NEW DELHI, India—Alarmed over increasing sectarian violence in South Asia, the Catholic Bishops' Conference of India ha demanded tough action against those “spreading hatred between communities in the name of religion.”

The strong Church reaction followed two lethal attacks on religious targets in India and Pakistan late last month. Unidentified gunmen executed seven staff members of the ecumenical Institute for Justice and Peace in Karachi, Pakistan, on Sept. 25, after tying the victims to chairs. This was the fifth deadly attack on Christian minorities in Pakistan, pushing up number of casualty to three dozen lives since October 2001.

The previous day, heavily armed militants stormed the Akshardham Temple in Gujarat state in western India and shot dead 30 Hindu devotees and injured 70 others. Notes recovered from the terrorists indicated the attack was in revenge for recent anti-Muslim riots in the state.

More than 1,000 people—mostly Muslims—were slaughtered by Hindu arsonists following the torching of a train carrying Hindu pilgrims at Godhra township in Gujarat state in February.

“Such killers represent no religious community but only a section that believes in the cult of violence, whose inhuman acts only further widen the gap between religious communities, aggravating the agony of the larger human community,” the Indian bishops asserted in their statement following the two massacres.

“We fully agree with the Indian bishops,” Archbishop Lawrence Saldana of Lahore, chairman of the Justice and Peace Commission of the Catholic Bishops Conference of Pakistan, said when asked for his reaction to the spurt in sectarian violence in the region.

“Unless the government acts tough with the fundamentalist forces, the situation is not going to improve. But unfortunately, this is not taking place,” pointed out Archbishop Saldana. On the contrary, the archbishop said, those in power in the region find it “politically expedient” to ignore fundamentalist violence as they are reluctant to offend influential fundamentalist lobbies.

India

According to Bishop Stanislaus Fernandes of Ahmedabad, chairman of the United Christian Forum for Human Rights in Gujarat, religious fundamentalism has now become a “political weapon to assert Hindu identity” in troubled Gujarat. The Gujarat state government, led by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has been “trying to capitalize on the Hindu identity,” Bishop Fernandes said.

He said the communal violence following the Godhra train burning was a “good occasion to score [political] points” for the BJP, which has been promoting Hindu nationalism. In fact, representatives of Gujarat's BJP government have condoned and in some cases even justified last winter's orchestrated attack on the state's Muslim minority as a “spontaneous Hindu reaction” to the torching of the Hindu pilgrims' train.

More than 80% of India's 1 billion inhabitants are Hindu. Muslims account for about 12% of the population, while Christians comprise less than 3%.

During a recent trip to Europe, Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, the leader of the BJP at the national level, declared that he was “ashamed of what happened in Gujarat.” Bishop Fernandes countered that this expression of BJP remorse is contradicted by Gujarat state's chief minister, Narendra Modi, who has promoted gaurav yatra, or pride marches, that the bishop said are “belittling” to the state's religious minorities.

Bangladesh

According to Bishop Theotonius Gomes, secretary general of Catholic Bishops' Conference of Bangladesh, “Fundamentalist thinking is shaping new political philosophy in the region.”

Commenting on the sudden spurt in anti-minority violence in Bangladesh since the pro-Islamic Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) assumed office last year, Bishop Gomes said, “The government is constituted by the parties run it. When the government fails to assert itself, others around it assert themselves.”

Bangladesh's population of 130 million is 83% Muslim and 16% Hindu.

Recently, Islamic fundamentalists have carried out a series of attacks on minority Hindus, forcing hundreds of Hindu families to flee from Bangladesh to the neighboring Indian state of West Bengal. Bishop Gomes said the BNP government's alliance with the Muslim fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami party explained the “silence” of the government about attacks on the minority Hindus and on Christians

The Bangladeshi bishop said South Asia's increasing religious fundamentalism is due to several factors, with poor education a leading cause. And, with nearly half a billion illiterates in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan, political parties that thrive on religious nationalism are becoming increasingly powerful.

This explains the “reluctance and silence” of the governments in the region to speak out against fundamentalist groups, Bishop Gomes said.

Pakistan

Though Islamic fundamentalists are a small minority in Pakistan (where 95% of the county's 140 million inhabitants are Muslim), Archbishop Saldana said that “these groups wield lot of influence on the government and the ordinary people.”

With secular education being highly expensive in Pakistan, ordinary people commonly rely on the madras—Islamic religious schools that often advocate a militant brand of Islam—making them susceptible to Islamic fundamentalism.

Archbishop Saldana fears the latest deadly attack on the Christian charity in Karachi might “aggravate the alienation” of the minuscule Christian minority in Pakistan. Though many Muslim groups came out to deplore the Sept. 11 terror strikes in the United States last year, there has been a clear decline in similar criticism of the recent attacks on Christian targets, the Pakistani bishop noted.

Under these difficult circumstances, local Church leaders say it is the state's approximately 100 Christian schools (whose 100,000-plus students are mostly Hindus) that provide the best means to promote religious tolerance in Gujarat—the home state of Mahatma Gandhi, who preached equal respect for all religions.

Anto Akkara writes

from New Delhi, India.