ALL INDIA CHRISTIAN COUNCIL
Plot No. 142, Telecom Colony, Kanajiguda, Secunderabad - 500015
040-2786-8907 www.christiancouncil.in
President Dr Joseph D Souza Secretary General Dr John Dayal
Secretary General’s Contacts; john.dayal@gmail.com, Mobile 0981102172
Unexpected hate violence against church, and an equally surprising guarantee of community peace
Report of the investigations into the attack on the Church at Saoner, Nagpur, Maharashtra, India on 19 April 2009
Fact-finding team led by Dr John Dayal, Secretary General, All India Christian Council with Mr. Vishal Lal, Open Doors and Mr. Prateek Tongra, All India Christian Council, Nagpur
[The Fact Finding Team acknowledges with thanks infrastructure and other assistance from Mr Nitin Sardar, Truthseekers International and Mr Vijaesh Lal, Open Doors Foundation, and the cooperation of Civil Society movements of Nagpur]
NAGPUR, 26 June 209
Preamble: The attack by some miscreants, owning allegiance to a cocktail of Hindutva outfits, on the outpost the Douglas Memorial Church in Saoner town, a dot on the highway from Nagpur to Bhopal, on Sunday, April 19, 2009 could not have been more unexpected as it took place in an otherwise somnambulant hinterland Vidharbha stretch of Maharashtra. Equally surprising was the mass response. The Other Backward Classes, [OBCs] members of some of which had been arrested in the attack, responded in a uniquely magnificent manner, publicly announcing that in future they, and not the police, would ensure peace, would guarantee religious harmony in the region, and would personally ensure the safety and security of the church, of the school, of the pastor and his family. This fact finding report was therefore deliberately delayed to see if the promise was fulfilled. At the moment of filing of this report, the experiment remains a success, with possibilities that it can be replicated elsewhere in the country where sporadic acts of violence take place against church groups. Engaging the local Dalit and OBC groups, together with the others, in a voluntary people-to-people peace accord would seem to hold out hope for lasting peace even when the sparsely deployed police force would be ineffective or just insufficient, and anyway too late in arriving on the scene.
THE FACTS OF THE CASE:
Other than scholars of Marathi literature interested in the works of the classic writer author Gadkari who was born here in the early part of the last century, not many people even in the state of Maharashtra had heard of Saoner, a dusty, hot township about 40 kilometres from the state’s northern capital city of Nagpur. It was known just as a point where the National Highway to Bhopal and New Delhi branches off to the coal-mine plateau of Chindwara 120 kilometres away. This is basically a small time trading post for forest produce, organic pulses and grain harvested with great difficulty in the plains of Vidarbha, the poorest and most deprived area of India’s most developed province.
On 20 April, 2009, Nagpur and the rest of India woke up to Saoner’s newfound notoriety as the latest in the increasing list of places of Christian prosecution at the hands of right wing Hindutva elements. Said the times of India in a small news report:
“Miscreants attack Saoner church
20 Apr 2009
Soumittra S Bose, TNN
Miscreants apparently belonging to Hindu radical groups attacked over 100-year-old church during morning mass on Sunday in Saoner, about 40 kms from city. Two worshippers, both women, were hurt as fanatics, allegedly from outfits like VHP and Bajrang Dal, stormed the premises of the Douglas Memorial Church at 10.40 am chanting ‘Jai Shree Ram, Jai Bajrang’. Both outfits, however, denied they had a hand in the attack but said it was done by Hindus angry over religious conversions in the area. Children present in the church too were intimidated. The intruders tore up holy books including Bible, ransacked the furniture, broke musical instruments, and damaged the altar. The attackers, chanting ‘Har Har Mahadev’, shattered window glasses of a school bus parked in the campus. The group of 20-25 attackers was armed with sticks, swords and swordsticks, and possibly had firearms too.”
