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Every year for the past two decades, veteran missionary Graham Staines of Australia conducted five-day open-air "jungle camps" in villages of the eastern Indian state of Orissa, teaching, preaching, and singing to Santal tribal members.

After one such meeting on January 23 in Manoharpur, a village 600 miles southeast of New Delhi, the 58-year-old Staines and his two sons, 10-year-old Philips and 7-year-old Timothy, were murdered. They had been sleeping in a vehicle parked outside a local church when militant Hindus, allegedly from the Bajrang Dal group, doused the vehicle with gasoline and set it afire.

"My husband and sons tried to get out of the burning vehicle, but were stopped by the attackers," Staines's wife, Gladys, recounts. As the flames engulfed the vehicle, the mob danced and some shouted, "Justice has been done; the Christians have been cremated in Hindu fashion." The mob kept would-be rescuers at bay for more than an hour until making sure the missionary and his sons had died.

Police arrested 53 people in connection with the killings. Staines, secretary of the Evangelical Missionary Society, an independent missionary organization based in Brisbane, had been operating a hospital and clinic for lepers in India for 34 years. Two days after the murders, lepers dug the graves for the family while Gladys Staines consoled them as they wept.

"God has given me peace, and I have never questioned his wisdom in allowing this tragedy," Gladys Staines said after the tragedy. "These people are my people and I hope to stay here."

UNPRECEDENTED ATTACK: Indian President K. R. Narayanan denounced the "barbarous killing" of Staines and indicated it is not representative of his country's behavior. "That someone who has spent years caring for patients of leprosy, instead of being thanked and appreciated as a role model, should be done to death in this manner is a monumental aberration of the traditions of tolerance and humanity for which India has been known," Narayanan said.

Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee called the murders "a blot on our collective consciousness." In a televised speech, he said, "Such violence violates the country's tradition and culture of tolerance."

India has a long history of violence between the Hindu majority that makes up 82 percent of the population and a Muslim minority, which composes 12 percent. Until recently, Christians, only 2.5 percent of the 980 million people in India, have never been a target of violence.

According to tradition, Christianity first came to India as a result of first-century missionary activity of the apostle Thomas. Western missionary activity took place from 1448 to 1975.

Even though the Indian government stopped issuing missionary visas in 1964, Christians have continued working toward the transformation of the poor, and to educate, empower, and break the stranglehold of the caste system, money lenders, landlords, and other vested interests.

As the United Christian Forum for Human Rights (UCFHR) has documented more than 120 attacks against Christian individuals, churches, and schools by Hindu fundamentalists in the past year—half of them in the western state of Gujarat—it raises the question of why minority Christians are suddenly being singled out.

RISE OF HINDU FUNDAMENTALISM: The answer lies largely in the surge of Hindu fundamentalism during the past decade. It began with a television campaign in the late 1980s to evoke and assert a self-conscious collective Hindu identity by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The RSS, an India-based organization of Hindu leaders, functions as the principal guardian of Hindu ideology. In 1991, present Interior Minister L. K. Advani followed up with a historic "chariot journey" from a Hindu temple in Somnath in Gujarat to Ayodhya in the north, the legendary birthplace of the Hindu god Ram. The symbolic journey helped establish the transformation of the Bharatiya Janatha Party (BJP) from a marginal group with only two seats in Parliament a decade ago to the ruling party today.

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March 1 1999, Vol. 43, No. 3