Christian refugees flee Orissa

Fear turns Orissa refugees into migrants

By Rajesh Ramachandran in Kandhamal
MAIL TODAY October 9, 2008

HATRED and the misery it begets seem to have travelled the breadth of the country from Gujarat to Orissa.
Riots here have become comparable in their terrible scale of suffering to those of Gujarat because of the sheer number of the homeless and their migration.
Over 27,000 people are refugees in just one district.
Many more are missing in the forests. Worse, despite the governments claims of normalcy, they are not returning home, but are fleeing the district and even the state.
At the peak of the riots that began on August 24, there were 17 relief camps housing 27,000 people. Now there are 10 with around 13,000 refugees.
But the figures fail to tell the tale of migration. Those who are leaving the camps are not going home as the administration insists. Some may have returned, but the overwhelming majority is seeking safety.
There is a steady stream of Dalit Christians reaching the state capital, Bhubaneswar, only to flee further from fear.
Their houses have been looted, flattened and in some cases, the rains have erased all traces of habitation.
Even a conversion to the Sangh Parivar brand of Hinduism, a pre- requisite to step back into the village, is no guarantee for life and land.
According to those who run the relief camps, there are few cases of families returning to their villages. “ They are going to Kerala, Goa, Surat, Bangalore, Pune and elsewhere. It is a lie that they are going home.
Those who have relatives in Bhubaneswar stay there while those who have been working in other states are taking away their families to their workplaces.
There are many from Kandhamal who are working in Kerala, in the textile mills of Surat and elsewhere,” said a relief worker who didnt want to be identified.
In a desperately poor milieu, many Dalit Christians are the educated rural middle class.
Theirs has been a descent from decent living to destitution.
From pucca houses to cramped tents, most of them like Asya Digal at the Vijaya camp in Raikia look distracted.
His glassy gaze hides his proud past and the present pain of loss. Once a farmer who
fed his family and a skilled mason who had a three- bedroom pucca house, Asya now shares his tent with his grownup daughters.
At the G. Udaigiri camp, Jana Naik was ashamed to talk. He retired from the Army, his wife is a government school teacher and they had enough land to have never bought rice.
The murder of two of his cousins by the rioters drove him first into the forests and then into the camp.
“ I will not go anywhere. How can I go? What will happen to my standing crop and my land?” He refused to be photographed.
Unlike Naik, Dilip Pradhan is a tribal Christian whose family got stranded in the crossroads of the ethno- communal strife.
Ethnically, he ought to be with the arsonists but his faith sent him to the relief camp.
He works at Thrissur in Kerala and desperately hopes that the government will help his family go back to the village because he cant afford to shift them.
But nobody, neither the state nor the central government, has instilled any hope of home for Kandhamals refugees.