Twenty-six years ago, on the same day, Australian missionary Graham Staines and his two pre-teen sons were burned to death by violent Hindu groups in one of the worst hate crimes recorded in India.
On the intervening night of 22-23 January 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 Philip 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 woke up and apparently tried to escape but were prevented from doing so by the angry mob of Hindu men.
He was traveling 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 organization. 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 leprosy patients was well known.
The Wadhwa Commission, formed by the Union government, found that although some Adivasis had been baptized at Staines’s camps, there was no evidence of forced conversions.
Staines’s widow, Gladys, also denies that forced conversions ever happened. She continued to live and work in India, caring for the poor and those affected by leprosy, until she returned to her native country of Australia in 2004. In 2005, she was awarded the Padma Shri, India’s fourth-highest civilian honor, in recognition of 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.”
Christian groups and human rights watchdogs accused the Indian government of failing to prevent violence against Christians and of exploiting the sectarian tensions that existed at the time for political gain.
Dara Singh, who was convicted of the murders, was treated as a hero by hard-line Hindus and was reportedly protected by some villagers.
A trial court in Bhubaneswar sentenced Dara Singh, the convicted ringleader of the mob, 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’s decision on 21 January 2011.
