More than 25 years after her husband and two sons were burned alive by a Hindu nationalist mob in India, Gladys Staines is again speaking of forgiveness even as the Odisha state government is pressured to decide on release from prison of the primary convict in the case.
The Supreme Court of India has pressed the state government to rule on the remission plea for early release by Rabindra Kumar Pal, better known as Dara Singh, the primary convict in the killing of Graham Stuart Staines and his two sons, Philip, 10 and Timothy, 6, in rural Odisha state.
In a statement sent to Christian Daily International in response to queries about the upcoming hearing, Staines said she had heard reports of the proceedings concerning Singh’s possible release.
“Continuing to follow Jesus’ teaching and example, I continue to forgive,” she said, reiterating what she had first stated in 2003: “I have forgiven the killers and have no bitterness, because forgiveness brings healing and our land needs healing,” and “God in Christ has forgiven me and expects his followers to do the same.”
In her statement to Christian Daily International, she added that she had “no comments regarding the law taking its own course” and did not plan to make any further statement, either now or after the hearing.
According to the Supreme Court’s official case status records for Writ Petition (Criminal) No. 301/2024, Rabindra Kumar Pal @ Dara Singh vs. State of Odisha & Anr., the matter was listed again on Sept. 2, as directed by the bench earlier.
The Sept. 2 hearing was heard by a partially reconstituted bench, with Justice Manmohan sitting alongside Justice Manoj Misra in place of Justice Vijay Bishnoi. Attorney Vishnu Shankar Jain appeared for Singh alongside his existing counsel, though the order itself records no reasoning beyond listing the matter for Sept. 8.
Supreme Court Hearing
Dara Singh filed his remission plea for premature release before the Supreme Court in 2024, after spending more than 26 years in prison.
The matter has been adjourned repeatedly since then to allow the Odisha government time to decide on his plea, which is examined by the State Sentence Review Board before any recommendation is forwarded to the government for final approval.
At a hearing on Aug. 19, the bench recorded that the matter had “been adjourned time and again to enable the respondents to take a decision on the plea of remission,” and that Singh had by then been incarcerated for “a period exceeding 26 years.”
The bench noted that when the case was last adjourned, the Sentence Review Board was said to be in the process of deciding on Singh’s plea. Appearing for the state, attorney P.V. Yogeswaran placed before the court a letter from the Directorate of Prisons and Correctional Services, Odisha, stating that a report from the district jail in Kendujhar (Keonjhar) was yet to be received.
“We are not informed about the decision of the Sentence Review Board,” the bench recorded in its order, directing that the matter be listed again on Sept. 2, “by which date, Sentence Review Board shall take a decision and apprise us about the decision.”
Beyond the written order, media reports of the oral courtroom exchange quoted the bench as telling the state’s counsel, “You take a decision, whichever way you want. If you do not take a decision, then we will,” and separately remarking, “We cannot tolerate this avoidance of decision.” These lines were reportedly spoken in court but do not appear in the bench’s signed order.
The Aug. 19 hearing also saw high-level representation from both sides: Additional Solicitors General K.M. Nataraj and Kanakamedala Ravindra Kumar and Odisha Advocate General Pitambar Acharya appeared for the respondents, while Singh was represented by attorneys including A.P. Singh and V.P. Singh.
Court records also show that Singh has separately sought permission to appear and argue his case in person, and that a third party has filed an application seeking to intervene in the proceedings, though the case file does not specify the grounds for that request.
Manoharpur Killings
Graham Staines came to India in 1965, joining the Evangelical Missionary Society’s leprosy mission in Mayurbhanj, Odisha state, at that time called Orissa state.
The mission itself dated back to 1895, when the king of Mayurbhanj invited missionaries to the region, including Sri Rama Chandra Bhanja Deo, who was particularly invested in eradicating leprosy after his own daughter contracted the disease. Gladys reached Mayurbhanj in 1981 to serve as a missionary with Operation Mobilization, and it was there that she met Graham Staines; the two wed two years later. Their work extended beyond the leprosy home to include ministry at local churches and organizing Christian camps in the region.
Staines’ service was maligned as “converting tribals to Christianity” by the Hindu nationalist group Bajrang Dal, including Dara Singh, who himself had moved to Odisha from Uttar Pradesh state in 1989.
According to a letter Mahendra Hembram, one of the convicts in the case, wrote to his sister-in-law Kapura Tudu after the murders, he confessed that he along with Dara Singh burned the “Jisu, [Jesus].” Courts have clarified that Hembram’s use of the “Jisu” epithet was his way of referring to the Christian missionary.
Hembram mentioned that they were enraged over villagers “eating beef,” blaming it on Staines, and over the missionaries distributing sanitary pads and bras among tribal residents.
Beef (cow meat) formed part of the traditional Santal diet long before any missionary presence in the region. Nabendu Datta-Majumder in his1956 study, under the Department of Anthropology, printed by the Government of India Press, Calcutta, titled, “The Santal: A Study in Culture-Change,” records that cows and bullocks were among the domestic animals that “enter the Santal dietary,” their meat eaten alongside that of fowls, pigs, goats and buffaloes, typically killed on the occasion of social and religious festivals.
