There has been no ambiguity about the Vishwa Hindu Parishad's antagonism towards the Muslims or the BJP's own track record on Hindu-Muslim relations. The unprecedented, planned and systematic attack on the Christians points to a shift in Sangh Parivar priorities and a new threat perception.

First, there is now a clear case of clash of interests. The VHP faces Christian missionaries in the fields of education and welfare, the two sectors into which the RSS and its affiliated bodies have tried to make inroads. Sadhvi Ritambhara, for instance, runs an ashram for Hindu orphans in Shahdra. Another RSS outfit runs more than 5,000 schools allover India and some in adjoining Nepal involving about half a million students and teachers.

The Sangh organisations active in the tribal areas for more than a decade have also come across the splendid work done by Christian missionaries in the fields of education and welfare. According to the Sangh, the work does not end there: the missionaries have also been equally successful in engineering mass conversions.

Sangh insiders admit that it was largely due to this, and to counter the missionary `encroachment', that they have also set up schools in those areas. The RSS has identified over 67,000 villages in the country where tribal population is sizeable and where they want to dominate.

That is why the Parivar suspiciously looks at the word Welfare and anyone who has anything to do with it -- including Nobel laureates Mother Teresa and economist Amartya Sen.

Incidentally, there are reasons enough for the Sangh to hate the late Mother Teresa. Her work and her international recognition had always annoyedthe Sangh affiliates. She directly wrote to then Prime Minister Morarji Desai in 1978 opposing the proposed legislation, pushed by the Parivar, to ban conversion. Her Missionaries of Charity in Bengal had also been opposed by the Hindu fanatics in Bengal in early years. But on both counts she won, the legislation never came through.

In the past, the BJP-VHP-RSS had not been able to confront the Christian missionaries as they did not have sufficient presence in the Christian-dominated Northeast. While the lack of organisational network has hampered its comeback mission in the Northeast, the Sangh Parivar has begun its anti-Christian mission in mainland states such as Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat.

There was a reason why the Christians were not targeted in the past. They too have been traditional supporters of the Congress, like the Muslims who deserted it occasionally -- in 1977 after the forced sterilisation campaign and post-1989 for the mishandling of the Ayodhya movement which led to theDemolition.

Yet the Christians were not as vulnerable to the militant Hindu onslaught largely because of their minimal influence on politics, numerically. While the Muslims could influence parliamentary elections in about one fourth of the total seats with their 12-per cent population, Christians influence would be limited to about 20 seats, mainly from north-east and in Kerala where the BJP do not have much clout.

But the increasing influence of the Christian missionaries on the welfare sector and the growing paranoia over conversions have changed the attitude of the Sangh outfits towards the Christians. Also, they realised that their weapon of welfare against conversions don't work in areas where the Christian missionaries operate.

The VHP-RSS intensified their missionary and educational campaign in 1981 in response to large-scale conversion into Islam in Meenakshipuram, Tamil Nadu. They began their educational activities in slums and dalit bastis. Though the immediate reason was the Meenakshipuramconversion, the RSS wing working among tribals (Banabasi Kalyan Ashram) stepped up its activities in the tribal belts. According to their claim, they have already succeeded in setting committees in half of the 67,000 tribal villages.

The fact that Banabasi Kalyan Ashram gets priority in the BJP set-up became evident when Atal Behari Vajpayee inducted a little-known Babulal Marandi in the Union cabinet. Marandi was the Ashram's head in Bihar's tribal belt where missionary activities have come under fierce attack of the Sangh brotherhood.

The latest round of hate attacks also comes in the wake of the failure of a much-touted slogan, `Rome Rajya versus Rama Rajya'. For the RSS and VHP, the main opposition leader, Sonia Gandhi, still represents Pope more than a political party. And a community identified with her becomes a natural target.

Though the BJP did not make `Rome Rajya Vs Rama Rajya' an issue in the last election, that was largely because of the electoral law banning slogans with communalimplications, and partly because of BJP's alliance with different non-BJP parties including the one headed by George Fernandes.

But the reality that Sonia Gandhi is in Indian politics to stay has now sunk in. So the Sangh family finds the collective threat from the political-social-cultural sphere greater than the one from Muslims which is just about numbers.