Separatists Kill 5 Hindu Marchers : India: The attack confirms government warnings that the national unity procession could cause bloodshed.

Separatists armed with automatic weapons opened fire Thursday on an advance party of Hindu supremacists marching the length of India for national unity, killing five and injuring at least 16. The attack confirmed government warnings that the marathon procession is a flash point for religious bloodshed in the war-torn northern states of Punjab and Kashmir.

Police said the gunmen raked several buses filled with the Hindu march participants in Punjab near the town of Paghwara, a stronghold of armed Sikh militants who have waged a 10-year crusade to create a separate nation for their minority sect in Punjab.

The shootings came just one day after the Indian government, backed by much of the nation’s intelligentsia and mainstream press, called on the leaders of the Hindu-chauvinist Bharatiya Janata Party to end its 9,000-mile Unity March before reaching India’s northernmost states of Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir. There the party plans to conclude the march by hoisting the national flag on India’s independence day this Sunday.

S. B. Chavan, India’s minister of internal security, had warned the marchers Wednesday night that they were “easy targets” and that they were traveling at their own risk. “The Unity March has nothing to do with unity” and, instead, is a dangerous political exercise by the nation’s largest opposition party with enormous implications for the stability of secular India as a whole, Chavan added.

Chavan, a stalwart of the ruling Congress-I Party, asserted that the Hindu party’s march would incite widespread religious violence in Punjab and the Himalayan state of Jammu and Kashmir, where a similarly religious-based armed secessionist movement by the state’s Muslim majority has made the former tourist mecca a virtual war zone for two years.

But Murli Manohar Joshi, the march’s leader and president of the Hindu party, flatly rejected the government appeal, insisting that his main goal in seeing the procession through to the end in Jammu and Kashmir is to condemn the very terrorists who ambushed his lead convoy of buses Thursday morning. It would also be a powerful nationalist statement for Hindu-majority India, he said.

“This is not against any community or religion,” Joshi said in an interview Tuesday as his procession passed through New Delhi, although he quickly added that the march is meant as a statement against “Islamic fundamentalism, which is posing a threat in Kashmir.”

Brushing aside the government warnings, Joshi said, “The people are our security.” When asked the main purpose of continuing the march to its end, he said: “We will raise the flag in Srinagar (Kashmir’s capital) as a symbol of India’s unity and a statement that the country is standing united against terrorism.”

But in vowing to complete the procession that began 43 days ago on the southernmost tip of India, Joshi not only defied the advice of the government and the Indian army, which is deployed in large numbers in both states, but went against popular opinion as well.

A spate of editorials in India’s principal national dailies Thursday universally condemned Joshi’s decision to push onward from New Delhi to the north. The widely circulated Times of India called it “a foolhardy course” that will “turn into a catastrophe or a farce or, worse still, a shabby combination of both.”

But even after Thursday’s attack, the party and its leader showed no sign of stopping. Joshi is due to cross the Punjab border into the state of Jammu and Kashmir today and arrive late tonight in the Hindu-majority Kashmiri town of Jammu. There, party leaders said they will make a final decision on whether to continue through the worst of the rebel-infested regions to Srinagar on Saturday.