A 160-year-old church in the Chikkaballapur District of the Indian state of Karnataka was vandalised on Thursday.
The incident was reported at 5:30am after a parishioner saw a broken statue of St Anthony and damage to the church. He informed the priest of the church, Father Joseph Anthony Daniel, who later filed a police complaint.
Father Joseph told the media that this kind of vandalism had never happened before.
The incident came as the state assembly was due to debate an anti-religious conversion Bill, against which 40 socio-political organisations are protesting.
A spokesman for the archdiocese, Kantha Raju, told the media that this is the 11th attacks on a church across Karnataka state since September this year.
In recent weeks, Christian prayer meetings in different parts of Karnataka have been disturbed. The most recent was in November when a group of Bajrang Dal (a Hindu organisation) activists allegedly disrupted a prayer meeting at the Jesus Prayer Hall in Belur town.
A report released on 5 December by the Association for the Protection of Civil Rights, the United Christian Forum, and United Against Hate revealed that there were 305 attacks on members of the Christian community reported in India between January and September.