Narayanpur, Chhattisgarh: On 2 January, when 34-year-old Nareshbati Netam fled her home for the second time in a span of 15 days, she had only to grab the navy blue suitcase she had already packed days earlier. In it were some clothes, and all the rice they had at home, about 10 kg. She and her husband Danuram Netam, a farmer, hoisted their three children on the back of a neighbour’s tractor before climbing in themselves.
“We left at 2 am, in complete darkness, hiding under a jute mat on the tractor,” said Netam, a tall woman with a tired, scared face. “If we hadn’t left, we would have been beaten to death in the morning. We were told to leave Christianity or leave the village.”
Netam, of Bhatpal village in Narayanpur block of south Chhattisgarh’s Narayanpur district, was first forced out of her home on 18 December 2022. She was among more than 400 Christians from 19 villages of the adjoining districts of Kanker, Kondagaon and Narayanpur who fled their homes after mobs of local tribals backed by Hindu right-wing vigilantes threatened to kill tribals who had converted to Christianity.
For two days, Netam and other families who fled protested in front of the district collector’s office in Narayanpur, before the authorities set up a makeshift shelter. Several of those who fled lived in churches in the region, fellow Christians’ homes, relatives’ homes in nearby villages or hid in the dense forest around their villages. District authorities sent many in the shelters back home later, promising to ensure law and order in their village.
When Christians returned to their villages around the third week of December, they lived in fear of fresh attacks, attending weekly mass in pillaged churches. Netam returned to find her paddy crop, painstakingly transplanted and tended to over months, harvested without her knowledge by other villagers. Her one-acre farmland was empty. “What will I feed my children?” she said.
Netam, and several others, were threatened once again as 2022 wound down, and on 2 January, she fled her home for the second time. Police and district officials sent her back home on 15 January from a makeshift shelter in Narayanpur town, a 4 metre X 4 metre single room that she shared with another family.
Back in Bhatpal village, 280 km south of Chhattisgarh’s state capital Raipur, where the family of five lives in a brick house with a tin-roof, surrounded by forest and farm lands, Netam said her children are scared to step out of the tiny home. “My oldest is 11 years old. He understands (what is happening) though the younger ones don’t,” she told Article 14. “Every night we were at the shelter, he urged me to never go back.” Eleven-year-old Anukalp’s friends no longer visit, and the boy has stopped venturing out to play. Anukalp, a student at the village primary school, hasn’t gone to school since December as his parents fear another attack.
During the latter half of 2022, members of the Janjaati Suraksha Manch, a tribal group working against religious conversions to Christianity, launched violent attacks against Christians (here, here, here) in at least four districts of south Chhattisgarh. The group claims to be seeking to save Hinduism.
At least three churches were vandalised and nearly a hundred homes attacked, according to Christian groups. After policemen were assaulted at two locations during scuffles, five first information reports (FIRs) were registered, invoking sections of law pertaining to punishment for rioting, obscenity in public places, assault, obstruction and use of criminal force against a public servant.
This story was originally published in article-14.com. Read the full story here