Police enforce curfew after India religious riots

BHUBANESWAR, India (Reuters) - Hundreds of federal police enforced a curfew in parts of eastern India on Thursday after clashes between Hindus and Christians in which one person was killed and 14 churches and 3 Hindu temples were damaged.

Police said the clashes had ended but curfews remained in place in three towns in central Orissa.

Long-running tensions between the two groups in Orissa's rural Kandhamal district came to a head on Christmas Eve, when fights broke out after Christians put up a temporary ceremonial arch to mark the holiday, police said.

Later in the day, Christians attacked and injured a Hindu leader known to resent Christians' attempts to convert low-caste Hindus, according to police.

Fighting and rioting continued intermittently on Christmas day and Wednesday. Mobs set alight Hindu temples and churches, many of them unsturdy huts of thatch, mud and stone. Rioters also attacked homes and government buildings.

A Christian man was killed during the fighting, police said. No one has arrested so far, police said.

Hardline Hindus, some linked to India's main Hindu-nationalist grouping, the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), have accused Christian priests of bribing poor tribespeople and low-caste Hindus to change their faith.

Christian groups say lower-caste Hindus who convert do so willingly to escape the highly stratified and oppressive Hindu caste system.

India's constitution is secular, but most of its billion-plus citizens are Hindu. About 2.5 percent of Indians are Christians.

There have been attacks on Christians in the past in Orissa. In 1999, a Hindu mob killed Australian missionary Graham Staines and his two children by burning them in their car.

Several states ruled by the BJP have passed anti-conversion laws.

(Writing by Jonathan Allen; editing by Alistair Scrutton)