Christian woman murdered by relatives with an axe, face smashed

According to Morning Star News, Thursday, July 04, 2024

NEW DELHI — A tribal villager in India last week killed his 32-year-old niece with an axe and stones, saying she and her relatives had no right to their ancestral farmland because they had become Christians, sources said.

Bindu Sodi from Toylanka village, Kotewarpara in Dantewada district, Chhattisgarh state was the sole breadwinner for her mother, sister, younger brother, his wife and their 2-year-old child. Her surviving relatives are unable to return home due to death threats.

Two weeks before the murder, Bindu Sodi’s uncle, Chetu Sodi, and his son, Kumma Sodi, had entered the land belonging to her younger brother, Bhima Sodi, and sown one-third of the plot with seeds.

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When Bhima Sodi filed a complaint with the Katekalyan police on the advice of Christian pastor Sudru Ram Telam, the station master told him he had to go to the tax office and the village registrar to resolve the issue, the pastor said.

A tax office official summoned Chetu Sodi, but he refused, Pastor Telam said. The official then ordered the village registration officer to visit Chetu Sodi’s home to verify the claim and determine the rightful owner.

Bindu’s younger sister Aarti Mandavi said the official faced opposition from Chetu Sodi.

“My uncle told the official that since we had all become Christians, we had no rights to our ancestral property, so he refused to sign the documents the official had with him,” said Mandavi, a Christian who had been living with Bindu for the past year.

Mandavi said the revenue officer ordered a notice to be served on Chetu Sodi asking him to go to the collector’s office, failing which he would face consequences for non-compliance.

“But it was too late,” Pastor Telam said, saying that Chetu Sodi and his son had gone on to farm another part of Bhima Sodi’s land. “Bhima and the whole family were very worried about the way things were going. Bhima had no job; he was tending agricultural land. They were not sure how long the tax office would take to investigate.”

On the evening of June 24, Bhima Sodi, his wife Tulsi, and Bindu Sodi and her mother decided to cultivate the only remaining piece of land before their uncle took it over, Pastor Telam said. Someone saw them cultivating their land and informed Chetu Sodi, who quickly arrived with his son.

Bindu Sodi recorded on her mobile phone her uncle picking up stones and throwing himself at them. Bhima Sodi and his mother hurried out of the field in a tractor, while Bindu Sodi and Tulsi Sodi fled on foot.

“While Bindu was running, she tripped over something and fell down,” Mandavi told Morning Star News. “A mobile phone was thrown from a distance and Tulsi turned, picked up the phone and went to help Bindu, but the uncle and his son caught up with Bindu and started attacking her.”

Tulsi Sodi ran to hand the phone to Bhima Sodi, who called the police. But the station chief said it was getting dark and they wouldn’t come until the next morning, Mandavi said.

“Bhima called the Tribal Christian Forum and their chief in turn called the relevant police station and (urged them to go to the farm) explaining that the matter was serious,” Pastor Telam said.

When the police arrived with an ambulance, Mandavi said, “the field was wet with Bindu’s blood.”

Chetu Sodi and his son attacked Bindu Sodi, hitting her with stones and an axe, and beating and kicking her, witnesses said. He and his son left her half-dead and started chasing Bhima Sodi and his mother, Mandavi said.

“Bhima and her mother hid in someone’s house to save their lives,” she said. “When her uncle couldn’t find them, they returned and started attacking Bindu again until she died.”

Mandavi said she was shocked by the brutality of the attack, which left Bindu Sodi with injuries to her face, head and neck.

“Some parts of her body from her cheeks were missing,” Mandavi said, sobbing. “She was hit with an axe several times in several places, they smashed her face with stones and brutally attacked her until she bled to death in the field.”

The police sent her body for an autopsy to Dantewada, where the family was also taken. The next day, police arrested Chetu Sodi. Officers arrested his son, Kumma Sodi, on June 29.

The Police registered First Information Report No. 30/2024 on murder (Article 302) and criminal acts committed by several persons with common intent (Article 34) against Chetu Sodi and Kumma Sodi.

A human rights activist in Delhi, who requested anonymity, said he called the police on June 26 and came to know about the reports, but when he mentioned that there was opposition to Bindu Sodi’s Christian faith, “the officer replied that the accused and the victim were from the same family and had a land dispute.”

Pastor Telam dismissed the police claim, saying that if the motive was merely a family land dispute, “why didn’t the police allow us to bury Bindu in the village? Why did they want to avoid any religious tension by allowing her a Christian burial in the village? There is no doubt about the Christian persecution aspect behind the murder.”

Police pressure

After the funeral on June 26, Pastor Telam told Morning Star News that police pressured the family to bury Bindu’s body 19 miles from her home village.

“Unfortunately, the police did not come to our defense or provide us with police protection so that we could conduct the burial in their homeland,” said Pastor Telam. “Bindu’s body was quickly transported from the mortuary to the burial ground in Dantewada and in the blink of an eye the burial took place in the evening.”

He added that the officers threatened him with arrest for opposing the police decision not to fulfill the family’s wish and organize a burial in the village.

“The police even threatened to jail me for four or five hours if I continued to persuade the family to demand a burial in the village,” he said. “They said I had poisoned the minds of the family members to have a burial in the village, and that was why the family was becoming stubborn about it.”

Bhima Sodi and his family have been receiving constant death threats from villagers who were united in their desire to protect Kumma Sodi from arrest, Mandavi said. Before Kumma Sodi was arrested, villagers had said he would kill another family member if the police chased him, she said.

“We’re afraid to go back,” Mandavi said from her family’s rented room, nearly 20 miles from the village. “We’ll stay here for a few days until things get sorted out.”

Bindu Sodi was the sole earner in the family, the pastor said. Mandavi said her sister took over the family’s support after their father died and “never married because she had to feed so many members.”

Bindu Sodi took up a job as a teacher at a local child and mother care centre sponsored by the government under the Integrated Child Development Programme.

As Pastor Telam said, she was the first person from the village of Toylanka to accept Christ.

“Through her evangelism, eight more families in this village came to Christ,” he said. “She was a wonderful evangelist for our church.”

India ranked 11th on Christian advocacy group Open Doors’ 2024 World Watch List of the hardest places to be a Christian. In 2013, the country ranked 31st, but its ranking worsened after Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to power.

Religious rights activists say the hostile tone towards non-Hindus by the National Democratic Alliance government, led by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has emboldened Hindu extremists in many parts of the country to attack Christians since Modi took power in May 2014.

Originally published on Morning Star News