Raphael Cheenath, the Roman Catholic archbishop in the eastern Indian state of Orissa, calls the religious violence there “ethnic cleansing of Christians.” Pope Benedict, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and the Italian government have all called for an end to the killings in the eastern state. The death toll is now 13 and possibly up to 10,000 people — mostly Christians — have sought shelter in makeshift refugee camps. More than a dozen churches have been burned. Catholic schools across India closed in protest on Friday. Local officials say the week-long violence may be waning, but this remains to be seen.

The criticism from outside the state hinted the critics believed authorities in the state had not done enough to halt the violence. No names are named, but anyone who knows Indian politics can connect the dots. The violence by Hindu mobs broke out after a Hindu leader in Orissa, Swami Laxmananda Saraswati, was killed. The state is run by a coalition which includes the main Hindu nationalist opposition party the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), so suspicions immediately fall on a party that has also been already accused of turning a blind eye to the deaths of about 2,000 Muslims in Gujarat in 2002. The BJP’s Lal Krishna Advani, head of the opposition in the Indian parliament, has said Maoists were suspected of the killings.

As our correspondent Jatindra Dash in the Orissa state capital Bhubaneswar wrote: Most of India’s billion-plus citizens are Hindu and about 2.5 percent are Christians. In the Kandhamal area, more than 20 percent of the 650,000 people are mainly tribal inhabitants who converted to Christianity. Religious violence has troubled the tribal regions of Orissa for years, with Hindus and Christians fighting over conversions. While Hindu groups accuse Christian priests of bribing poor tribes and low-caste Hindus to change their faith, the Christians say lower-caste Hindus convert willingly to escape a complex Hindu caste system.

See also our factbox on religious violence in eastern India.

The bombings that killed 45 people in the communally sensitive city of Ahmedabad have shaken India's establishment. It is now sinking in that India faces homegrown Islamist militant groups operating with a scale and sophistication unheard of in
previous years.   

A group called "India Mujahideen" claimed responsibility for the attacks, the same group that said it carried out the bombings in Jaipur in May that killed 63 people.

For years, India had been seen as country that had largely rejected the attractions of global militancy spurred on by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. U.S. President George W. Bush notably said there were no Indians in al Qaeda.

But mainly Hindu India is home to one of the world's biggest Muslim populations, around 13 percent of its 1.1 billion people.

It only takes 0.0001 percent of India's roughly 150 million Muslims to form a nucleus of 15,000 militants, as Uday Bhaskar, former director of New Delhi's Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, told me.    

And the attacks on Ahmedabad may have involved dozens of people.    

"We have crossed the tipping point," he said.

Has India being ignoring a simmering revolt from disaffected Muslim youth? Over the last two years there have been a wave of bombings, nearly all blamed by the government on some local Islamist groups funded or backed by Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Reading the Indian newspapers, they are quick to blame Pakistan and Bangladesh. The home-grown front -- perhaps the banned Students Islamic Movement of India -- is seen as having its roots abroad.   

But there has been signs of growing dissatisfaction within the Muslim community, especially since the 2002 riots in Gujarat when around 2,500 people, mainly Muslims, were massacred by Hindu mobs.

Take the Gujarat riots. Hardly anyone has been brought to justice. The Hindu-nationalist chief minister at the time, Narenda Modi, was accused of turning a blind eye during the riots, is now a rising political star in India.

Data also shows that Muslims are one of the poorest segments of Indian society, and some of the most neglected people.   

The years since Gujarat has also coincided with a rise in global Islamist consciousness, with television and the Internet providing people in remote Indian villages with news of what is going on in Iraq and Guantanamo.

Some commentators point to the fact that ultra-conservative versions of Islam like Wahabism have been making inroads into India in recent years.

There has been a "well-funded effort to bring these ideas and these ideologies to Muslim communities across India," said Ajai Sahni of the Institute for Conflict Management.

In May, the Indian Mujahideen threatened senior Muslim clerics including Khalid Rasheed, head of the oldest madrasa, or Islamic religious school, in Lucknow, over their pacifist stance.

Rasheed said his peace movement had received support from the influential ultra conservative Darool-Uloom Deoband madrasa in northern India, whose strict interpretation of Islamic law is said to have inspired the Taliban in Afghanistan.

But how many young Muslim youths are now ignoring these clerics? How will these bombings in India's most entrenched Hindu-nationalist state be received among alientated and poor Muslim youth in other parts of the country?

Or will the Indian Mujahideen tactics of bombing hospitals as well as many in their own Muslim community backfire?

For those Western critics that say Islam does not enough to to condemn terrorism, perhaps they should look at India, home to one of the world's biggest Muslim populations -- around 13 percent of mainly Hindu India's 1.1 billion people.

