Christians cower from Hindu backlash in Orissa

By Krittivas Mukherjee Wed Sep 3, 1:31 AM ET

TIKABALI, India (Reuters) - On a starry night last week, as Lal Mohan Digal prepared to go to bed, a mob of raging, machete-wielding Hindu zealots appeared above the hills of his mud house and swarmed over this bucolic hamlet in Orissa.

By dawn, Christian homes in the village were smoking heaps of burnt mud and concrete shells. Churches were razed, their wooden doors and windows stripped off.

We could hear them come shouting 'Jai Shri Ram'," Digal said, referring to the rallying cry of Hindus hailing their warrior-god. The mob poured kerosene on the thatched rooftops of the village homes, then threw matches. Church spires were hacked down.

The Hindu part of the village was untouched. For four days Digal and his stricken Christian neighbours hid in the teak forests, before being herded to a government-run relief camp. The violence replicated itself in village after village, as the rural Kandhamal district of Orissa convulsed from some of the worst anti-Christian attacks in India.
At least 16 people, mostly Christians were killed, churches destroyed and 10,000 Christians were forced to flee their homes as violence spread.

Christians responded with some -- not proportionate -- violence. Almost all the villages Reuters visited bore evidence of attacks on Christians.
Relief shelters were packed with Christian refugees, most of them women and children as their men folk were too scared to emerge from forest hideouts. At one temporary camp in Raikia village, some 8,000 people crammed into two floors of a government office, sleeping on the bare floor and surviving on rice and lentils given twice a day.

"It was the hate campaigns of the Sangh Parivar which led to untold misery for Christians," said Sam Paul of the All-India Christian Council, referring to an apex body of Hindu radicals.
There has not been a long tradition of rivalry between Hindus and Christians, who form less than three percent of officially secular India's 1.1-billion population.

On the contrary, the missionaries have a reputation of running some of the finest schools in India. Intolerance has risen, though, in the last two decades with a revival in Hindu nationalism in India, and a new agenda to fight "foreign faiths" said to be undermining Hinduism.
With political power, Hindu nationalists in several states have made religious conversion either unlawful or extremely difficult.

Orissa has seen some of the worst violence against Christians. "There is an atmosphere of fear," said Krishan Kumar, the chief administrator of Kandhamal, a land dominated by "Adivasis" or traditionally animist forest-dwellers where Christian proselytisers arrived on horseback more than a century ago.

quoted from : http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080903/india_nm/india352913