Saffron terror attacks: Swami Aseemanand implicates RSS Chief Mohan Bhagwat

SWAMIJI KO BULAO,” the jailer ordered. Call the Swami. Two police constables scurried out of the jailer's office and onto the grounds of the prison. A deafening noise reverberated through the room, as if a hundred men outside the walls were howling at the same time. It was visiting hours in late December 2011 at Ambala's Central Jail.

After a few minutes, Swami Aseemanand, the Hindu firebrand accused of plotting several terrorist attacks on civilian targets across the country between 2006 and 2008, stepped into the doorway of the jailer's office. He wore a saffron dhoti and a saffron kurta that hung down to his knees. The clothes were freshly ironed. A woollen monkey cap was pulled down over his forehead, and a saffron shawl was wrapped around his neck. He looked bemused to see me. We exchanged namastes, then he ushered me through a door into an adjoining room, where clerks in white dhoti-kurtas were poring over titanic ledgers. He sat on a large wooden trunk behind the door, and instructed me to pull a chair from a nearby desk. He was informal, like a good host, and asked me about my visit. “Somebody has to tell your story,” I said.

This was the beginning of the first of four interviews I had with Aseemanand over more than two years. He is currently under trial on charges including murder, attempt to murder, criminal conspiracy and sedition, in connection with three bombings in which at least 82 people were killed. He could also be tried for two other blast cases; he has been named in the chargesheets, but not yet formally accused. Together, the five attacks killed 119 people, and worked as a corrosive on the bonds of Indian society. If convicted, Aseemanand may face the death penalty.

In the course of our conversations, Aseemanand became increasingly warm and open. The story he told of his life was remarkable and haunting. He is fiercely proud of the acts of violence he has committed and the principles by which he has lived. For more than four decades, he has loyally promoted Hindu nationalism; during much of that time, he worked under the banner of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh's tribal affairs wing, the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram (VKA), spreading the Sangh's version of Hinduism, and its vision for a Hindu Rashtra. Through all this, Aseemanand, who is now in his early sixties, has never diluted the intensity of his beliefs.

After the assassination of Mohandas Gandhi, Nathuram Godse and his accomplice Narayan Apte were executed by hanging and cremated at the Ambala jail, in 1949. Their co-conspirator, Godse's brother Gopal, was sentenced to 18 years' imprisonment. “I'm kept in the same cell as Gopal Godse,” Aseemanand proudly told me. Today, Aseemanand is perhaps the most prominent face of Hindu extremist terrorism. Journalists who met him in the years before the bombings described him to me as an extraordinarily arrogant and intolerant man. What I saw in the dark records room of the jail was a man subdued by his imprisonment, but void of remorse. “Whatever happens to me, it's a good thing for Hindus,” Aseemanand told me. “Logon me Hindutva ka bhaav aayega”—it will stir Hindutva among the people.

ON THE NIGHT OF 18 FEBRUARY 2007, the Samjhauta Express started on its usual course from platform 18 of the Delhi Junction railway station. The Samjhauta, also known as the “Friendship Express”, is one of only two rail links between India and Pakistan. That night, almost three-quarters of its roughly 750 passengers were Pakistanis returning home. A few minutes before midnight—an hour after the train started its journey—improvised explosive devices (IEDs) detonated in two unreserved compartments of the 16-coach train. Barrelling through the night, the train was now on fire.

The explosions fused shut the compartments' exits, sealing passengers inside. “It was awful,” a railways inspector told the Hindustan Times. “Burnt and half burnt bodies of the passengers were all over in the coaches.” Two unexploded IEDs packed into suitcases were later discovered at the scene; the devices contained a mixture of chemicals including PETN, TNT, RDX, petrol, diesel and kerosene. Sixty-eight people died in the attack.

This was the second, and deadliest, of the five attacks in which Aseemanand is implicated. He is now accused number one in the Samjhauta train blasts; accused number three in a bombing at Hyderabad's Mecca Masjid that killed 11 people, in May 2007; and accused number six in a blast at the dargah in Ajmer, Rajasthan, that killed three people, in October 2007. He is also named, but not yet charged, in two attacks in Malegaon, Maharashtra, in September 2006 and September 2008, that together took the lives of 37 people.

