NEW DELHI: When anti-Muslim violence was in its peak in the western Indian province of Gujarat, India’s Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee publicly worried that it had tarnished India’s image abroad.

Now his worst nightmare has come true — foreign countries have begun to shed their reluctance to criticise the Indian democracy and started to comment on the Gujarat carnage, now in its third month.

The violence has left some 2,000 mostly Muslims dead, according to non-governmental and diplomatic sources. Over 100,000 have been made homeless. And the killings still have not stopped.

It was a matter of time before voices of concern were raised abroad — although the first foreign criticism was heard a full month after the violence began.

British Foreign Minister Jack Straw spoke of the “deep concern about the deaths and injuries on both sides of the religious divide”.

Finland’s Foreign Minister Erkki Tuomioja, during a visit to India told a local daily that “pictures of the carnage were very disturbing”.

Visiting Swiss Foreign Minister Joseph Deiss said he was “disturbed by the situation”.

Some foreign missions in Delhi sent teams to Gujarat to report on the situation, and leaked their findings to the media.

A damning internal report by the British High Commission says the violence had all the hallmarks of ethnic cleansing and that reconciliation between Hindus and Muslims is impossible while the Gujarat chief minister remains in power.

The daily Hindustan Times quoted the report as saying that “in some areas the police had been specifically instructed not to act, while in some others, the force was communally polarized and looked the other way, without any prompting by political bosses.”

Such damning internal assessments are also said to have been prepared by the Dutch and German missions in Delhi. The United States ambassador to India declared at a press conference, “I condemn the violence and it is regrettable. The Indian government should find ways to resolve the issue and see that normalcy is restored.”

The international reaction comes as a wake-up call for New Delhi, which has traditionally dismissed all foreign criticism of India as interference in its internal affairs.

Prime Minister Vajpayee, in a somewhat belated hardline response, declared that India did not need sermons from foreigners about its own “millennial secularism”.

On April 22, foreign office spokeswoman Nirupama Rao added, “Some foreign countries and missions in Delhi are injecting themselves into the highly politically charged internal debate in the country and are creating the impression of playing a partisan role.”

Days later, the junior minister for external affairs Omar Abdullah put in his resignation from the government, saying the violence had done “great damage to India’s image abroad”.

Secularism is a basic premise of the Indian constitution, in a nation that is nearly 85 per cent Hindu. Muslims form 11 per cent of the population — around 120 million people — making India home to the second largest Muslim population after Indonesia.

Changed realities — both internally and externally — have left Indian diplomacy unprepared in the face of criticism.

As a secular democracy, India has never had to face the kind of criticism on human rights issues as regional rival China, for instance, has faced from the West.

Questions over Gujarat come in a post-Cold War world marked by increasing Western interest and involvement in issues of democracy, governance and human rights.

“What is unique about the Gujarat events, is that the foreign office does not acknowledge that the world around has changed,” said ex-foreign secretary Jyotindra Nath Dixit.

“The old concept of territorial sovereignty does not circumscribe issues like human rights and treatment of minorities, which are now matters of legitimate international concern according to United Nations conventions.”

Gujarat, says the veteran diplomat, “has severely affected our international credibility, while our diplomacy has a lot of work ahead to repair the damage”.

Another former diplomat G. Partha Sarathy said, “When your own Indian institutions are accusing you of targetting Muslims, how can you accuse the world of interfering?”

Foreign criticism, once a matter of sensitivity to many Indians, does not appear to bother opinion makers. The daily Indian Express commented that what other countries are really complaining about is the political attitude of the Indian government to the violence in Gujarat.—Dawn/Gemini News Service.