 On Wednesday, it was the turn of Khalid Rasheed, head of the oldest madrasa in the northern city of Lucknow -- a traditional centre for Muslims and religious scholarship. He rejected terrorism as anti-Islamic after he and his colleagues had been accused of apostasy over their pacifist stance by at group that calls itself the Indian Mujahideen.

Indian Mujahideen made threats against the madrasa in which they also claimed responsibility for last week's bomb blasts in Jaipur, western India, which killed 63 people.

"The reaction of terrorists to our stand against terror has shown that we were moving in the right direction," Rasheed said.

   Apparently a "Movement Against Terrorism" has been created by clerics to exhort imams to use Friday prayers at mosques across India to speak out against terrorism.

This was no flash in the pan. Earlier this year, tens of thousands of clerics and students from around India attended a meeting near Delhi at the 150-year-old Darool-Uloom Deoband -- whose strict interpretation of Islamic law is said to have inspired the Taliban in Afghanistan -- and denounced terrorism as against Islam.

It is not surprising that Rasheed said they had received support from Darool-Uloom Deoband, Indian clerics appear to be increasingly outspoken, perhaps not surprising in a country where there is a centuries-old tradition of preaching religious tolerance.

How much is this outspoken criticism happening in other Muslim countries? And how much is being reported in the Western press? I would be eager to know more.

 Despite a history of religious clashes, India's tolerance often seems to win through. It was the Mughal Emperor Akbar, who was famed in the 16th century by many for his religious tolerance and who initiated scholarly debates with Muslim, Sikhs, Christians and Hindus.

Many of India's bombings are blamed on Islamic militants, although few groups every claim responsibility and few people are ever arrested. The attacks have mostly failed to incite Muslim-Hindu tensions.

Here in New Delhi, I always enjoy taking foreign visitors to India to the Sufi shrine in Nizamuddin. My latest guest was a U.S. diplomat based in Pakistan. Hardly allowed out in Islamabad - let alone able to visit a mosque -- the diplomat wallowed in the warmth of the visit and the relaxed atmosphere of the Qawwali singers.

The issue of redressing the imbalance of Hinduism’s ancient caste system by creating job and college entry quotas for lower caste and other disadvantaged groups in India seems to be gaining headway in an election year. Now it may be the turn for private industry.

Parties across India’s political spectrum appear to be seeing caste-based reservations, as the quotas are known, as potential vote winners. It is a sign again that caste consciousness will become ever more important in what in theory is a secular Indian state.

Now multinationals enjoying the fruits of an Indian economic boom may find they are not immune. Much to the horror of many industrialists worried about their international competitiveness.

India’s Supreme Court has already this year upheld a government policy to reserve about half of all state college seats for students from lower castes, in what some call the world’s biggest affirmative action scheme.

Then, the Indian Express quoted on TuesdayHindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party general secretary Gopinath Munde as demanding quotas for lower castes in private companies. His comments were not endorsed officially, but the caste issue was out of the bag for a party that could well win the next general election. The Hindu nationalists’ election strategists must realise they could win millions of votes with such policies before a general election due by early 2009.

Turn a few pages of the Indian Expressand there is a full-page advert for Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati, known as the “Queen of the Untouchables” and the potential “king maker” in the next general elections. Celebrating her first year in power, she proudly espouses her move to introduce quotas to private companies participating in state partnerships in her state, India’s most populous. It was the first prominent policy in India to include private business into the quota system.

I recently returned from Bangalore covering the Karnataka state election in southern India where the Janata Dal (S), the main regional party, made headlines by proposing to reserve about a third of seats in IT companies in Bangalore for local Karnataka residents.

IT multinationals are currently free to hire from anywhere in India — a policy that has increasingly annoyed many local Karnataka residents. Karnataka has its own language and many feel they are discriminated against as highly-educated Indians move to their state to work .

Most leading businesses have shunned the idea of quotas, worried it will worsen their competiveness in a global market, especially in the fast moving world of IT.

For those that think that all this talk of caste quotes in private industry is just small parties playing politics, remember it was Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, in a 2006 speech, who first raised the spectre of quotas in private industry.

He then called on companies to take voluntary action to help lower castes get jobs, a statement at the time widely seen as a warning to India’s booming business sector to act or face possible legislation.

India’s economy may be booming, but this debate highlights how these religious and social issues of inclusiveness could dictate the election campaign. And then companies may find they are not immune to the issues of caste and Hinduism, no matter how proud they are of their global branding.

For an example of how India often struggles with its secular ideals, especially in election years, look no further than Andhra Pradesh. The chief minister Y.S. Reddy has decided the large southern Indian state will subsidise pilgrimages for Christians who want to travel to Israel.

