Identity, Conversion and Violence: Dalits, Adivasis and the 2007–08 Riots in Orissa

C H A P T E R 12C H A P T E R 12

Identity, Conversion and Violence: Dalits, Adivasis and the 2007–08 Riots in Orissa

Chad M. Bauman

INTRODUCTIONINTRODUCTION

In the annual Hindu festival of Raksha Bandhan, sisters express devotion to their brothers by fasting and offering prayers on their behalf, and symbolize their concern by tying rakhi around their brothers’ wrists. The ‘sisters’ and ‘brothers’ in the ritual need not be related by blood, and there is a long history of sisters ‘adopting’ cousins and other unrelated males, even non-Hindus, during the festival.

In 2008, I returned to Raipur, Chhattisgarh, where I had previously conducted research, to visit some old friends. My trip coincided with Raksha Bandan, and on a warm, windless Saturday in August, I visited

a Hindu friend of mine who had recently been married. There, in their home in a quiet neighbourhood on the edge of town, my friend’s new wife tied rakhi around my wrist in a moving display of hospitality and amity.

At the same time, in another part of town, members of the Dharma Sena (Army of Faith, or Righteousness), a local Hindu nationalist organ-ization, were assaulting a group of Christians at a prayer meeting. After physically abusing the Christians, the assailants forcibly tied rakhi around their wrists in a proprietary gesture intended to claim them as members of the Hindu fold.

There is today in India, as these two stories should illustrate, a battle for the right to defi ne what it means to be ‘Hindu’. On one side stand those whose Hinduism is tolerant, friendly and hospitable to strangers and minorities; on the other side stand those whose Hinduism is intolerant, suspicious and aggressively chauvinistic. If this chapter focuses on the violent, aggressive side of Hinduism, it is only because of its subject matter. The chapter should not, however, be taken as an argument that Hinduism is (and is essentially) a violent and aggressive religion. We would do well to keep in mind the diverse range of Hindu opinions and behaviour, the ‘clash within’ Hinduism, as Martha Nussbaum (2007) has termed it, as we move on to a description and analysis of the recent Hindu–Christian1 violence in Orissa.

The chapter is divided into two parts. The fi rst supplies an overview, necessarily brief, of the violence itself. The second enumerates a number of signifi cant factors involved in this particular clash (or rather, series of clashes) and then attempts to analyse those factors by situating them within a broader context of Hindu–Christian confl ict in contemporary India. Throughout the chapter I argue that the Orissa violence was exacerbated by the involvement of those who intentionally politicized and communalized local tensions, in part by portraying communal identities at both the local and national level as if they were singular, rigid and mutually exclusive.

THE 2007–08 ORISSA RIOTSTHE 2007–08 ORISSA RIOTS

Anti-Christian violence has been on the rise in India since the end of the 1990s (Froerer 2007: 2; S. Sarkar 1999: 1691). At Christmas, in 1998,

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for example, mobs attacked Christian Adivasis in Dangs, Gujarat, burning dozens of houses and places of worship, while threatening bodily harm (Gonsalves 1999). And a year later, the Australian missionary, Graham Staines, and his two young boys were famously immolated in their vehicle in Orissa.

In the last days of December, 2007, Dalit Christians in Brahmanigaon, Kandhamal district, Orissa, were constructing a Christmas pandal, a long, cloth-draped scaffolding surmounting a main street in town. The con-struction of the pandal was sponsored by the Dr Ambedkar Banika Sangh of Brahmanigaon, a Christian organization which had duti-fully sought and received permission from authorities for its construc-tion. Nevertheless, there were signs of potential trouble. The Kui Samaj, a Kandha tribal organization which had strained relations with the Dalit and largely Christian Pana community in Kandhamal, had called for a statewide bandh, or strike, on December 24th and 25th to press a variety of its political demands, despite (or perhaps because of ) the fact that many Hindus celebrated Christmas along with Christians. And on December 23rd, as Narendra Modi was celebrating his re-election as chief minister in Gujarat, Christian women and youth in Brahmanigaon were warned by some Hindus not to put up their Christmas decorations. Though the pandal had been constructed in the same spot for a number of years, this year some local Hindus demanded it be removed because it was located in the same area where Hindus had recently celebrated Durga Puja.

Because of this, several delegations of Christians visited police offi cers in the days before the violence began, requesting extra protection. On the morning of December 24th, a Christian delegation asked police to offi cially open the local haat, or market, in Brahmanigaon, despite the Kui Samaj’s call for a bandh. (Christians needed the market to make last-minute Christmas preparations.) The Assistant Sub-Inspector of Police arrived and opened the market at 7:00 am. Around an hour or two later a large group of Hindus arrived, led, Christian eyewitnesses assert, by Bikram Raut, a local Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) leader, and attempted to forcefully close the market. Police intervened and kept it open. Later, Raut’s group began to rough up Christians in the market, and according to one Christian eyewitness who spoke to Tehelka magazine’s reporters, Christians responded by looting Hindu merchants (Bibhuti Pati 2008). Scuffl es broke out between Hindu and Christian merchants, effectively closing the market.


Around 10:00 am, a crowd of perhaps 500, led again by Bikram Raut, arrived and ransacked the Christmas pandal, setting it ablaze in the presence of the police, who intentionally or out of helplessness did not intervene. The crowd attacked Christians and destroyed their shops. Shots were fi red, and at least one young Christian was seriously wounded. In fear, Christians fl ed to the jungle, abandoning their plans for Christmas Eve services.

Then, at around 10:45 am, while travelling to Brahmanigaon where he was reportedly planning to conduct a yagna (a Hindu fi re ritual), the car of Lakshmanananda Saraswati, an elderly sadhu and regionally famous anti-conversion activist, was forced to stop on a narrow road when a bus travelling ahead of it broke down with mechanical problems. Hearing Christmas music coming from loudspeakers of the nearby Dasingbadi Church, Saraswati sent his bodyguards to ask that it be turned down. Local Christians asserted that the guards roughed up some Christians and vandalized church equipment. Saraswati contended that a group of Christians came, unprovoked, injured him and his driver, and damaged his car.

Those who saw him afterwards say that Saraswati appeared not to have been seriously hurt. Yet pictures of him after the incident, lying on a hospital cot and looking somewhat under the weather, circulated widely in news reports and through the Internet. Reports of the incident reached Brahmanigaon around 2:00 pm (long after the morning clashes there), and when they became more widely known, the RSS, Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) and Bajrang Dal, with the support of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), called in protest for a four-hour bandh on Christmas day.

