Thursday, March 28, 2024

Remembering Graham Staines and his sons on their 24th death anniversary

On this day, 24 years ago, an Australian missionary and his sons were burnt to death by a Hindutva group who falsely claimed he was forcefully converting people to Christianity.

On the intervening night of 22-23 January in 1999 in Manoharpur village in Odisha‘s Keonjhar district, Graham Staines, a 58-year-old Australian Christian missionary, was burnt to death along with his two sons – 10-year-old Phillips and seven-year-old Timothy.

Staines and his sons were sleeping in their station wagon in front of a church in the village, when the car was attacked by the Hindutva mob. Staines and his sons had awakened and apparently tried to escape, but were prevented from doing so by the angry mob of Hindu men.

He was travelling to the village of Kendujhar with his sons, who were on a break from their schooling in the hill city of Ooty. His wife and daughter did not accompany them on the journey, having decided to remain behind in the town.

The mob was led by Dara Singh, a local leader with alleged links to Bajrang Dal, a Hindu nationalist militant organisation. Dara Singh claimed that Staines was involved in forced conversions of adivasis.

Graham Staines who had come to India from Australia in 1965, was a Christian missionary. He worked with leprosy patients in Mayurbhanj district in Odisha for nearly three decades. His family had opened a leprosy home in Baripada and his work among tribals and lepers was well-known.

The Wadhwa Commission formed by Union government found that although some adivasis had been baptised at Staines‘s camps, there was no evidence of forced conversions.

Staines’s widow Gladys also denies forced conversions ever happened. Gladys continued to live and work in India caring for those who were poor and were affected by leprosy until she returned home to her native country of Australia in 2004. In 2005, she was awarded the fourth highest honor a civilian can receive in India, the Padma Shree, in recognition for her work in Odisha.

In her affidavit before the Commission on the death of her husband and two sons, Gladys Staines stated: “The Lord God is always with me to guide me and to help me try to accomplish the work of Graham, but I sometimes wonder why Graham was killed, and what also made his assassins behave in such a brutal manner on the night of the 22nd/23rd of January 1999.
… It is far from my mind to punish the persons who were responsible for the death of my husband Graham and my two children. But it is my desire and hope that they would repent and be reformed.“

The Christian groups and human rights watchdogs accused the Indian government of failing to prevent violence against Christians, and for exploiting the sectarian tensions that existed at the time for their own political gain.

Dara Singh, who was convicted of the murders, was treated as a hero by the hard-line Hindus and reportedly protected by some villagers.

A trial court in Bhubaneswar sentenced the convicted ringleader of the mob, Dara Singh, to death by hanging for killing Staines and his two sons. In 2005, the Orissa High Court commuted the sentence to life imprisonment. The Supreme Court upheld the High Court decision on 21 January 2011.

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