Despite election season, Kandhamal stays calm

BALIGUDA, KANDHAMAL: A vinyl poster of Swamy Laxmanand Saraswati and a lone flag on one corner of a boundary wall are all that is there as sign; miss those, and you miss the ashram. Inside the 10-acre part-ashram, part-girls-school, at Jalaspata near Tumidibandha, it is an idyllic pastoral scene. Girls, mostly in saffron dresses, take a break from classes; some tend cows, some fetch water and others sit chatting on a bench.
The Vishwa Hindu Parishad in-charge is away visiting relatives. But for one, all other teachers are new. The Sanskrit teacher, Guruma Nalini Acaharya, who has been around for seven-eight years now, was also away on August 23, 2008 when Naxals killed the Swamy, an influential and untiring critic of Christian conversions of locals, and four others, triggering ethnic and communal riots that engulfed Kandhamal in Odisha for months and led to the death of 38 according to official records.

Suspecting Christian hand in the VHP leader’s death, rioters said to be Hindu allegedly raped a nun of the Divyajyoti Pastoral Centre at Baliguda, 40 km from the Ashram. Six year hence, only a burnt Bolero in the campus remains a testimony to those days. "Forgive and forget, we are taught. But if you have experienced the riots, you can never forget them. Politics though stays outside the door," says a priest at the centre.

Campaign vans have hit the sparsely populated countryside. Lone women collecting mahua flowers ignore them. Christians who were driven out of their homes near Badabanga, and now live in a new separate colourful colony built for them, also refuse to rise to the bait. "Modi? who?" they ask. Life in Kandhamal has seemingly moved on.

Odisha, it is said, never votes on caste and religious lines. Though ethnic and economic fault lines between tribes and Dalits always existed, Kandhamal was no exception until the 2009 election. The riots and BJP’s alleged involvement in anti-Christian violence were one of the reasons, at least the one cited by Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik, for the BJD to break ties with BJP. The election that followed saw BJP’s fortunes dwindle in the state, down to six assembly seats. In Kandhamal, though, it won two seats.

The backward, largely tribal, district consists of G Udaigiri, Baliguda and Phulbani assembly constituencies, while the Kandhamal Lok Sabha constituency also includes Boudh, Kantamal, Daspalla and Bhanjanagar. "One fallout of the riots is no major party is willing to field either Dalit or tribal person as Lok Saba candidate," says Kailash Chandra Dandapat of the NGO Jagruti, who has worked here for 32 years.

Post the riots, says a bureaucrat who worked in the region at that time, the state reached out to the people directly and intensified development efforts. To undo historic economic imbalances, Odisha gave tribal people titles to 85,000 acres of land -- the largest ever implementation of the Forest Rights Act in any district. Communities though continue to seek greater entitlement to resources. A social worker at Janavikas, another NGO in the region, says: "The belief that Dalits have usurped significant tribal land is a myth."

Former BJD Sarpanch Khogeshwar Naik is doing the rounds of Kandhamal, a saffron cap on his head and a Modi badge pinned to his shirt. "When Vajpayee was campaigning to become Prime Minister, he too said Ram Mandir-Ram Mandir but didn’t get to build it. When Modi sits on that chair, he'll have to abide by the Constitution which says you cannot discriminate on caste, gender, religious lines," he says. There hasn’t been an overnight ideological shift – he is just angry because party MLA-aspirant Pradip Pradhan stayed on his two phones when visiting him. "They are offering me Rs 500 to return, let them offer Rs 25,000. I'll sit at home but not campaign for BJD."