While it is clear that news of the incident involving Saraswati exacerbated the tensions and might well have been the main cause for their dissemination beyond Brahmanigaon and Dasingbadi, it is also equally clear that the anti-Christian attack in Brahmanigaon preceded it. No matter what the provocation, for the next three days violent clashes continued and spread throughout the region. Logs downed across roads by miscreants prevented an effective police response, forcing the government to impose curfews and call upon the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) for help. And then, on the 27th, a large Christian mob in Brahmanigaon entered a Hindu quarter of the city and set nearly a hundred Hindu homes alight. Similarly, in nearby Gadapur, Christians


burned down around twenty additional Hindu homes. But by the end of the day the rioting had stopped.

Assessing the effects of the violence in Kandhamal district is diffi cult, given the inaccessibility of the terrain and the widely varying reports of damage to institutions, homes and bodies. The riots took place over four days and roughly across 600 square miles, and affected at least six district blocks. According to the All-India Christian Council’s (AICC) reports, corroborated by those of the National Commission for Minor-ities (NCM), rioters destroyed ninety-fi ve churches and 730 houses (around 120 of them Hindu) in the clashes. In addition, rioters destroyed or looted several convents, mission schools and parish houses in the district, and vandalized or desecrated a great deal of Christian property (All-India Christian Council 2008).

There were six people seriously wounded, multiple reports of women molested or raped, and four people confi rmed dead, with rumours of other deaths, murders and cover-ups. Of the four confi rmed dead by early reports, at least three were Christian. One of them, 50-year-old Bhogra Naik, had been rather gruesomely dismembered. The identity of a fourth, killed in the fi refi ght at the Brahmanigaon police station, remains uncertain. The fi fth victim was Khageswar Mallick. VHP sources claim Mallick, an older tribal man, was stoned to death by Christian women. But Christian eyewitnesses say he either fell from or was burned on a church tower he had mounted to destroy.

One question which remains unanswered is the extent to which Naxalites were involved in or manipulated the discord and confusion for their own purposes. State police offi cials alleged a Naxalite hand in the violence, as did Sangh leaders. The BJP’s Kamal Sandesh urged, ‘It is incumbent upon the central government and 24x7 channels to open their eyes and ears towards the nexus between the anti-nationals [the Naxalites], the missionaries and their activities in this part of India’ (R.P. Tripathy 2008: 20). Some Christian leaders also publicly alleged that the Christian retaliation was instigated by Naxalites (implying that it was therefore not entirely the fault of Christians). They rejected the notion, however, that there was any stable or organized Naxalite–Christian cooperation.

It is diffi cult to determine whether Naxalite involvement in the Kandhamal riots was real and signifi cant, or whether Hindu, Christian and state government leaders wishing to defl ect blame simply scapegoated the Maoist insurgents. Though it would surprise no one if the Naxalites

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were found to have exploited the unrest to achieve some of their own goals, it should be stressed that they had not before this point been as active in Kandhamal as they had in other parts of the state.

In addition to the damage to property and body, the violent clashes provoked a refugee crisis. By the end of February, there were ap-proximately 3,000 refugees, Christian and Hindu, in fi ve relief camps. That number would have been much higher if more men had entered the refugee camps. But many of them remained in the forests, fearing that they would be harassed or arrested for their involvement (real or fabricated) in the violence. Life within the camps was not easy, particularly for the pregnant or elderly, a few of whom died there. The government reportedly provided very little food, clothing or shelter, and evening temperatures occasionally dropped into the low fi fties.

Adding to the problems of victims was the fact that the recon-struction efforts became politicized in a number of ways. Until the Supreme Court of India reversed the decision, for example, the Orissa state government prohibited NGOs from providing relief in the region. In addition, the Orissa state government’s promised compensation—Rs 40,000 for homes (eventually raised to Rs 50,000) and 200,000 for institutions—was not only lower than expected and less than that given in similar circumstances in other states, but also failed to provide reconstruction compensation for destroyed places of worship, which had been repeatedly targeted by vandals.

The 2007 Hindu–Christian riots in Orissa were, at the time, the most damaging and widespread in India’s independent history. But they seem insignifi cant in comparison to the violence unleashed upon the same region just eight months later. Once again, Swami Lakshmanananda Saraswati was involved in the ‘triggering event’ (Tambiah 1997: 56), but this time only posthumously, and as a victim of violence. On Saturday, the 23rd of August, 2008, as Saraswati and a crowd of his followers were celebrating the birth of Krishna (Krishna Jayanti) at his ashram and orphanage in Jalespata, a gang of armed and masked vigilantes broke through the gates, forced their way into Saraswati’s room and gunned him down along with four of his followers.

Police investigators announced relatively early in their investigation that a note found on the scene indicated the involvement of Naxalites, who continued publicly over the next days and weeks to claim responsibility for the murder, which they portrayed as punishment for his ‘persecution’


of minorities. Nevertheless, most of Saraswati’s supporters and nearly all regional and national leaders of Sangh Parivar organizations rejected the claim as a ruse, asserted the attackers were Christians, and began venting their anger on the Christian community. Orissa State Secretary of the VHP Gouri Prasad Rath said, ‘Christians have killed Swamiji. We will give a befi tting reply’ (Times News Network 2008). And as Saraswati’s followers carried his body from Jalespata to his main ashram in Chakapada the next day, mourners began attacking Christian homes and institutions.

The fi rst reported death occurred on the next day, Monday the 25th, in the middle of a VHP-initiated general strike during which a rioting mob burned a woman (who appears to have been Hindu) alive, because she worked in a Christian orphanage. On that same day, a Christian nun, Meena Barwa, was raped by a group of male rioters. The assault, the most widely publicized of this second round of riots, which garnered international attention, was exacerbated by insensitive handling by the local police. The rape resulted in a criminal case brought against multiple alleged assailants, the proceedings of which at the time this chapter went to press (August 2009) continued to be covered extensively by Indian and even international media.

On the very next day, Tuesday, August 26th, police imposed a curfew on violence-affected villages, and again called for help from the CRPF. On Wednesday local police threatened rioters with a shoot-on-sight order. But law and order had already effectively broken down in the region, and this time the violence was more widespread, more long-lasting, and more gruesomely effective. Copycat riots erupted even in other states, most notably in Karnataka and Kerala.

For the next three weeks, state authorities repeatedly claimed that the confl ict was over, only to be proven wrong by subsequent events. Then, on September 19th, Congress Party offi cials ruling at the centre threatened to dissolve the Bharatiya Janata Party–Biju Janata Dal (BJP–BJD) government in Orissa, invoking a little-known article (355) of the constitution which gives the centre power to impose direct rule in states incapable of maintaining law and order. Opposition parties quickly claimed, however, that the threat was merely a political move intended to embarrass the BJP and its BJD allies, and the article was never invoked.

