Death toll reaches 20 in holy city bombings
Soldiers and police patrolled holy sites across India today following a series of bloody bombings in Hinduism’s holiest city, Varanasi.
But despite a palpable sense of anger there were no immediate reports of sectarian violence in a nation that long ago grew to fear them.
Two blasts at a train station and another at a temple to the Hindu monkey-god Hanuman yesterday killed 20 people in the northern city of Varanasi on the holy Ganges River.
Although officials have not yet said who they believed was behind the attack, many in India suspected either homegrown Muslim extremists or Islamic militants from Pakistan.
Still, the only hint of sectarian violence today came when a mob of angry Hindus briefly blocked the motorcade of a politician who has championed Muslims and lower-caste Hindus.
But Varanasi, a city of temples and holy men living alongside an even holier river, is as ancient as India, and to many here, the bombings were a bloody reminder of hundreds of years of tension and violence between South Asia’s Hindus and Muslims.
“Our city is a refuge for the devout, a centre for Hindus,” said Sanjay Panday, a 43-year-old Hindu shop owner who blamed the attack on “Muslim extremists.”
“Their purpose is to disrupt our society, to show that Hindus ruling India cannot live in a peaceful way with Muslims,” he said. “But our people are aware of this intention so there will be no communal violence.”
Instead, Panday said Varanasi’s people were showing their anger through a strike called by Hindu nationalist groups that shut markets and schools in the city, about 450 miles east of New Delhi.
“We have shut down the city to demand an end Muslim violence against Hindus,” said Ashok Singhal, one of India’s most prominent Hindu militants, in a visit to the Sankat Mochan temple.
He insisted that he opposed violent reprisals for the attack, but said: “this aggression must be dealt with by an iron hand.”
At least 10 people died in the explosions at the train station, and five were killed in the blast at the temple, officials said. Five more people died overnight, and dozens more remained in hospital, many of them in serious condition, they said.
“It is a terrorist attack. It has all the characteristics of a terrorist attack,” Alok Sinha, the top home ministr official of Uttar Pradesh state, said.
Cities across India were on high alert today, and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh appealed for calm.
Investigators and sketch artists were interviewing a young man who may have seen the bombers. Two men came to the young man’s shop in Varanasi’s Gaudaliya market and left a bag there promising to return later.
When they did not return, he called the police, who defused the bomb inside the bag, a federal intelligence official said.
Soldiers and police were sent to guard prominent religious pilgrimage spots across this country of 1 billion people, which is about 84% Hindu but also has a sizable Muslim minority and millions of followers of many other religions.
Varanasi is among India’s and the world’s oldest cities, and millions of Hindu pilgrims gather annually here for ritual bathing and prayers on the banks of the Ganges.
Like much of northern India, it has a Hindu majority and a large Muslim minority.
India’s Hindus and Muslims have lived largely in peace since the partition of the subcontinent at independence from Britain in 1947, when more than 1 million people were killed as overwhelmingly Muslim Paistan was carved from largely Hindu India.
But there have been sporadic bouts of savage violence, many of them sparked by attacks on temples or mosques.
The last major outbreak was in 2002 after 60 Hindus pilgrims were killed in a train fire initially blamed on Muslims. Subsequent rioting in western India left more than 1,000 people dead over three months.
Yesterday’s attack came only days after Hindus and Muslims fought in the streets of the nearby city of Lucknow, leaving four people dead, during a visit to India by US President George Bush.
The next day, angry Hindus looted Muslim shops and burned vehicles in the coastal resort of Goa in a dispute over a mosque demolition.
L K Advani, leader of the opposition in India’s Parliament, said he told President Bush during his visit to India last week that terrorism continued to be a problem.
“People of India will not feel assured until the terrorist infrastructure across the border (in Pakistan) is fully dismantled,” Advani said.
Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry denied Advani’s charge.
Hours after the bombings, the Uttar Pradesh state anti-terrorist squad said it had killed a suspected Islamic militant, but the local superintendent of police, Paresh Pandey, said it was not known whether he was linked to the bombings.
In the capital, New Delhi, police also shot two suspected militants as they were entering the city in a car this morning, said Karnal Singh, joint commissioner of police. It was also unclear if they were tied to the Varanasi attacks.