Many of these cases have been investigated by multiple agencies at different points in time—including the Mumbai Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS), the Rajasthan ATS, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), and the National Investigation Agency (NIA). At least a dozen chargesheets have been filed in the five cases. Thirty-one people have been formally accused, and two of Aseemanand's close associates are among them—Pragya Singh Thakur, who was a national executive member of the BJP's student wing, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP); and Sunil Joshi, who was a former RSS district leader in Indore. All of the investigative agencies determined that Aseemanand played a central role in plotting the attacks. Aseemanand, by his own account, hosted planning sessions, selected targets, provided funds for the construction of IEDs, and sheltered and otherwise aided those who planted the bombs.

In December 2010 and January 2011, Aseemanand made two judicial confessions, to courts in Delhi and Haryana, in which he admitted to planning the attacks. At the time of his confessions, Aseemanand refused legal representation. He spent 48 hours in judicial custody, insulated from investigating agencies, before making each statement, thereby giving him an opportunity to change his mind. Both times, Aseemanand resolved to confess, and had his statements recorded in court. His confessions, and the confessions of at least two of his fellow conspirators, allege that the attacks were planned with the knowledge of at least one senior member of the RSS.

On 28 March 2011, Aseemanand accepted legal representation. The next day, he retracted his confessions, claiming that they were coerced by torture. An application he submitted before the trial court read, “the leak of Aseemanand's alleged confession to the media, which is shocking and deliberate, is a part of the design to politicise and hype the case, conduct and conclude a media trial, and to create, at the global level, the notion of Hindu terror for the political purposes of the ruling party.” Aseemanand and several of the defence lawyers working on the Samjhauta case told me that the lawyers are all members of the Sangh; one of them said that they manage the case in meetings of the Akhil Bharatiya Adhivakta Parishad, the RSS's legal wing.

When I interviewed him, Aseemanand denied being tortured, or that his confessions were coerced. He said that when he was arrested for the bombings, by the CBI, he decided it was “a good time to tell all about this. I knew I could be hanged for it, but I'm old anyway.”

Over the course of our conversations, Aseemanand's description of the plot in which he was involved became increasingly detailed. In our third and fourth interviews, he told me that his terrorist acts were sanctioned by the highest levels of the RSS—all the way up to Mohan Bhagwat, the current RSS chief, who was the organisation's general secretary at the time. Aseemanand told me that Bhagwat said of the violence, “It's very important that it be done. But you should not link it to the Sangh.”

Aseemanand told me about a meeting that allegedly took place, in July 2005. After an RSS conclave in Surat, senior Sangh leaders including Bhagwat and Indresh Kumar, who is now on the organisation's powerful seven-member national executive council, travelled to a temple in the Dangs, Gujarat, where Aseemanand was living—a two-hour drive. In a tent pitched by a river several kilometres away from the temple, Bhagwat and Kumar met with Aseemanand and his accomplice Sunil Joshi. Joshi informed Bhagwat of a plan to bomb several Muslim targets around India. According to Aseemanand, both RSS leaders approved, and Bhagwat told him, “You can work on this with Sunil. We will not be involved, but if you are doing this, you can consider us to be with you.”

Aseemanand continued, “Then they told me, ‘Swamiji, if you do this we will be at ease with it. Nothing wrong will happen then. Criminalisation nahin hoga (It will not be criminalised). If you do it, then people won't say that we did a crime for the sake of committing a crime. It will be connected to the ideology. This is very important for Hindus. Please do this. You have our blessings.'”

Chargesheets filed by the investigative agencies allege that Kumar provided moral and material support to the conspirators, but they don't implicate anyone as senior as Bhagwat. Although Kumar was interrogated once by the CBI, the case was later taken over by the NIA, which has not pursued the conspiracy past the level of Aseemanand and Pragya Singh. (Joshi, who was allegedly the connecting thread between several different parts of the conspiracy—including those who assembled and those who planted the bombs—was killed under mysterious circumstances in December 2007.)

Since allegations first emerged in late 2010 that Kumar had a role in the attacks, the RSS has closed ranks around him. Bhagwat, in an unprecedented act for an RSS sarsangh-chalak, participated in a dharna to protest the accusations against Kumar. The BJP has also defended him, and the BJP national spokesperson Meenakshi Lekhi was his lawyer at the time he was named in the chargesheets. A lawyer for one of the accused told me that Kumar is “highly ambitious”, and “in waiting to be the sarsanghchalak”.

An officer at one of the investigating agencies, on the condition of anonymity, allowed me to inspect a secret report submitted to the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA). The report requested that the MHA send a show-cause notice to RSS authorities, asking why the organisation should not be banned in light of the evidence against them. The MHA has not yet acted on the recommendation.

