The Murder of Sister Valsa: Chapter Three

By Krishna Pokharel and Paul Beckett

[Read� Chapter One here, Chapter Two here, Chapter Four here, and the final Chapter here]

[Join series reporters Krishna Pokharel and Paul Beckett for a live chat on Tuesday, Feb. 7 at 8:30 p.m. India time, 10 a.m. ET. They'll answer your questions about the series and speak to your comments. Ask your questions now.]

The Wall Street Journal

As Sister Valsa John Malamel became more involved in the anti-mining protest movement around the village of Pachwara in Jharkhand, her relationship frayed with her religious order, the Sisters of Charity of Jesus and Mary.

In the early years that she lived in Pachwara, she used to visit the order�s nearby convent in Amrapara every weekend. But her visits ceased in 2006. �She found she didn�t have the time,� says Sister Lilly Pallipurath, who heads the order�s council that oversees the Jharkhand convents from Ranchi, the state capital.

Sisters of Charity of Jesus and MaryAn undated picture of Sister Valsa

The council summoned Sister Valsa to discuss her absence. It suggested placing her elsewhere. She refused.

Sister Valsa�s church attendance also lagged, though she told her sisters she celebrated the Eucharist when a local priest visited. The sisters worried that she was neglecting her nun�s rituals.

�We always said we approve of her work but about her religious life we were not very happy,� says Sister Lilly, 50 years old.

Sister Valsa would respond: “What is important for me is the life of the people.”

Was Sister Valsa losing her faith?

“If you look at rituals and other things, one would say she had no faith,� says Sister Lilly. �But rituals and timely prayers are not really faith. That she diminished in her faith, I cannot say that. She always felt close to Jesus.�

The Wall Street JournalLilly Pallipurath heads the Sisters of Charity of Jesus and Mary’s convent in Ranchi.

Sister Valsa also believed her work was closer to the order�s original mission of serving the poor than the life her sisters led inside their convents. And she wasn�t shy about saying so.

� �I am living the life our founder lived,� she would say,� says Sister Lilly. �She felt she was living it much more than the other sisters. I said, �You can’t say that.� That was not appreciated.�

In Pachwara, too, resentment was building toward Sister Valsa.

Promodini Hembrom is the 42-year-old niece of Binej Hembrom, the tribal chief, and the daughter of his brother, Cornelious. She says that as Sister Valsa�s role as an activist increased, her father and uncle worked at her �beck and call, out of their goodness and ignorance.�

�We used to tell our fathers, �You are the head of the villages, how can an outsider make you run like her dogs here and there?�� Promodini Hembrom says. �But they wouldn�t listen. She had made everybody in the village dumb.�

Cornelious Hembrom, 73 years old, says he and his brother supported and helped Sister Valsa because they believed she was �working for the good of the village.�

The Wall Street JournalThe office of PANEM at Kathaldih, near Pachwara.

After the village reached an agreement in 2006 with PANEM, the local mining company, Pachwara was undisturbed by the company�s activities. But PANEM opened two mines in the area, one in Kathaldih, about seven kilometers from Pachwara.

The mine�s entrance is a craggy and desolate terrain of black and gray shiny sludge. Dump trucks and coal trucks roar along the access road. A narrower road leads up a few hundred yards past machinery, workers’ housing, and piles of trash to the company�s offices. Of the almost 600 people employed at Kathaldih, about 400 are local tribal members, a company official says.

The mining takes places in a vast canyon. Its walls are layered like a Himalayan mountainside but they are devoid of green. In the canyon floor, solitary dots of yellow and orange — a mammoth excavating machine, backhoes and trucks — plow through the freshly-blasted earth to extract, load and remove the coal.

The road from the mine to the railway station in the nearby city of Pakur is in constant use. Dozens of trucks move slowly in giant convoys. Traffic jams are frequent as they meet convoys returning to the pit.

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As the trucks trundle by, local men play out a gruesome ritual of desperate poverty. They line the roadside, waiting for their moment. When it comes, they climb the walls of the passing truck and throw out what coal they can grab from the high pile in the truck bed. The drivers make no effort to stop them. Back on the roadside, the scavengers scrape up the fallen coal with a long fork, pack it into tall sacks, mount the sacks on bicycles, and push them to market to sell as fuel in tea stalls or homes.

