Kandhamal is deadly beautiful. A tropical forest, but with close mountains and deep valleys, and a climate that can get alpine in winter, without the snow. The topography of this plateau in the middle of the Indian province of Orissa may have saved the lives of tens of thousands of Christians who fled to the forests as mobs with murder, arson and rape on their minds, attacked 300 villages on 25 August 2008. At the peak of the violence, 54,000 men, women and children were hiding in these forests of tall Sal trees, where bear and big cats still abound, and wild elephants can be heard in the dark of the night. Among those 54,000 were the families of perhaps three dozen Catholic priests and twice as many Nuns, and two dozen priests themselves, hiding and waiting for the moment the police would come to restore order. For some of them, it came too late. A hundred people may have died there, among them three protestant Pastors and a Catholic priest, Fr Bernard Digal, who was grievously wounded and succumbed some time later. A nun, Sister M, as I will call her, was among at least three women raped.
The brutal tragedy however also shed light on how close are the bond that the local priests have with their flocks. Unlike in many other parts of India where he parish priest may have come from as far as three thousand kilometres, be of a different ethnicity and with a different mother tongue, priests and nuns in Kandhamal are of the soil. The villages that were torched were where they were born, the churches destroyed were the priest too had been baptised, and where they celebrated their First Mass.
There is therefore something remarkable about the Priests and Nuns of Kandhamal, be they Dalits or the Tribals. Some of them, such as Fathers Vijay Naik and Vijay Pradhan, the first a Dalit and the second a Tribal, have doctorates from Roman universities. Many others chose to study social work, and were active at the grassroots. They helped galvanise a people who for centuries had suffered from a situation close to serfdom in which food was rare and education unknown, where women were vulnerable and children could bare hope to grow to adulthood. No wonder the work of the priest sand nuns had angered vested interests, the local equivalent of big business, and the power brokers. When the violence broke out, the families of the priests were particular targets. The brother of Fr Mrityunjay, the secretary of the Archbishop of the region, was forcibly converted into Hinduism by a murderous gang shaving off his head and forcing cow dung and urine down his throat. The youth suffered in silence, but was back in the church in the refugee tent as soon as it was humanly possible.
As elsewhere in the world, the clergy and women religious in India too face occasional charges of financial wrongdoings, but those in Kandhamal can easily be said to be crystal clean. The family of father Bernard Digal, who was Treasurer of the Archdiocese and became its first martyr in the violence, lived in a mud and thatchl hut when I visited them some years ago. After the violence, they were among thousands living in a government refigure camp. They still have to return to their village.
I salute the priests and Nuns of Kandhamal.
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