Although not much has been written about Hindu hardliners in the mainstream media, the Associated Press has reported on the recent clashes between Christians and Hindu nationalists in the eastern Indian state of Orissa that made about 700 Christians flee to government-run relief camps. Last week, four people died during clashes.
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 India's eastern state of Orissa, which has one of the worst histories of anti-Christian violence.
According to the report, the Hindus had complained that the police were unable to protect them from Christians.
There were conflicting reports of what sparked the violence in rural Kandhamal, about 840 miles southeast of New Delhi. Each side blamed the other.
The Hindu hard-liners 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 offense at a show marking Christmas Eve, believing it was an attempt to convert poor and lower-caste Hindus to Christianity.
Last week, Ashok Sharma of the Associated Press reported that Hindu hardliners had burned six churches in a village that killed one person.
Although Hindus, the overwhelming majority of India's 1.1 billion people, and Christians, who make up around 2.5 percent of the population, have tended to coexist peacefully in India, the region where the violence took place has a history of tension between the communities.
Orissa, in fact, is the only Indian state that has a law requiring people to obtain police permission before they change their religion, a move designed to counter missionary work.
Something that might help understand the rise in Hindu nationalism, also referred to as Hindutva, is a series of articles in the October issue of Himal magazine (published out of Kathmandu).
In the cover feature "Saffron Terror", Subash Gatade writes that there is a rise in militant Hinduism but a conspiracy of silence seems to hide this reality (the photo above is from this article).
