from: justice4 kandhamal <justice4kandhamal@gmail.com>
Kandhamal - a BLOT on Indian judicial system
Seven
innocent Christians from remote Kandhamal district in Odisha state of India are
languishing in jail following the mysterious murder of Swami Laxmanananda
Saraswati on August 23, 2008. These innocent Christians - six of them
illiterates including a mentally challenged - were convicted in 2013 for the
murder touted as a Christian conspiracy.
Following
the Hindu leader's murder, nearly 100 Christians had been killed and 300
churches and 6,000 Christian houses plundered and torched rendering 56,000 homeless in unabated violence
that continued for weeks. Hindu masses - most of them illiterate - had been
incited to take revenge on the Christians after the slain Swami's body was paraded
across Kandhamal for two days along zigzag route.
A third
judge of the trial court - after two judges were transferred – convicted the
accused Christians to life imprisonment for the Swami’s murder in 2013 on the
basis of a fabricated Christian conspiracy theory. The seven convicts
constituted the ‘second batch of killers’, arrested by the police after the
‘first batch killers’ - seven Christians who had been detained for 40 days and
let off after the ‘news’ of Christian conspiracy was publicised across the
nation. In mid 2015, two top police officials - who had relied upon the same
conspiracy theory to ensure the conviction of the accused - have testified
before the Kandhamal judicial Inquiry commission that the allegations were
false.
Yet, the
hearing on the appeal of the innocent convicts has been pending in the Odisha
High Court. Hence, I urge the Chief Justice of India, Odisha High Court and
other constitutional authorities to end the travesty of justice and release the
seven innocents...
Lend your voice to the voiceless by signing the online petition at www.release7innocents.com
Kindly sign and share the petition.....Satyameva Jayate!
The journalist
author brought out the revised edition of the nationally acclaimed book ‘Who
Killed Swami Laxmanananda?’ on December 28, 2017 in New Delhi. Veteran
journalist Kuldip Nayar and leaders
of opposition political parties highlighted the judicial farce and travesty of
justice in Kandhamal exposed by the book, leading to news headlines like Book questions conviction of Christians
in Kandhamal violence, Not silence, time to preserve liberated India, says
Kuldip Nayar, Questions Over Alleged Cover-Up of Kandhamal Killings