Two days later, the Times of India reported again:
“Saoner minorities feel insecure now
22 Apr 2009 Soumittra S Bose, TNN
When the banner put up by a Muslim organisation during a festival recently was damaged, Saoner residents dismissed it as a one-off happening. After last Sunday’s church attack, the minority communities are afraid it indicates beginning of a new trend. Members of Muslim community, expressing their concern, said that their mind is now full of anxiety as fanatics have started targeting religious institutions. Police statistics show that 60% of around 40,000 population of Saoner town is Hindu while 30% is Buddhist, 10% Muslim and rest others including Christians. Most Christians are attached to the Douglas Memorial Church. “Today a church has been ransacked. Tomorrow another religious place would be destroyed. They created a ruckus during Muslim festival. Sooner or later, somebody will retaliate. We must ensure that a bunch of miscreants do not succeed in vitiating the feeling of harmony. So far, all communities have lived peacefully in friendly manner,” said Jabbir Shaikh who lives on bank of Kolar River. Kusumbai Jhorawane and Rekha Thoke, both regular worshippers at Douglas Memorial church, had witnessed the attack. They are still reeling under the fear. “We are petrified. They can also target us. We shall come here again but the memories shall keep haunting us,” said Thoke. “Though nobody was seriously injured, the attackers were aggressive. We are now feeling threatened,” said Jhorawane.”
The Fact Finding team was in Saoner on 24th and 25th April 2009. We interviewed the Pastor of the Church, a wide cross section of society, two other eye witnesses, police officers, local politicians including the member of the State Assembly from the constituency, and leaders of civil society at Nagpur who had come to Saoner for a public meeting on 25th April. We were also present at the public meeting.
The main narrative of the attack was obviously from the Pastor, Mark Madhukar Sakharpekar, who doubles up as the parish priest of his church, unpaid Principal of the High school run since 1978 from a new building built by him and his father, Pastor Madhukar who was priest between 1975 and 2003, on the compound of the Church which itself was built in 1832 and refurbished in 1902. The senior Madhukar, now very ill, was patently a popular man and his school has become the main high quality educational institution in the area, patronised by the rich and the powerful as also by civil servants, police officers and businessmen who send their wards to study here. In fact, there are less than half a dozen Christian children out of the student body of 700 in the school at any one time. The community is proud of the fact that this school has produced the first generation of English-knowing students who have then done well in colleges in Nagpur. Interestingly, the office of the Principal displays huge portrays of National leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, the mandatory Maharaj Shivaji, and surprisingly, portraits of several founders of Hindutva, including Savarkar. Asked about it, the Principal-cum-Pastor said it was on instructions from the Education Department of the Government of Maharashtra, currently in the control of the Congress party.
The heritage church, however, is in a shabby condition, but did have some wooded pews and a new music system of sorts. Pastor Mark succeeded his father – who was also the one who had ordained him in this independent church which owes allegiance to an Anglican faction headed by the current Moderator, Rev Chandrakant D Salve. The denomination break from the parent Church three decades ago was possibly a reason why senior churchmen from Nagpur maintained their distance from the Pastor even after the attack was so widely publicised in the media. Pastor Mark is married, and his parents, wife and small son live in the small parsonage next to the church and the school. A part of the church property is walled off, and is said to have been usurped some years ago by outsiders. The last baptism in the church took place as far back as 2001, apart from the baptism of Pastor Mark’s own son, Joshua. The large major Christian activity in the region was a Revival meeting by Brother Rajkumar, an Independent evangelist, in 2007.
According to Pastor Mark, the total number of Christians cannot be more than 500 in the administrative region of Saoner consisting of a population of 40,000 in 432 villages, and are served by a Catholic institution run by some Nuns, and an outreach programme of the Believers Church of Gospel for Asia mission. Politically, the region is basically loyal to the Congress or its breakaway factions such as the NCP of Mr Sharad Pawar. Sections of the people are tribals, and there are about three dozen families of South Indians, mostly government or private sector employees.
Our own investigations reveal that there has been increasing right wing activity since the split in the Mumbai based Shiv Sena and the attack launched by one of its factions against Hindi speakers and migrants from Madhya Pradesh and North India. Since Saoner has a large Hindi speaking population because of its location in Vidharbha region and its proximity to Madhya Pradesh, very many young men once loyal to the Shiva Sena found themselves suddenly without a strong and popular political base. Apparently, these Shiv Sena members were quickly mopped up, or constituted themselves into some groups aligned with the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh or the Bajrang Dal, the more militant faction of the Sangh Parivar. They had been flexing their muscles as the State was gearing up for the Lok Sabha parliamentary elections, which the State Assembly elections scheduled for later in the year.