The fear of being banned—as the organisation briefly was after the assassination of Gandhi, in 1948; during the Emergency, in 1975; and after the demolition of Babri Masjid, in 1992—looms over the RSS leadership. Whenever terrorist violence has been attributed to its members, the Sangh has taken a tack similar to the one they used with Nathuram Godse: there is no question of owning or disowning the perpetrators, the RSS says, because they have all previously left the Sangh, or were acting independently of the organisation, or alienated themselves from it by embracing violence.

Aseemanand poses a serious problem to the RSS in this regard. Since it was founded in 1952, the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram has been in the nucleus of the Sangh family, and Aseemanand has dedicated almost his entire adult life to serving the organisation. At the time he planned the attacks, he had been the national head of the VKA's religious wing—a position created especially for him—for a decade. Even before the inception of the terrorist plot, organised violence (including coordinated communal riots) was a well-known part of his methods.

Bhagwat and Kumar were allegedly aware of Aseemanand's involvement in the plot by mid 2005. Aseemanand was not excommunicated—far from it. In December of that year, according to a report in Organiser, the RSS's weekly mouthpiece, he was honoured with a Rs. 1 lakh award marking the birth centenary of MS Golwalkar, the RSS's second and most venerated chief; the veteran BJP leader and former party president Murli Manohar Joshi gave the ceremony's keynote address. Even if Kumar remains insulated from a full inquiry into the allegations against him, there can be little question of the RSS convincingly denying its brotherhood with Aseemanand.

Denouncing terror attacks launched in the last decade by members of the Sangh, Swami Agnivesh, a prominent Hindu reformist, told me that the RSS “will harm themselves and others of the Hindu society” through militant Hindutva. “It is deplorable,” he said. The political scientist Jyotirmaya Sharma, who has authored three books on Hindutva, said, “the RSS involves itself in both covert and overt functions. But the organisation's central premise is the sort of hit-and-run guerrilla warfare advocated by Ramdas, the guru of Shivaji. And the problem is that we don't have enough liberal institutions within the country—from political parties to even strong enough media—to counter such acts of terror waged so blatantly in the name of Hindu religion.”

Despite such condemnations, the Sangh has come a long way since the ignominy of 1948. Through their efforts at man-making and nation-building, the RSS and its affiliates, particularly the BJP, now seem to represent a major current in the mainstream of Indian society. Aseemanand, too, is in many ways a product of those efforts, and he shares the RSS's aims—albeit in magnified form: his vision for the future, he told me, is a global Hindu Rashtra.

[II]

ASEEMANAND'S PASSIONATE BELIEF in the Hindu Rashtra, and his commitment to violence as a means of securing it, emerged from two connected but radically different streams in Indian thought—the ecumenical karma yoga of the Ramakrishna Mission, and the Hindutva of the RSS. Aseemanand was shaped by both of these currents, and in some sense he chose to combine the ascetic life of the former with the extreme politics of the latter. This partly had to do with his early participation in a local RSS shakha, and it was also, in some measure, a rejection of the values of his father. In Aseemanand's own account, it was a sort of awakening—to Hinduism as a political force.

Aseemanand was born Naba Kumar Sarkar in the Hooghly district of West Bengal, sometime in late 1951. He is the second of seven sons of the freedom fighter Bibhutibhushan Sarkar, a Gandhian who told his children that Gandhi was his god. The village where they lived, Kamarpukur, was also the birthplace of the 19th-century sage Ramakrishna Paramhamsa, who preached “yato mat, tato path” (many faiths, many paths to god). Ramakrishna's most famous disciple, Swami Vivekananda, established the Ramakrishna Mission, in 1897, to carry on the work of karma yoga—service through selfless action. Aseemanand grew up around the corner from the mission's local branch—a place of pilgrimage for Ramakrishna devotees—and spent many of his evenings listening to the monks there singing devotional songs.

Bibhutibhushan and his wife, Pramila, wanted their son to join the mission's holy orders—a source of pride for many devout Bengali families. But Aseemanand and his brothers were also drawn to the RSS, whose own version of social service was burgeoning under the leadership of MS Golwalkar. “I have gone after ideologies in my youth and lived by them,” Aseemanand recalled his father telling them. “So I understand when you are influenced by an ideology and want to follow it. But the RSS is the organisation that killed Gandhi, so it is my duty to warn you against it.” The boys nevertheless grew close to local RSS workers, who often ate with the brothers at the Sarkar house, and they began participating in local shakhas. Aseemanand's elder brother joined the RSS full time. Aseemanand and his younger brother Sushant Sarkar, whom I met in Kamarpukur, told me that their father didn't try to prevent this, but he issued a stern warning: they were never to introduce him to a member of the Sangh.

