NEW DELHI -- The new millennium has been terribly cruel to Christians in India. Fanatical Hindu organizations -- which are wings of the country's ruling party, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) -- have unleashed a reign of terror on the second-largest minority group after the Muslims. Murder and mayhem and desecration of churches are no longer confined to remote forests or nameless villages, where modern communication has not yet reached. They now occur in well populated and policed areas.
Even as this piece is being penned, the news of a church in the Western Indian state of Maharashtra being burned down comes on the ticker. On June 7, the Christian warden of a school, a prominent missionary in the central Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, was battered to death as he lay asleep on a cot outside his humble dwelling.
His cook, the only witness to this gruesome event, died mysteriously while he was being interrogated by the police in the station. First, this was termed a suicide, but later the authorities admitted that he had been killed. They had to because the marks on the body were an obvious giveaway.