A crucial part of gunman Mohammad Ajmal Kasab's confession at the Mumbai attack trial has been censored by the judge on the grounds that it could inflame religious tensions between Hindus and Muslims in India. After stunning the court on Monday by admitting guilt in the the three-day rampage that killed 166 people, Kasab gave further testimony on Tuesday that included details about his training by Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), a Pakistan-based militant group on U.S. and Indian terrorist lists.

The front-page report in today's The Hindu, which noted the judge's gag order in its sub-header, put it this way:

Ajmal made some crucial statements on Tuesday as part of his confession. They pertained to the purpose of the attack as indicated by the perpetrators and masterminds and the message they wanted to send to the government of India. Ajmal also wanted to convey a message to his handlers. However, this part of his confession faces a court ban on publication.

In view of the communally sensitive nature of Ajmal’s statements, judge M.L. Tahaliyani passed an order banning the publication and broadcast of Ajmal’s statement recorded on Tuesday by any media or person, except the part which pertains to the CST. Mr. Tahaliyani remarked that the trial was at “a delicate stage.”

Given the complex mix of religion and politics in India, it's not unusual to see the media playing down the communal aspect of tension and violence. In the recent general election, the party that usually plays up these differences, the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), hardly used the "religion card" in its losing campaign. But that doesn't mean things are getting better. According to the Centre for Study of Society and Secularism in Mumbai, the "unfortunate year of 2008 ... proved to be worse than 2007." See their two-part report on 2008 here and here.

But Kasab's testimony could shed important light on what role religion plays in Islamist militancy. How could a young man who wanted to become a dacoit (bandit) be convinced by Islamist militants to try to become a shahid (martyr) instead? Was he actually convinced, or did he do it for other reasons?

(Photo: Taj Mahal hotel burns, 27 Nov 2008/Punit Paranjpe)

Kasab told the court on Monday that he originally approached the militants to get weapons and training and won (surprisingly easy) admission to their office by saying he wanted to wage jihad. He was taken in and given extensive training in preparation for the Mumbai attack last November. All of this is detailed in published accounts of his statement in court on Monday. In earlier statements, police say, he showed little understanding of Islam or jihad, saying the latter was "about killing and getting killed and becoming famous."

What role did Islamist ideology play in this, and what part the confused ambitions of a poor and impressionable young man? In a publication entitled Why Are We Waging Jihad?, Lashkar-e-Taiba listed its goals as:

1) to eliminate evil and facilitate conversion to and practice of Islam;

2) to ensure the ascendancy of Islam;

3) to force non-Muslims to pay jizya (poll tax, paid by non-Muslims for protection from a Muslim ruler);

4) to assist the weak and powerless;

5) to avenge the blood of Muslims killed by unbelievers;

6) to punish enemies for breaking promises and treaties;

7) to defend a Muslim state; and

8 ) to liberate Muslim territories under non-Muslim occupation.

Did his handlers stress all this to Kasab? Did he want to do any of the above? What did his Islamist handlers say about Hindus? If they fed him a diet of anti-Hindu hatred, might it be better to publicise the details so they can be debated and discredited? Some of the most interesting contributions to such a debate could come from Indian Muslims, who live in the kind of secular democracy the LeT rejects.

(Photo: Kasab in detention, 3 Feb 2009/video grab from CNN IBN)

I'd be especially interested to hear the reaction from the famous Darul Uloom Deoband seminary, which is a traditionalist Sunni school but has urged Muslims to reject terrorism and vote in elections against extremists.

Right now may not be the best time to publish Kasab's censored confession. But revealing it at a later date, for example after the verdict, might do more good than the harm Judge Tahaliyani fears. What do you think?

A Roman Catholic nun who left her convent in India after 33 years of service has penned an unflattering picture of life within the cloistered walls in a book that may further embarrass the Church.

In "Amen: The Autobiography of a Nun", published in India in English this month, Sister Jesme tells of sexual relations between some priests and nuns, homosexuality in the convent and discrimination and corruption in Catholic institutions...

"Amen" grabbed media headlines in February, when it was first published in Malayalam -- the regional language of Kerala. With the new English edition and offers of a film based on the book, Sister Jesme's plea for a reformation of the Church is now set to reach a wider audience.

Read our feature here.

(Photo: Sikhs pray at the Golden Temple in Amritsar, 17 Sept 2001/Rajesh Bhambi)

Are some holy sites so holy or so unique that they shouldn't be copied? Should monuments like the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Saint Peter's Basilica at the Vatican or the Western Wall in Jerusalem have a kind of copyright so nobody can replicate them elsewhere?

