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Full
text report of the fact finding team into the attack on
the Church at Saoner, Maharashtra, India on 19 April
2009
Dr John Dayal, Secretary
General, All India Christian Council with Mr. Vishal Lal,
Open Doors, and Mr. Prateek
Tongra, All India Christian Council, Nagpur
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. Members of 'Other Backward Classes' [OBCs]
some of whom 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 (20 Apr 2009) in a small news report:
“Miscreants attack Saoner church" 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) 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.
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. |
