Through the padlocked gates of the Tikabali relief camp. Picture by Sankarshan Thakur

Tikabali (Kandhamal), Oct 11: The last rites of Puja aren’t done yet; hamlets scattered across the rain-swept hills are still ringing with festivity — a rousing crescendo of near and distant drums and bells, merry processions erupted rivulet-like in the narrow lanes, redolent in scented smoke and vermilion and the tinkle-tink of cymbals. Mahishasura slain and the victory over evil established at the bloodied end of her sparkling spearhead, Durga, mother benevolent, protector supreme, is on her way to yearly consecration, held atop a rickety cart swilling over with the devout.

From the ringside another congregation of the devout watches the triumphal march of the devi. But they belong to another god and they must remain fenced behind the chained gates of the local school ground, a nervous eddy at odds with the procession’s heady pitch.

This blessed season has come trailing a curse on them and caution is in order. If they are slightly shivered by the sight of the passing tableau it is probably with good reason. It cannot be that too many have missed out on their assigned part in the high metaphors of Dussehra; they are at the wrong end of it — demons deserving of destruction, beef-eating, cross-kissing Christians. Banish them!

Kandhamal, this Puja, has been doing its own quelling of evil, taking arms on behalf of one god and waging unsanctioned war on another. There is quiet, but pervasive, celebration of the manner in which it has dealt with its Christians — their churches vandalised, their dwellings razed, their women raped and molested, their numbers reduced, their will trembled.

Bhagwan Sah, a contractor paying court at the block development office, is at peace with the violence and plain in his aversions: “These people are not right for us, you see, they are alien, alien culture, alien habits. They kill cows and drink their blood and they sing carols at their weddings. We don’t like it. And they are growing. We don’t like it.” A police officer who wouldn’t be named attests Sah with a sombre summing up — “They have become a problem, they have to behave.”

But it isn’t the flowering of plurality that has wracked the Kandhamal hills, it is the wrath of the god of sameness. Orissa is next only to Himachal Pradesh in its Hindu preponderance, at 95 per cent, probably the largest Indian state with such an overwhelming bias in demography. Two-odd per cent Christians state-wide stick in the side like a thorn, 20 per cent in Kandhamal are a poke in the eye.

Intolerance of another way of being rings through Subhash Patra’s agitated intimations of doom. “Churches are springing all over, they have their own schools, their own festivals, their own kind of food.” The young college student from Phulbani is near distraught, but you could afford a laugh at his anxieties. “If they are not stopped now, they will take over, there will be no cows left, there will be no Durga puja. You know pastor Joey killed a cow and ate all of it in one night because he did not want to get caught?”

Pastor Joey killed a cow. But nobody knows who pastor Joey is in these parts — pastors there are many but none named Joey to our inquiries — and nobody owns up to the cow he killed. But student Subhash Patra knows for sure because someone told him. And now the cow is about to go extinct. Myth and half-truth, farce and fiction — ingredients of a killer brew that is nothing but rumour masquerading as wisdom. It is this that brought a ghastly end to Graham Staines and his sons in January 1999. It is this that cost Reverend Arul Doss his life months later. It is this that unleashed the deadly rumble in the Kandhamal hills last December; it is rolling ruinously till today.

“Agreed India is a secular country,” concedes Ashok Sahu, former IPS officer and newly-anointed high priest of Hindu activism in Orissa, president of the Hindu Jagaran Samukhya, “But it is Hindu too, it is a Hindu country too, why should we not fight conversions? Christian money is coming from abroad, it is being used to kill Hinduism. In Kandhamal they are running anti-Hindu shops, grabbing land, buying Hindus out. This has to be stopped. Why are they being allowed to convert us?”

Rage comes easily to Sahu but he may be guilty of bias against reason. Ask the converted of Kandhamal and they will tell you. They will tell you it isn’t so much the allurements offered by the other as the punishments meted out by their own. The Christians of Kandhamal, and probably elsewhere in Orissa, are mostly Dalits, weary of suffering at the hard toe-end of Hindu caste structure. “Why, we were untouchables,” protests Ujri Digal in defence of the choice his grandparents made, “Not allowed into homes and temple, beaten, exploited, treated worse than animals.

The Church has given us place and pride. And if that counts as allurement, if free education and healthcare count as allurement, yes we have been lured into Christianity, but we are happy where we are.”

At the moment, though, Ujri and his mates in the tented encirclement of the Tikabali relief camp — more than a thousand uprooted souls — are also a trifle anxious. The last rites of the season aren’t quite over yet.