August 27, 2008	Wednesday	Sha'aban 24, 1429

BHUBANESWAR (India), Aug 26: Authorities imposed a curfew in parts of an eastern Indian state on Tuesday after two people were burnt to death and more than a dozen churches torched in spiralling religious violence deplored by the Vatican.

Hundreds of police were deployed in three towns in Orissa’s rural Kandhamal district as they tried to end two days of violence in which a Christian orphanage was also torched by suspected Hindu mobs angry over the murder of their leader.

Violence erupted after armed men killed a Hindu leader linked to the main opposition Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and four others last week, an attack Hindus blamed on Christians.

The leader had been heading a local campaign to reconvert Hindus and tribal people from Christianity.

“We have clamped curfew in three places — Baliguda, Phulbani and Tumudibandh,” said Kishan Kumar, Kandhamal’s chief official.

Local TV stations showed an angry mob vandalising a church, throwing away furniture and setting them on fire. Villagers blocked roads with logs and boulders to stop police from entering the trouble spots.

The Vatican condemned the attacks, calling for “an end to all bullying” and a return to dialogue.

“It expresses its solidarity with local churches and the religious orders involved, and condemns these actions, which are an affront to dignity, peoples’ freedom, and endanger peaceful civil coexistence,” a Vatican statement said.

Separately, the Rome-based Italian missionary agency Misna said it had received reports that two Jesuit priests had been abducted in the area but had no further details.

PROTEST PLANNED: A top body of Indian bishops counted 32 incidents of violence against Christians in Orissa over the past two days.

In protest, it said some 25,000 Catholic schools and colleges in India would be closed on Friday. “People are totally harassed, driven away from their homes, beaten up and institutions destroyed,” Archbishop Vincent Concessao of Delhi told a press conference.

Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, head of the Vatican’s department for inter-religious affairs, told an Italian newspaper that the Vatican did not understand Hinduism as well as it should.

“I think my department should intensify our contacts with religious leaders,” Tauran told the Corriere della Sera.

India’s constitution is secular, but most of its billion-plus citizens are Hindu. About 2.5 per cent of Indians are Christians.

The remote and forested Kandhamal region is rife with religious tension. Hardline Hindus accuse Christian priests of bribing poor tribes and low-caste Hindus to change their faith.

Christian groups say lower-caste Hindus who convert do so willingly to escape the highly stratified and oppressive Hindu caste system.

There have been attacks on Christians in Orissa and other parts of India in previous years. In 1999, a Hindu mob killed Australian missionary Graham Staines and his two children by burning them in their car in Orissa.

Christians in eastern India have condemned this week’s killing of the Hindu leader.—Reuters