NEW DELHI, 10 November — If Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee has exercised his diplomatic prowess to convince the United States of India’s support for its war against terrorism, protests and demonstrations at home tell a different story.
Thousands of leftists and Muslims found common cause yesterday, using strikingly similar rhetoric to denounce the US action on Afghanistan. In different parts of the Indian capital, leftists accused Washington of declaring war on all "weak nations of the world" while India’s top Muslim leader said Washington was targeting all Muslim nations.
Around 25,000 activists of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), or CPI (ML), one of India’s main left parties, blocked the main street to the parliament building, fluttering hundreds of red flags and fervently chanting anti-US slogans.
Coined as the "anti-war and anti-WTO" rally, the CPI (ML) members burned an effigy of Bush and beat it with sticks, chanting: "Down with the world’s terrorist number one, down, down," "Down with the world’s imperialist number one" and "Hands off Afghanistan."
Police were heavily deployed to prevent the demonstrators from moving toward the nearby parliament.
The protesters, mostly farmers and laborers, squatted along a kilometer-long stretch of Parliament Street, some climbing on trees, and holding red flags with the sickle-and-hammer symbol of the CPI (ML).
"America is waging an all-out war on the weak nations of the world," said Dipankar Bhattacharya, general secretary of the CPI (ML) in a fiery speech interlaced with passionate slogans of "red salute."
"While in Afghanistan it is using bombs to kill and terrorize the people of that beleaguered country, at the ministerial conference of WTO in Doha, it is trying to use trade as a weapon of war and terror," he added, greeted with an uproar of "shame, shame."
Some six kilometers away, in the heart of Old Delhi, about 200,000 Muslims heard similar denunciations of the United States from India’s top Muslim cleric as they squatted in the sprawling red marble-stone 16th-century Jama Masjid.
"The war between believers and non-believers (that) has continued for more than 1,400 years. The target of America and its allies is not Afghanistan or its people but the real target is Islam," said Syed Ahmad Bukhari.
Meanwhile, at least 10 people were injured in Kashmir yesterday when police fired tear gas shells to disperse dozens of demonstrators protesting against US-led air strikes on Afghanistan.
Protesters burned a US flag in Srinagar, the summer capital of troubled Jammu and Kashmir, where violence has spiraled since the start of the campaign against Afghanistan’s Taleban rulers.
"At least 10 people were injured in the tear gas shelling and two policemen were also wounded in stone pelting in Srinagar and Baramulla," a police official said.
Some of the protesters waved placards saying, "Save Afghan children."
"There is a near total shutdown in Srinagar," a senior police official said.
The city’s major streets were deserted except for security patrols, and most schools and colleges were shut.
The strike — called by the militant Muslim group Jamiat-ul-Mujahedin and Dukhtaran-e-Milat, or Daughters of Faith — was being observed to coincide with a strike yesterday by Islamic parties in Pakistan to demand an end to the US air strikes on Afghanistan.
"We are perturbed by the daily killing of civilians in Afghanistan in the ongoing air strikes," said Dukhtaran-e-Milat leader Aasiya Andrabi.