It seems unlikely that believers of any faith would undertake such a project, if for no other reason that most holy sites are quite complex, with artwork that would be very expensive to reproduce. But some Sikhs in India are building what looks like a copy of the Golden Temple, their religion's holiest shrine, in Sangrur, 265 miles (427 km) southeast of the temple in Amritsar. The project has sparked off a debate in the Sikh community and the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee (SGPC), which maintains gurdwaras in India's Punjab, Haryana and Himachal Pradesh states, has protested against it and called on the religion's five high priests to intervene. The Sikhs building the new gurdwara deny they're copying the famous temple, simply giving a facelift to their dilapidated gurdwara.

As Mumbai's DNA daily put it: "Imitation is sometimes not the most acceptable form of flattery."

Here's an IBN-CNN video on the dispute, accompanied by a written report with more background.

Why did the murder of a preacher in a Sikh temple in Vienna spark riots in the faraway Indian state of Punjab, in which thousands took to the streets to torch cars, trains and battle security forces?

The root cause may lie in India’s caste system that Sikhism officially rejects, but that still grips swathes of India’s billion-plus people, including in Sikh-dominated Punjab state in northwestern India.

“Via Vienna, Sikh caste war returns, sets Punjab aflame” ran the headline of the Hindustan Times.

The preacher, Guru Sant Rama Nand, 57, was killed in a gurdwara in the Austrian capital in an attack by six men armed with knives and a gun.

He was from the Dera Sach Khand, a religious sect separate from mainstream Sikhism that has a large support base of Indian Dalits, or “untouchables”, and other lower castes.

The leader of Dera Sach Khand, Guru Sant Niranjan Das, 68, was wounded in the attack.

The thousands who went on the rampage in Punjab on Monday were mainly Dalits. Authorities have imposed a curfew in parts of the state, in which three protesters died on Monday in clashes with security forces.

The Dera Sach Khand sect was inspired by the 15th century spiritual leader Ravidas, himself from a lower caste. It differs from mainstream Sikhism, for example, in that it reveres living gurus such as Sant Niranjan Das. Some pious Sikhs find this concept offensive.

Traditional Sikhism recognises 10 gurus who led the community from the founding of the faith by Guru Nanak in the late 15th century. The 10th guru named the religion’s holy book, known as the Guru Granth Sahib, as his successor.

Sikhism does not recognise caste, but “the clash in a Vienna gurdwara and the mob fury are yet another manifestation of simmering discontent that Dalits in Punjab feel due to increasing social inequality and oppression in a society that was supposed to be free of it,” writes the Times of India.

In the relatively prosperous state, “caste prejudices and biases remain steeped among followers of Sikhism…facing-off in a festering, endless dispute over rights, rituals and religion.”

In such a context, the appeal of sects such as the Dera Sach Khand is easy to understand.

“The legitimacy given to these deras and the steady weaning away of the faithful from the gurdwaras has often rattled the Sikh clergy and its more hardline followers pitting them against the deras,” writes the Indian Express.

The caste conflict may have been the cause of the Vienna attack as well.

“Caste has moved beyond India with Indian diaspora as the latter does not move as individuals but takes its cultural baggage along,” Vivek Kumar, who teaches sociology in New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, told the Times of India.

According to some reports, the attackers objected to the temple allowing a living guru to speak in the presence of the holy book.

But Vienna police say they are still unclear on what motivated the kiling.

The temple which was attacked is newer than Vienna’s two other Sikh temples and had been gaining popularity, but so far there had been no hostilities between the different groups in Vienna, said Bernhard Fuchs, an ethnologist at Vienna university.

And the city’s two other Sikh temples have distanced themselves from the attack and condemned it as against the basic tenets of the Sikh faith.

“The foundation of Sikhism besides brotherly love and care for others, is also the principle of non-violence,” they said in an open message.

“Based on these principles, the Sikh religious community in Austria therefore reject all act of fanaticism and condemned this outrageous attack in the strongest term.”

"Bewildingerly diverse" is the way Asghar Ali Engineer describes his native country, India. This 70-year-old Muslim scholar has written dozens of books about Indian politics and society, Islamic reform and interreligious dialogue. As head of the Centre for the Study of Society and Secularism in Mumbai, he works to promote peace and understanding among religious and ethnic communities through seminars, workshops, youth camps, research and publications. The centre even organises street plays in the slums of Mumbai to teach the poor about the dangers of communalism.

