All the speakers offered floral tributes to the pictures of Swami Lakshmanananda Saraswati and Bharat Mata [Mother India] at the opening of the meeting.
Shri Swadesh Pal Gupta, President of the Indraprastha Vishwa Hindu Parishad, Delhi, who had personally known Swami Ji for a long time, expressed his views: “Swami’s murder has shocked the whole world. It is difficult to imagine why anyone would pump bullets and then cut off the body parts of a man who devoted his complete life for the social, educational and economic upliftment of the poor tribals of Kandhamal region in Orissa.
“The popularity of the Swami Ji could be gauged from the fact that the procession that followed his dead body to the cremation ground was several kilometers long and took 48 hours to reach its destination. Swami Ji was loved in Kandhamal but was killed because neither the government nor the security agencies did anything to protect him despite the threats to his life received just two days before his death.”
Shri Kripa Prasad Singh, the Joint General Secretary of the “All-India Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram”, Jashpurnagar, paying his tributes said, “The murder of a Hindu Swami is an unholy act which needs to be strongly condemned. The society in which such a heart rending and shocking incident takes place will take time to adjust to this and no wonder it will remain in turmoil for quite some time to come.”
Ms Sandhya Jain, Editor of vijayvaani.com, in her speech, declared, “Wherever the Christian Church has gone in our nation it has divided people on the basis of religion. We must also try to understand that there are strong feelings among people who are approached for conversion but do not want to convert. The problem is that many a times the true feelings of the affected people do not get proper coverage as our media is biased and one sided.”
Expressing an independent Christian view, R.L. Francis, National President of the “Poor Christian Liberation Movement,” said, “In the past sixty years the Church has made deep in roots in influencing the powerful echelons of the Indian society. So much so that the powerful and the mighty do not raise their voice even when they see the wrong doings of the Church. Millions of rupees are being pumped into India for conversion activities at an alarming rate.”
In his speech, Jagabandhu Mishra, Editor of Rastradeep Weekly, published from Orissa, said, “My father was a devotee of Swami Lakshmanananda. Swami Ji touched and transformed the lives of thousands of poor tribal families of the Kandhamal region of Orissa.”