Reports of vandalism, mutilation, murder, gang rape and, occasionally, of Christian retaliation continued to leak out of the region in a steady


stream well into February and March of 2010. Again the Naxalites got involved in the violence, claiming (as indicated earlier) responsibility for Saraswati’s murder and then publicizing a hit-list of local Hindu nationalists they deemed responsible for the continuing violence. In at least two cases the Naxalites appear to have followed through on their threats, assassinating Dhanu Pradhan and Prabhat Panigrahi, local RSS leaders, in November 2008 and March 2009, respectively (Indo-Asian News Service 2008; Pattnaik 2009).

At the height of the violence, there were over 20,000 refugees, mostly Christian, in relief camps. Perhaps a number just as large were avoid-ing the violence by living in the forests. By November, the AICC was claiming over a hundred deaths. An opposition party report put the total much higher. But in May of 2009, government offi cials were reporting only forty-two confi rmed dead, including the Hindus allegedly killed by Naxalites after the main riots (Express News Service 2009). Rioters attacked hundred of villages, injured thousands, destroyed over 4,000 homes and at least a hundred churches, along with dozens of other Christian institutions. By December, news sources reported 10,000 people accused in over 700 cases lodged against those who participated in the violence. Over 500 had been arrested, though few of the rioters had been convicted (Agencies 2008). A full year after the beginning of the confl ict, in August of 2009, thousands of Christians had yet to return to their homes, fearing violence or forced conversions. Many of those who did return followed a growing trend in the region by placing a saffron fl ag on their homes for protection (Pattnaik 2009; Press Trust of India 2009).

FACTORS IN THE VIOLENCEFACTORS IN THE VIOLENCE

In The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India, Paul Brass has argued against the academic inclination to seek the ‘causes’ of riots. Causal explanations of riots are always overly simplistic, Brass argues, and also do not take into account the fact that all kinds of vio-lent actions take place ‘under the cover of the discourse of communalism, actions that cannot be explained or justifi ed in terms of that discourse, but can easily be fi t into more parsimonious explanations of individual pursuit of political advantage, profi t, and vendetta’ (2003: 17). Even more


problematically, Brass argues, the search for causes often exonerates those bearing some responsibility by displacing blame on others; all those not explicitly named can consider themselves innocent, and the ‘principal perpetrators go scot-free’ (p. 16).

Because of this, rather than search for causes, Brass suggests, analysts should focus instead on the forms of violence, and on the specifi c ques-tion of who is served by communal confl ict. I am in general agreement with Brass on this matter, though I consider it rather diffi cult to disentangle interests, causes and contextual factors, even at the group level (let alone the individual). There is no doubt that the group which benefi ted most obviously from the riots in Kandhamal was the BJP, which while losing ground nationally and in the state during the 2009 elections still gained seats in some of the districts most affected by the riots (Express News Service 2009). It was clearly in the interest, then, of the Sangh Parivar to allow, stoke and even participate in the confl ict. But if we ask why riot violence translated into greater political power, we must refer back again to contextual factors. In this section, I attempt to enumerate the most signifi cant of those factors in the Kandhamal violence. They are: (a) Kandha–Pana tensions, (b) the Sangh Parivar’s communalization of the confl ict and (c) the ‘calculus of conversion’.

Kandha–Pana TensionsKandha–Pana Tensions

Though not responsible for igniting the Kandhamal riots, tensions be-tween two local groups, the Kandhas (or ‘Kondhs’) and Panas (or ‘Panos’), clearly provided fuel for the fi re. Both communities speak Kui, but in the offi cial parlance of the Indian government the Kandhas are a Scheduled Tribe (ST) and the Panas are a Scheduled Caste (SC). The reason this matters is that a high percentage of Panas have converted to Christianity, and whereas ST converts to Christianity retain their benefi ts under India’s system of reservations (in universities, government posts, the legislatures, etc.), SC converts to Christianity do not.

Beginning in the 1950s, large numbers of both Panas and Kandhas began converting to Christianity. Today around 70 per cent of the Panas are Christian, though the proportion is much lower for Kandhas. In the same period, sections of the Kandha community became increasingly Hinduized. As they did, they more and more enthusiastically embraced


a Hindu identity, such that by 1994 they were denying Panas, as a Dalit caste, entry to the Shiva temple in Phulbani (Bibhuti Pati 2008). Today, the Kandhas constitute roughly 52 per cent of the population in Kandhamal district, and the Panas 17 per cent. Of the entire district population, around 18 per cent are Christian.

In the decades leading up to the 2007 riots, economic disparities had also driven a wedge between the two communities. The Pana commu-nity had become noticeably more educated and wealthier, and many Kandhas and Hindus in the region attributed Pana success to the community’s Christianization. This bred resentment, particularly among the Kandhas, who alleged that the Panas were taking advantage of Kandhas’ illiteracy and impoverishment to exploit the Kandhas and appropriate their lands. Some Kandhas also accuse certain Pana Christians of superfi cially reconverting to Hinduism to claim SC status, or of fraudu-lently claiming Kandha ST status in order to not lose the advantage of reservations. The evidence suggests that these economic considerations infl uenced the Kandhamal clashes in a number of signifi cant ways. For example, in Brahmanigaon the sahi (quarter) in which wealthier, shop-owning Pana Christians lived bore the brunt of the attacks while a sahi of poorer Christians remained largely untouched.

Nevertheless, the more salient issue at the time was that a signifi cant proportion of the Pana community supported a petition organized by the Phulbani Kui Jankalyan Sangh (PKJS) to have the SC Pana community classifi ed as an ST community. The petition, if successful, would have allowed the Pana Christian community to claim eligibility for educational, vocational and political posts reserved for STs and non-convert SCs. The PKJS argued in a petition to the Orissa High Court that the Pana community deserved ST status because a 2002 Presidential Order had said that the Kui community should be considered an ST, and therefore the Panas, as a Kui-speaking community, were historically undifferentiated from the Kandhas. The High Court issued an order on 12 July 2007, directing the government of India to investigate the matter, but the issue remained unresolved as the year 2007 drew to a close.

Many in the Kandha community perceived the PKJS petition as a cynical effort to increase the community’s economic position, and they therefore resisted it. In September of 2007, the secretary of the pro-Kandha Kui Samaj Coordination Committee (KSCC) said that the Kandha community was ‘vehemently opposed to’ the petition and


insisted, somewhat presciently, that if the ‘Government accepted Pana harijans as tribals than it would lead to violent clashes between the two communities in Kandhamal district’ (Staff Reporter 2007).

To protest the Pana Petition, the KSCC organized the aforementioned bandh for 24–25 December 2007. The KSCC chairman, Lambodar Kanhar, claimed that the bandh was not intended to interfere with Christmas celebrations, but rather to correspond with a planned tenth anniversary celebration of the BJD being held on the 26th in Bhubaneshwar. Whatever the KSCC’s intention, the hundreds of trees they felled on roads in and out of Kandhamal not only obstructed traffi c towards the anniversary celebration in Bhubaneshwar, but also prevented government security forces from gaining access to the riot-stricken areas.

