NEW DELHI - Leaders of India's Christian and Hindu communities held their first meeting in nearly three years to try to resolve differences over religious conversions that have left a trail of violence across the country.
Christians, who make up just over two percent of India's mainly Hindu population, have faced a spate of attacks by suspected hardline Hindu groups who accuse missionaries of carrying out forced conversions.
A spokesman of the Catholic Bishops Conference of India said on Wednesday its talks with the powerful Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) were aimed at ending misunderstanding.
"Christians feel that the RSS is wrongly accusing them of carrying out conversions either by force or through fraudulent means," Father Dominic Emmanuel, spokesman of the CBCI, said.
Emmanuel told Reuters the RSS delegation, headed by General Secretary K. Sudarshan, in turn had said the organisation had been wrongly blamed for attacks on minorities.
He quoted Sudarshan as saying at the meeting on Tuesday that Hinduism taught tolerance, and that India had accepted people belonging to different religions.
The RSS, or the National Volunteers Corps, is widely seen as the ideological mentor of Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's Bharatiya Janata Party.
The RSS denies any bias against minority Muslims or Christians.
Vajpayee himself drew flak from political rivals and the church for saying last weekend that conversions appeared to be a motive for some missionaries engaged in social work across India.
Tensions reached a peak in late 1998 and early 1999 when prayer halls were torched in the BJP-ruled western state of Gujarat and an Australian missionary and his two young sons were burnt to death in their car in the eastern state of Orissa.
Emmanuel said community leaders had first met in 1998, but a subsequent outbreak of religious violence prevented any progress.
"The dialogue has been re-started. We have agreed to meet again," he said.
07:32 08-22-01
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