Key Points
On January 20, 1999, 58-year-old Australian missionary Graham Staines and his two young sons, Timothy (6) and Phillip (10) arrived in Manoharpur, deep in the middle of a dense sal forest, to conduct a jungle camp to spread the teachings of the Bible..
On the night of January 22, as Staines and his two sons slept in their station wagon next to the church, mobs entered the village chanting slogans of Bajrang Dal Zindabad and Dara Singh Zindabad, and burnt them alive..
Fifty-one people were arrested in the months that followed, and in 2003, the leader of the mob, Dara Singh, a right wing zealot from Etawah in Uttar Pradesh who had nine previous cases against him that included attacking cattle-laden vehicles, was sentenced to death..
In many ways, Hansdahs conversion frames the politics of Manoharpur a village which struggles to escape its violent past; where publicly, incidents of rancour are few and far between; but where, beneath the surface, the fault lines that led to the murder of Staines and his children still simmer..
In 2008, there was another wave of Hindu-Christian tension in central Odisha when 43 people were killed in Kandhamal after violence spread in the aftermath of the murder of VHP leader Swami Laxmananda Sarwaswati by alleged Maoists..