This kind of subsidy is not new. The central government has for years offered subsidies to Muslims wanting to join the annual haj pilgrimage to Mecca. New Delhi even has a special haj air terminal for Muslims, who account for about 13 percent of India’s 1.1 billion population. Tens of thousands travel every year from India.

But the latest announcement has sparked debate in India over whether it further eats into the country’s secular ideals.

“The government has undermined Indian secularism once again,” said one India’s leading newspapers, the Times of India. The Indian constitution says there should be no discrimination on religious grounds. It is broadly intepreted to mean that none of India’s religious groups, whether majority Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Buddhists and Sikhs, should ever dominate. That secular identity was the pride of many of the country’s founders 60 years ago after independence.

The debate is now focused on what kind of secularism should exist. Should there be the kind of separation of church and state as in France, where the idea that religion should be kept out of public life is strong? Or should India make compromises by appeasing minority faiths to ensure religious harmony?

The original argument for subsidies for Muslims, who are among the poorest members of Indian society, was that it helped them go on the haj many could not otherwise afford. It’s still controversial, though, and even one of India’s school text books has a chapter titled “Should a secular state provide subsidies for the Haj pilgrimage?”

But critics say the latest move over Christians was a cheap populist trick ahead of state elections this year. While Christians account for only 2 percent of Andhra Pradesh’s population, that’s still 1.2 million people.

Subsidies like this have long been criticised by India’s main Hindu nationalist opposition, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The party has asked why Hindus, who account for about 80 percent of the population, don’t get subsidies to visit Hindu temples. For the BJP, the current secularism in India is another word for “appeasement of minorities”.

Defenders of the move argue that India’s secularism is much more loosely fitting, as highlighted by the controversy last month when the French government awarded an exiled Muslim woman writer in India with the Simone de Beauvoir Prize. That prize met with silent disapproval from the Indian government, worried the award could incite Muslim groups. It showed how the Indian government is reluctant to speak publicly of lofty secular ideals — ideas the French loudly defend — if it means upsetting a religious group.

The debate this time round has also come down to politics and electoral votes. As the Times of India’s Ronojoy Sen pointed out, those opposing the subsidies to Christians should also oppose the haj subsidy. But no political party, even the BJP, has ended that.

With 13 percent of India’s population, that’s a lot of Muslim votes to lose. Especially in an election year.

France and India are two countries that proudly proclaim the secular nature of their democracies. The principles of church-state separation and state neutrality towards religion are the same. But somehow the accents were different when French President Nicolas Sarkozy visited India last week. While they both were dealing with the concept called “secularism” in English, it was clear that Sarkozy’s thinking was based on the French word laïcité while Prime Minister Manmohan Singh clearly had the Hindi term dharmanirpekshta in mind.

The visit focused mostly on expanding investment and defence cooperation, with much gossip on the side about whether the freshly divorced president’s new flame Carla Bruni would join him at the Taj Mahal (much to the chagrin of the paparazzi, she didn’t).

Hidden behind the headlines, though, was a fascinating disagreement about Sarkozy’s plan to present Taslima Nasreen, an exiled Bangladeshi writer living in India, with the “Simone de Beauvoir Prize For Women’s Freedom.” This prize sponsored by CulturesFrance (part of the French Foreign Ministry) and a Paris publisher went this year to Nasreen and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, two women of Muslim background who have been threatened with death by Islamists because of their forceful criticism of the religion.

Sarkozy wanted to present the award to Nasreen in New Delhi, presumably at a ceremony to be broadcast back home where he is under fire for allegedly violating French laïcité. He was even thinking of doing it at the safe house where she is hiding from death threats. This caused considerable concern in the Indian government, which worried about a possible Muslim backlash over any honour for the award-winning writer they accuse of blasphemy. The Indian army had to be called in to quell anti-Nasreen riots by Islamist groups in Kolkata last November.

In the end, it didn’t happen. The grand French gesture was reduced to a request to India to “facilitate Ms Nasreen’s journey to France” to pick up her award.

It looks like a case of thinking that secularism was the same the world around. The French version, laïcité, was a reaction to the power of the majority Catholic Church and aimed to keep religion out of public life. Defending this is as natural for a French president as praising apple pie and motherhood is for his American counterpart.

With religion such a part of public life, India’s dharmanirpekshta aims more at making sure no one religious group dominates this country of 1.1 billion people. While Hindus are the majority at around 80 percent, Muslims are more than 13 percent of the population. Christians and Sikhs each account for about 2 percent of the population while Buddhists and other religions account for the rest. Indian law also makes major concessions to religions. For example, Indian laws on family, divorce and adoption differ depending on your religion.

