Extremists target Christmas celebrations

Hindu extremists attacked six village churches in eastern India during Christmas celebrations, leaving one person dead, officials said today.

Authorities deployed 450 police and imposed a curfew to quell the violence in the remote district of Orissa state, where the churches – most mud and thatch houses – were set alight, said Bahugrahi Mahapatra, a government official.

India is overwhelmingly Hindu but officially secular, a fact India’s leaders often point out.

They note that religious minorities, such as Christians, who account for 2.5% of the country’s 1.1. billion people, and Muslims, who make up 14%, often coexist peacefully.

Some have risen to the highest levels of government and business.

But throughout India’s history, both communities have faced repeated attacks from hardline Hindus, with violence against Christians often directed at foreign missionaries and Hindu coverts to the religion.

Orissa has one of the worst histories of anti-Christian violence. In one of the most brutal incidents, an Australian missionary and his two sons, aged 8 and 10, where burned to death in their car following a Bible study class in 1999.

Orissa is also the only Indian state that has a law requiring people to obtain police permission before they change their religion. The law was intended to counter missionary work.

There were conflicting reports of what sparked the Christmas violence, with each side blaming the other.

Officials, meanwhile, were hesitant to wade into he-said, she-said – Mahapatra called the violence a “sensitive matter” and refused to discuss how it began.

The Hindu hardliners said Christians had attempted to attack one of their leaders, 80-year-old Laxmanananda Saraswati of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad group, who leads an anti-conversion movement.

“When they were prevented from attacking him by his followers the Christians hit someone with an ax and one Hindu died,” Giriraj Kishore told reporters in New Delhi.

But the New Delhi-based Catholic Bishops Conference of India said the fighting on Monday began when Hindu extremists objected to a show marking Christmas Eve, believing it was designed to encourage Hindus at the bottom of the religion’s rigid caste hierarchy to convert to Christianity. Low-caste Hindus are often a target of missionaries.

An argument over the Christmas show got out of hand and some of the Hindus opened fire on the Christians, wounding three of them, said John Dayal, a spokesman for the Bishops Conference.

The Hindus then went on a rampage yesterday, Christmas Day, chasing people out of six churches and setting the mud-and-thatch buildings ablaze, he said.

Later, dozens of people from each community clashed, Dayal said. One person was killed, he added, but could not say if the dead man was a Hindu or Christian.

Another 25 people were wounded, the Press Trust of India news agency said.

Much of the ill-will in the area, about 840 miles south-east of the national capital, New Delhi, stems from anti-missionary sentiment.

Some hardline Hindus are pushing for all missionaries to be expelled while Christians have challenged the conversion law in court, saying it violates India’s constitution.