Central to this practice was a ritual called kutam dangra, in which a cow was sacrificed to the deity Orak’ Bonga and an ox to Marang Buru.
Datta-Majumder’s fieldwork, however, documents that this custom had already begun to erode under Hindu influence well before any Christian missionary contact: in some regions he studied, kutam dangra was “not performed...because of the influence of Hindu belief which forbids cows to be killed,” and elsewhere he notes that as the Hindu goddess Kali was absorbed into the local Santal pantheon, older festivals faded and “the sacrifice of cows has likewise disappeared.”
Tensions came to a head in January 1999, when Staines, his two sons, and several other Christians organized a five-day church camp in the jungles of Manoharpur village in Keonjhar District. On the night of Jan. 22, 1999, Staines and his sons Philip and Timothy were sleeping in their jeep, parked in front of a small church in the village, after attending the camp. A mob allegedly led by Dara Singh and Hembram surrounded the vehicle.
A retired police officer who was posted in Keonjhar at the time told media that the mob accused Staines of promoting religious conversion, assaulted him and his children, and forced them back inside the van despite Staines’s pleas for mercy. The attackers then poured kerosene on the vehicle and set it alight, shouting the slogans, “Jai Bajrang Bali [Victory to the Hindu deity Hanuman]” and “Dara Singh Zindabad [Long live Dara Singh]” and burning the father and his two sons to death.
The killings drew global condemnation and became one of the most widely reported instances of anti-Christian violence in India.
Investigation and Trial
India’s Central Bureau of Investigation initially arrested 51 people in connection with the killings. Over the years, courts acquitted all but three of the accused: Hembram, Dara Singh and Sudarshan Hansda, alias Chanchu, who was a minor at the time of the crime.
On Sept. 22, 2003, a special CBI court in Bhubaneswar handed Dara Singh a death sentence and imposed life terms on 12 co-accused, including Hembram. The Orissa High Court later acquitted 11 of those convicts, upholding sentences only for Dara Singh and Hembram. On May 19, 2005, the High Court commuted Dara Singh’s death sentence to life imprisonment while maintaining Hembram’s life term.
The Supreme Court upheld the commuted sentence in 2011.
Sudarshan Hansda was just 13 when he joined the mob that killed Staines and his sons and served nearly a decade in juvenile detention for it. He was released in 2008 after serving about nine and a half years for good behavior.
In April 2025, at age 39, he was baptized as a Baptist Christian, saying the decision was entirely his own, a search for peace after a string of personal tragedies, including the deaths of his parents, sisters, first wife, and infant son, led him to the local Baptist church in Manoharpur, the very village where Staines had worked.
Forgiveness and Honors
In the aftermath of the killings, Gladys Staines publicly forgave her husband’s and sons’ killers and chose to remain in India, returning to run the leprosy home where Staines had served. Her statement of forgiveness, first made in 2003, has since become closely associated with her public identity in India.
In 2005, the Government of India awarded her the Padma Shri, one of the country’s highest civilian honors, in recognition of her social service work; she was one of only two foreign nationals to receive the award that year, the other being author and former BBC correspondent Mark Tully.
In 2015, the Harmony Foundation conferred on her the Mother Teresa Memorial Award for Social Justice for her continued work with leprosy-affected communities in Odisha.
Staines eventually returned to Australia, though her legacy, and that of her husband, continues in the village where they once lived and worked.
Hembram’s Release
The case returned to public attention in April 2025, when Odisha authorities released Mahendra Hembram from Keonjhar jail after 25 years on grounds of good conduct.
Hembram, now 52, was arrested on Dec. 9, 1999, months after the killings, while Dara Singh, who had remained on the run, was arrested on Jan. 31, 2000. Authorities lodged the two convicts in separate cells in Keonjhar jail for the following 25 years.
Upon his release, Hembram maintained his innocence, telling reporters, “I was innocent. But still I was in jail for the last 25 years.”
Hembram, who is associated with Bajrang Dal, walked out of the jail to a celebratory welcome, with supporters garlanding him and chanting “Jai Shri Ram [Hail! lord Rama].”
The joint secretary of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Council of Hindus, a Hindu nationalist organization], attorney Kedar Dash, welcomed the release, saying, “It is a good day for us. We welcome the government’s decision.”
The reception drew sharp criticism from sections of the Christian community. John Dayal, an activist and spokesman for the United Christian Forum for Human Rights, told Christianity Today that Hembram’s release amounted to a convicted killer being “quietly merged into civil life after a long stay in jail.”
Christianity Today’s report noted that authorities had, over time, shortened the sentences of all the convicts in the case, which some observers see as reflecting a broader trend of Hindu nationalism in the country.
Odisha’s prison department also released 30 other convicts on the same day as Hembram, citing the state’s premature release policy for prisoners who had served between 14 and 25 years for murder.
Officials said the state’s 2022 guidelines require life convicts to serve a minimum of 14 years before remission is considered, with serious murder cases requiring 20 to 25 years, and additional age-based considerations for convicts above 60 for women and 65 for men.
Under this policy, the State Sentence Review Board examines inputs from district collectors and superintendents of police before forwarding its recommendations to the government, which grants final approval after clearance from the governor and the chief minister’s office.
