Religion India

Ghulam Yazdani, a Muslim lawyer and social worker, was at his desk at home on a recent Saturday night discussing with a Hindu colleague ways to end the growing religious violence tearing apart his south Indian city when five Hindu youths quietly entered the room. They bowed respectfully. " Salaam aleikum ," they said to Yazdani, mouthing in unison the traditional Islamic greeting for peace.

About 6,000 Dalits, often segregated as "untouchables" in India's Hindu caste hierarchy, converted to Buddhism in Kanpur, 240 miles southeast of New Delhi. Leaders of the ritual said they were protesting caste discrimination and India's failure to raise the issue at the U.N. conference on racism that concluded in South Africa over the weekend. Hundreds of monks arrived from Nepal, Japan and other countries to witness the ceremony Saturday, which was presided over by a Japanese Buddhist priest.

In the dimly lit interior of a shrine sacred to the world's 18 million Sikhs, a trio of men wearing tightly bound turbans sit on a rickety wooden scaffold, their faces grazing the ornately sculpted ceiling. The rites of the faith require every Sikh male, all of whom ritually take the name "Singh," or lion, to carry a dagger. But these men helping restore the building called the Akal Takht, or Throne of the Almighty, wield only fine-tipped paintbrushes.

With faith, the stalagmite of pure white ice pouring from a large hole in the rock is the lingam of Lord Siva, fount of eternal happiness. The phallic symbol has a powerful force. Each year, it draws about 125,000 people, mostly Hindus, who began this year's pilgrimage up a Himalayan mountainside in remote Kashmir on July 2.

In a holy war that threatened to engulf South Asia, more than 200 people were killed and hundreds injured Monday as bloody religious riots erupted in cities and towns across India and communal tensions flared from the frenzied destruction by Hindu militants of a revered Muslim temple in Ayodhya.

The Sacred Ashes Special pulled into Kanpur railway station late Monday night to the same slogans that had bombarded Sonia Gandhi again and again during the 10 hours that her train, carrying the remains of her assassinated husband, had snaked its way through the blistering Indian countryside. "Sonia, fight! Save the nation!" mob after screaming mob had pleaded when they spotted the white, garlanded shrine car.

A mob of 50 people attacked and set afire two churches in a region of west India where anti-Christian attacks have destroyed dozens of churches, domestic news agencies reported. No one was injured in the attack in Dang district in the western state of Gujarat late Friday, the Press Trust of India reported in New Delhi. More than 120 people have been arrested for attacks on Christians and churches since Christmas Day.

Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee visited a violence-hit region in western India on Sunday and demanded severe punishment for anyone attacking houses of worship, after Hindu militants burned or demolished churches there. "Exemplary punishment should be awarded to perpetrators of such crimes," he said in Ahwa, a town in the western state of Gujarat, a region that has been marked by more than 100 acts of violence against Christians in the past year.

Anyone who thinks gunpowder, vigorous swordplay and religious piety don't mix should consider the Dussehra festival. This singular Hindu holiday, which carries a dramatized moral as easy to comprehend as a Hollywood oater where the bad guys all wear black Stetsons, is a re-enactment of one of the most famous of India's epics. Like the Christian Easter or the Jewish Passover, the holiday symbolizes the triumph of good and hope over evil.

At least 32 more people were killed Thursday in religious strife across India over a militant Hindu campaign to build a temple where a mosque now stands, domestic news agencies said. "More blood may spill before there is peace," said Mulayam Singh Yadav, chief minister of Uttar Pradesh state, who has organized the defense of the mosque in the town of Ayodhya. Fourteen people were killed Thursday in Uttar Pradesh and seven in Gujarat.

As Pope John Paul II sat down here Sunday to exchange views with leaders of 10 other religions, Indian security guards stopped a blue-turbaned Sikh trying to enter the assembly hall with a 4-foot sword. The armed man, it turned out, was Bhai Manjit Singh Sahib, a Sikh guru. His chair, three places to the left of the pope, remained vacant for 30 minutes before he could persuade organizers that the ornate silver saber was a symbol of his religious authority, not a security threat.

The charred bodies of a missionary and his two sons were laid out in wooden coffins Sunday amid a wave of outrage at their killings, the first deaths in a string of attacks on Christians in India. Police arrested 49 Hindu radicals suspected of burning to death Australian Graham Stewart Staines, 58, and his sons Philip, 10, and Timothy, 8, Saturday as they slept in their utility vehicle.

Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee visited a violence-hit region in western India on Sunday and demanded severe punishment for anyone attacking houses of worship, after Hindu militants burned or demolished churches there. "Exemplary punishment should be awarded to perpetrators of such crimes," he said in Ahwa, a town in the western state of Gujarat, a region that has been marked by more than 100 acts of violence against Christians in the past year.

A mob of 50 people attacked and set afire two churches in a region of west India where anti-Christian attacks have destroyed dozens of churches, domestic news agencies reported. No one was injured in the attack in Dang district in the western state of Gujarat late Friday, the Press Trust of India reported in New Delhi. More than 120 people have been arrested for attacks on Christians and churches since Christmas Day.

Suspected Muslim militants killed 13 Hindus in remote villages in the restive northern state of Kashmir, police said. The killings came two weeks after guerrillas massacred 25 Hindus in a mountain village, prompting residents to demand better security in the area that borders Pakistan, India's hostile neighbor. No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attacks, but police blamed guerrillas fighting for the independence of Jammu and Kashmir, India's only Muslim-majority state.

Just inside the entrance to the Jain Center in Buena Park, a spider edges down a silky strand of web on a cubbyhole where visitors place their shoes. Of all the places in the world to weave a web, this spider has chosen well. Adherents of the Jain religion revere even the tiniest of lives, down to the most microscopic of beings. It is a reverence that requires strict vegetarianism, what Dr.

A radical Hindu group vowed Saturday to make another attempt to begin construction of a temple on the site of a mosque in the northern city of Ayodhya as fresh violence sparked by the controversial campaign left 13 more people dead, news reports said. The developments came one day after about 10,000 Hindus tried to break through barricades surrounding the religious site but were stopped when police opened fire. At least 18 people were killed and more than 60 wounded in that clash.

Prime Minister Vishwanath Pratap Singh's government hangs in the balance as India's ethnic tensions mount over the determination of Hindu revivalists to break ground today for a new temple on the site of a 16th-Century mosque sacred to the country's 100 million Muslims. Singh has deployed tens of thousands of heavily armed police to head off violence around the northeast temple town of Ayodhya, but clashes appear inevitable despite the arrests of more than 50,000 Hindus en route to the site.

Just inside the entrance to Jain Center in Buena Park, a spider edges down a silky strand of web attached to one of the cubbyholes where visitors place their shoes before entering the temple. Of all the places in the world to weave a web, this spider has chosen well. Adherents of the Jain religion revere even the tiniest of lives, down to the most microscopic of beings. It is a reverence that requires strict vegetarianism, says Jain Assn. leader Dr. Manibhai Mehta.

Soaring above luxury apartments in an exclusive section of Bombay, vultures swoop toward the Parsi Towers of Silence on Malabar Hill. It is time for another "burial" at the "vultures cemetery," where the Parsis--Indian followers of the ancient faith of Zoroastrianism--refuse to bury their dead. The Parsis believe fire, earth and water are sacred, so they will not cremate or bury their dead. Instead, the bodies are left on circular stone towers to be picked clean by vultures.