Brother George stood no chance of escape. His killers moved silently through the school compound to where he was sleeping in the open on a folding bed. His assailants started beating him - methodically and deliberately -over the head with iron rods. He struggled, briefly. The next morning his body was found by the school cook.
"He was a perfect gentleman, a very mild person," Brother Julius Vattavayalil said yesterday, pointing to the bloodstains on the floor where the priest had died. His bed was still there, in front of a half-constructed school building, which will be the Assisi boys' home. "He was only 43 years old. He was committed to the welfare of the poor and underprivileged," Brother Julius said. "People here cannot believe such a person could be murdered." The killing last week of Brother George Kunjhikandam, a Catholic priest in Mathura, in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, was not an isolated incident. Instead, it was part of a sinister and evolving pattern. Four weeks before Brother George's killers struck at St Francis's school in Mathura, another priest was severely beaten and left for dead in the nearby town of Kosi Kalan. At the Sacred Heart school in Mathura, its Carmelite principal, Sister Maria, was forced to hide in a classroom while a mob of 200 people tore through her school. A second priest was also attacked. The state's tiny Christian community has found itself terrorised during the past two months. The contentious and politically explosive question is by whom? Uttar Pradesh's Christians are not alone in their fear. Last week four bombs exploded simultaneously - two outside churches in the south Indian
state of Andhra Pradesh, one in neighbouring Karnataka, and a fourth in Goa. Over the weekend, a second priest - this time in the Punjab - was murdered and then burnt. Though India's prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, has declared that so far no motive for the attacks has been established, all the evidence points to the involvement of extreme Hindu gangs with embarrassing links to Mr Vajpayee's ruling Hindu nationalist government. The crisis has become so serious that two days ago a delegation of Christian leaders called on Mr Vajpayee at his official residence in Delhi and urged him to intervene. Speaking afterwards, Archbishop Alan de Lastic said India's Christian community now faced its "gravest challenge" in the 53 years since the country's independence. It was facing a "well-orchestrated campaign of hate and calumny", he said. "People are really frightened. They don't feel they can come to a church and pray." Christians have been attacked in the past, but since Mr Vajpayee's pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata party came to power in March 1998, the attacks have increased; there have been 35 recorded incidents this year alone. The fundamentalist Hindu organisations linked with the attacks have denied involvement. They include the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and its militant youth wing, the Bajrang Dal, part of a collective Hindu movement known as the Sangh Parivar. Detectives investigating the attacks have refused to draw the obvious conclusion - that they are the systematic work of local Hindu gangs acting with impunity. Sister Maria, whose school was ransacked, yesterday recalled how the mob chanted: "We are Hindus. You are foreigners." "The police just stood and watched the fun," she said.