India's National Magazine
From the publishers of THE HINDU

Vol. 16 :: No. 04 :: Feb. 13 - 26, 1999

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COVER STORY

A bitter aftermath

The pattern set in the aftermath of the Staines killing shows that there are enough voices in positions of authority willing to justify heinous crimes committed in the name of religion.

SUKUMAR MURALIDHARAN

SENSITIVITY to public opinion was at a premium in the aftermath of the grisly murder of Australian missionary Graham Stewart Staines and his two young boys by a lynch mob in Orissa on January 23. Union Home Minister L.K. Advani put on record his strong condemnation of the event, as did Minister for External Affairs Jaswant Singh, the latter describing it as a "crime against humanity". But for each such concession to the demands of rectitude, there was a gesture that tended to work to the contrary purpose. One such act was Advani's preemptive exculpation of the Bajrang Dal - his claim that he had authoritative information that the organisation was not involved in the crime. Another was BJP president Kushabhau Thakre's assertion that Christian missionaries were inviting trouble through their activities. He said: "I appeal to the missionaries that they are sitting on a stack of hay. They better be careful."

Thakre's remarks conformed to a pattern of morally dubious conduct by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and its affiliate organisations after the Staines murder. In what could only be construed as a gross act of dishonouring the dead, Vishwa Hindu Parishad vice-president Giriraj Kishore asserted that the work of Graham Staines amidst leprosy sufferers was a facade, since there were no such people within a wide radius of where he lived and worked. As an intervention in an emotionally fraught situation, this was only slightly less coarse than that of Hindu Jagran Manch's Orissa unit president Subhash Chouhan. He said that Graham Staines was killed because he was engaged in proselytisation. The pattern set in the aftermath of the killing was very clear. Adherents to the RSS worldview who happen to be in the Government felt obliged to issue deprecatory noises. But those outside the Government felt few such restraints.

EASTERN PRESS AGENCY
Australian Christian missionary Graham Stewart Staines with wife Glade and children Philip, Esther and Timothy, in a picture from the family album.

A three-member team of Cabinet Ministers visited the site of the murder as part of the Government's crisis management strategy. Prior to his departure to the spot, Union Minister for Steel and Mines Naveen Patnaik made it clear that he looked at the event through the miasma of his antagonism to the Orissa unit of the Congress(I). Defence Minister George Fernandes and Human Resource Development Minister Murli Manohar Joshi chose a strategy of prudence in advance of their visit - the former because he is a key member of the BJP-led Government's crisis management effort and the latter because of his well-advertised proximity to hardline elements in the RSS.

The ministerial trio spent one hour at the scene of the crime. On its return to Delhi, the team issued a statement which ascribed responsibility for the crime to an "international conspiracy" by "forces which would like this Government to go". If this effectively ruled out the culpability of the Sangh Parivar and its affiliates, the team also urged that a judicial commission of inquiry be constituted to look into the murder in order to uncover the conspiracy.

Shortly afterwards the Government announced, on the advice of the Chief Justice of India, that a sitting Judge of the Supreme Court, Justice D.P. Wadhwa, had been appointed as a one-man commission of inquiry into the Staines killing. Union Minister for Information and Broadcasting and Cabinet spokesman Pramod Mahajan said that the inquiry report would be completed by April, so that it could be placed in Parliament in its next session.

The Director-General for Investigations in the National Human Rights Commission, D.R. Karthikeyan, visited the scene of the crime. His report is expected to be submitted by the middle of February, though with the appointment of the judicial commission it could become an input for the broader inquiry. Certain suggestions that he made in the context of the local police investigation, such as entrusting it to the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) of the State police and putting an officer of the rank of Superintendent in charge of it, have been accepted.

A two-member team from the National Commission on Minorities comprising James Massey and N. Neminath also went to the site. Its report is also expected to be an important input into the inquiries of the judicial commission.

AP
During their visit to Manoharpur village in Orissa a few days after the murder of Graham Stewart Staines and his sons, members of the Cabinet team, Defence Minister George Fernandes, Human Resource Development Minister Murli Manohar Joshi and Minister for Steel and Mines Naveen Patnaik, make inquiries.

IN the midst of these exertions, the ambivalence of official utterances continues to cause disquiet. It is well known that the Bajrang Dal - as in the case of most organisations in the RSS constellation - does not maintain membership rolls. Established in 1984, just when the Ram Janmabhoomi movement was beginning to take shape in the strategies of the RSS, the Bajrang Dal honed its agitational and inflammatory skills in the lethal campaign to bring down the mosque in Ayodhya. The slogans it crafted as part of this campaign still ring with menace and were often chanted by the riotous mobs which took a heavy toll of human life during the six years leading up to the demolition.

Many modern legal systems have a category of offence known as "hate speech". Slogans and declamations that tend to engender a sense of antipathy towards any group of people are an offence in themselves. And if they are issued in close temporal or spatial connection with actual incidents of violence against these groups, a direct association is drawn. The onus is then on those who raise the inflammatory slogans to prove that there is no connection with the actual act of violence.

By this reasonable benchmark, the BJP spokesmen who have, at every juncture since the cycle of anti-Christian violence began, exerted themselves in the cause of strife rather than harmony bear a share of the blame for the Staines killing. And their conspicuous lack of remorse after the event has certainly contributed to the sustenance of an atmosphere of violence. This has been most recently exemplified in the alleged gang-rape of a Catholic nun on February 3 in Mayurbhanj district in Orissa. Heinous crimes have been justified by the supposed sense of rage at the incursions of alien religions into what is deemed to be Hindu territory. For the BJP leaders who today represent governmental authority, this has concurrently become an alibi for a complete abdication of responsibility.