Our long conversation at the Centre in Mumbai's Santa Cruz neighbourhood of Mumbai during a recent visit to India provided a few key quotes for my earlier analysis and blog post on religion in the Indian election campaign. Since these issues are crucial to the general election taking place in India, I've transcribed longer excerpts from his answers and posted them on the second page of this post.

(Photo: Asghar Ali Engineer, 14 April 2009/Tom Heneghan)

What is the role of communalism in Indian elections?

"The BJP bases its whole politics around accusations that Congress uses Muslims as vote banks and does a lot of favours for them. 'The Muslims vote for Congress and we are against vote bank politics,' that's what they claim. But the BJP itself is basing its politics on Hindu vote banks, (especially) certain castes among Hindus, particularly the upper castes. But when they saw that upper class support cannot put them into power in Delhi, they widened their circle and tried to include some OBC (Other Backward Class) Hindus. Many OBC leaders have become militant Hindu leaders. They are more militant than the upper-class leaders. They see this as the only way to carve out their niche in upper-class politics. Dalits are lower than the OBC. Dalits generally vote for secular parties. Most used to vote for Congress, but now many caste parties have come into existence -- for example, (the Dalit politician) Mayawati. She's also widening her political base by including the upper class.

So are the politicians mostly to blame for using "wedge issues" between religious and ethnic communities to mobilise their voters?

(Photo: Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati, 9 August 2008/Pawan Kumar)

"Left to themselves, there would be no tension (between communities). But politicians have to face so many elections -- municipal, panchayat, state assembly, parliament - and during all these elections, identity has become important. Since the late 1980s, the Indian population has been polarised like never before. During all those years Congress was ruling, it was a sort of umbrella organisation trying to carry certain castes and communities with it. But not all castes and communities were getting justice, so other parties came into existence. You see it's 60 years of our democracy and each election brings more and more political awareness among the people ... All politicians make promises to Christians, to Dalits, etc. When the promises are not fulfilled, then some regional parties come into existence."

Why is communalism so persistent in a secular democracy like India?

"Our educational system injects communalism into the minds of young children. They grow up with those ideas, with hatred of Muslims. Nehru very much desired change in the education system but he never succeeded because it is a state subject, not a national subject, so they could do little to change it. The RSS, which is a major Hindu communal force, kept on training people in communal ideas and putting them in various cadres like teachers, police, army, bureaucrats, journalists ... We are a secular democratic country, fine, but in practice, communal ideas and violence have gone very deep into our system. India being such a diverse country, identity becomes more and more important. This is not like a European country. Now in the post-colonial period, multiculturalism became important (in Europe). But those nations were formed long ago. India has deep trouble forming a nation itself. Nation-building is much more challenging, all these identities come into play ... "

Here in India, migration is causing problems. Shiv Sena has its 'sons of the soil' theory and says all jobs should go to Maharastrians. 'Why are they settling here? Why are the coming to Mumbai?' they ask. So people were attacked. Interstate migration in India is like international migration in Europe. And India is so backward. There are so little resources to be shared among so many people."

Varun Gandhi, an estranged member of the Nehru-Gandhi political dynasty who is campaigning for the BJP, played the religion card with a speech that reportedly threatened to chop of the hands of any Muslims harming Hindus. This seems to have embarrassed the BJP. Why is he a problem for them?

(Photo: Varun Gandhi arrives at court for hearing on charges of hate speech, 28 March 2009/Adnan Abidi)

"The BJP leadership has to exercise caution. If they're seen as extremists, they will not be voted into power. But this young boy had no experience and thought he'd become a hero for the Hindu community with these strong words. Even the BJP had to distance itself, but then said he would be their candidate."

India's Muslim population, one of the largest in the world, is generally moderate in its politics. How do you explain this? "

Any majority tends to be more aggressive and assertive. As we see, Hindus are more assertive here and Muslims are more assertive in Pakistan. Right-wing Christians in America are more assertive. Muslims are in a minority here, a 15 percent minority. A minority cannot afford to be aggressive. Secondly, there is the impact of Indian culture. It is basically a composite culture. In any multi-religious society, you will find that the different religious traditions create a new tradition that is more moderate and less aggressive. The third important factor is Sufi Islam. In India, the overwhelming majority of Muslims believe in Sufi Islam, which is basically a peaceful Islam. Several things make Pakistani Islam more aggressive. First, it is in the majority. Secondly, Punjabi Muslims want to maintain their hegemony over other Muslims in Pakistan -- Sindhis, Baluch, Pathans -- so they tend to be more aggressive also in their Islam, in order to maintain their hegemony. Thirdly, the army is mostly Punjabi and it is using Islam with a vengeance to maintain its hegemony in Pakistan and to supplant democratic forces. And now the Taliban are another factor ..."

