Priest murdered in Indian village

Christian Century, Sept 22, 1999

The murder of a Catholic priest in the early hours of September 9, in the village of Jamudhi in the state of Orissa in eastern India has sent shock waves through the nation's Christian community. Christian groups are condemning the death as another example of religious intolerance. The priest, Arul Doss, a 35-year-old Indian missionary, was killed in the same general area where Australian Baptist missionary Graham Stuart Staines and his two sons died in January when their jeep was set afire.

Only a week before the killing, residents of Orissa were outraged by reports that Hindu extremist Dara Singh, who is alleged to have taken part in the Staines murders, had chopped off the hands of a Muslim trader and burnt him alive in his shop.

"We are shocked at this," said the local bishop, Thomas Thiruthalil of Balasore, concerning Arul Doss's murder. The bishop, who traveled 300 kilometers to the scene of the crime as soon as he learned of it, described the priest as a "good missionary dedicated to the local tribals." He was attacked as he spent the night in a village church, accompanied by a catechist. "At 2 A.M., on hearing noises, they tried to run away. But the father [priest] was shot with [poison] arrows and died on the spot." The catechist was injured. According to reports, 15 Christian families live in Jamudhi, which lies some 700 miles southeast of New Delhi, the Indian capital.

"We are distressed that such crime continues to occur despite assurances ... that adequate steps are being taken to ensure the safety and security of ... religious persons," Archbishop Alan Basil de Lastic of Delhi, chairperson of the United Christian Forum for Human Rights, stated in a letter to India's prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, immediately after the murder was reported.

De Lastic, who is also president of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of India, urged the federal and the Orissa state governments "to restore public confidence" and to prevent "such macabre violence designed to intimidate the peaceful minority communities engaged in development work among the most deprived and marginalized." The murder of missionaries, the archbishop emphasized, is "more than a law-and-order problem." The killings pointed, he said, to "an ideology of hatred that has spread all over the country."

A police spokesman in the Orissa state capital of Bhubaneshwar said on September 3 that two people had been arrested and that more arrests were expected. However, a second police official said that no one had as yet been arrested, but the killing appeared to stem from separate Christian and Hindu celebrations of Nuakhai, a Hindu festival.

Further reports indicate that Father Arul Doss was attacked because of his "illegal" involvement in converting Hindus to Christianity. According to a report in Newsroom, a British-based evangelical-oriented news service, the top police official in Orissa state claimed that the priest was "involved in illegal conversions." Dilip Mahapatra, Orissa director-general of police, told the Times of India newspaper that he had evidence that Arul Doss had violated a 1967 Orissa law that prohibits forced conversions. No details were provided by the Newsroom report, however. Newsroom said the priest had been converting "low-caste Hindu tribal people" for four years.

Hindus, who account for more than 80 percent of India's nearly 1 billion people, have clashed repeatedly with Christians across the vast Indian subcontinent. Christians say Hindu extremists are at fault; Hindus say Christians bribe or pressure poor Indians to convert to Christianity. Christians, both Catholics and Protestants, constitute roughly 2 percent of India's population.