Paul Brass (1997: 16) argues that communal violence in India generally involves ‘conversion specialists’ who ‘convert’ otherwise insignifi cant, local or limited confl icts into larger communal ones. As will be discussed in the next section, Sangh Parivar leaders played this role conspicuously in the Kandhamal riots. The Kandhas, however, appear to have gone along with this ‘conversion’ to achieve their own ends. In the midst of the violence Kanhar, the KSCC Chairman, asserted that he desired to protect the Kandhas from both ‘Christianity and the Sangh outfi ts’. Yet in the same interview he exposed the extent to which he had allowed his community’s ethnic confl ict with the Panas to become a communal one: ‘How can we get along with Christians? It’s like cat and mouse. We don’t like the ways of even those who are Christians among the Kandhas’ (Anand 2008). As Kanhar’s views demonstrate, the Kandhamal violence was premised on the illusion of stable, defi nite identities: Hindu versus Christian, Kandha Adivasi versus Pana Dalit. And yet one of the truly striking features of the Kandhamal violence is that these supposedly stable identities were in fact very much in fl ux.

Christian Pana Dalits, for example, were agitating for recognition as Adivasis. At the same time, there were, according to Biswamoy Pati, some Panas who went to church and followed Christian precepts, but who refused baptism and suppressed their Christian identity to preserve their reservation privileges (2003: 21). Pana Christian identity was, therefore, quite unstable; in certain circumstances and for specifi c reasons, Pana Christians might be compelled to declare themselves Adivasi, or to deny their devotion to Christ.


Likewise is with Kandha identity. The Adivasi Kandhas had become thoroughly Hinduized in the previous fifty years. And there were moments when they emphasized this Hindu identity as if they had always been Hindu, such as when they refused to let the Pana Dalits enter Shibamandira (Biswamoy Pati 2003: xiii). At other times, however, when seeking concessions from the dominant Hindu community, the Kandhas would emphasize their Adivasi identity, or at least threaten to do so. Kandha ethnic and religious identity was therefore in fl ux as was that of the Panas. And it must also be kept in mind that a signifi cant portion of the Kandha community was Christian. And yet, the Kandhamal riots pitted a supposedly monolithic Hindu Kandha Adivasi bloc against a supposedly homogenous Christian Pana Dalit bloc, as if these identities were inescapable, essential and timeless.

It is the ‘illusion’ of fi xed and singular identities, Amartya Sen argues in Identity and Violence, which leads to a sense of the inevitability of confl ict between different communities (2006: 2–4). Contributing to this sense of inevitability, according to Sen, is the high profi le work of scholars like Samuel Huntington, whose ‘Clash of Civilizations’ theory has become in many ways the dominant worldview of social scientists and foreign policy makers around the world (Huntington 1996; Sen 2006: 4, 10). There are too many problems with this theory to enumerate in the space available here, but the most salient is that it assumes homogeneity and consensus within the ‘civilizations’ it describes, despite the fact that, for example, Muslim civilization, as Huntington describes it, stretches from North Africa to Indonesia. It is a seductive theory, but deeply fl awed.

The assumption of fi xed and singular identities plays into the hands of those who espouse an ideology of Hindutva and seek to divide and exclude. For them, the accusation that Christianity is a ‘foreign’ religion (and therefore inherently subversive) is linked to the assertion that the Hindu religion is indigenously and eternally Indian, that it is static and unifi ed, despite the fact that any careful historiography suggests that this assertion is also problematic (Kesavan 2001: 45; Needham and Sunder Rajan 2007; T. Sarkar 2002: 122–23; van der Veer 1994: 1).

There is always, Sen asserts, some element of choice involved in individual and communal identity (pp. xiii, 4). The choices are not limitless, of course, but choice remains, particularly in the relative weight that a person or a community gives to various elements of its identity (pp. 5, 34). At any given point, a person or a community can choose to

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emphasize its religious, ethnic, political, linguistic or economic identity. Yet in the Orissa riots, both the Kandhas and the Panas emphasized a single element of their identities (religion) to the exclusion of others which may have drawn attention to their commonalities rather than their difference. Nevertheless, their inability to fi nd common ground may be in part the fault of Sangh Parivar organizations, whose involvement in this confl ict contributed to the ‘conversion’ of ethnic tensions into communal violence.

The Sangh ParivarThe Sangh Parivar

The allegations of Sangh responsibility for the Kandhamal riots arise primarily from the conviction, widely held but not convincingly proven, that both rounds of riots were pre-planned, perfectly timed and meticulously organized. In a press conference after the December riots, NCM fact-fi nding team members pointed to the large number of felled trees and said, ‘This is an indication of organization on a massive scale. Besides, how could there be simultaneous attacks across the districts soon after Swami Lakshmananda [sic] of the VHP was attacked?’ (Special Correspondent 2008).

Many Christians and opposition political leaders also suspected the BJD party of complicity in the Sangh’s alleged plans. And the NCM called for close scrutiny of possible Sangh–BJD collusion. In addition, a thorough fact-fi nding report drafted by the AICC a week after the end of the confl ict found ‘that the VHP … instigated the attacks and carefully targeted Christians’ throughout the district. It specifi cally mentioned Bikram Raut, the RSS leader from Brahmanigaon mentioned earlier, and named Chitta Bindhani and Bhagaban Panda (both Orissa VHP leaders) as co-masterminds of the ‘operation’. It also accused the KSCC of making an alliance with the VHP to achieve their common anti-Christian agenda. And fi nally, the report asserted that the rioters wore yellow ribbon on their heads and vermilion on their foreheads, marks of identity associated with the RSS and VHP (All-India Christian Council 2008).

None of this, however, is damning evidence. Proof of pre-planning and organization, itself conjectural, would, if true, not necessarily point to pre-planning and organization by the Sangh. No clear, incontrovertible evidence of pre-planning and organization exists, and the AICC report,


while careful and thorough, does not give evidence or justifi cation for its claim that Panda and Bindhani masterminded the riots. Moreover, the fact that Sangh leaders, such as Bikram Raut, were present, or even in some cases leading groups of rioters does not, again, necessarily implicate the Sangh, at an institutional level, in the organization of the violence (though it does indicate that Sangh leaders did not uniformly remain aloof from the attacks or attempt to quell them). Similarly, the incompetent government response does not implicate the BJD party in being anything other than incompetent, and in responding insuffi ciently, which while unfortunate is not at all surprising given the challenges of resources, communication and transportation in Kandhamal, and Orissa more generally.