What about the Deobandis, the traditionalist school of Islam that inspired the Taliban? It originated in India and runs the influential Darul Uloom Deoband seminary north of Delhi.

(Picture: Jama Masjid in Delhi, 9 Dec 2008/Vijay Mathur)

"Indian Deobandis and Pakistani Deobandis are quite different. Islam is in the majority over there. The ulema have been politicised, they want and they use Islam. There is a very interesting phenomenon here. The Deobandis here are attacking terrorism and militancy. Deobandis have held largest demonstrations in India against terrorism ... They are puritan otherwise and against Sufism, but in the Indian environment, their behaviour is very different."

So do most Indian Muslims think secularism is best? "

Yes, here the Deobandis and the Jamaat-i-Islami, which is totally against secularism in Pakistan, support secularism in India. In fact, these days (the Indian) Jamaat-i-Islami is in the forefront of the secular democratic movement. In the early days of independence, Jamaat-i-Islami opposed secularism in India and refused to take part in elections. But after the demolition of the Babri Masjid and the riots in Mumbai, they totally changed their policy and formed a secular democratic front that's spreading secular values today. The Jamaat in Pakistan is like the RSS and BJP here. But here its character is entirely liberal. "

The situation makes you respond. That's what I argue. Religion was instituted in certain circumstances and believers respond accordingly. If extremism pays, they will resort to extremism. If moderation pays, they will respond to moderation. Religion by itself is neither extremist nor moderate. It is human followers who become extremist or moderate according to their situation. It's a tool -- an instrumental cause, not a fundamental cause. Those who maintain that terrorism originates in Islam have to think, why is there this difference?"

Tell me about your centre's work in Interfaith dialogue and conflict resolution.

Politicians basically exploit misunderstandings, so we base our dialogue on issues. Take, for example, the issue of violence and religion - what is violence in the Hindu, Muslim and Christian traditions? What is the position of women in religions? Those issues create problems and misunderstanding. Unfortunately, those who condemn religion and hold it responsible for what happens in society neither know their own religion nor the others. But when we explain things to them, they start to understand ... "

(Photo: Hindu militant in Kolkata, 26 Sept 2002/Jayanta Shaw)

I conduct a lot of workshops for the police. They have such prejudices against Muslims, all based on ignorance. But they have seen things from one side only. When we hold workshops, prejudices are dispelled. We have more and more requests for these workshops in Maharashtra, Haryana, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh. I've been holding these workshops continuously, sometimes invited to conduct workshops for the recruits, 3,000 - 4,000 in number.

"We have identified four groups which are crucial to promoting peace. Teachers, because education is very crucial. Second is police, of course, because they maintain law and order. If they rise above prejudices, they can control better. The prejudices are simply atrocious in communal politics, simply atrocious. There are such raw prejudices against Muslims. Third category is youth. Fourth is journalists. What they write in newspapers ... Just now our workshop is going on about peace and conflict resolution in Ayodha, which is the centre of this whole controversy. We hold workshops in all these sensitive areas."

Hindu nationalism, Muslim "vote banks", anti-Christian violence, caste rivalry -- Indian politics has more than enough interfaith tension to offer populist orators all kinds of "religion cards" to play. Coming only months after Islamist militants killed 166 people in a three-day rampage in Mumbai, the campaign for the general election now being held in stages between April 16 and May 13 could have been over- shadowed by communal demagoguery.

(Photo:Voters show IDs at a polling station in Ayodhya, 23 April 2009/Pawan Kumar)

But in this election, the "religion card" doesn't seem to be the trump card it once was. It's still being used in some ways, of course, but the main opposition group, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has played down its trademark Hindu nationalism in its drive to oust the secular Congress Party from power in New Delhi. A BJP candidate who lashed out at the Muslim minority saw the tactic backfire. During a recent three-week stay in India, I found religious issues being discussed freely and frequently in the boisterous election campaign. But they were usually not the main issues under debate and not isolated from the pocketbook issues that really concern voters. Click here for the rest of my report quoted above.

