Bhubaneswar: The day after Christmas this year, two tribal women were tied to a tree and beaten up by a crowd that accused them of trying to convert a Hindu man into Christianity under the Remuna police station area of Balasore district in Odisha.
Balasore is represented in the Lok Sabha by former union minister Pratap Sarangi who also won the seat in 2019. It shares borders with Keonjhar and Mayurbhanj, the home districts respectively of chief minister Mohan Majhi and president Draupadi Murmu.
‘Face smeared with cake’
The incident came to light after a video showing the two tribal women in their forties tied to the tree with the face of one of them appearing disfigured went viral. The Inspector-in-Charge (IIC) of Remuna police station Subas Mallick confirmed that the women – Subhasini Singh and Sukanti Singh – were beaten up, and that the face of one of them was smeared with the cake they had allegedly brought with them to the Chhankhanpur hamlet of Mukhura village in Remuna. Locals claimed that had brought the cake to celebrate a conversion which was thwarted. Police detained four persons in connection with the incident and filed two cases under various sections of Bhartiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) and Odisha Freedom of Religions Act, 1967.
The video makes the humiliation of the two women clear. It shows them surrounded by a group of men and women with one of the men wearing a white shirt saying that they were responsible for destroying (Hindu) religion and culture. The man sporting a vermillion tikka on his forehead later raises slogans of “Bharat Mata ki jai” and “Jai Shri Ram.” The women watch helplessly.
‘Christmas picnic’
Chitta Nayak, the assistant sub-inspector (ASI) of Nilgiri police station, said he reached the spot after being asked by his immediate senior sub-inspector Dilip Kumar Senapati to rush to the scene of the incident. “We had received a call from the district police control room that some people were engaging in religious conversion in a particular area where there was tension. I was asked to rush there. I saw two women tied to a tree and brought them with me to our police station but later we realised that the area where the incident took place fell under [the jurisdiction of the] Remuna police station. So we handed them over to the Remuna police,” said Nayak.
This story was originally published in thewire.in. Read the full story here.