The balance of Aseemanand's beliefs tilted dramatically during his twenties, under the mentorship of two Sangh members. The first was Bijoy Adya, an RSS worker who guided Aseemanand towards radical Hindu politics. In his office in Kolkata, where he now edits the Bengali RSS newsweekly Swastika, Adya told me that he first met Aseemanand in 1971. Aseemanand was studying for his bachelor's degree in physics at a local university—he eventually got his master's degree as well—but “his parents always understood that he was different from their other sons,” Adya said. “They knew that there was no way he would lead a normal life like the other brothers.” Aseemanand was also still a regular at the Ramakrishna Mission. “It was in fact from his house that I read all the major literature” on Vivekananda, Adya said.

One of the books in the Sarkar library was A Rousing Call to the Hindu Nation, a collection of Vivekananda's writing and speeches edited by Eknath Ranade, a stalwart of the Hindutva movement whose colleagues gave him the nickname “underground sarsanghchalak” for his leadership of the RSS during its prohibition following Gandhi's assassination. The book emphasised Vivekananda's call to Hindus to “Arise! Awake! And stop not until the goal is reached.” The Ramakrishna Mission had wrongfully made Vivekananda a secular figure in order to get government funding, and it took Ranade's text to correct this, Adya said. (At the behest of the RSS chief Golwalkar, Ranade also oversaw the construction of the Rs. 1.35-crore Vivekananda Rock Memorial off Kanyakumari, which was completed in 1970.) Adya encouraged Aseemanand to read the book.

“According to Ramakrishna Mission every religion is equal,” Aseemanand told me. “They used to celebrate Christmas, Eid—so I used to do the same. When Adya said that this was not what Vivekananda preached I did not believe him.” He then took up Ranade's text. One particular line from Vivekananda dominated Aseemanand's reading: “Every man going out of the Hindu pale is not only a man less, but an enemy the more.”

“I got a huge shock after reading this,” Aseemanand said. “In the days that followed, I gave this a lot of thought. Then I realised that it is not in my limited capacity to realise or fully analyse Vivekananda's teachings, but since he has said it, I will follow it all my life.” He never visited the Ramakrishna Mission again.

IF RANADE'S VERSION OF VIVEKANANDA became the soul of Aseemanand's political conviction, its form was provided by an RSS worker and ascetic named Basant Rao Bhatt, who had moved to Calcutta from Nagpur, in 1956, to work under Ranade. Bhatt was fiercely dedicated to the mission of the RSS, but had a soft, disarming charisma; Aseemanand told me that even his father once remarked, “It is hard to believe that an organisation that has people like Basant working for it could be bad.” In Bhatt, who eventually became the chief of RSS operations for West Bengal, Aseemanand found an example of how to unite the ideology of the Sangh with the sort of pastoral service practised by monks of the Ramakrishna Mission.

When Indira Gandhi imposed the Emergency and banned the RSS in 1975, she started cracking down on its members. Thousands of Sangh workers were thrown in jail, including Aseemanand. Bhatt followed the example of his mentor, Ranade, and began operating underground, providing for the families of the imprisoned. When the ban was lifted at the end of the Emergency, Bhatt started a new wing of the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram, to cover Bengal and the Northeast. Soon after, Aseemanand moved in with him and began working full-time for the organisation. In 1978, they founded the first VKA ashram in the north-eastern part of the country, in the forests of Baghmundi, near Purulia, West Bengal.

The push towards the Northeast was part of a nationwide expansion of the VKA into tribal areas. Since it was founded in Jashpur (now in Chhattisgarh) by the RSS leader Balasaheb Deshpande—who began his work with a dozen children of the Oraon tribe—the organisation has strived to counter the influence of Christian missionaries and to prevent tribals from converting. Christianity, the Sangh believes, is a threat to the integrity of the nation, breeding separatist movements like those that have long operated in the Northeast. The VKA's methods are largely derived from the successful model of Christian evangelists: it runs playgroups, primary and middle schools, hostels and health services that also serve as centres for proselytisation. Its goal is to promote Hindutva and thereby increase the cultural and political capital of the RSS.