The point of this discussion is not to exonerate the Sangh, or even to suggest that its partisans were not involved in signifi cant ways both before and during Kandhamal attacks. Rather, the point is to make it clear that the evidence of systematic involvement in its instigation is, at this point, largely circumstantial. Nevertheless, it is clear that the Sangh response to the alleged attack on Saraswati, particularly that of the VHP, contributed to the production and spread of violence by drawing upon and fueling a sense of indignation among Saraswati’s followers and supporters. Sangh sources insisted that the December attack on Saraswati had provoked the anti-Christian riots, which were therefore justifi ed as retaliatory, and this genealogy of the clashes was perpetuated by many news sources. Sangh sources also exaggerated the nature of that December attack, asserting, for example, that a member of Saraswati’s entourage, or even Saraswati himself, had been killed (Sharma 2007; Vishva Hindu Parishad 2008).

Saraswati himself, who had long established ties to the Sangh, participated in this exaggeration. In an interview with the RSS’s Organiser after the Daringibadi attack, he said:

They attacked us suddenly, abused us for our Paravartan [home-coming, reconversion] mission and dragged us out to kill. Our driver and angrakshak [bodyguard] were roughly beaten up. It was a pre-meditated plan to kill us. The area is dominated by converted Christians and minority Hindus suffer a lot. We were going to perform a religious satsang there. The attackers told us that their government is ruling at Delhi and they can do everything. (D. Tripathy 2008)

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Similarly, calling upon the putatively affronted honour of Hindus nationwide (and thereby widening the call for a response), the prominent Shankaracharya of Puri, Swami Nishchalananda Saraswati, to whom Christians had appealed fruitlessly for help in quelling the violence, said ‘this pre-planned and well organized attack on Swami Laxmanananda was a gruesome attempt to murder him in cold blood. It is a shame for us’ (D. Tripathy 2008).

Sangh groups also mounted a counter-propaganda campaign against what it viewed as the anti-Sangh bias of the independent, English-language press, what a writer in the BJP journal, Kamal Sandesh called the ‘24x7 secular media’ (R.P. Tripathy 2008: 20). And a VHP press release went even further, deliberately, it seems, promulgating misinformation. The press release claimed that during the riots ‘not a single Christian was attacked’. Moreover, the press release alleged that ‘Christians themselves burnt’ their own houses, knowing the national government would give them relief funds, and hoping by provoking sympathy to get ‘foreign aid’ from Christian organizations. Turning the allegation of Sangh pre-planning on its head, the report alleged that ‘…the poor innocent Christians of such remote areas could not have done such things in a planned way without the support of [some] big foreign funding organization. There is hidden hand of world vision, YMCA, NISWASS2 etc., and church organization behind such incidents (Vishva Hindu Parishad 2008). In short, as in other anti-minority riots in which they have been involved (cf. Brass 1997: 6), Sangh sources portrayed the attacks on Christians as a ‘natural’ (if offi cially regrettable) response to Christian aggression, and accounted for the spread and scope of the violence by depicting it as the result of years of offensive evangelistic efforts by Christian ‘missionaries’.

The BJP’s Kamal Sandesh, for example, suggested that:

Communal tension in Kandhamal district had nothing to do with Christmas celebrations. A conversion convention was organized by the missionaries and it was opposed by the local people. Ignoring the warnings, missionaries and their supporters erected boards and arches in front of Hindu houses. People removed boards and banners in front of their houses and protested to the people who erected it. This action of the tribal Hindus infuriated the Christians and fi rst of all the Christians attacked Hindus and stoned their houses. (R.P. Tripathy 2008)

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Though claims of a ‘conversion convention’ are a rhetorical exagger-ation, conversions and rumours of conversions certainly were involved in the clashes, or at least in the underlying grievances which fueled them.

The Sangh Parivar is surely not solely responsible for the existence of Kandha–Pana tensions. Nor are they entirely to blame for the com-munalization of these tensions. The fact that Pana Christians attacked Saraswati’s (very Hindu) entourage at the beginning of the December riots, for example, gave Sangh leaders a convenient excuse to paint the ensuing violence in the broad strokes of communalism. But Sangh leaders did play the role of ‘conversion specialists’ in two signifi cant ways. First, as elsewhere in India (cf. Basu et al. 1993: 67; Froerer 2007: 12; Kanungo 2006: 149–52), Sangh leaders like Saraswati had long attempted, through a large network or rural schools, to Hinduize and Sanskritize the Adivasi Kandhas and thereby to win them to the Hindutva cause. This contributed to the creation of an environment in which Kandhas and Panas viewed themselves fi rst and foremost as Hindus and Christians. Second, in a process Tambiah (1997: 81) has called ‘transvaluation’, Sangh leaders exacerbated the violence, once it began, by exaggerating the aggression of Christians and by rhetorically linking the Kandhamal violence, through insinuation and sometimes outright fabrication, to broader Hindu anxieties about minorities and the integrity of the nation. The most important of those anxieties, perhaps, had to do with conversion and the growth of Christianity. It is to that issue, therefore, that we now turn.

The Calculus of ConversionThe Calculus of Conversion

As indicated earlier, many in the region explained the anti-Christian attacks as a natural response to the ‘conversion activities’ of ‘missionaries’. This explanation (and implicit justifi cation) is a common one in India, and is regularly applied to incidents of anti-Christian violence. Three interrelated claims generally accompany such an explanation, and did so in the context of the Kandhamal riots as well: (a) that the Christian community is growing at an exponential rate, (b) that ‘conversion activities’ are funded primarily by foreigners (that is, Europeans and Americans) and (c) that these foreign funds are used directly (for eample,

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through bribes) and indirectly (for example, through the provision of social services) to lure naïve and impoverished Hindus to Christianity.

The fi rst of those claims, that the Christian community is growing at an exponential rate in Kandhamal, is supported to some degree by the Indian government’s census fi gures. The Christian community in Kandhamal grew nearly 56 per cent in the decade between 1991 and 2001, according to 2001 census data. This is a signifi cant increase, given that the Indian population only grew at a rate of around 22 per cent in the same period. It is therefore not at all surprising that conversion became such a signifi cant issue in the context of the Kandhamal confl ict, especially since sociologists have shown that violence against minorities correlates more strongly with the growth of a community than with its actual numbers.

The 2001 census reported that Christians constituted 18.2 per cent of Kandhamal’s population, while Hindus constituted 81.4 per cent. In the wake of the Kandhamal clashes, Ram Madhav (2008), national spokesperson of the RSS, exaggerated the size of the Christian community, alleging that Christians made up 27 per cent of the district’s population. By exaggerating the size of the Christian community and the speed of its growth, Madhav and other Sangh leaders turned conversion into an effective ‘confl ict symbol’ (Horowitz 2001: 217) and thereby portrayed the violence in Kandhamal as the work of a dominant Christian com-munity which preyed upon a helpless Hindu minority. In so doing, they also exploited and perpetuated long-standing Hindu anxieties about the survival of Hinduism itself (Mukherji 1909; Robinson and Clarke 2003: 17; Sikand 2003: 98). ‘We are very much worried about the life and property of the minority Hindu community of Daringibadi block of Kandhamal district,’ a VHP press release reported (Vishva Hindu Parishad 2008).

