INDIA: The anti-Muslim campaign that has returned India's Hindu nationalists to power in the state assembly in troubled western Gujarat province is ominous, not only for the country's secular fabric, but also for its security.
"India will become a Hindu republic within two years," said Mr Praveen Togadia of the World Hindu Council, a close ally of the Bharatiya Janata Party that was returned to office in last week's Gujarat elections.
Predicting further major victories by Hindu nationalists beyond Gujarat's borders, Mr Togadia, who campaigned vigorously on an anti-Islamic platform, warned all those who opposed their agenda.
"All opponents to Hindutva (Hindu hegemony) will get the death sentence and we will leave it to the people to carry this out," he said.
Mr Togadia, a cancer surgeon who is demanding his "price" of imposing Hindu rule on the country for helping the BJP in Gujarat with nine more seats than the 117 it got in the previous state elections, also favours breaking up Pakistan.
The council recently talked chillingly of a "final settlement" of India's Muslim problem after Gujarat's riots earlier this year that had frightening echoes of ethnic cleansing campaigns in other parts of the world.
Muslims constitute 12 per cent of India's population of over one billion - and Hindus over 82 per cent.
"It will be disastrous if India's vast Muslim population decides to retaliate against the majority Hindu community," a senior security official in Delhi said. "We just do not have the wherewithal to deal with such an eventuality."
Security agencies are of the view that by preying on sectarian tensions, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's BJP-led coalition is bound to give rise to "hundreds if not thousands" of potential Muslim terrorists with whom the law enforcement structure is either too weak, "aligned", or too battle-fatigued to contain.
The BJP's Gujarat victory followed a three-month pogrom of Muslims that ended in May, in which over 1,000 died. The administration of state chief minister Mr Narendra Modi was accused by the National Human Rights Commission, the opposition and independent non-governmental organisations for "sponsoring" the riots.
Under the administration, high-school textbooks declare that Hitler lent "dignity and prestige" to the German government by establishing a strong administrative set up.
