Killed or hounded out – just for being Christian

IT WAS about 5:30pm last Monday when Sushil Kumar Naik heard knocking at what remained of his front door.

He peered through the holes left by the axes that the mob had used to batter their way in two weeks earlier. Outside stood a group of his Hindu neighbours, holding guns. The 43-year-old Indian air force officer was not surprised: he had been expecting them.

Like thousands of other Christians, Mr Naik has been living in fear since a wave of violence swept through the Kandhamal district of India's eastern state of Orissa two months ago. At least 59 people have died and thousands of homes and churches have been burned down.

Simmering tensions between the area's Hindu majority and their Christian neighbours were ignited by the murder of a hardline Hindu leader, Swami Laxmanananda Saraswati, on 23 August.

The initial Hindu backlash drove as many as 50,000 Christians from their homes. Now a new threat has emerged, and hundreds have been forced to renounce their faith and convert to Hinduism on threat of death.

The men who called on Mr Naik at his home in the village of Gadaguda last week were not in the mood for small talk.

"You'd better convert," they told him. "If you don't convert to Hinduism, you must leave this place."

They did not say what would happen if he stayed, but Mr Naik did not really need to be told.

The men outside were the same ones who had turned up in the middle of the night two weeks earlier, smashed their way in and set his home on fire. At the time, Mr Naik had been on duty at his air force base more than 1,000 miles away in Nicobar. The only people who were at home were his wife, Binita, 36, and his 70-year-old mother, Brundavati.

"We were sleeping at the time," his mother said, "And then people came from everywhere. We heard them shouting slogans and we ran to the school."

She started to cry, wiping her eyes on her yellow sari. "They were firing guns in the air. They burned most of our possessions. We only got out with the clothes we are standing in."

The slogans the mob had been shouting were those of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) – or World Hindu Council – the hardline Hindu organisation that has been blamed for encouraging Hindus to seek revenge for the killing of the swami. The VHP blames Christians for the murder, though Maoist guerrillas have claimed responsibility.

Those slogans were enough to alert Binita and Brundavati to the danger in time. But for their neighbours, Lalia and Mandikini Naik, there was to be no escape. The couple were in their 70s; they were simply too slow to get away.

"The men barged into their house. He couldn't move fast and they cut his throat with an axe," Binita said. "His wife was also cut."

The couple were taken to hospital, where Mr Naik died two days later. His wife remains seriously ill.

Sushil Naik's family were lucky; the police arrived within a few minutes, before the fire could consume the whole house. Even so, most of their possessions have been destroyed.

But they know it is only a matter of time before the men come back, and next time they might not be so lucky.

What makes it harder to bear is that they knew the people who attacked their home. Their family has been in Gadaguda for more than 100 years; the faces of the mob were those of their neighbours, people they had lived alongside and chatted to every day.

"If it was outsiders, they would not have known which house to attack," Mr Naik said.

When police officers eventually started to look for the culprits, some of the Hindu men took to the forests. From there, they appear to be able to venture forth at will to threaten those Christians who have remained in the area.

The Christians do not believe the police really want to help find the men responsible. They point out that smoke from the Hindus' cooking fires rises above the trees every night, but no-one goes after them.

"They were able to come to my house and threaten that we have to convert to Hinduism or stay away," Mr Naik said. "I don't understand what is happening. Even if we become Hindu, what guarantee is there that they will leave us in peace?"

It is a question many of Orissa's Christians are asking: many have concluded that their only option is to convert.

Last week, in the village of Sankarakhole, a little way down the road from Gadaguda, a total of 18 people converted. They were the only four Christian families in the village. Preti Singh Patra, the priest who carried out the ceremony, said the VHP had brought him letters from the families asking to convert. They had been happy to embrace Hinduism, he claimed.

Christians who have converted say nothing could be further from the truth.

In the village of Sarangagada, 32-year-old Jaspina Naik said she and her husband had been forced to take their three children to the temple to convert. "My neighbours said, 'If you go on being Christians, we will burn your houses and your children in front of you, so make up your minds quickly'," she said.

The VHP counters that many of those who are switching to Hinduism are recent converts from Christianity who had been attracted by the economic benefits that went with abandoning their low-caste status as Hindus. The VHP's leaders claim that many of those converts were so repulsed by the killing of the swami that they have been eager to rejoin the fold.

"They saw what happened to the swami – of course they want to come back, what's wrong with that?" said Gouri Prasad Rath, the VHP general secretary in Orissa.

He told The Scotsman the Christians had only themselves to blame for trying to entice Hindus to convert.

"If there is a problem today, I feel it is because the Hindus have lost patience," he said.

"Christians are giving Bibles to uneducated people who have nothing to eat and nothing to wear. They don't even know how to read it," he said. "If you go to their houses, they have a Bible and a photo of Jesus and, by keeping all these things, they think they have turned western.

"But you look at them and they still look like everyone else, and so what's the use of having such a religion when you have the same society as Hindus?"

Few of the 800 people crammed into tents in the Rudangia refugee camp a few hundred yards back along the road from Sushil Naik's home would see it that way.

For them, the idea that they can return to live alongside the people who turned on them so brutally seems little more than fantasy.

Rajma Naik, 45, fled to the camp after a mob chased her out of her home in Gonjugra village. The Hindus had been mocking them for their religion, she said. People were running everywhere, desperate to escape. In front of her, a woman stumbled as she tried to shepherd her eight-year-old son to safety.

"She was killed in front of me," she said. "She was running with her child. She was hit and she fell and they slashed her throat and then they got the child."

There was no way she could live alongside those people again, she said, not as a Christian, not as a Hindu.

"The Hindus say they will kill us," she said.

"In my village, we've been told that if we don't become Hindus, we will be killed. But I will never become a Hindu, even if I have to die."