Aseemanand spent most of the next ten years working in Purulia to advance these aims. But he also decided to follow some version of the monastic path his parents intended for him, and at 31 he resolved to take sanyaas. Bhatt told him that if working with tribals and furthering the Sangh's cause was his mission, he didn't need to join a holy order. But Aseemanand had made up his mind, and left Purulia for the ashram of the Bengali guru Swami Paramananda. “I chose him to be my guru because he followed Ramakrishna's teachings,” Aseemanand said. “He worked mainly with the Dalits, but he was also involved in the propagation of Hinduism.” Paramananda administered the vows of sanyaas to Naba Kumar Sarkar, and renamed him Aseemanand—“boundless joy.”

After taking sanyaas, Aseemanand returned to Purulia and his work with the tribals. His life at the ashram there brought him into contact with the top leaders of VKA, including its all-India organising secretary, K Bhaskara Rao, who was also for much of his life the RSS chief for Kerala (which today boasts over 4,000 shakhas—more than any other state). Impressed by Aseemanand, in 1988 Rao and the VKA president, Jagdev Ram Oraon, asked him to extend the VKA's dharma jagran—its work of spiritual awakening—to the Andamans.

Since colonial times, many of the more than 500 islands in the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago have been settled by Indians from the mainland. To build townships for the settlers, tribals from areas in what is now Chhattisgarh were often shipped in. By the 1970s, the Sangh feared that tribal migrants to the Andamans were becoming increasingly enthralled by Christian missionaries, making the islands hostile to Hindus and Hindutva, Aseemanand told me. The islands had been represented in parliament for more than a decade by a Congressman, Manoranjan Bhakta. Aseemanand was to go and establish a foothold for the RSS.

“When I landed in the Andamans for the first time, there was no place to work from, no people to work with,” Aseemanand said. He set about forming bonds with tribal settlers through a combination of folksiness and unvarnished religious zeal. Although he didn't go into detail, he told me that even in the Andamans he was using the threat of violence to coerce tribals into embracing Hindusim. He called these reformations “ghar vapasi”—homecomings. (The Sangh maintains that adivasis are fundamentally Hindus, not animists, and talks about “reconversion”.)

Aseemanand also employed more sophisticated types of propaganda. He lived among the tribal settlers, seeking out older members of the community who had not fully embraced their new religion. “They told me that though they had converted to Christianity, they still wanted to keep their traditions alive—the festivals, their dance,” he said. “So I told them that it is my job to get this done.”

Armed with the goodwill of these community elders, Aseemanand recruited half a dozen young girls, then sent them to a Vivekananda centre in Kanyakumari to teach them bhajans and get them to “start believing in Hanuman,” he said. Afterwards, he took them to the VKA headquarters at Jashpur, where they learned about Hindu culture for three months. Aseemanand and the girls then began a sort of road show, circulating through Andaman villages to lead bhajans and recruit another set of children. Because Aseemanand felt it was not right to travel in the company of young single women, the girls were married off, and the next batch of children—trained by the girls—were around 8 years old.

Aseemanand then set about formalising the Hindu community by building permanent spaces for worship and creating official bodies to look after them. In Port Blair, a man named R Damodaran became the president of the local temple committee, and a Bengali named Bishnu Pada Ray became the secretary.

Aseemanand lived full-time in the Andamans until the early 1990s. He said his efforts there laid the groundwork for Ray to become the territory's first BJP parliamentarian, in 1999. “I told him that it's good for him to go into politics, and so he went to Delhi and met Vajpayeeji,” Aseemanand told me. “Politics is also part of our work.” Damodaran was unanimously elected the chairman of the Port Blair Municipal Council in 2007.

Even after leaving the Andamans, Aseemanand frequently returned, sometimes to hand out medicines and food following natural disasters. But he callously restricted his relief efforts to those who declared themselves Hindu. He told me one story about the aftermath of the tsunami in 2004. “A Christian woman came for milk for her child,” he recalled. “My people said no. She said that the kid had not had any food for three days, and pleaded that it would die if we didn't give some milk. So please give some. Then they said go ask Swamiji. I told her that what they are doing is right. You won't get any milk here.” It is a story he likes to repeat.

[III]

THE DANGS IS THE SMALLEST, least populated district of Gujarat, and lies in its southern tail, bordered by Maharashtra to the east and west. Seventy-five percent of its population of roughly 2 lakh lives below the poverty line, and 93 percent is adivasi. Like other tribal areas, it has seen a disproportionate share of conflicts over resources and ideology. The British first subdued the area's tribal kings in the 1830s, and obtained the rights to exploit the Dangs' teak-rich forest, which still covers more than half the district, in 1842. Apart from Christian missionaries, the British banned all social workers and political activists from the area, fearing the influence they might exert over adivasis' sense of entitlement to the land. The first mission school there was founded in Ahwa, the district headquarters, in 1905, and Christian evangelists of many denominations have been active in the area ever since. According to Aseemanand, Christians used to call the Dangs “Paschim ka Nagaland”—the Nagaland of the west. “The threat was as big as in the Northeast,” he said.

