By dawn, Christian homes in the village were smoking heaps of burnt mud and concrete shells. Churches were razed, their wooden doors and windows stripped off.

A Reuters first-hand account of the continuing pogrom against Christians in eastern India — “Christians cower from Hindu backclash in Orissa” — captures the horror unfolding in that state, where Hindu fundamentalists, egged on by nationalist politicians, are doing to the Christians there what scapegoating mobs have done throughout history.

There is a social law, identified by students of these things, that the fewer the victims and the larger the mob, the greater will be the violence. Orissa is a homogeneously Hindu state where Christian numbers are very small indeed. Krittivas Mukherjee’s harrowing story, says Tom Heneghan, religion editor of Reuters, “comes from a hamlet so small it doesn’t show on web maps.”

The saddest thing about this is that it is hard to see who can help them.

Austen Ivereigh is a Fellow in Contemporary Church History at Campion Hall, at the University of Oxford, and a biographer of Pope Francis. In 2020 he collaborated with Pope Francis on his Let Us Dream: the Path to a Better Future, published by Simon & Schuster.