I’ve known Gladys since 1999, and perhaps over the years, I dare call myself a friend, one among thousands she has in India. Some call her the most well-known Christian in India, second only to Mother Teresa.
Suppressing her unfathomable pain and anguish, she told television reporters, “I forgive those who have killed my husband and my two sons.” But it is not for the State to forgive, or forget, one who commits a murder so foul.
Dara Singh, a Bajrang Dal activist from the Gangetic plains whose usual targets were cow traders in Orissa, had burnt alive Graham Stuart Staines, 58, an Australian Christian missionary working with victims of leprosy, and his two sons, Philip, 10, and Timothy, aged 6, as they slept in their jeep in a forest clearing in Manouharpur-Baripada on the night between January 21 and 22, 1999.
A black spot on the nation, said K.R. Narayanan, the president of India at that time, on the deed. Even the prime minister, Bharatiya Janata Party leader Atal Bihari Vajpayee, expressed similar feelings.
Vajpayee had just a few weeks earlier made a helicopter flight to Dang in Gujarat, where members of the Sangh parivar had burnt about three dozen small log churches in the bamboo and sal forests not too far from Surat. Back in Delhi, he had called for a national debate on the conversion of tribals to Christianity. He said the arson was the work of fringe elements, “not more than one percent of the people”.
Vajpayee sent his cabinet minister, George Fernandes, to Orissa. Fernandes went, returned to the national capital, and firmly announced the gruesome murders were by a foreign hand.
Gladys Staines is still involved in Odisha, the new name of the state. Her surviving child, a daughter, is now a medical doctor in Australia. They had not accompanied Graham to his visit to the villages that fateful day.
It was when the murder trials began that people came to know of the vicious and inhumane manner of their deaths. The three had woken up when the flames leapt from their vehicles. Dara Singh and his cohort used their long, stout lathis to push them back into the fire, till they died.
The Staines’ triple-murders was when the western world came face to face with the violence being meted out to the Christian community in India by religious and nationalist extremists groups, known as the Sangh parivar. It was in 2007 and 2008 that the Sangh targeted Christians once again, in Kandhamal district in the same state, leading to more than a hundred deaths, the burning of more than 6,000 houses and 300 churches and the displacement of 60,000 people.
The Christian community also remembers that even the courts apparently had not fully understood the murderous ideology of the killer. The Supreme Court of India, which finally sentenced Dara Singh to a life term in prison, said the murder was to “teach a lesson” to the missionary. It was the strong protest from the Christian community that forced the Supreme Court to withdraw those deeply hurtful words in its judgment.
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The court upheld the high court judgement which had given Dara Singh a life term, holding that the crime was not the rarest of the rare, and the trial court in Khurda had erred in giving Dara Singh and some of his associates the death penalty in the first place.
The Supreme Court had also said, “It is undisputed that there is no justification for interfering in someone’s belief by way of ‘use of force’, provocation, conversion, and incitement or upon a flawed premise that one religion is better than the other.”
A day later, civil society activists, among them Navaid Hamid, Shabnam Hashmi, Seema Mustafa, Harsh Mander, H.S. Hardenia and former MP Shahid Sidiqi, and Christian activists including this writer, Dominic Emmanuel and Mary Scaria, issued an angry press note, widely covered in the media.
The Christian community is still divided on its support or opposition to the death penalty, but most in the Catholic and Protestant churches say capital punishment is an anathema in this age and time. I am myself a staunch opponent of the death penalty.
There are no more foreigners working in Christian relief and medical missions in the country. Those that remain, old men and women, have become citizens. But “punishing conversions” became a part of the political lexicon. It has been totally weaponised now, used not just against Christians, but also against Muslims. It is also the main instrument for withdrawing the FCRA licences of tens of thousands of Christian NGOs which were working on donations from co-religionists in the West.
The intimidation, indeed terrorising, of the Christian community, continues unstopped. Its victims are the clergy and mission staff who work in forest and tribal areas, among Dalits and marginalised communities, away from urban centres. Three or more cases of anti-Christian violence took place every day in 2023, the United Christian Forum said.
Police continue to be inactive and often are complicit in the state of lawlessness.
Probes by the National Commission for Minorities, Right To Information (RTI) requests, and other investigations have proven repeatedly there have been no fraudulent or forceful conversions by Christians in India anywhere, anytime.
John Dayal is a human rights activist and author.