The second and third claims, that ‘conversion activities’ are funded primarily by foreigners and that these foreign funds are used to lure naïve and impoverished Hindus to Christianity, are so closely related that they must be discussed together. Sangh groups have repeatedly called upon the government to document and publicize the amount and specifi c use of foreign money received annually by Christian NGOs. In the wake of the 1998 anti-Christian violence in Dangs, Gujarat, for example, BJP Prime Minister L.K. Advani called for a ‘public debate’ on conversion, and controversially released information about the foreign


funding of Christian institutions (Kesavan 2001: 82, 113). Similarly, in response to the Kandhamal clashes, a VHP press release called upon the Indian government to ‘check foreign funding to the NGOs and Church establishments and frame laws to scrutinize the activities of these organizations’ (Vishva Hindu Parishad 2008). Clearly these calls are partisan, but some Christians have also called for greater transparency in the funding of Indian organizations, believing that if such information included more detail regarding the uses to which the funds were put, and if information on Christian institutions were accompanied by information on foreign funding for Hindu organizations such as the VHP or RSS, which may now equal that given to Christian organizations (cf. Kurien 2007: 144), a more balanced and fruitful public debate on the issue might ensue.

In a televised debate aired on CNN-IBN’s Face the Nation after the fi rst round of riots in Kandhamal, Ram Madhav said, ‘There is absolute freedom for Christians to propagate their religion. But when you indulge in fraudulent conversions, there is a localized reaction’ (CNN-IBN 2008). In the same debate, Madhav referred to a Christian Science Monitor (CSM) article, which, he said, argued that ‘… Christian missionaries’ conversion zeal is responsible for all the violence’ against Christians in India. The article, by Scott Baldauf, describes a ‘new breed’ of independent missionaries in India which puts ‘an emphasis on speed’ and which is ‘returning to practices of proselytizing that were long ago abandoned by the mainline missionaries because they were seen as offensive’ (Baldauf 2008). Baldauf ’s assertions appear to be corroborated by the evidence; even a cursory review of isolated incidents of violence against Christians indicates that ‘independent’ pastors and non-denominational Christian organizations bear the brunt of every day incidents of anti-Christian attacks, in part because their greater aggressiveness and criticism of Hindu beliefs and practices offends Hindu sensibilities, and in part because they are more publicly seeking converts. And yet in the context of anti-Christian riots, the distinction between more culturally sensitive, introverted, mainline Protestant and Catholic Christian organizations and this ‘new breed’ of aggressive evangelists breaks down, largely because the well-established Protestant and Catholic organizations have easily identifi able and targetable institutional centres.

The CSM article indicates that most of the well-established denomin-ations in India, as well as most Western groups that support missionaries


in India, object to the methods of this ‘new breed’ of missionary. For example, in a different article, Rev. Enos das Pradhan, General Secretary of the Church of North India, said that ‘an upsurge in evangelization by missionaries from overseas and from southern India’ had ‘further infl amed tensions in Orissa’ (Greenaway 2008). Not surprisingly, Madhav ignored this part of the story, because it undermines his depiction of Christian in India as uniformly dedicated to aggressively tearing down the edifi ce of Hinduism.

The rhetoric of ‘fraudulent conversion’, as Madhav, Reddy and others use it, implies not merely that evangelists are being offensive, but that they are physically or through fi nancial inducement or promise forcing Hindus to convert. Few would go as far as Tripathy, who alleges that ‘Conversions of poor tribal villagers are being conducted at gunpoint’ (R.P. Tripathy 2008: 20). However, many Hindus believe a Sangh leader like Madhav when he writes, ‘90 per cent of conversions [in] India are through fraud means or allurement…’ (CNN-IBN 2008).

Even before independence, it was common for opponents of Christianity in India to claim that converts to the faith had been lured away, either by the possibility of association (through religion) with the aphrodisiacal power of the colonizer, or by the promise of economic benefi t. That claim crystallized in the 1956 report of the Madhya Pradesh government-sponsored Christian Missionary Activities Inquiry Committee, or the Niyogi Committee Report, as it came popularly to be known. The report, which ran to a thousand pages, quickly became a touchstone for the anti-conversion movement, and remains so today. Arun Shourie’s description and criticism of missionary methods in his popular Missionaries in India (Delhi: Rupa & Co., 1994), for example, is based almost entirely on the Niyogi Committee Report. And the report’s language, which repeatedly invokes the variously articulated triple spectre of conversion by ‘force, fraud, and inducement’, has had a signifi cant infl uence on the way that the issue of Christian conversion in India has been framed ever since. In a substantial number of the incidents of anti-Christian violence in 2007, and certainly during and after the Kandhamal riots, the alleged involvement of Christians in ‘forcible’ and ‘fraudulent’ conversions was provided as both explanation and justi-fi cation for violence.

The Niyogi Report led, indirectly, to the creation of acts regulating conversion in Madhya Pradesh (1968) and Orissa (1967) that established

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the grounds on which to prosecute those who would use underhanded methods or bribes to lure someone to convert (Bauman 2008a: 248–53, 2008b; Jaffrelot 2007: 234; Kim 2003: 61–72). Despite the existence of this ‘Freedom of Religion’ act in Orissa, however, inquirers from the NCM found after the fi rst round of riots in Kandhamal that no offi cials in the region were aware of cases in which it had been used to prosecute missionaries (National Commission for Minorities 2008).

There is therefore little evidence that missionaries of any stripe, even the ‘new missionaries’, are employing obvious, direct and explicit means of inducement as a regular part of their evangelistic strategy (which is not the same as saying that no one ever does). That said, when Madhav and others speak of ‘fraudulent’ conversion, they often refer to more subtle forms of allurement, such as the hope (even if ill-founded) that conversion to Christianity will lead to better economic and employment prospects, better educational prospects for one’s children or easier and cheaper access to health care.

The rhetoric of fraudulent conversion or conversion through allure-ment involves several assumptions. The fi rst assumption is that conver-sion to Christianity brings with it economic benefi ts. It cannot be denied that many, perhaps even a majority of Indian converts to Christianity in the last two centuries have experienced some material benefi t from their movement into the Christian community. There are the obvious examples: offering food to the impoverished famine-victims by Christians with an implicit expectation of conversion, the mission hospital which dispensed medicines to Christians only, or at a reduced rate, the outlaw who received legal help from missionaries in exchange for his conversion (Bauman 2008a: 71–99).

