India Gunmen Kill 26 Hindus; Sikhs Blamed

Gunmen sprayed machine-gun fire and detonated two powerful bombs Sunday at an outdoor meeting of a militant Hindu organization in the northern state of Punjab, killing at least 26 people and injuring two dozen others in the worst violence this year in the strategic, strife-torn state.

Calling the massacre “a most dastardly and cowardly attack by nefarious people,” Punjabi Gov. S. S. Ray declared an indefinite curfew in the area and ordered police to capture the gunmen “dead or alive within seven days.”

Police officials blamed the attack on a militant Sikh organization called the Khalistan Commando Force. Khalistan is the militants’ name for a hoped-for separate Sikh state they would like to see carved out of Punjab, India’s most fertile and once most-prosperous state.

In New Delhi, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s minister for internal security, Buta Singh, declared the massacre to be “the biggest in recent times” and said that it is “a very serious attempt on the part of terrorists to whip up tension along communal (religious) lines.”

The organization targeted by the gunmen Sunday is one of India’s largest and most militant national Hindu groups, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or National Volunteer Corps.

Martial Arts, Fervor

When the attack took place, the group’s members were meeting in a park in the Punjabi town of Moga, one of hundreds of such gatherings in which the volunteer corps teaches martial arts and mobilizes religious fervor among India’s dominant religious group.

Police said that a van pulled up to the gathering and half a dozen men began firing at random. Nearly an hour after they sped away, a time bomb exploded at the scene of the shootings, killing two police investigators and a bystander. Later, a second bomb went off in the park but caused no casualties.

In an effort to play down the religious implications of an attack that many fear could further inflame the situation in Punjab state, where thousands have been killed since the militant Sikh campaign began in 1982, Gov. Ray tried to place the ultimate blame on Pakistan, which borders the Punjab.

“The perpetrators of this ghastly crime are neither Hindus nor Sikhs, but animals hired by vested interests, principally from across our border, to create chaos, confusion and division in our sacred land,” Ray said.

Despite a recent warming of relations, India has often accused Pakistan of abetting the Sikh militants. Allegations of Pakistani involvement in the conflict have never been proved conclusively.

After Sunday’s attack, however, several analysts in New Delhi speculated that the massacre also may have serious political ramifications for Prime Minister Gandhi as this year’s national elections approach.

Gandhi, who succeeded his mother, Indira, after she was assassinated by two of her Sikh bodyguards in 1984, must stand for reelection before the end of this year, and religion is likely to be one of the key issues.

The National Volunteer Corps represents a huge, nationwide voting bloc centered in the central Indian region known as the Hindi heartland, which political analysts say is the key to winning a national election.

Already, the Hindu militants have been speaking out against Gandhi’s government, and Sunday’s massacre almost certainly will alienate the group still further from Gandhi’s secular Congress-I ruling party.