Nearly 700 Christians move to relief camps to escape attacks in India

The Canadian Press ^ | 29 Dec 2007 | The Canadian Press

[BGHater]

BHUBANESHWAR, India - Hundreds of Christians are fleeing to relief camps in eastern India after clashes with Hindu nationalists.

The government-run camps are providing food, medicine and security.

Officials say the clashes left at least four people dead last week, including three killed when police fired on a group of hardline Hindus that had torched a police station.

Hindus complain the police aren't protecting them from Christians.

The killings and subsequent flight of nearly 700 Christians to four relief camps are the latest in a series of religious and political power struggles in the secular but Hindu-dominated state of Orissa, which has one of the worst histories of anti-Christian violence.

In 1999, an Australian missionary and his two sons, aged eight and 10, were burned to death in their car in Orissa following a Bible study class.

But relations between religious minorities - such as Christians, who account for 2.5 per cent of the country's 1.1 billion people, and Muslims, who make up 14 per cent - are usually peaceful.

There are conflicting reports of what sparked the violence in rural Kandhamal, about 1,300 kilometres southeast of New Delhi. Each side blamed the other.

The Hindu hardliners said Christians tried to attack an 80-year-old leader, Laxmanananda Saraswati, of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad group, who leads an anti-conversion movement.

The New Delhi-based Catholic Bishops Conference of India said the fighting began when Hindu extremists took offence at a show marking Christmas Eve, believing it was an attempt to convert poor and lower-caste Hindus to Christianity.

That has long embittered Hindu groups who say Christian missionaries try to lure the poor and those on the lowest rungs of Hinduism's complex caste-system away with promises of money and jobs.

Since Monday, Hindu nationalists have ransacked and burned about 19 churches, according to officials who say Christians burned down several Hindu homes in apparent retaliation.

Authorities were providing food, medicine and security to Christians moving into the four relief camps, said Pradeep Kapoor, the inspector-general of police.

Two police officers were suspended and a top district administrator was transferred for failing to prevent the violence, Kapoor told The Associated Press. Nearly 800 police and paramilitary forces were trying to restore calm.

At least 25 people have been arrested, police Supt. Narsingh Bhol said.

[BGHater]

Update for this:

Hindu mobs ransack churches in India http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1944743/posts

[villagerjoel]

“But relations between religious minorities - such as Christians, who account for 2.5 per cent of the country’s 1.1 billion people, and Muslims, who make up 14 per cent - are usually peaceful.”

Just in case you had some crazy notion that Muslims were prone to violence.

[familyop]

I’m sure that they’d do better in Pakistan.

[NMR Guy]

That has long embittered Hindu groups who say Christian missionaries try to lure the poor and those on the lowest rungs of Hinduism's complex caste-system away with promises of money and jobs.

Yeah, screw those Christians for treating the poor, outcast, and discriminated against as if they're human beings. How dare they.

[britt reed]

But one Christian defender, who asked not to be identified, states, “we keep killing them (the Hindus) but they keep on coming back.”

[Brilliant]

“we keep killing them (the Hindus) but they keep on coming back.”

Reincarnation no doubt.