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Dangerous turn in Orissa

No words can adequately condemn the cycle of murder and mayhem in Orissa that led on Monday to the burning alive of a young woman at a Christian orphanage. The 20-year-old perished in violence that recalls the fiendish lynching in 1999 of Graham Staines and his two little sons. It is not just that Orissa has been the staging ground for both atrocities. The suspects belong to the same ideological persuasion. This time the thuggery is sought to be justified as retribution fo r the horrific killings, on Saturday, of Vishwa Hindu Parishad leader Swami Lakshmanananda and four others. Mobs affiliated to the VHP have since unleashed a retaliatory wave of terror across the State, calling a bandh in defiance of curfew orders, paralysing rail and road traffic, torching Christian homes, and attacking churches, prayer halls and other Christian institutions. The circumstances leading to Saturday’s killings are not fully established. As of now, there is no evidence pointing to a Christian missionary involvement, as is being claimed by the VHP and the Bharatiya Janata Party. The VHP priests fell to an armed attack on their ashram in Jalespata in the communally sensitive district of Kandhamal. A day earlier, the ashram reportedly received a letter carrying a threat to eliminate the Swami. The Orissa police deduced from the manner of the attack — especially the threat letter, the automatic weapons carried by the assailants, and the claiming of responsibility by an entity styling itself the People’s Liberation Revolutionary Group — that it was probably spearheaded by Maoists.

Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik, who has come under attack from the saffron fringe, has ordered a judicial probe into the ashram murders. The VHP’s sense of loss and outrage at losing five of its followers might have resonated with the public at large had the organisation not so brazenly taken the law into its own hands. It points to a December 2007 murder attempt on Swami Lakshmanananda to buttress its claim that he was eliminated as part of a larger Christian missionary agenda. That incident set off widespread communal clashes in the State. Given all this, the best option before the sangh parivar was to await the findings of the judicial probe. Of course, to ask that of the VHP is to ask for the impossible. Witness the lawlessness unleashed by parivar affiliates in Jammu and, in tandem, by Islamist activists in the Kashmir Valley. Recklessness comes naturally to fanatics. But with the 15th general election just months away, the BJP must weigh the political costs of alienating its non-communal allies — which it has in Orissa as well as in other States.

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