There was nothing subtle about the attack, but apparently some amount of preparedness had gone into it as the assailants were quite large in number, armed, and very focussed. Pastor Mark narrated the sequence of events: There was a congregation of about 50 to sixty Christians at worship, most of them women, many of them Dalits. Even as the pastor was getting ready to give his Homily at about 10:45 a.m., a gang of about 30 young men armed with staves and clubs, several trishaws [steel tridents] and knives, broke through the main door and barged into the church shouting slogans “Jai Shriram,” “Jai Bajrang Bali” and “Har Har Mahadev.” They smashed the benches with the rods, focussed on the musical instruments and attacked the women in the front rows and on the sides of the aisle. A pregnant woman was among those who were manhandled. Pastor Mark said one threw the trident at him, but the man missed his target. The Pastor’s Bible was snatched and torn. The men abused the women and asked them to run away from the church and not to come back. They then came out and vented their ire on the school bus, damaging its windowpanes and windscreen. The violence continued for almost 20 minutes to half an hour. At one stage, the mob wanted to attack the family of Pastor Mark in the parsonage [the retired pastor who founded the school was at that time on his bed, as he is partially paralysed] the family was spared when Pastor Mark begged them not to harm his old parents and his wife and child. The Pastor defied one of the gang leaders as Sonu Baraiya, 35, who runs a cassette shop and is said to be the head of the local unit of the Bajrang Dal. The pastor said another man, Pandit Dube, a resident of the Water Tank area, had a pistol or revolver which he brandished menacingly. Dube was the one who ran to attack Pastor Mark’s mother as she came out of the parsonage after hearing the noise. Pastor Mark said he was repeatedly threatened by the pistol wielding Dube.
Pastor Mark’s narration was corroborated by an old Dalit woman who was in the congregation who gave her name as Mrs Pachhobai Ramnathji Kalse, a widow and a pensioner. Mrs Kalse said she told the attackers she had come of her own attack and there was no allurement or force by the Pastor. She said the attack would not stop her from attending church service together with others of the congregation.
The aggressors had apparently also gone to the local police station to complain that Pastor Mark was converting Tribals in his church. The police eventually came to the Church after the attack and asked Pastor Mark to come to the Police station where they recorded the statements of the Pastor and some other women.
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The police eventually arrested ten persons and produced them in court.
But the arrests united the Sangh elements in Saoner and Nagpur. The Sangh Parivar and Bajrang Dal in particular had called a Bandh and a closure of markets on 25th in protest against the arrest of Bajrang Dal activists. A defence committee was also formed in Nagpur which retained high powered lawyers to defend the suspects whose bail petitions were dismissed by the local court. The fact Finding team was in the Saoner court on the evening of 24th April 29 when the Nagpur senior advocates argued that the police had failed to establish any charges to retain custody of the suspects. The advocates also repeated the charge that there was large scale conversion was going on in the church and that there were in fact more than 5 to 6 people in the church when the incident took place. Counsel charged that the violence was in fact the result of a class between people waiting to be converted and their own relatives who did not want them to convert and leave their culture. Counsel also charged that the police had not taken any action on applications which had been submitted to the local police two days before the violence accusing the pastor of large scale conversions by fraud and coercion. He said the police had not asked converts if they had converted by their own free will. The court did not agree with defence counsel to let all the eleven accused free, but it also rejected the police request for continued remand, or custody, so that they could carry on investigations to trace four leaders of the group who were still absconding. The suspects were remanded to judicial custody and sent to the local jail amidst high drama in the small court room and its courtyard which is close to the police station. There was a sizable police presence to keep a check on about a hundred people, apparently supporters of the arrested persons, who had gathered there.
