Kathmandu, July 29 (IANS) A 40-year-old priest from India’s Jharkhand state, teaching underprivileged children in Nepal for almost a decade, has been attacked by a group led by an expelled student.
Sanjay Ekka, who comes from Jaspur village in eastern India’s mineral-rich Chhotanagpur plateau and belongs to the underprivileged Oraon tribe, joined the Society of Jesuits, the group of Catholic priests who have played a leading role in spreading education in India and Nepal, in 1994.

In 2000-01, he was sent to the border town of Bhadrapur in eastern Nepal to teach at the St Xavier’s School there. Then after studying theosophy for nearly four years in New Delhi’s Vidya Jyoti College run by Catholic priests, he was sent to northern Kathmandu.

Since December 2005, Ekka had been in charge of the Loyola Students Home in Baniyatar, a hostel for boys mostly from the Tamang community, who have been the worst victims of trafficking.

The problem started after the priest tried to discipline a teen, Minesh Tamang, who was said to be headstrong and hostile to authority.

After the teen was expelled Friday for playing hooky, he brought six more youngsters with him on Monday taking advantage of a power outage.

“They did not even speak,” the injured priest, his left hand heavily bandaged, told IANS lying on his hospital bed.

“They started attacking me. They were carrying knives and screw drivers.”

While six of the others wore masks, a defiant Minesh, the priest said, did not bother to cover up his face.

Ekka’s left arm was slashed and he also received deep gashes on the hip. When his cries brought alarmed neighbours to the hostel, the gang fled.

However, the neighbours chased the fugitives and caught 13-year-old Suresh Tamang, who was subsequently handed over to police.

On Wednesday, police said they had produced the boy in court, asking for 25 days remand to complete investigations.

Raju Adhikari, the investigating officer, said the arrested boy had identified the other culprits but all of them had gone into hiding.

Ekka was badly shaken by the incident.

“I would not like to go back to Baniyatar,” he said. “I tried to help somebody who needed help and this is how I was treated.”

The attack comes two months after an explosion in one of Kathmandu valley’s biggest Catholic churches killed three women, two of whom were Indians.

Last year, another Indian priest, John Prakash Moyalan, was killed by armed bandits in his residence in southern Nepal.

Moyalan’s murder and the church blast were planned by the same man, a 38-year-old Hindu extremist whose underground organisation, the Nepal Defence Army, is seeking to restore Hinduism as the state religion and revive monarchy.

“The India-Nepal hostility is affecting Catholic priests as well,” said Lawrence Maniyar, former principal of the St Xavier’s School that is being targeted by unions led by the Maoists.

“At a meeting with the union representatives, they told us dismissively, you people from Kerala think you can run things in Nepal,” Maniyar said.

“We can’t explain to them that we are not here because we are Indians. We are here because we are Catholic priests. We belong to an international organisation and take up our stations wherever we are asked to by our superiors.”