CHENNAI, Sept 21: A state leader in India has dismissed a deity worshipped by millions as a “big lie”, deepening a highly sensitive row over plans to dredge a shipping lane through an area sacred to Hindus.

The chief minister of India’s southern Tamil Nadu state said the government was justified in making a half-billion dollar canal that would allow ships to save more than 30 hours by skirting around the southern tip of India.

The comments have already sparked protests and two deaths in the south of the country, police said.

The shipping project involves dredging a lane through Adam’s bridge, a chain of islands between India and Sri Lanka. At the moment, ships moving between the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal also need to travel around Sri Lanka.

The Hindu epic Ramayana says the geographic feature was built by an army of monkeys to allow the god Ram to cross the narrow strip of sea and rescue his kidnapped wife from a demon.

“Ram is as big a lie as the Himalayas and the Ganga (river) are true,” Tamil Nadu’s chief minister, K. Karunanidhi, told reporters on Thursday.

He was repeating comments earlier this week which led right-wing Hindus in the neighbouring state of Karnataka to attack his daughter’s house and torch a bus, killing two people.

Police said 10 people have been arrested, press reports said.

India is officially secular but the reverence for Ram is deeply entrenched in the South Asian nation of 1.1 billion people.

The controversy erupted after the Archeological Survey of India, acting on behalf of the federal government, filed a statement to the supreme court saying there was “no tangible material evidence” to prove the god ever existed.

The top court is examining complaints over the project.

After a barrage of criticism, authorities withdrew the statement.

But the row has also driven a wedge through the cabinet of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, with the commerce minister calling for the resignation of the culture minister for questioning Ram’s existence in the legal submission.

The government said it was putting the project on hold for six months, but later insisted it would still go ahead.

The opposition Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) accused the government of “blasphemy.” Analysts said the debate has given political mileage to the BJP, which rose to power in the 1990s by leading a campaign to destroy a 16th century mosque and build a makeshift temple dedicated to Ram on a disputed site.

“Both the Congress and the BJP have been losing support. With this issue, the BJP has been able to put the government on the defensive,” said political analyst Mahesh Rangarajan, a history professor at the University of Delhi.

The controversy has highlighted the challenges of secularism in the deeply religious nation, with the BJP favouring a return to the values of Hindutva (Hinduness) and the ruling Congress often accused of appeasing the nearly 130 million Indian Muslims.“Indian secularism is definitely under strain. Creating a secular state in a religious country continues to be a daunting task,” Rangarajan said.

The Congress, which has ruled India for decades, regained power in 2004 on the back of a pro-poor, pre-reform agenda, wtih the BJP’s defeat blamed on its focus on the temple issue.—AFP