India’s Religious Warfare Worst Since Independence : Asia: Hindu-Muslim conflict takes 200 lives this month. Tough official action is seen as only solution.

Ghulam Yazdani, a Muslim lawyer and social worker, was at his desk at home on a recent Saturday night discussing with a Hindu colleague ways to end the growing religious violence tearing apart his south Indian city when five Hindu youths quietly entered the room.

They bowed respectfully. “ Salaam aleikum ,” they said to Yazdani, mouthing in unison the traditional Islamic greeting for peace. Then, without warning, and with each taking his turn, the five methodically stabbed Yazdani 10 times, piercing both of his lungs, his head, his back and his legs. Then, without a word, they left him for dead in a river of blood.

When Yazdani was brought to Osmania General Hospital a few minutes later, he was pronounced dead--one of the scores of Muslims and Hindus who have been chopped, stabbed, hacked or burned to death throughout India in the past three weeks, in the worst religious carnage this once-secular nation has experienced since the blood bath of its independence and partition 43 years ago.

The only thing that set Yazdani’s case apart from the more than 150 deaths that have occurred in Hyderabad alone since Dec. 7 was that the diagnosis was premature. Laboring skillfully and tirelessly, Osmania General’s predominantly Hindu doctors brought the aging Muslim lawyer back from the brink of death that night.

As he sat in his hospital bed last week, Yazdani, a patchwork of stitches and dried blood, echoed the sentiments of many in this battered and bruised nation: “The hour for our nation is dark, indeed.

“Most in the majority (Hindu) community are not ‘communal’ people,” he said, using the word by which Indians refer to the religiously fanatical and bigoted. “But the communalists are taking charge now. They want this Hindu fundamentalism to prevail throughout India. They want to destroy our mosques. And they want to destroy India itself as a democratic and secular nation.

“Now, it can only be stopped if government takes stern action at all levels. Someone must fight back.”

As the nationwide death toll in this month’s rioting passed 200, the government in New Delhi tried to do just that. The Indian army was deployed in mid-December, and strict 24-hour curfews were enforced last week in half a dozen of the country’s worst-hit cities and towns, including most of Hyderabad. An entire state government was dismissed for its failure to control the carnage. And, in the words of the Indian press, most of the nation finally began to “limp back to normalcy.”

But the damage has already been done.

For the first time in Indian history, women and children have been targeted. Entire families of both religious communities, even pregnant women and infants, have been massacred, often with the efficiency of professionals. And deep and enduring fear and mistrust have set in between many Hindus and Muslims throughout much of India, a nation of about 100 million Muslims and seven times that number of Hindus.

The violence has struck at the very heart of the Indian nation. It left more than a dozen dead in Agra, site of the Taj Mahal and centerpiece of India’s international tourism trade. For four days, to protect the thousands of tourists in town, authorities were forced to close the famous shrine that Shah Jehan built as a symbol of his undying love for his wife.

The closing exacerbated India’s growing image as a religious battleground, which last month contributed to a decision by the world’s major lending institutions to lower the nation’s credit rating, deepening its already grim economic crisis.

The starkest and perhaps most symbolic religious warfare occurred in Ahmedabad, not far from the national ashram and shrine dedicated to Mohandas K. Gandhi, known as the Mahatma, who fought for an independent India and who saw it as a safe haven for those of all religions.

There, during a single week recently, more than two dozen people were killed in Hindu-Muslim clashes, scores of houses and shrines were burned and neighborhoods were torn apart along religious lines. Tolerance and nonviolence, the cornerstones of Gandhiism, were abandoned for a nightmare of hatred and fear.

The common spark to these struggles is the nationwide campaign by India’s increasingly powerful Hindu revivalists to tear down a 15th-Century mosque in the remote northeastern town of Ayodhya and replace it with a massive shrine to Hinduism’s demigod Lord Rama, who they assert was born on the site.

Two months ago, dozens were killed there when waves of militant Hindus stormed and damaged the mosque. The confrontation in Ayodhya was largely responsible for bringing down the government of Prime Minister Vishwanath Pratap Singh a few weeks later.

By now, the toll is more than 450. And it was during the past few weeks in Hyderabad, a sophisticated metropolis of more than 3.5 million Hindus and Muslims more than 1,000 miles southwest of the disputed mosque, that the worst of religious bloodletting took place.

It is here, among the nation’s largest urban concentration of Muslims, that the breadth of India’s brewing civil war is clearest and that the scars now appear deepest.

According to independent accounts from doctors, police officers and those few impartial eyewitnesses who remain after an orgy of brutality that the local police dubbed a “holocaust,” the violence unleashed here was even more savage than that of 1947. That was during the religious partition of the subcontinent, when about 1 million people were killed, Muslims as they migrated toward the newly created Islamic state of Pakistan, Hindus as they fled from it.

