TRIVANDRUM, India, January 15 (News Agencies) - A 60-year-old American Protestant missionary was attacked and seriously injured by rightwing Hindu activists in the southern Indian state of Kerala, police said Wednesday, January 15.

Joseph Cooper and seven companions were assaulted on Monday after attending a convention in Kerala’s capital Trivandrum, a police spokesman said, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.

Cooper, who had come to Trivandrum from the town of New Castle in the United States to attend the Protestant convention, was set upon by a gang of 10 after they had exploded firecrackers to divert attention.

“The gang attacked Cooper and others with swords, sticks and crowbars. Cooper sustained a deep cut in his right palm. As other church members rushed to the scene the attackers fled,” the spokesman said.

Police said they had arrested a member of radical Hindu movement Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS or National Volunteer Corps) over the incident and a search was underway to track down others involved in the attack.

“Five other RSS activists have been detained by the police and further arrests will soon follow,” police official K.R. Sivasudan told AFP.

“On Tuesday the RSS held a march protesting the arrest of one of its activists but the region is calm and peaceful,” Sivasudan said.

RSS leader R. Santosh denied his organization was involved in the attack but said the incident could have resulted from anti-Hindu speeches made at the convention.

“The speeches made by the U.S. missionary and others at the convention were communally inflammatory and insulting to the practitioners of the Hindu faith,” Santosh told The Hindu newspaper.

A church spokesman condemned the attack but said the Christian community would not retaliate.

“It is very unfortunate that there is a trend to eliminate minority communities and religions across the country and now it has surfaced in Kerala also,” said J.W. Gladstone of the Catholic Syrian church in Trivandrum.

“The overall anxiety of Christians in Kerala has increased because of this attack. But even if we are attacked we will adopt a policy of not retaliating. India's pluralistic unity should not be hampered,” Gladstone said.

India has seen increasing violence in recent years against Christians, who make up about two percent of the country’s overwhelmingly Hindu population.

In 1999, Graham Staines, an Australian-born missionary working in the eastern state of Orissa, was burnt to death along with his two teenage sons, allegedly by Hindu zealots.