The Wall Street JournalA girl collects nuggets of coal on the roadside near Pachwara.

In the early hours of the morning, local women line the roads to scrape bare-handed for what the men leave behind, their blackened fingers probing the deep coal dust for a nugget. Everything, even the garbage, is plastered with soot.

Since 2005, more than 150 villagers have died after being hit by coal trucks, according to the villagers and police officials. Bishwanath Dutta, director of PANEM, says the transportation of coal is handled by contractors from Pachwara and elsewhere in Jharkhand and the company doesn�t have direct knowledge of these incidents.

The Wall Street JournalTrucks carrying coal move in convoy near Pachwara.

The mine also has attracted the attention of local Maoist rebels. They are known as Naxalites after the village of Naxalbari in the neighboring state of West Bengal, where their insurrection started in 1967. The rebels seek the overthrow of the Indian state and have won support among some tribal villagers in Jharkhand and across central India where government services are decrepit or don�t exist. The rebels intimidate villages they view as unsympathetic to their cause. And they target police stations and corporate offices.

In 2009, two senior PANEM officials were shot dead while they were on a morning walk. The murders are under investigation. Police suspect the rebels. On Jan. 10, a group of about 20 Maoists attacked the Kathaldih mine, firing indiscriminately. They killed a security guard, police say.

Villagers in Pachwara and surrounding hamlets have earned unprecedented sums through road construction contracts and other benefits offered by the mining company.

But by early last year, Sister Valsa was growing frustrated. She believed PANEM was dragging its feet on key provisions of the 2006 agreement between the company and nine villages that she helped negotiate, according to villagers and her friends.

In a May meeting of the committee that oversees the pact, she demanded that the company build a hospital that, in 2006, it had promised to complete by the end of 2007, says James Murmu, a PANEM official, who was present. He says the company took her demand seriously and has acquired land where the hospital will soon be constructed.

Sister Valsa also was coming into increasing conflict with Pycil Hembrom, the 40-year-old son of Binej, the tribal chief, according to Sister Valsa�s friend, Sonea Deheri, and police documents filed later.

Pycil Hembrom was responsible for distributing company funds to villagers, a process Sister Valsa supervised. But by early 2011, he had begun challenging Sister Valsa�s supervisory role, Mr. Deheri says, and sought to usurp her.

He says Pycil Hembrom wanted to have “complete control” of the process of negotiating with the company, distributing company funds for compensation and welfare programs, dispensing contracts and supervising the implementation of the 2006 agreement. The contracts and compensation were set to increase dramatically when mining began in Pachwara.

Pycil Hembrom was not available for comment. His son, Prem Hembrom, says his father negotiated with the company only when Sister Valsa was away from the village. He added that his father didn’t “want anything for himself from the company.”

The differences between Sister Valsa and Pycil Hembrom caused a broader rift between the villagers. And it left Sister Valsa in a difficult position: Since she had arrived in Pachwara, she had been staying at the home of Pycil Hembrom�s family, where he also lived.

The atmosphere in their shared house soured. Father Tom Kavalakatt, a local priest, says Sister Valsa recounted to him an incident in June when Pycil Hembrom and his elder brother, Anand, were drinking at the house. Anand Hembrom verbally abused Sister Valsa, Father Tom says she told him.

She confided in her friend Mr. Deheri, too. In a statement later filed with a local court, he said Sister Valsa told him in June: �Pycil has started using abusive words against me and is hurting me emotionally.�

In late June, Sister Valsa moved out of the house to a pair of small rooms in a nearby home.

Anand Hembrom denies that he or his brother abused Sister Valsa. He says Sister Valsa �went out of the house peacefully.� But her relations with the village�s most powerful family would never be repaired.

***

This is the third chapter in the story of Sister Valsa. The first chapter is here, the second here, the fourth here and the final chapter here. It is a tale of greed, lust, friendship, betrayal , faith, and brutality set against the conflict between two major forces shaping India today: Industrialization and the drive to preserve traditional ways of life. The Wall Street Journal compiled this account based on dozens of interviews, witness statements, court documents, and police files. It is running as a serialized story on India Real Time and india.wsj.com every day this week.