World | India
Curfew in Orissa after orphanage torched, nun burnt alive
Authorities imposed a curfew in parts of an eastern Indian state of Orissa on Tuesday after a nun was burnt to death and more than a dozen churches torched by suspected Hindus angry over the murder of their leader.
- Agencies
- Published: 13:17 August 26, 2008
Bhubaneshwar: Authorities imposed a curfew in parts of an eastern Indian state of Orissa on Tuesday after a nun was burnt to death and more than a dozen churches torched by suspected Hindus angry over the murder of their leader.
Suspected Hindu hard-liners set an orphanage run by Christian missionaries on fire in eastern India on Monday, killing one nun and seriously injuring a priest, police said.
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.
On Monday, a group of Hindu hard-liners converged on the orphanage and asked nearly 20 residents to leave the complex, Biswal said.
They then set the orphanage on fire with the nun and the priest locked inside, the police officer said. The nun died and the priest was hospitalised with serious burns, Biswal said.
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.
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.
India's constitution is secular, but most of its billion-plus citizens are Hindu. About 2.5 percent 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.
Police blamed the killings on local Maoist rebels taking sides in a controversy over religious conversions, but Hindus say Christians were to blame for the killings.
Police say by attacking Hindus the Maoists were trying to win support among the region's poor tribes, most of whom had converted to Christianity.
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