Every election is awaited with fear by Christians in rural central India, but the community says the current campaign for national polls has been particularly brutal as right-wing Hindus step up harassment.
Thottumarickal Chacko, the Roman Catholic bishop of Jhabua in Madhya Pradesh state's remote tribal belt, has policemen posted outside his office. It was in his parish on January 9 that the mutilated body of a raped nine-year-old was dumped on the grounds of a missionary school.
He said it was part of a string of attacks in the run-up to the elections being held in five rounds starting Tuesday. Opinion polls tip the Hindu nationalist-led coalition to secure a new term.
"It is the season for Christian-bashing. Attacks against us always intensify when elections are round the corner," Chacko said. "But things have been particularly tough for us in the last four months."
He said that when the parish found the raped girl's body, the school was visited not by police but by Hindu mobs.
"We called the police as soon as we found the poor child's body on our campus. It should have been treated as a crime. But instead Hindu right-wing groups tried to pin the blame on one of our priests," said the bishop.
"Our campus was vandalised," he said. "Nuns could not step out of their rooms. We have been under seige."
"During the Easter holidays we had a gang of men riding their motorcycles through our campus at night screaming obscenities at us and telling us to go home -- but this is our home."
Police later charged a Hindu fruitseller, Manoj Jhadab, with the rape and murder of the girl but it has not stopped attacks against Catholic priests and nuns providing education and medical help to rural areas.
Some Hindu nationalists openly campaign against Christian missionaries, who they argue are altering the historic religious makeup of India through conversions.
"In five years, I will have these meddlesome Catholic missionaries packing their bags and leaving Jhabua," Kalsingh Bhabor, a local member of the state legislature from Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), told an election rally.
"They are here to 'buy' Adivasi souls," said Bhabor, referring to tribal people. "It is their one-point agenda to convert the tribals to Christians. The social work is a cover."
In its election platform, the BJP has promised to tighten laws "prohibiting conversion by force or allurement" across India.
Madhya Pradesh along with the eastern state of Orissa and northeastern Arunachal Pradesh already have laws prohibiting conversions dating back to the late 1960s and 1970s.
Hinduism, which is practiced by more than 80 percent of India's billion-plus population, generally does not accept converts, unlike Christianity, Islam and Buddhism.
"Does Christ keep a register of how many tribals have turned into Christians and give these missionaries in Jhabua points for scoring?" said Kumb Singh Bhagat, a local leader of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, or World Hindu Council, a hawkish group close to the BJP.
Father Pradeep Cherian who runs the mission hospital in Jhabua district said Hindu right-wingers were "spreading lies" to create "unfounded fears about conversions."
"Our parish in Jhabua is 112 years old. That was the beginning of Christianity here. And at that time there was conversion. We do not hide it," said Cherian.
"There are 25,000 Adivasi tribals... who are Catholics which is just one percent of the total population. Hindu right-wing leaders are spreading panic that Hindus are diminishing -- this is not true."
According to officials, there are 1.4 million Adivasis living in Madhya Pradesh's Jhabua, Ratlam, Mandsaur and Neemach districts and in all of them Catholic missionaries have a strong presence.