Prime Minister Singh was largely silent on Nasreen’s case last year, sparking criticism from secular intellectuals that the government was failing to defend the country’s principles. In the Hindustan Times, Karan Thapar wrote of India: “Democratic we may be, but liberal we most certainly are not.” His low profile has also drawn fire from Hindu nationalists, who charged he was appeasing Muslims by not vocally supporting Nasreen. There may not have been much he could say. Criticism of the Muslims could have prompted the Hindu nationalist opposition to cry even more loudly that Islamist groups are a threat to the Indian state.

For the moment, it seems as if Singh has won on both counts. He headed off both Sarkozy and a possible uproar from Muslims over his award ceremony plans. In a recent broadside, Jamaat-i-Islami Hind focused on the government’s decision to extend the visa of “a foreign controversial lady.”

Nasreen has since said she will not go to Paris for the award and asked that it be sent to her residence in Kolkata.

The controversy, for now, appears to be fading. And the French have bounced back into the cultural news headlines smartly with another, less controversial award. On Sunday, the French ambassador decorated the Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan with the country’s highest decoration for artists, the “Order of Arts and Letters.”

In India, it was a much safer bet.

A year can seem like an eternity in India, especially for a foreign correspondent discovering how complex the links between religion and politics can be here.

The last time I went from New Delhi to Uttar Pradesh was in January 2007 to cover the Kumbh Mela, one of the largest religious gatherings in the world. Around seven million Hindus and thousands of holy “Sadhus” descend on the junction of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers to pray and make offerings.

I stood where the two rivers meet along with thousands of poor Hindus performing their ritual baths. At night, whole families huddled together to keep warm on the river bank. Small paper boats with candles floated precariously down the river.

At the time, this felt like the essence of Hinduism — a relationship with nature and its cycles, its running rivers, the elements of fire and water. New to India then, I don’t remember thinking about caste once in my three-day visit.

The second visit to the state this month was an eye-opener.

A journalist’s early impressions on a trip are often gleaned from the back seat of an airport taxi. Uttar Pradesh is the heart of the Hindu “cow belt” and one of the poorest, most populous and caste-ridden places in India. Yet what we drove through this time looked like a birthday bash for royalty.

The state capital Lucknow was decked out in mile upon mile of blue decorations, light bulbs and banners to celebrate the birthday of the new chief minister — a Dalit (”untouchable”) former teacher known as Mayawati. She has stormed onto the national stage as such a champion of the rights of the poor that she’s known as the “Untouchables Queen.”

Welcome to caste politics in Uttar Pradesh.

Mayawati is everywhere in Uttar Pradesh. Statues of her abound thanks to a building spree she launched that employs many Dalits and other lower castes. She has spent lavishly on one of India’s biggest highway projects, creating even more jobs for the poor, and on parks dotted across the country’s most populous state. A huge park in honour of her party’s founder is being built in Lucknow for around $100 million. Hundreds of poor women bricklayers toiled nearby, their children camped out next to them.

Mayawati is a politically astute politician. Many analysts rate her as a middle-of-the-road leader who surrounds herself with well-meaning technocrats. But her rise highlights the importance of caste in northern Indian politics — and what Indian critics of this kind of caste politics call the darker side of Hinduism.

Despite the secular ideals of modern India, whose founders prided themselves on not being a religious state like neighbouring Pakistan, Uttar Pradesh shows that caste politics is alive and kicking in this part of northern India.

Much of this surfaced because the Indian government decided two decades ago to introduce caste quotas into civil service hiring and college admissions. Around one-third of state jobs are now dished out by caste preference.

It pays to have a caste and be proud of it. Academics and reformers may say the essence of Hinduism does not have to be related to caste and that one can coexist without the other. But it’s hard to see that on the ground in India these days.

The rise in caste politics has also been accompanied by the rise of Hindu nationalist political parties that say the prevalence of caste shows India is a religious, not a secular nation. The main Hindu nationalist party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), just scored important victories in the western state of Gujarat last month and the southern state of Karnataka (its capital is high-tech centre Bangalore) in November.

I spent three days in Uttar Pradesh visiting Dalit villages where poor villagers were beaten up by higher castes for collecting firewood from the wrong forest, and where water supplies are so bad and appeals to officials for help so ineffective that their only hope left is their rain god. I talked to politicians, academics and NGO workers.

All their talk was related to caste. It was a sobering look at the flip side of the modern hi-tech India that so often hits the headlines. For all the talk of a globalising India, Mayawati’s focus on caste may be a sign of things to come. She has talked about running for prime minister in the next elections, in 2009, and some Indian analysts think she could pull it off.

My second trip to U.P. left me wondering what path caste and Indian politics will take. Can Hinduism keep the spirit I saw last year on the banks of the Ganges, where caste seemed secondary, if even only for a few days? Or will caste stay and grow in India’s political fabric, justifying those politicians that say India is religious, not a secular society?