BHUBANESHWAR, India — Hundreds of Christians, fearing more clashes with Hindu nationalists, fled to government-run relief camps where authorities on Saturday were providing them with food, medicine and security.
The clashes left at least four people dead last week, including three killed when police fired on a group of hard-line Hindus that had torched a police station in Kandhamal district’s Brahmangaon village. Another person also died in the communal fighting.
The Hindus had complained that the police were failing to protect them from Christians.
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 India’s secular but Hindu-dominated eastern state of Orissa, which has one of the worst histories of anti-Christian violence.
In 1999, an Australian missionary and his two sons, aged 8 and 10, were burned to death in their car in Orissa following a Bible study class.
But relations between religious minorities — such as Christians, who account for 2.5 percent of the country’s 1.1 billion people, and Muslims, who make up 14 percent — are usually peaceful.
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.
Nearly 800 police and paramilitary forces were trying to restore calm.
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