KOLKATA, INDIA, October 11, 2008: Police officers in Orissa said that Christian youths have turned to militancy by teaming up with local Maoists. Police are concerned that if anti-Christian riots continue, the Christians may also join forces with Muslim militants to take on Hindus.
Chandrasekhar Pattnaik, a police officer with the intelligence branch, said: “Some of these Christian militants might have joined or helped the Maoists in killing Laxmananda Saraswati and his associates in August.
The shift follows seven weeks of violence triggered by the killing of a local Hindu leader, Swami Laxmananda Saraswati, a leader of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council, or VHP) with critics claiming authorities are failing to rein in the armed Hindu activists who are attacking Christians.
“The arrested militants have confessed to their links with Maoist guerrillas hiding in jungles and we think the Maoists have trained these Christian youths in jungle camps since some years ago,” officer Pattnaik said.
Some security analysts worry the Maoist-Christian alliance could lead to a rise of terrorism in the region and Christian militancy could soon spread to other states.
According to police sources, the arrested Christian youths admitted that they got arms and ammunitions, including explosives, from the Maoist rebels.
“During interrogation, the arrested Christian militants revealed that many Christian young men who were ‘not satisfied with government actions against Hindu militants’, were desperate to resort to violence against Hindus in revenge attacks and they were on the lookout for arms and explosives,” said one police intelligence officer who specializes in Maoist groups in Orissa’s capital, Bhubaneswar.
Hindu Threat to Christians
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/13/world/asia/13india.html?hp
[An important HPI note: Neutral information on the clashes between Hindu and Christians this year in India has been rare. In many cases articles that are biased carry otherwise relevant information to the state of the conflict and its causes, such as this New York Times piece. HPI will run those articles but does not necessarily condone all their content. As a principle, HPI and Hinduism Today Magazine strongly condemn religious violence and retaliation in any context.]
BOREPANGA, INDIA, October 11, 2008: India is no stranger to religious violence between Christians, who make up about 2 percent of the population, and India’s Hindu-majority of 1.1 billion people. But this most recent spasm is the most intense in years.
It was set off, people here say, by the killing on Aug. 23 of a charismatic Hindu preacher known as Swami Laxmanananda Saraswati, who for 40 years had rallied the area’s people to choose Hinduism over Christianity.
The police have blamed Maoist guerrillas for the swami’s killing. But Hindu radicals continue to hold Christians responsible. In recent weeks, they have plastered these villages with gruesome posters of the swami’s hacked corpse. “Who killed him?” the posters ask. “What is the solution?”
Behind the clashes are long-simmering tensions between equally impoverished groups: the Panas and Kandhas. Both original inhabitants of the land, the two groups for ages worshiped the same gods. Over the past several decades, the Panas for the most part became Christian, as Roman Catholic and Baptist missionaries arrived here more than 60 years ago, followed more recently by Pentecostals, who have proselytized more aggressively.
Meanwhile, the Kandhas, in part through the teachings of Swami Laxmanananda, embraced Hinduism. The men tied the sacred Hindu white thread around their torsos; their wives daubed their foreheads with bright red vermilion. Temples sprouted.