Urgent cries for help from Orissa state in eastern India are gradually turning to sober and traumatised reflection. One email in my inbox this week began with the haunting line, ‘How a 20 year old girl was burnt to death by a cheering crowd’. As the dust begins to settle after the furious communal violence which has afflicted Orissa, questions are being asked about how this could have been allowed to happen.
NGOs, religious leaders and journalists repeatedly warned of the tinderbox Orissa had become, so long as police failed to prosecute extremist Hindus for their part in instigating widespread anti-Christian attacks around Christmas 2007. Then suddenly it all exploded, in a tragic bloodbath of killing, gang-rape, arson and destruction carried out by rampant and uncontrolled mobs, this time worse than before.
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