Orissa

Orissa Ten Years Ago

Widow of Graham Staines: “Do not give up hope, pray for India”

10 years ago in Orissa, Hindu extremists burned alive the Christian Graham Staines and his two sons. His wife, back in India, connects the recent anti-Christian persecution to her husband. To the many recent widows of Kandhamal, she speaks of forgiveness and strength “in Christ.”

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Staines says that she will always continue working to fulfil her husband’s dream to live in peace and harmony, and work together for the good of all. “I forgive the other, because I have first received forgiveness from Jesus Christ – I have encountered the presence of Jesus in my life and this is the spirit I share. When we forgive, there is no bitterness and we live our lives and continue the task entrusted to us – with His grace and peace. These Kandhamal widows have also been touched by Jesus. All Christians who have known the intervention of Jesus in their lives will have this gift to forgive and to be the witnesses of His peace and presence. Support them with your solidarity and prayers.

“To the people of the world I say, do not give up hope, pray for India.”

And all the congregation said….

Ho hum? 😯

Another Orissa Update

I know I’m blogging here only once a week now!

But it seems urgent I remind us of Orissa.

Orissa: insecurity and hatred await Christians forced out of refugee camps

There is no sign that the long journey of suffering by Orissa’s Christian community is anywhere near its end. The government has decided to shut down refugee camps and force Christians to leave but no one is providing them with any guarantee as to their security against further violence once back home; instead, they are still the object of hatred and rejection.

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“Christians in Kandhamal are treated like animals. They live in fear and cannot find shelter, anywhere. They cannot live in dignity. The money they got [from the government] is not enough to buy food; their fields lie abandoned, burnt; their homes all but destroyed.”

Orissa Updates

Mission Network News

Four Christian relief workers were beaten, threatened and then arrested in Orissa on Tuesday, November 4. The World Evangelical Alliance says the four were arrested under “forced conversion” charges.

The workers were on their way to the Discipleship Centre which focuses on holistic care, education, health care and similar disaster relief projects when an unknown motorist collided with one of their motorbikes, causing minor injuries to the worker.

A crowd gathered around the scene, quickly turning into a group of 400. The mob beat the DC staff members, threatening to set fire to them at a local cremation centre. Included in the mob were two Hindu groups that had already been protesting against what they perceived to be forced conversions from local Christians.

When police arrived, the workers were arrested for supposedly forcing Christian conversions and causing the motorbike accident. The four are currently in the custody of Orissa police.

Read it all

Orissa Update

To put the financial crisis in a different perspective:

Christian villages burned, 12,000 people missing from refugee camps

About 12,000 people have disappeared from the refugee camps set up by the government of Orissa to accommodate the Christians fleeing from the violence of Hindu radicals and from their destroyed villages. Meanwhile, a dozen more houses have been burned, while the government of the state assures that it is doing everything possible to maintain security.

Since August 24, a campaign of attacks against Christians and their institutions has been underway in the district of Kandhamal, killing 60 people and forcing 50,000 more to flee. Of these, at least 15,000 have been accommodated in refugee camps overseen by the government. But the Christians do not feel safe; in recent days, attacks have been conducted by Hindu fundamentalist groups against Christians in the camps, with threats and attempts to reconvert them to Hinduism. No Christians from the outside are permitted to enter the camps, and even volunteers and medical personnel from nongovernmental organizations are closely monitored, under the suspicion of wanting to favor conversions to Christianity.

Meanwhile, news of more burned villages is coming from the diocese of Bhubaneshwar. Yesterday, in the village of Balligada, 25 homes belonging to Christians were first ransacked and then set on fire. On October 7 in Phiringia and Sujeli (G. Udayagiri), six homes were attacked and destroyed.

First, from the Indian Catholic:

The death toll in the continuing anti-Christian violence in Orissa state rose to 50 as India celebrated the birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi, father of the nation and champion of peace.
The latest victim, Lalgi Nayak, a Protestant, succumbed to a gash on his neck and other injuries on Oct. 1. He was injured on Sept. 30, when Hindu extremists attacked his Rudangia village, UCA News reported.

Bibhu Datta Das, a legal consultant for the Church of North India, told UCA News on Oct. 2 that Nayak and others were attacked because they “heroically” resisted demands by Hindu fanatics to denounce their Christian faith.

“Such murders are rampant” in Orissa, said the lawyer representing the unified Protestant Church. He added that perpetrators of the violence that began on Aug. 24 not only burn down houses and churches but “demand that Christians accept Hinduism or face death.”

Sindh Today reports:

The Manmohan Singh government has committed to buy energy worth $70 billion from the ‘dying US nuclear industry’ under the nuclear deal, Communist Party of India-Marxist CPI-M general secretary Prakash Karat said here Thursday.

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Karat condemned the continuing violence against Chrisitians in Orissa and serial bomb blasts in Tripura late Wednesday.

‘The Orissa government has failed to control the violence. It is shocking. The Naveen Patnaik government and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders should be held responsible for it,’ he said.

World Sikh News has this:

There was little that Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh could do to persuade the French President Nicholas Sarkozy on the issue of Sikh turbans as he was under fire with the European Union ticking him off for New Delhi’s failure to prevent massacre of Christians in Orissa and Karnataka. At the India-EU summit, Sarkozy, as head of the European Council, and Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, took up the issue very strongly about Hindutva terror outfit’s attacks on Christians, leaving Manmohan Singh with little room to push the Sikh demand for removing the ban on turbans in French schools.