. Some 10,000 people, including Mrs. Nayak, remain afraid to return to their villages — their attackers remain at large and still pose a threat. The Indian capital also recently hosted thousands of Christians from various northern Indian states, who held a demonstration on an artery road leading to India’s Parliament House. “The protest rally,” wrote a group of Christian community leaders, including the Roman Catholic archbishop of Delhi, Anil Couto, in a statement to the Indian government, “[expresses] our collective frustration, deep sorrow and mounting anguish at the government’s cynicism and apathy to stop the targeted violence against us.” Among those who addressed the demonstrators was a Protestant pastor who had been beaten by Hindu radicals a few days earlier for praying inside his house with some members of his congregation. When he went to the local police station to complain, law enforcers
thrashed him for praying in his house without a license. A.C. Michael, a Catholic lay leader at the demonstration, says Delhi’s lieutenant governor had told a Christian delegation that no one requires a license to pray inside one’s house. Events such as these, the demonstrators cite, prompted them to petition the prime minister, noting that Christians, who make up only 2.3 percent of India’s 1.2 billion people, face a systematic targeting by Hindu radical groups.
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s general secretary of the All India Christian Council, John Dayal keeps a record of attacks on religious minority groups in India. He says the country witnessed at least 43 deaths in more than 600 cases of violence against Christians and Muslims in the first year under the new government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Mr. Modi belongs to the B.J.P., or Bharatiya Janata Party (“Indian People’s Party”), which espouses Hindutva — the ideology of Hindu nationalism — and is considered the political arm of groups trying to change India into a Hindu theocratic state. Mr. Dayal says the number of such attacks may actually be higher, since the police do not record many crimes. Moreover, he adds, victims are often coerced into silence. Msgr. John Kochuthundil, who coordinates a core team that advises the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India (C.B.C.I.) on national issues, says the attacks against Christians and other religious minority groups are determined, planned and systematic. Besides the attacks on churches, schools, sisters and pastors, he says, Hindutva leaders indulge in hate speech against Christians. “They have slandered even Blessed Mother Teresa, an international icon of Christian
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