Bhubaneshwar, December 29:

Nearly 700 Christians fearing attacks by Hindu hard-liners took shelter in government-run relief camps today after sectarian violence in eastern India left at least four people dead last week.

Authorities were providing food, medicine and security to Christians who moved into the four relief camps on Friday in the rural district of Kandhamal in eastern Orissa state, said Pradeep Kapoor, the inspector-general of police.

Meanwhile, two police officers were suspended for failing to prevent violence on Christmas Eve, when long-standing tensions between the Hindu majority and the small Christian community erupted over conversions to Christianity, Kapoor said. Nearly 800 police and paramilitary forces were trying to restore calm, he said. No fresh incidents of violence were reported today for a second day in Kandhamal, nearly 200 km west of Bhubaneshwar, the capital of Orissa state, Kapoor said.

The state government also transferred the top district administrator, Bhabagrahi Mohapatra, as punishment for failing to stop the fighting. Three people were killed on Thursday when police opened fire on a group of hard-line Hindus who set fire to a police station in Kandhamal district’s Brahmangaon village. They said police failed to protect them after a group of Christians burned down several Hindu homes in apparent retaliation for attacks on churches, officials said.

Another person also died last week in communal fighting. About 19 churches have been ransacked and burned since Monday and several homes have been destroyed.

Over 25 people have been arrested, Superintendent of Police Narsingh Bhol said.

India is overwhelmingly Hindu but officially secular. Religious minorities — such as Christians, who account for 2.5 per cent of the country’s 1.1. billion people, and Muslims, who make up 14 per cent — often coexist peacefully. But throughout India’s history, the issue of conversions has sparked violence by hard-line Hindus.

Hindu groups have long charged Christian missionaries with trying to lure those who occupy the lowest rungs of Hinduism’s complex caste-system away with promises of jobs.

Orissa has one of the worst histories of anti-Christian violence. 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 in 1999.