(Photo: BJP leader L.K. Advani, 8 April 2009/Amit Dave)

This is one of those stories where context is king. Thanks to the internet and India's lively English-language media, anyone around the globe can find Indian reports highlighting the religion angle. One of the news magazines, The Week, ran an interesting cover story about the "high priests of hate." On balance, I think it looks a bit overdone -- it was written at the height of the Varun Gandhi controversy -- but it had this classic anecdote:

"A former BJP minister once said that he had won five times in a row using a simple trick: his men would make an issue of a Muslim boy marrying a Hindu girl or the death of a cow in a Muslim area on the eve of elections. He lost the last Assembly election when he campaigned with a development agenda."

But religion isn't just on the politics pages. Outlook, another news weekly, reported that an American investor long associated with the Hare Krishna movement has offered to build a huge Hindu temple in a planned Himalayan ski resort as part of a project previously nixed by religious leaders who feared it would desecrate the mountain home of their gods.

(Photo: Elderly voter helped to cast her ballot in Puri, 23 April 2009/Jayanta Shaw)

The Economic Times reported on its property pages that "more and more Indians want to have homes in religious centres." Real estate developers and analysts differed on whether the financial crisis would hurt this trend, some seeing a lack of faith in the market while others firmly believed these investments were good. And the tabloid Mumbai Mirror had this story about a court defending religious names on clothes.

While in Mumbai, I went to see Asghar Ali Engineer to talk about the role of religion in politics in India. He explained the central role of communalism -- the use of religious, ethnic or other loyalties to mobilise social groups -- in Indian politics. A noted Muslim reformer, interfaith dialogue advocate and head of the Centre for the Study of Society and Secularism, Engineer said:

Communalism is not actually a conflict between two religions but between the interests of two or more communities. It is using religious identity for political mobilisation. That is where religion becomes a tool. Religion is not a fundamental cause, religion per se does not cause any problem. Nobody is fighting whether Islam is right or Christianity is right or Hinduism is right. The main point is what the government does for Muslims, for Christians, for Hindus... The BJP bases its whole politics around accusations that Congress uses Muslims as vote banks and inclines towards them, does a lot of favours for them. 'The Muslims vote for Congress and we are against vote bank politics,' that's what they claim. But the BJP itself is basing its politics on the Hindu vote bank.

India is not a nation in the classical sense as in Europe. France, for example, is built on the French language and culture. But India is a bewilderingly diverse country and we have made it one nation. Declaring it a nation was easy, but in the process of nation-building, all these forces have come into play. Whatever development takes place is not based on justice. It is highly skewed. Some religious communities get much more than others, some castes or regions get much more than others. That is why this question of identity has become so important. Those who are left out use their identity to mobilise their people. Similarly, those who are privileged see a threat when other communities mobilise, so they also have to use their identity to ward off this threat from lower castes and backwards religious communities. This is the interplay of religion and politics.

More from that interview in a later post. For more on the Indian election, see the Reuters India website and its special section on the 2009 election. Click here for a slideshow of election pictures.

Here's a video from the second round of voting on April 23:

Catholic churchgoers in Kerala will soon receive, in addition to the communion, an appeal to not vote for atheists.

The Kerala Catholic Bishops Council has issued a pastoral letter to be read out in Catholic churches from Sunday, urging parishioners to vote for those who uphold secularism and fight terrorism, according to a report in the Indian Express paper.

The church is also keen that people vote for politicians who will fight against euthanasia and abortion, a direct response to the Left-ruled state’s law reforms commission, which favours legalising euthanasia and floating a public trust to run church properties.

The communists have long been at loggerheads with the Catholic church on matters related to religion and education, including how church-run educational institutions — mostly profitable — should be run.

Kerala’s Cardinal Varkey Vithayathil, head of the Catholic Bishops Conference of India, an association of Catholic bishops, went one step further, reportedly calling the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party the “lesser evil” to the state’s Marxists.

Critics of the church say it has no business meddling in affairs of the state — or telling people whom they should vote for — and that the issue is really about money and diverting attention from its own troubles.

Supporters of the church — and the outspoken cardinal — say Christians in India are under attack and it is only fair that the church look out for itself and its people.

No doubt, the rhetoric — and not just from the Catholics — will rise in the runup to the election.  But will the outcome settle the debate on the line between the Church and the state?

