The keenly-awaited verdict is pronounced at last. The trial judge has found Dara Singh and his twelve associates guilty of the murder of Graham Staines and his two sons: Philip and Timothy. He has, thus, validated the findings of the Wadhwa Commission that inquired into this event. The extent of punishment the culprits are to receive is not known yet. But that hardly concerns us here.

Justice requires that the instigators of a crime too be held guilty along with its perpetrators. For all practical purposes, Dara Singh was the hired assassin of a certain ideology. Sure enough, he was not engaged specifically to finish off Staines, like professional hit-men are. But it was on account of his ideological fanaticism that Dara, who did not have any personal grudge against Staines or his sons, felt obliged to eliminate this friend of the lepers of Baripada. Consider this. Dara was a native of Utter Pradesh. He was sent to Orissa on a specific mission: to spread the Sangh Parivar ideology in the tribal belt of Orissa.

At the time of committing this murder, Dara had already become a dreaded leader, as the Wadhwa Commission Report points out, of Bajrang Dal with at least eleven major criminal cases pending against him. This explains two things, which are otherwise inexplicable. First, Dara enjoyed immunity to law for the crimes he committed, one after the other. Second, he came to the conclusion that Graham Staines was “a threat to Hinduism and Indian culture”. Justice Wadhwa, who was a sitting judge of the Supreme Court when he enquired into this murder, states explicitly in his Report that it was this resentment that motivated Dara to kill Graham. The lepers of Baripada would still have had their friend, if these two factors had not reinforced each other.

That being the case, we stop short of the whole truth if we slap the responsibility for this ‘murder most foul’ wholly on Dara and his associates. Dara is incomplete and harmless without the Hindutva ideology, of which he is only an ardent camp follower. In the wake of the murder, several meetings were organized, including one in the Constitution Club, Delhi, to express solidarity with Dara by those who felt obliged to him. Staines was nobody to Dara, personally or professionally. The murder was the product of mere prejudice; and that prejudice was bred by Hindutva alone. The murder of Graham Staines is, hence, utterly inexplicable if we exclude the ideological motive behind it. Of course, you cannot hang an ideology, unlike an assassin, for an act of crime. But a sane society with any commitment to justice has to rein in ideologies that preach hate and instigate the murder of innocent and defenseless people. Even more importantly, every religious-minded person has to see crime done in the name of his religion as a crime against his religion.

Apart from seeing the murder of Staines in a wider perspective, we must also reckon some key issues that emerge from this act of perfidy that has defamed us globally. There is, in the first place, the orchestrated defiance of the rule of law. For years together, Dara had lived in this tribal belt in total defiance of law, intimidating, humiliating and hurting those he disliked at will. He was a law unto himself. Though he was wanted by the police in several cases, he could roam around freely and pursue his agenda without let or hindrance. According to a version of the event we gathered from Manoharpur, it was at a camp for school children Dara Singh organized in Takurmunda, some 17 KMs from Manoharpur, that the plot to kill Staines was hatched. Communal atrocities cannot happen in a society that respects rule of law. The murder of the rule of law was re-enacted yet again in Modi’s Gujarat for over three months in 2002. Its hangover continues to this day and justice is beyond the reach of the victims. The situation has proved serious enough to exhaust the patience of the Supreme Court. In extreme exasperation, the Chief Justice of India instructed Modi to deliver justice or to quit. Hindutva imperils the sanity of our society by glorifying the subversion of the rule of law. The demolition of Babri Masjid was a slap on the face of the rule of law; yet our Prime Minister felt it appropriate to romanticize it, on the floor of the Parliament, as an outbreak of nationalistic fervour!

The second issue that emerges from this bleak scenario is that of the threat that communalism holds out to religious freedom. Majoritarian communalism has the potential to rob minorities of their religious freedom. The ideologues of Hindutva derive much mileage from the Supreme Court verdict of 1976 [Stanislav vs. State of Madhya Pradesh] that excluded conversion from the ambit of religious freedom as envisaged in Article 25. Graham Staines, as per Dara’s (mis)information, was converting people; thereby posing a threat to Hinduism. The Wadhwa Commission Report exonerated Staines of this baseless allegation. And we who have visited Staines’ leprosarium in Baripada since his death, and interacted with its 86 inmates, can vouchsafe this to be true. Not one of them had converted to Christianity, even though they all regarded Staines as their “father”. The irony of this scenario is that Dara Singh can be free to enjoy his version of religious freedom, the freedom to blackmail and kill; whereas Graham Staines has to forego the freedom to practise his religion, which mandates him to care for the lost and the least. This is the curse of communalism: it degrades religious freedom into a license to do wrong but denies the freedom to practice social justice and philanthropy. Dara Singh has not created this aberration; instead, this aberration has created Dara Singh.

In a subtle sense, therefore, Dara Singh too is a victim. This is the truth that underlies Gladys Staines’ readiness to forgive him and his associates. At a news conference in Delhi, where journalists vied with each other to interact with this living saint, she quoted Jesus’ words from the Cross: “Father, forgive; for they know not what they do.” That is literally true of Dara Singh. Surely, he did not know that he was killing a dedicated social worker who was selflessly taking care of his forlorn Hindu brothers. He did not know that he was robbing a saintly lady of her husband and sons. And, above all, he did not know that, in killing Graham, he was also fatally wounding Hinduism. Is not the whole of humankind, according to Hinduism, one vast family (vasudhaiva kutumbakam)? In that case, are not Dara and Staines brothers? Is that not the reason why Gladys wants him forgiven? But who is responsible for Dara’s murderous ignorance? Who has filled his heart with hate and his eyes with darkness? To pronounce Dara Singh guilty is, therefore, to also indict the ideological ventriloquists who used him in this abominable way.