For the sake of balance, however, it is equally important to make it clear that such practices were rejected long ago by nearly all Christian missionaries, foreign and domestic, and that the vast majority of India’s Christians today fi nd such obvious allurements to the faith repulsive and illegitimate. Despite this, Arun Shourie and other opponents of Christianity in India cite the Niyogi Report, published in 1956, as if it contained an accurate description of Christian evangelistic methods today. It simply does not. The Niyogi Report was outdated even in 1956, and the use of it to describe contemporary Christian activities in India is therefore doubly anachronistic.


But what about more subtle forms of allurement? Is it allurement if a sick woman is cured by Christian doctors who also pray over her and thereby suggest that it was the power of Christ that cured her, rather than sound scientifi c medical methods? Is it allurement if an impoverished farmer notices that his Christian neighbours have formed economic cooperatives and are prospering more than he and his Hindu neigh-bours are, and he for this reason decides to convert? Is it allurement if, as David Martin (2002) and Peter Berger (2008) have suggested is the case with Pentecostalism around the world, converts to Christianity are instilled with a modernized form of the ‘Protestant Ethic’ and through ‘hard work, soberness, frugality, and a generally disciplined lifestyle [can] over a generation or so … escape from grinding poverty’ (Berger 2008)? Is it allurement if conversion to Christianity frees former Hindus from traditional prohibitions on certain kinds of work, and thereby allows them to fi nd more lucrative employment?

The second assumption implied in the rhetoric of ‘force, fraud, and inducement’ is that there are never advantages in remaining or becom-ing Hindu. In fact, there are a good number of advantages for Hindus who remain Hindu. It is diffi cult psychologically, for example, to break with one’s family, particularly with one’s parents, and doing so in India often incurs a kind of debilitating social ostracism. There are also the less obvious, but no less real advantages of remaining part of the numerically, politically and economically dominant community of the land. In addition, there is also the fact that for many centuries, Adivasi groups which have become Sanskritized or—to state it more provocatively—converted to Hinduism (Hardiman 2003; Robinson and Clarke 2003: 10–11) through a slow process of assimilation, have by that method become integrated into the more economically developed and powerful Hindu community and thereby gained access to its wealth and social power (Biswamoy Pati 2003: 11–16). And fi nally, of course, there is the reservation system, which as Mukul Kesavan argues, induces Dalits to remain Hindu because their conversion to Christianity would entail the loss of access to reserved seats in political, educational and vocational bodies (2001: 70–72).

The third assumption implied by the rhetoric of ‘force, fraud, and inducement’, is that people choose their religion based on material calculations alone. The assumption is particularly prominent, as Viswanathan (2007: 337) has pointed out, when the people in question


are poor Dalits and Adivasis who are presumed to be crass, gullible and unintelligent. There are many theories of conversion, but various forms of the ‘interest’ theory still dominate sociological analysis of religious change. Developed by Marxist theorists, the interest theory suggests that people’s material interests infl uence their religious behaviour (and therefore their religious affi liation). In my view, the interest theory is fl awed for two reasons: (a) because it implies, problematically, that human behaviour is determined at all times by a rational calculation of ends and means, and (b) because it suffers from a too narrow conception of interest (that is, as material concern).

My own view, as I have indicated elsewhere (Bauman 2008a: 94–98), is that while conversion may often be prompted by the pursuit of interests, such interests are more often intuited than rationally articulated, felt more than consciously considered. Moreover, I agree with Max Weber’s critique of Marx’s conception of interest. While Weber accepted the notion that rational action (which, for him, constituted only one kind of action) was guided by interests, he argued that ideals and values could also be interests, and could therefore sometimes infl uence human behaviour.

For Dalit and tribal Christians, it may be that conversion to Christianity represents, as Viswanathan (1996, 1998) has suggested, a rejection of their social and economic marginalization, dissent from the hegemonic socio-religious order (Burridge 1978: 16–17), or what another scholar has more recently called a ‘community-initiated bailing out’ (Clarke 2003b: 336). But conversion also involves assent to an alternative social ideal.3 In India, as elsewhere, conversion is often less about the acceptance of a new cosmology or theological dogma than about the acceptance of a new social vision, an alternate identity (Downs 2003: 386; Keyes 1993; Merrill 1993). This social vision includes ‘material’ concerns, of course, for what vision of the good life does not include comfort, security and a modicum of prosperity (cf. Mahapatra 1986; Robinson 2003: 303)? But it also entails a revalourized humanity and a new way of living perceived to be more appropriate, given the circumstances (Clarke 1997: 2, 7; Geetha and Rajadurai 1999: 83; Sebastian 2002: 202).

The current debate on allurement in India therefore essentially misses the point. All conversions involve self-interest, as do all non-conversions. The Hindu who remains Hindu is acting in her own per-ceived best interest just as much as the one who converts to Christianity, whether her self-interest is of a material or ideal kind, and whether she


can clearly articulate her interests or not. And so there is inducement and allurement in every direction, and of every kind. A more fruitful debate, therefore, would revolve around what kind of inducement is acceptable and what kind is not.

CONCLUSIONCONCLUSION

The anti-Christian violence in Kandhamal, as elsewhere in India, is premised on and justifi ed by the claim that Christians are enticing poor and uneducated Dalits and Adivasis to the faith by material ‘allurements’, and that the conversion of these communities consti-tutes their denationalization, and therefore represents a threat to the putatively Hindu nation of India. Two basic—and, I would argue, faulty—assumptions are embedded in this premise.

The fi rst is that identities are determined, most importantly and to the exclusion of other possibilities, by religion. It is for this reason that those who believe India is essentially Hindu conceive of conversion as an act of treason. But as I have argued earlier, religion is always only one ele-ment in a person’s or a community’s identity. Moreover, it is a mistake to view religions as discrete entities hermetically sealed one from another; it is clear from the available sociological and anthropological evidence that this is simply not the case. All religions are, at all times, amalgamations. They are works in progress, syntheses drawn from multiple sites of meaning and practice, old and new, orthogenous and heterogenous. Andrew Walls (Walls 1997: 28, see also, Clarke 2003c: 215; Dube and Dube 2003: 250) is therefore correct to describe conversion as a ‘turning’, rather than a break or rupture. And if this is so, then the notion that Christianization entails denationalization (and therefore constitutes a threat to Hinduism or the Indian nation) becomes untenable, useful only as a piece of cynical propaganda.

