MUMBAI: Fears of increased Hindu-Muslim tensions are rising in the wake of Indian security agencies’ findings that Monday’s two car-bomb blasts are part of a series of attacks in this bustling port city to avenge an anti-Muslim pogrom last year in adjacent Gujarat state.

The blasts, which claimed 51 lives and hurt 150 other people, have thus confirmed the worst fears of security officials, who say they are bound to lead to worrisome times ahead.

“Muslims in India today face a situation worse than that during Partition (of India and Pakistan from a larger British India in 1947) as they have nowhere to migrate to,” Faisal Ashraf, a company executive said.

The ghetto mentality that Muslims face in predominantly Hindu India has been reinforced under the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party of Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vayjapee, he added.

“If I got a chance I would leave Mumbai. Not only because of this growing radicalism, but also because of the fact that the city has now become unsafe,” A. Hussain, a public relations executive, said.

“In the Byzantine and cynical world of Indian politics, an insidious and violent anti-Islamic movement by hardline Hindus is menacingly building up across India, forcing the Muslims into a corner,” a senior intelligence officer said, declining to be named on such a sensitive issue.

Attacks like Monday’s merely reinforce anti-Muslim sentiments for the majority Hindus, the senior intelligence official said. He added that it was likely that the real culprits may never be caught.

Thus far, Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani has obliquely blamed a Pakistan-based insurgent group for the attacks. But senior counter-terrorism officials, politicians and analysts have, for now, no credible clues about the real perpetrators of the blasts. All they claim is that Monday’s attacks, the sixth in a series of bombings, mostly in suburban trains and buses over the past eight months, were carried out in retaliation for the Gujarat massacres. The earlier attacks in crowded trains and buses had claimed around 20 lives.

The security officials also claim, based on forensic evidence, that the blasts were similar to the ones carried out in 1993 in retaliation for nationwide anti-Muslim riots.

These were corollary to the tearing down of the 16th century Babri mosque at Ayodhya town in northern Uttar Pradesh by pro-Hindu groups that inflamed religious tensions further, they add.

A day after the blasts, 200 Muslims waving the national flag and peace banners marched through the city to condemn the bombings. “This is a march in sympathy for all the people who lost their lives,” said Mohammad Naushad Kureshi, the general secretary of the Muslim Council of India. The blasts were against humanity, he added.

Meantime, analysts said that the blasts and the anti-Muslim sentiments they could stoke would benefit the BJP in upcoming polls expected in five states. Earlier, the BJP, which swept to power on an anti-Muslim crusade in 1998, received a boost to its agenda after winning a landslide victory in Gujarat in December after campaigning for ‘Hindutva’ or Hindu hegemony that had little remorse for the anti-Muslim pogrom in 2002.

Militant Hinduism, blatantly expressed by senior leaders, has further enhanced this larger sentiment amongst Muslims. “India will become a Hindu republic within two years,” Praveen Togadia of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) or World Hindu Forum, a close BJP ally, declared recently.

In his election speeches last year, Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi claimed that only the BJP could protect Gujarat’s 50 million people from neighbouring Pakistan and radical Muslim militants.

Under Modi’s administration, high school textbooks declare that Hitler lent “dignity and prestige to the German government by establishing a strong administrative set-up.” The Class 10 Social Studies book, compulsory reading for 15-year-olds, also declares tamely that Hitler “adopted a policy of opposition towards the Jewish people and advocated supremacy of the German race.”

Bal Thackeray, who heads Mumbai’s extremist Shiv Sena Party that is also a close BJP ally, recently advocated raising Hindu suicide squads to fight Muslim terrorists to make the country more secure.

“Terrorists must be born amongst you too, but they must be suicide squads ready to die for the cause of making India a Hindu homeland. Otherwise it will be a lost cause,” declared Thackeray, who openly professes admiration for Hitler.—Dawn/InterPress News Service