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Church ransacked in Bokaro

In the first incident of its kind after the creation of Jharkhand, a church was attacked in Bokaro on Wednesday.

Miscreants targeted the 26-year-old church situated in Sector IV of the steel city and ransacked its prayer hall. Christian priests allege the attack was a deliberate attempt to disturb the communal amity in this industrial city.

The attack has come as a major embarrassment to the Marandi government as Christians have repeatedly been expressing fears about being the first target of any Bharatiya Janata Party-led government in the region.

This is the first attack on any place of worship of Christians in the last so many years in the erstwhile united Bihar. However, attacks on individual Christians have been reported in the past.

Last July, a priest was killed at an isolated spot on the highway about 20 kilometres from Ranchi. Police said dacoity was the intent as the priest was carrying Rs 10,000 with him.

Last year, a nun reported sexual harassment in a village in Chapra district of north Bihar.

In August 1997, Father Christudas, vice principal of the local school, was paraded naked on the streets of Dumka for allegedly performing sodomy. The charge is yet to be proved.

In fact, the mob, which paraded the priest, was led by none other than the then deputy commissioner of Dumka Abhas Kumar Jha, an Indian Administrative Service officer.

Dumka is the parliamentary constituency represented by Babu Lal Marandi who is now the chief minister of Jharkhand.

There is a large presence of missionaries in Jharkhand and a sizeable Christian population, most of them tribals.

Incidentally, all the industrial centres of Jharkhand such as Ranchi, Jamshedpur, Hazaribagh, Bokaro are communally sensitive places. It is only the 1990s that did not witness any major trouble.

While Ranchi, Jamshedpur and Hazaribagh had witnessed a number of Hindu-Muslim riots between 1960 and 1989, hundreds of Sikhs were killed in Bokaro in the aftermath of the assassination of former prime minister Indira Gandhi in 1984.

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