The Christian community in India remembers Jan. 22, 1999, as the day Australian missionary Graham Stuart Staines, who worked with leprosy patients in Odisha, and his young sons Timothy and Philip, were burned alive. It was on that day that the Western world really came face to face with the violence being meted out to the minuscule reli-gious minority by the Hindutva extremist groups collectively known as the Sangh Parivar.
The trio was sleeping in their jeep in a  clearing in the Manour-harpur-Baripada forest when they were surrounded by a mob led by Dara Singh, a local chief of the militant Bajrang Dal, who had gained a reputation as the scourge of cattle traders driving their animals through forest roads in the state on the east coast of India. Dara Singh had earlier slain a man called Rahman, a Muslim cattle trader.
The Staines family massacre remained international news, both in the West and especially in his home country, Australia, for a long time. The triple deaths were horrendous. The father and sons had been set on fire as they slept. As the flames rose, they tried to escape the vehicle but were beaten back into the fire by the mob with bamboo sticks.
The ups and downs of the trial in the superior courts were equally dramatic. It would seem the courts had not fully under-stood the murderous ideology of the killer group. The Supreme Court of India, which finally sentenced Dara Singh to a life term in prison, agreed with the High Court of Orissa (the state high court of Odisha) that the killers did not deserve the death penalty handed to them by the trial court.
The system was not shamed by the words of Graham Staines’ widow Gladys who told TV news reporters that she had “forgiven the murderers of her husband and her two young sons.” The criminal justice system was the job of the government.