The second assumption embedded in the standard justifi cation for anti-Christian violence is that religious change comes about only through material inducement. This assumption manifests itself particularly in the context of Dalit or tribal conversion. As I have indicated earlier, self-interest is very much involved in religious conversion. But there are a number of very good reasons why those worried only about their own material self-interest might remain or become Hindu. Moreover, a

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defi nition of self-interest which involves only material considerations is inadequately expansive. The desire for dignity and respect, and the need to make sense of the world and one’s place in it are all interests, interests which cannot be easily disentangled from ‘purely’ material concerns.

It is important to underline the fact that many factors contributed to and exacerbated the violence in Kandhamal. The anti-Christian rhetoric, which I have analysed and criticized here is but one part of the story. Moreover, it must be recognized that this rhetoric is very often perpetuated for cynical and ideological reasons, not merely out of ignor-ance. Further research is necessary to analyse the continued viability of this ideology, that is, the reasons why it remains palatable and appeal-ing to a sizeable (and arguably growing) population of Hindus in India and abroad.

NOTESNOTES

1. It should be clear from the foregoing discussion that I use ‘Hindu–Christian violence’ as a shorthand here, and do not wish to imply that all Hindus and all Christians are engaged in a kind of communal or ‘civilizational’ clash.

2. The National Institute of Social Work and Social Sciences, founded in 1971 by Radhakant Nayak, Congress MP in Orissa.

3. I am indebted to Dr Richard Fox Young for the coupling of assent and dissent. Similarly, Clarke (2003a: 287) speaks of conversion involving a ‘moving away’ and an ‘embrace’.

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About the Editors and Contributors

Rowena Robinson is currently Professor at the Centre for the Study of Social Systems, Jawaharlal Nehru University and has taught at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India for over ten years. She is the author of Con-version, Continuity and Change: Lived Christianity in southern Goa (1998), Christians of India (2003) and Tremors of Violence: Muslim Survivors of Ethnic Strife in Western India (2005). She has edited Themes in the Sociology of Religion (2004) and is co-editor (with Sathianathan Clarke) of Religious Conversion in India: Modes, Motivations and Meanings (2003).

Joseph Marianus Kujur had his MA in Anthropology from Pune Uni-versity. He has worked on the theme of religious conversion and tribal identity for his doctorate from the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, Delhi University. He was on the staff of Jnana-Deepa Vidyapeeth, Pune, for a few years teaching ‘Tribal Thought’ and ‘Anthropology’ to the students of Philosophy. He also taught ‘Tribal Religions’ at the Regional Theological Centres in Ranchi and Patna. For the last fi ve years he headed the Department of Tribal & Dalit Studies at Indian Social Institute, New Delhi. He has to his credit fi ve co-edited books and more than thirty research papers in national and international journals and edited volumes. At present he is a Visiting Researcher at the Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS), Georgetown University, Washington D.C. and is engaged in a comparative study of the identity formation of the two groups of indigenous peoples in the post-colonial period—one in India and the other in Bolivia.

292292 Margins of Faith

Ashok Kumar M. is Doctoral student in Sociology, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Bombay. His area of interest is Sociology of Religion, Caste and Christianity in India.

Chad M. Bauman is Assistant Professor of Religion at Butler University, in Indianapolis, Indiana. He conducts research on Hindu–Christian interactions in the colonial and post-colonial periods. His book, Christian Identity and Dalit Religion in Hindu India, 1868–1947 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008) was named Best Book in Hindu-Christian Studies, 2006–2008, by the Society for Hindu-Christian Studies.

Dr Jose Kalapura, currently Professor of History, St. Xavier’s College, Patna, was formerly Director of Xavier Institute of Social Research (XISR), a centre for research, development, training and action, at Patna. After his doctoral studies in New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, he undertook several research programmes at XISR some of which were published as Bihar Human Rights Documentary Study Series (six books) and Bihar Subaltern Study Series (four books). He has twelve books to his credit (edited or compiled or authored collaboratively) and has over fi fty-fi ve research articles published in books or journals. He has designed two Certifi cate Courses (one for Patna University and another for Nalanda Open University, NOU), both at Patna. His general interest in social sciences aside, his specialization has been in History especially History of the Christian communities in India. He has written three text-books on Christianity for NOU. Currently he is the Executive Editor of the bi-annual journal, Indian Church History Review, published by the Church History Association of India. He was twice awarded (in 2005 and 2007) the I. G. Khan Memorial Prize for the Best Paper in History of Science by the Indian History Congress.

Lancy Lobo is the Director, Centre for Culture and Development, Vadodara. Earlier, he also served as Director, Centre for Social Studies, Surat. He has conducted extensive studies on Dalits, tribes, OBCs and minorities in rural and urban Gujarat. He has authored six books and contributed several articles to professional journals. He was an Inter-national Fellow at the Woodstock Theological Centre, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. during 1999–2000 during which he worked on Globalisation, Hindu Nationalism and Christians in India. He is now working on degradation of forests and its impact on tribals of Gujarat.

About the Editors and Contributors 293293

Lakshmi Bhatia is an Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology, Aditi Mahavidyalaya, University of Delhi. With a doctoral degree in Sociology from the Delhi School of Economics, for the past few years she has been associated with the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla as a Teacher-Associate. Dr Bhatia is the author of a book titled, Schooling and Society in Changing Mizoram (under the Series on Societies in Transition in North-East India, Routledge India, forthcoming). Her areas of interest are cultural politics, sociology of education, gender and peace studies especially with reference to the much neglected North-East India. She is currently engaged in the study of the middle class in India’s North-East.

Mathew N. Schmalz received his Ph.D. in history of religions from the University of Chicago. He is an associate professor of religious studies at the College of the Holy Cross, where he also serves as Director of the College Honors Program. His research focuses on religion and politics in South Asia and Global Catholicism. With Peter Gottschalk, he is co-editor of Engaging South Asian Religions: Boundaries, Appropriations and Resistances (State University of New York Press, forthcoming). Also with Peter Gottschalk, he has developed the ethnographic teaching website ‘Arampur: A Virtual Indian Village on the World Wide Web’ (http://virtualvillage.wesleyan.edu/).

Peggy Froerer is a Lecturer in anthropology at Brunel University. Her current interests include ethnicity and nationalism, education and schooling, childhood and learning, and illness and healing. Her fi rst monograph, Religious Division and Social Confl ict: The Emergence of Hindu Nationalism in a Central Indian Tribal Community, was published by Social Science Press (New Delhi) and Berghahn (London). She is currently working on her second monograph on childhood, education and social mobility in central India.

S.M. Michael is Professor in Cultural Anthropology at the Department of Sociology, University of Mumbai. He was the previous Director of Institute of Indian Culture, Mumbai. He is also the author of several books and articles. His edited book Dalits in Modern India: Vision and Values was a best seller of Sage Publications for the year 2000.

Identity, Conversion and Violence: Dalits, Adivasis and the 2007–08 Riots in Orissa

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