From August 25 to now, Kandhamal district in Orissa has been the stage for organized violence against Christians. That adds up to one-and-a-half months. A week after the violence began, by September 1, the government of Orissa reported that more than 12,000 refugees from the violence had been fed in relief camps. Five weeks later, that figure has risen.

The Vishwa Hindu Parishad has an explanation for the burnt homes and churches that have led to the Christian exodus into relief camps. According to The Hindu, the VHP central unit secretary, Mohan Joshi, said, “Christians are setting their own homes on fire to get good compensation. There are rivalries among Christian groups. They are attacking and killing each other.”

Every conflict can be explained in more than one way, but historians know that one way of sifting out bad explanations is to look for plausibility. Here, we’re being asked to believe that the thousands of extremely poor people who make up the populations of these relief camps are self-arsonists running a compensation scam. This is not just a bad explanation; it’s an explanation made in bad faith.

There’s another, more respectable, sort of explanation for the prolonged violence that treats it as you would a natural disaster. This explanation, which doubles as an alibi for the inability/unwillingness of the state government to stop the violence, goes like this. Kandhamal is a large, inaccessible district where the absence of good roads and the presence of a jungly landscape make it impossible for agents of law and order (that is, the police and the administration) to get to the affected villages and settlements to impose order. This was the explanation offered by Jay Panda, Biju Janata Dal MP and spokesperson, on more than one televised discussion of the chronic violence in Kandhamal. A related factor, according to Panda, was the Central government’s tardiness in sending CRPF reinforcements requested by the state governments.

It would be reasonable to give Naveen Patnaik and Jay Panda and the BJD the benefit of the doubt if it weren’t for the fact that the administration seems to have done so little with the powers and police forces that it did have at its disposal. The state government allowed the assassinated Swami Laxmananda Saraswati’s funeral procession to pass over 150 kilometres in a district electric with sectarian tension. This triggered off a massive campaign of violence against the Christian community. A nun was raped in front of policemen who did nothing. Organized bands of Hindu militants carried out night-time attacks on village after village with impunity. The larger question is this: why was Kandhamal, which had erupted in violence as recently as the last week of December 2007, so thinly policed?

Kandhamal district in Orissa is demographically unusual. The tribal community after which it is named, the Kandhas, are numerically the largest group in the district. The Kandhas are Hindus and their political loyalties lie with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and its affiliates who have worked amongst them for decades. The Panos, a community of Dalits, are mainly Christian, and while estimates vary, the Christian population of Kandhamal is estimated to be between one-fifth to one-fourth of its total population. This is a high figure compared to the figure for Orissa, where Christians constitute just over 2 per cent of the population.

The success of the RSS and its affiliates on the one hand and of churches and missionary organizations on the other, in influencing two distinct communities who often see their material interests to be at variance with each other, has made Kandhamal a tense place. These are both very poor communities who live in a district where the State has abdicated its ameliorist function: schools, roads, dispensaries, all the institutions that represent a responsible and caring government, are conspicuous by their absence. The absence of the State in matters of welfare is one reason why denominational organizations have been so successful in establishing themselves in Kandhamal. Even so, the Panos and the Kandhas look to the State for affirmative action and jobs, and since life in a straitened district seems like a zero-sum game, any concession to either community sparks resentment in the other.

This history, this social context, is often worked into accounts of the violence that has repeatedly made the headlines since August. Jay Panda referred to the long-standing tension between tribals and non-tribals, and warned against the dangers of simplifying a complex social history into a communal conflict. The problem with this apparently reasonable warning is that in Kandhamal, a complex social history is being violently simplified through communal conflict. There are two communities in Kandhamal, but only one is the object of sustained, organized violence. A social history of the district might help us understand the way in which tribal/non-tribal tensions have been exacerbated by religious affiliation, but it doesn’t explain a coordinated campaign of ethnic cleansing that renders a large fraction of the Christian community homeless, marooned in wretched refugee camps, unable to go home.

Unable to go home because Hindu militant groups announce with impunity that they won’t be allowed to return unless they reconvert to Hinduism. The refugee camps, filled with fearful Christians, are symbolic of the place of minorities in the Hindutva project. Guruji Golwalkar, the RSS’s most revered sarsanghachalak, wrote long ago that non-Hindus “may stay in the country wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment, not even citizens’ rights”. The successful marginalization and subordination of Muslims in Gujarat has helped create a state where Muslims live, de facto, as second-class citizens, on Hindu sufferance.

What we’re seeing in Orissa is the attempt to replicate Gujarat’s ‘success’ and Golwalkar’s object on a smaller scale. Thus, Christians are driven out of their homes to live in limbo as destitute, vagrant wards of the State in camps, or else allowed to return to their villages as neo-Hindus purged of an alien possession. This is, or should be, unacceptable. The use of murder, rape and arson against civilian communities to achieve a political object (in this case ethnic cleansing) is a form of terror, and this republic’s government needs to treat it as such.

The prime minister has declared his intention to visit Orissa so he can see for himself if the state government was discharging its responsibilities. The measure he should use to make this judgment is not the mere absence of violence, but evidence to show that Naveen Patnaik’s government is actually rehabilitating Christian refugees in the homes from which they’ve been driven. If the government of Orissa seems unwilling to do this, or (as it has done in the matter of law and order) eagerly declares its helplessness in the absence of Central aid, perhaps the government of India should take it at its word and directly assume the responsibility of governing that state.