Nagpur houses the headquarters the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, the mother organisation of which the Bharatiya Janata party is the political arm. The BJP’s local leadership had at first fully supported the attack on the Saoner church. The Bharatiya Janata party district Yuva Morcha [youth wing] vice chief Shashikant Singh was arrested on 22 April in a case filed against him under Section 153 (a )(1) and (2) for giving an interview to a news channel not only supporting the attack on the church but also giving a “warning” that the “agitation” would be expanded in future. He repeated the threats in statements to the media later in the day. He was sent to police custody till 24 April 29.
In their press statements, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad denied any role by any Hindutva group in the violence against the church. But Sangh-affiliated groups later called for a Bund or strike in Saoner on 25th April 29 and demanded that shopkeepers pull down shutters that day. Police was called in from neighbouring areas as a precautionary measure.
The Fact Finding team was in fact in the market on the eve of the bandh. It was a bustling day with Tribals from surrounding areas and small farmers occupying almost every available space in the market, all the way to the lane that leads to the Church, selling their produce. There was a talk that there would be a strike next day, but there was no palpable tension. At the same time, pamphlets were distributed in the market, to shopkeepers and prominent citizens that they should, instead of closing shops for the bandh not only keep the markets open but come for a peace meeting called by the town leadership to wash away this “sin” in Saoner by the attack on the church, and also to assure security to the tiny minority community on behalf of the entire people of the town.
The meeting by Saoner Nagrik Manch convenor Adv Jayant Khedkar was held at Bazaar chowk, Jay Stambh, and was chaired my Member of the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly Sunil Kedar who had been elected as an Independent from the Saoner constituency, but later joined the Nationalist Congress party. The Association of local businessmen and traders not only ignored the call of a closure, or Bandh, by the Hindutva groups, but joined in the peace rally together with groups such as Truthseekers, All India Secular Forum, Bahujan Sangharsh Samiti, India Peace Centre, representatives of the local Muslim and Buddhist community, and several OBC groups. A prominent participant was Dr Suresh Khairnar of the All India Secular Forum who had led a civil society Fact Finding Team to Saoner after the violence.
The meeting lasted more than three hours. Almost every speaker expressed his shock that a church could have been attacked in Saoner. They denounced the attackers and said there was no way communal and violent elements would be tolerated in the region. The OBC leaders and members of the trading community were particular in associating themselves with assurances of peace. They volunteered that the church would be repaired at their cost and all damaged furniture and vehicle would be repaired and restored, or brought new.
There was but a small; group of local Christians in the large crowd that sat through the evening and late into the night. Some pastors had come from Nagpur to show their solidarity, but there was no senior church leader from Nagpur.
Church response. Nagpur is home to the headquarters of the major Protestant Churches affiliated to the national Council of Churches. It is also an important Archdiocese of the Catholic Church and has a resident Bishop of the Church of North India and another of the Believers Church apart from possibly as many as 700 independent pastors. It has several major and very popular Christian educational institutions. It was disappointing to learn that apart from some church officials sent to Saoner by NCCI general Secretary Bishop Das, and groups led by senior Truthseekers activists Nitin Sardar and others who were there from the second day after the violence, most senior church leaders chose not to go to Saoner to ascertain the facts for themselves, or in solidarity with the Pastor and members of the attacked church. A small protest was organised in Nagpur by some independent pastors and all church groups, and was well covered by the local media. In lessons learnt from Orissa, local church groups could easily have shown more solidarity. Church unity will be crucial in the Nagpur region in the future for vigilance against persecution and anti Christian violence.
Role of the media: The Marathi and Hindi Language media, which had given some coverage to the charges of large scale conversions made by the Sangh activists against the Saoner church, in fairness, also covered the Christian protests. No media however covered the major path-breaking peacemaking rally in Saoner on 25th April or the failure of the Sangh-called bandh. Their priorities, it sends, were the dog show held in the city the same day!
POSTSCRIPT: Rev Nitin Sardar of Truthseekers and Dr Suresh Khairnar told the fact Finding Team on 25 June 2009 they were keeping a watch on the situation. Peacemaking efforts were being sustained, and the police was being persuaded, according to Dr Khairnar, to see how wounds were healed and rifts in society closed. The point for the police was to catch the conspirators, but not to harass others. They said the OBC leaders are keeping their end of the bargain to maintain peace and communal harmony in the Saoner region.
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