India's conversions controversy

Anti-Christian riots have rocked several parts of India over the past month. The BBC's Soutik Biswas travels to a remote region in the eastern Orissa state, where it all began, to explore the touchy issue of religious conversions.

A church attacked in Orissa's Kandhamal district

Churches have been attacked in Orissa

Sixty-year-old Indian farmer Kanduri Digal says he converted to Christianity a decade ago because he found "it a very useful religion".

For most of his life, Digal languished at the bottom of India's caste pyramid as a Hindu untouchable. But he doesn't say he escaped Hinduism because the caste system gave him a raw deal.

Instead, he says, Christianity offered him a road to redemption.

"When I was a Hindu I was stealing, doing bad to others. I have become a better man after I converted. Salvation is ensured in Christianity," he says.

Forty-year-old government peon Ashok Kumar Behera, who converted to Christianity 18 years ago, says he changed faith to get some "peace of life and salvation".

"The Bible says when we die we go to heaven. The holy book also lays down the instructions about life in detail, unlike Hindu scriptures," he says.

However, Digal and Behera have now discovered that in the Kandhamal district of Orissa state where they live their leap of faith has a darker side to it.

They are among the over 13,000 Hindu untouchables-turned-Christian converts who continue to live in 11 camps in the district a month after a wave of anti-Christian violence convulsed the area. Most have fled their homes which were looted and torched by mobs shouting pro-Hindu slogans.

At the root of the confrontation is an age-old rivalry between the majority local Hindu-tribes people and the converted Christians over land, affirmative action benefits and identity rights.

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Orissa has a long and chequered history of Christian proselytising.

Protests against attacks on Christians in Orissa

There have been countrywide protests against the attacks

On the one hand, large numbers of untouchables and tribes people have converted to escape poverty and deprivation.

It is a moot point whether that has worked: nearly 80% of the people in Kandhamal, for example, continue to live under the poverty line, according to official records.

At the same time, Christian zealots have sometimes operated with impunity: a state pastors gathering in November 1996 openly made a call to "win Orissa for Christ by 2000". And, in 1993, the police booked 21 pastors in Nowrangpur district for carrying out "induced" conversions, invoking the conversion law.

It is another matter, as some analysts argue, whether the state should get in the way of personal faith and keep tabs on and demand explanation from a person who is changing faith.