Mumbai: On April 13, a Christian delegation met President Droupadi Murmu at the Rashtrapati Bhavan. Soon after the meeting, the Christian delegation, led by Delhi Archbishop Anil Couto, issued a press statement giving details of the conversation that his team had with the president during the less than 10-minute-long meeting.
Along with apprising the president about the many targeted attacks on the people belonging to the Christian community, the delegate in a press statement said that they also spoke to her about the 1999 incident in which Australian Christian missionary Graham Staines and his two minor children were killed in Odisha.
While the delegate has claimed that the president had expressed “regret (at) her inability at the time to avert” the “tragic loss of (Australian Christian missionary) Graham Staines”, The Indian Express on April 20, Thursday, reported that the president’s statements on the issue were “misconstrued”.
The newspaper quoted a “Rashtrapati Bhavan source” in the story. The story, however, doesn’t carry Murmu’s quote or the actual conversation that took place between the president and the delegate.
The Wire has written to the president’s office to clarify its stand but has not received any response yet. The story will be updated as and when the president’s office responds.
In an interview with The Wire, Michael Williams, president of the United Christian Forum and one of the members of the delegation to meet the president, said, “I was pleasantly surprised that the president was aware of a lot of persecution that has been happening in the country.”
Williams said he was surprised by the sudden turn of events. He further refuted the claims made in the Indian Express story. “No one from the delegate has received any intimation from the Rashtrapati Bhavan regarding this. President Murmu was generous and had given the delegation a patient hearing. The press release that we had issued on April 13 reflects only what was discussed with the president.”
The delegate had met the president with a memorandum and had discussed the rising incidents of violent attacks on the community, especially in Uttar Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. Williams said while the attack continues, as many as 11 states have come up with the anti-conversion law.
Most states, in recent times, came up with state laws under the pretext of controlling “conversion” into other religions using “coercion and temptations”. For example, in Haryana, there is a provision looking specifically at “preventing so-called ‘love jihads’,” a conspiracy theory that claims Muslim men lure Hindu women for marriage to convert them into their religion.
Williams said the anti-conversion law existed since 1967 but there has not been a single conviction, which is indicative of the fact that the charges made against the community are “baseless” and the law is only being used as a “tool of harassment”.
In early 1999, Graham Staines, a 58-year-old Australian Christian missionary, who worked with leprosy patients in Odisha for over 30 years, was burnt to death along with his two sons, 10-year-old Phillips and seven-year-old Timothy. This incident in Manoharpur, a small village in Keonjhar district in Odisha, was one of the deadliest attacks on the community in the country.
The far-right group Bajrang Dal was accused of inciting the mob against the Staines family and the judicial commission set up to inquire into the killing had held Dara Singh guilty of the murder.