It did not get great publicity but a recent U.N. report on religious freedom in India offers a stinging image of a country suffering from communal divisions and mob-inspired religious persecution.

 It argues there is a very real risk of a repeat of a tragedy like the Gujarat riots of 2002, when more than 2,000 people, mainly Muslims,were killed by Hindu mobs.

The U.S. Special Rapporteur of religion or belief Asma Jahangir, a well-respected Pakistani human rights activist, travelled to India last March to prepare the report. It catalogues violence and discrimination faced by India’s religious minorities, whether Muslim or Christian or Sikh.

“Organised groups claiming roots in religious ideologies have unleashed all pervasive fear of mob violence in many parts of the country.” the report, released on Jan. 26, says.

 “There is at present a real risk that similar communal violence might happen again unless political exploitation of communal distinctions is effectively prevented,”

The report makes special mention of Gujarat,. It says the Hindu nationalist state government of Gujarat — headed by Narendra Modi and a favourite of many Indian business leaders—has done little to help victims who still live in fear of persecution.

Indeed, it says there is “is increasing ghettoization andisolation of Muslims in certain areas of Gujarat.”

The report comes after a series of incidents in India that have sparked widespread worries about the rise of religious mob violence.

Last month Hindu militants attacked a bar and assaulted women in the city of Mangalore in the Hindu nationalist-run Karnataka state. The militants – labelled the “Indian Taleban” by media – said they were trying to safeguard Indian culture.

Last year, dozens of mainly poor tribal Christians in the eastern state of Orissa were killed by Hindu mobs over the issues of religious conversion.  

 With general elections due by May, the political atmosphere is already charged with religious rhetoric. The Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party says it wants to rebuild a Hindu temple on Ayodhya, where a mosque was razed by Hindu mobs in 1992.

The report is a timely reminder that despite all the talk of a global India, religious tension may be as pervasive as ever — especially when political parties are vying for political power.

I wonder whether news of Indian priests doing a purification ritual after a minister belonging to a lower caste visited a temple comes as a surprise in a country where religion plays a big role in politics?

Sadhus or Hindu holy men chant hymns as they carry a photograph of the Hindu god Shiva in Jammu in this July 1, 2004 file photo. REUTERS/Amit Gupta

While officials in Orissa said they will question the priests for throwing away holy offerings and washing the floors after the minister’s visit to the temple this week, the incident has left the controversial minister angry.

Pramila Mallick, the Orissa state minister for women and child welfare, said her political rivals must have been behind it because she had been to the temple a few times without any fuss.

Mallick is said to be partial to lower caste voters who have been instrumental in her winning elections, while ignoring upper-caste people who administer temples.

Upper-caste Hindus may have tried to get even with her this time around, she said.

In spite of India’s secular constitution banning caste discrimination, Dalits, who represent 16 percent of India’s 1.1 billion population are sometimes beaten or killed for using a well or worshipping at a temple reserved for upper castes.

Dalit political leaders are also accused of instigating caste wars to help shore up voter support.

Temple politics is nothing new. India’s former prime minister, Indira Gandhi, was stopped at the gates of the famous Jagannath temple in the town of Puri. She was deemed to have become an outcast after marrying a non-Hindu.

In 2007, the temple priests in Puri threw away food cooked for 7,000 devotees after a foreigner entered the temple.

Do dead terrorists lose all right to any respect? I ask this because my post Should India cremate Mumbai militants, spread ashes at sea? last week has prompted a surprising wave of comments suggesting these corpses should be desecrated. Readers have been proposing (and we have been deleting) graphic and crude scenarios for disposing of the nine corpses still lying in a Mumbai morgue. The proposed solution of cremating the bodies and spreading the ashes at sea - originally from a blog post by Leor Halevi in the Washington Post - seemed far too tame for them.

(Photo: Gunmen at Mumbai train station, 26 Nov 2008/Official CCTV image via Reuters TV)

The Mumbai militants were murderers. Once they're dead, though, what purpose would it serve to dismember them, feed them to crocodiles or turn them into a stoning pillar? What would it say about the Indian government if it disposed of these bodies without even the barest minimum of respect for the dead? Indeed, what does it say about readers who want it to do just that?

BTW the majority of comments - even those that are understandably very angry - call for a minimum of respect for the dead, no matter who they are.

India is under no obligation to give these bodies a proper Muslim burial. The refusal of Indian Muslim organisation to grant them one is what has created this stalemate. But can that mean New Delhi should go all the way in the opposite direction?