(left) Asha Lata Nayak and her son (right) Asmita Digal and her daughters
August 26, 2008, was the worst day of Asmita Digal’s life and the last day of her husband’s.
Digal lived with her husband, Rajesh, a pastor, and their two young daughters in Kandhamal, a community in the eastern Indian state of Odisha, then called Orissa. Christians and Hindus had lived as neighbors relatively peacefully in the area for years.
The majority of Christians in Kandhamal were Dalit converts who demanded that the government continue to pay them reparations even though the law discriminated against them, only allowing Hindu scheduled caste members to get funds. But Hindutva (a political ideology seeking to establish the hegemony of Hindus and Hinduism in India) groups used the Dalit converts’ actions as a justification to instigate tensions between the local tribes and the Christian majority-Dalit community of the area.
In December 2007, Hindu nationalists had burned down churches and Christian houses. But the worst yet came the following August.
Rajesh Digal was returning home when a mob surrounded him. Finding a Bible in his possession, the mob assaulted him and buried his body, leaving only his head above the ground.
“They kicked Digal’s head like a football,” said Asmita, who learned of the graphic details of her husband’s last moments from his Hindu friend, an eyewitness to the atrocities whom the mob set on fire after they rejected his religious claim. (The friend jumped into the river to extinguish the fire.)
When Rajesh asked for water to drink, one of the Hindu extremists urinated in his mouth. After intense torture, the mob covered Digal’s face with mud and buried him alive.
Asmita Digal reported the matter to the police, but when they searched for the body, they couldn’t find it, leading her to believe that his killers had exhumed and disposed of it. She and her daughters, ages four and one, fled.
“We were in the jungle for three days, without food and water. I had a packet of cookie on which my daughters survived,” Digal said.
When the family returned home, they found their home burned down. For three years, the family took shelter in a relief camp with other displaced Christians, 30 miles from her home. No one was ever prosecuted for her husband’s death or the majority of deaths of the more than 100 people who lost their lives in the wave of massive anti-Christian violence.
The Indian government paid damages to some widows like Digal who lost their husbands to the mob. But not all traumatized families received money for the murder of their fathers and husbands, and none received compensation for property damage or loss.
In the nearly 15 years since, with no fixed monthly support from the government or church, the widows have struggled on a daily basis to provide for their families. In addition to facing poverty, many still suffer significant emotional trauma from the horrors of the attacks.
This story was originally published in christianitytoday.com . Read the full story here