A guard protects the remains of a church in Mulchand set ablaze on Christmas day. Sherwin Crasto--AP

The pride of independent India is its democracy: freewheeling, pluralistic and broad-based. (In the 1988 general elections, more than 375 million Indians voted.) Free and regular elections, it's argued, provide the glue that has held the heterogeneous land together for half a century.

But the ways in which electoral politics is conducted, in India as elsewhere, can become emblems of national shame. Consider recent events in Ahwa (pop. 10,000), a township in the western state of Gujarat. With the permission of local authorities, several thousand protesters took to the streets on Christmas day to denounce the activities of the town's Christians. Raised voices turned to mob violence and a crowd descended on Deep Darshan, a high school run by nuns, pelting it with stones and damaging several buildings. Later in the day, a Jesuit-run school in a nearby village was besieged by a similar mob--two priests were injured--and 20 more Christian establishments were attacked over the following week.

An obscure locale, a tiny minority--Christians account for 5% of the population in Ahwa's region, and less than 3% of India's masses as a whole--sticks, stones and ugly chants: the resulting headlines initially seemed evidence of the local skirmishes that chronically roil India's diverse society. They were anything but, as follow-up proclamations from India's bigwig politicians demonstrated. Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, after a tour of the affected areas, called for a "national debate" on all religious conversions in largely Hindu India. Ashok Singhal, leader of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, a powerful Hindu group, was quoted in newspapers decrying a "Christian conspiracy to propagate their religion and wipe out Hinduism from this country."(The VHP also announced a three-year plan to counter Christian missionaries and "reconvert" Christians to Hinduism.) Says Denzil Keelor, a highly decorated former Indian Air Force marshal and himself a Christian: "I'm extremely concerned and disgusted that the government in power is allowing the violence to escalate."

Unforeseen threats to the nation and growing violence can mean only one thing: politics rearing its ugly head. In this case, the fragile and fumble-prone government of Vajpayee's Bharatiya Janata Party and its ideological sympathizers seem determined to fabricate an issue to rally support among the country's Hindus, the majority religion accounting for 82% of the population. The purpose is not so much to stay in power but to recover lost ground before the next general election, which analysts predict could take place this year. The Christian community has come into the militants' cross-hairs. There were only 15 instances of violence against Indian Christians in 1997, according to the New Delhi-based United Christian Forum for Human rights; but in 1998, the year the BJP came into power and Sonia Gandhi entered politics, there were 108 such attacks. And while it seems paradoxical for Hindu groups and their allies to target Christians, who are small in number, unaggressive and have never before been considered a threat, that might be precisely the point. "If you're in power, what's a safe way to mobilize militant Hindu cadres?" asks Balveer Arora, professor of government and politics at New Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University. "Pick on a smaller minority. The violence is manageable and will not put the government in peril." It does, however, put peril in the way of a fairly defenseless religious community. "Hindu groups are openly declaring that they will drive out all the Christians," says Sister Carmen Borges, 42, a Vedrunite nun from Goa, who runs Deep Darshan, the high school attacked on Christmas. "We now live in constant fear."

India's 23 million Christians are a small minority, but for the BJP government they represent a very big political bull's eye: a strike against Italian-born Sonia Gandhi, the widow of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi who is trying to rejuvenate her husband's Congress Party and boot the BJP out. The ruling party's strategy is to tar Sonia as a Christian, a foreigner, a figure who will institute a "Rome Raj" if she ever gains the prime ministership, which is increasingly likely. "All these years, nobody accused Sonia Gandhi of Christian bias," points out political scientist Rajni Kothari. "It's nothing but a tacit admission by the BJP that the Congress is coming back to power."

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