Guilty ‘gone’, all are victims

Guilty ‘gone’, all are victims - Kandhamal won’t own up to attacks Original Trackback Url

[+uc('Padmacharan Digal surveys his charred home in Kandhamal. Sankarshan Thakur ')+]

Phulbani (Kandhamal), Oct. 10: This is as perplexing a scene of crime as it is horrid; everybody wants to be a victim, even those palpably guilty. The Hindus have their slain patriarch, Laxmanananda Saraswati, his body interred in a shallow samadhi, his memory now a gory murder poster flaming on public walls across the district. The Christians have their dead and ravaged — 40 killed, one raped, three molested, scores of homes and churches burnt, thousands scarred and displaced. An exorbitant price for one dead man, and nobody has even established they got Laxmanananda. But then, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen the majority-minority calculus at play — it’s a diabolical trick that turns on inverse proportions, the fewer you are the more you pay, numbers will designate some gods greater and others lesser. In Kandhamal, for all his fear-mongering over the predatory sweep of Jesus, Laxmanananda was by far the child of the greater god: census figures reliably tell you Shiva leads Christ 80-20, and the latter team has just been retired from the game, grievously hurt. Padmanabha Digal, teacher of Sanskrit at Laxmanananda’s Chakpada Ashram, up a craggy hill road winding into the remoteness beyond Phulbani, tells us that the Christians had to take the beating they’ve got. “As a lesson,” he says with professorial persuasiveness, “just as a lesson, you cannot kill such a big man and go unpunished.” A few yards from where he speaks, behind the ashram’s vast pillared prayer hall, lies Laxmanananda, six feet under in padmasana after the fashion of saints, a blue PVC canopy fluttering atop his final abode. “By this act they have justified all that Swamiji used to say about them, he would warn every time he spoke.” To Digal and the ashram, Laxmanananda has become cold proof of his own dire prophecy; his progeny must now confront it in good measure. Digal is as sanguine about the eruption of mayhem after Laxmanananda’s killing on the night of August 23 as he is convinced of the culprits. “These Christians, who else? I don’t buy these Maoist claims, they had nothing against him, the Christians did, he was barricading their expansion.” It’s almost as if Digal is armed with proof Laxmanananda died of being bored by a cross, not by gunshots. “Ask anyone,” he wages on, “everybody knows who did it. They will also tell you why the violence happened. It was natural, spontaneous, it may not have been right but it was necessary, people took out their anger.” He wasn’t part of that enactment of anger, though, just like nobody else in Kandhamal was. Everywhere you go trailing fire in the hills and hamlets of Kandhamal, you’ll find it or the remains of its depredations. You’ll never find the man who lit it. Everywhere it’s down to the spontaneous ire of an anonymous horde that arrived from somewhere and vanished into nowhere. Who knows who did that, is what you get told for the effrontery of asking, it wasn’t me. Across the hills from Chakpada, across stormy rivulets and pristine forests that are now blossoming over with checkposts and jawans, is Beheragam where the fiction of the anonymity and spontaneity of violence lies nailed to the crucifix of reason. It has begun to rain and the wooded hills have turned voluptuously green under its ministration, like sprouts of gigantic broccoli. From a distance Beheragam looks a splendoured patch blessed with nature’s bounties; up close it is streaked with the curse of human ugliness — rows upon rows of houses ransacked and burnt, bereft lanes that the horror-stricken have escaped, a mattress flung in the wake of panicked departure, a mangled birdcage, crushed bangles and half-eaten corn-cobs in the ashes on the floor, a kaleidoscope of devouring madness arrived and gone. The Christian homes of Beheragam, a mostly mud-and-thatch settlement, were burnt on the night of September 26, more than a month after Laxmanananda’s murder; spontaneity and anger took their time traversing the hills. The Christian homes of Beheragam were singled out for torching. They’ve been knocked out and others left untouched like Dr Horror had gone about marking bad teeth from good ones before taking them out. Dr Horror couldn’t have been part of an anonymous storm arrived from elsewhere; he had to belong here to know which ones to pick and which not. But of course, says our second Digal of the day — this time a man called Padmacharan, a Digal on the other side of the fence from Padmanabha Digal of the Chakpada ashram, a Christian. But of course he knows Dr Horror. “There were many from here, from among us, but how are we to prove it? The only proof is that not a single Christian home stands and all the others are untouched.” One of the burnt homes is his; he has slipped quietly out of the relief camp 20km away to survey the damage. “Quieter now, and we did not get a chance to see how bad it was, I was hoping there would be something left, but there are just the walls now and even they have been licked through by the fire.” Wasn’t he afraid, though, of returning, isn’t the danger still there? Padmacharan Digal affords himself a wry smile. “No, not now, later maybe but not now.” He motions to the untouched homes of Beheragam and says, “Can’t you see there is nobody around? They collaborated, now they are afraid. They have all run away, the one with homes have all run away, leaving behind the homeless. They claim they are afraid, of what you must ask them.” This is a perplexing scene of crime; everyone’s a victim and the guilty are nowhere.