In spontaneous street fights as well as professional “hits” in Hyderabad, attackers used a variety of weapons, from three-foot swords to poison-tipped daggers, from glass shards to rusty nails and hatchets. Women carrying babies as they shopped for vegetables were randomly cut to pieces. A 16-year-old girl was forced to watch as her parents were slaughtered outside their mud shanty.

“She has turned psychotic,” said Dr. Anand Dayal, the Osmania General Hospital neurosurgeon who treated 16-year-old Kiren for a fractured skull after the attack.

The girl sat crumpled on her hospital bed, her eyes rolled up into her head. “And now, there is no one to look after her in the world,” the doctor added.

“In a city like Hyderabad, there are always a few stabbings every day. And communal violence has flared in the past. But this is the worst ever. For the first time, we are seeing women and children. Maybe it’s political, I don’t know, but what kind of politics is this? I cannot tell about the reason. Certainly, though, this has been the work of professionals. Most of these stabbings were done by persons who know where the organs are and how to approach them to make our job most difficult.”

In all, the surgeons at Osmania General tried to stitch up about 450 stabbing victims during a 10-day period this month, of whom about 300 survived. Then, at the end of the day, as the surgeons return home, even they cannot escape the harsh realities.

“Then we are forced to think about ourselves,” Dayal said. “When we leave the hospital, we are part of the general public, and the fear psychosis is very much there among all of Hyderabad these days.”

At police headquarters a few miles from the hospital, Hyderabad’s urbane, newly appointed police commissioner echoed Dayal’s phrase.

“You can’t blame people who are suffering in a fear psychosis,” Commissioner M. V. Bhaskara Rao said. “There has been this holocaust, and now vigilante groups are coming out in the street with sticks in panic reactions to rumors. When a panic reaction is there, you cannot expect people to act rationally.

“And, of course, there are still some people who do not like normalcy to come back. Some are still blaring these audiocassettes of screaming women and children to scare the people in the streets. There are bomb scares and false rumors every day. It’s like a rough play in a football match. It sets off a free-for-all, and now everyone is playing foul.”

For a veteran police officer like Rao, who described Hyderabad as a powder keg just waiting for a spark, it is the violence that swept through his city that augurs worst for India.

“This fundamentalism, be it Hindu fundamentalism or Islamic fundamentalism, has now come to stay. It will take a long time for these people to throw it away,” he said, adding a reference to Ayodhya: “Today, you have a rallying point for it. Before, it was nebulous. But now there’s a focal point that the interested political forces can use over and over again to surcharge the people.”

That the Ayodhya controversy ignited Hyderabad’s religious passions is undeniable. The violence coincided with a street campaign by the Hindu revivalist Indian People’s Party and World Hindu Council, which fielded sound trucks throughout Hyderabad appealing to the faithful to join militant pilgrims gathering for a second time at the Ayodhya site earlier this month.

Mohammed Kasim, one of hundreds of Muslim refugees who have taken shelter in makeshift camps at Hyderabad’s largest mosque, the Mecca Masjid, and inside several Muslim marriage halls, said that the day before the violence erupted, a local politician delivered a fiery speech in the shadow of a statue of Mahatma Gandhi near Kasim’s home. The politician vowed to pay 5,000 rupees ($275) to every Hindu who killed a Muslim.

“For Muslims, there is no security anymore in life and in all things of life,” Kasim lamented.

Similarly, though, Muslim passions were ignited nationwide at the height of the violence earlier this month by the widely distributed speech of their spiritual leader, the Imam Maulana Abdullah Bukhari.

Delivered during Friday prayers at the Grand Mosque in the nation’s capital, New Delhi, and reproduced on hundreds of cassettes, the imam’s speech was a tirade against India’s predominantly Hindu riot police. He charged not only that the police were bigoted against Muslims but that they were the guiltiest party in the nationwide rioting.

“Now I say the time has come that our protectors (the police) have become our killers,” Bukhari said. “Either they are removed or we will defend ourselves. We will not be attackers, but we will not spare our attackers.”

He called on the government to withdraw the police and simply allow Hindus and Muslims to “fight it out among each other and let the world know who is the winner and who is the loser. Then we will show this communalism how to end hostility toward Islam and the Muslim community.”

The speech only refueled the anarchic spiral of bloodshed in Hyderabad and elsewhere in the country. It was only after the army was deployed in huge numbers and curfews clamped on the most critical cities that the worst of the violence appeared to subside.

Four days after the imam’s speech, two Hindu milk deliverymen were stabbed by fanatic Muslim youths while making their rounds in the old section of Hyderabad, formerly the seat of ancient Muslim kings. That afternoon, the emergency room of Osmania General Hospital again filled with Muslim casualties.

Jani Begum, 35, was wheeled in with a stab wound in her breast. Alongside her was her 10-year-old daughter, Khysar, bathed in blood from a gaping hole in her throat.

“This is the worst, the worst I’ve ever seen,” an emergency room doctor whispered as he frantically helped his colleagues suture and clamp the wounds. “It’s a political power game, to be sure. But here you see the real victims: women, children, innocents--and, of course, India itself.”