Aseemanand first visited the Dangs in 1996, while touring the country on behalf of the VKA. The organisation's leaders had asked him to take his successful conversion programmes into every tribal area in India; they had even created a Shraddha Jagran Vibhag (faith awakening wing) and installed him as its president. But Aseemanand thought he could have a greater impact working in a single area, and felt a strong pull to the Dangs. The Dangs “had the kind of work that I am good at—staying among the tribals and working with them,” he said. “One should always do the work from which one gains contentment.” Unlike the Northeast, he told me, there was still a chance to reclaim the Dangs from Christians.

First and foremost, however, Aseemanand was loyal to the Sangh, and his superiors were worried that he would be unable to fulfil his national mandate from the forests of Gujarat. Aseemanand didn't convince them to let him focus his operations on the Dangs until 1998. Their anxiety proved unwarranted: less than a year after setting up in the district, Aseemanand managed to galvanise Sangh cadres across the country with his combination of evangelical outreach and violent coercion. Rao, the VKA organising secretary and Kerala RSS chief, called it “an example for the whole nation,” Aseemanand recalled.

By the time Aseemanand stationed himself at a VKA ashram in Waghai, in 1998, religious differences were already straining adivasi communities in the Dangs, many tribals told me. Christian proselytisation in the area had been relatively limited before the 1970s; but since 1991 the Christian population in the Dangs had been growing by roughly 9 percent each year, according to census figures. When parents died, brother would fight brother over what sort of funeral rites they should perform. In the year before Aseemanand arrived, 20 attacks on Christians had been reported in the district, and they continued sporadically throughout 1998.

Every year, the VKA ashram housed around two-dozen tribal boys, providing them with free food and accommodation so they could attend a local government school. A day at the ashram began with Aseemanand leading the boys in chanting the Ekata mantra, an ode to Bharat Mata and prominent Indians—from Gandhi to Golwalkar—sung by RSS swayamsevaks to open every session at the shakhas. One of the students that Aseemanand met at the ashram was Phoolchand Bablo. Aseemanand credited Bablo, who became a sort of guide and aide-de-camp for the swami, with much of the success of his work in the Dangs.

When I visited the Waghai ashram last year, Bablo came from his village to meet me. He was plump, with a round face and a smile whose warmth reflected in his eyes—the sort of person I felt I could trust to give me directions in a strange land. Even the most disturbing stories Bablo told me were imbued with this warmth.

Aseemanand's methods were similar to those he used in the Andamans. He trusted Bablo to guide him to communities where he would be easily welcomed and could recruit aides to extend his influence throughout the forests. He and his volunteers would then hike to remote tribal villages, where they camped for up to a week at a time, eating with the adivasis and sleeping in their huts. Aseemanand preached Hinduism; distributed chocolates, Hanuman lockets, and copies of the Hanuman chaalisa to children; sang bhajans; and told the villagers that they should not be converting to Christianity. In every village, Aseemanand and his aides would make lists of people who could be baptised into Hinduism. The lists were closely monitored by Aseemanand. When he left for the next settlement, his aides would make sure that the adivasis' huts were flying the saffron pennant of the Sangh.

Aseemanand married these comparatively soft methods to fear mongering. “He talked of real life situations like that in the districts on the borders of Bengal,” Bablo said. “Over there, the entire Hindu community had to flee because of the Muslims who keep coming in from the other side.” In pamphlets that he printed in the thousands and distributed throughout the district, Aseemanand also denounced Christians. The header on one flier, announcing a massive rally in June 1998, warned: “Come Hindus, Beware of Thieves.” The invective below read: “The most burning problem of Dang District is the establishments being run by Christian priests … Wearing a mask of service these Satans are exploiting the adivasis … Lies and deceit are their religion.” Aseemanand soon turned these execrations into violence.

On Christmas evening 1998, the Deep Darshan High School, in Ahwa, was attacked by members of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), the Bajrang Dal, and the Hindu Jagran Manch (HJM), an offshoot of the VKA. Sister Lily, one of the Carmelite nuns who ran the school, said