NEW DELHI, 21 March — Opponents said yesterday that an Indian government-sponsored anti-terrorism bill had already been abused to target Muslims as debate raged on whether to adopt the legislation.

As the government considered convening a joint session of Parliament to force through the Prevention of Terrorism Ordinance (POTO), opposition members and leading newspapers said the law was bound to be misused. However, the bill will be first taken up in the Rajya Sabha today.

The belligerent opposition made a spirited effort to poke new holes into the contentious bill, warning that the government could inflict abuse on political rivals and Muslims if the draft becomes law. The opposition drew unexpected support when a key ally of Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s coalition government lashed out at its ideological big brother of the premier’s Hindu extremist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for its hard-line anti-Muslim stance.

The regional DMK party, a pillar of legislative support to Vajpayee’s government, drew first blood yesterday when it said in a protest letter it will not tolerate explosive utterances of the RSS. The RSS has warned that Muslims must toe the line in overwhelmingly Hindu India. "We strongly condemn the narrow-minded, big brother act of the RSS," party leader C. Kuppuswami said in the statement.

The opposition forced an adjournment in Parliament over the decade’s worst sectarian riots and gave vent to its fears that the POTO would be misused against Muslims if endorsed as law. The Samajwadi Party charged Vajpayee’s BJP-led government with trying to divide India with laws such as POTO and demanded an explanation.

"Not a single rioter has been arrested in Gujarat and only Muslims were shot dead (by the police)," said opposition MP Raghuvansh Prasad Singh of the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), which backed the Samajwadi’s move.

"At this rate the country cannot be saved. The members in the government are traitors," he shouted, forcing the brief adjournment of the lower house.

Singh said that until Advani and Gujarat chief minister, Narendra Modi, resigned and hard-line Hindu groups including the RSS were outlawed, "there will not be peace in the country".

The bill, which seeks to curb funding to suspected terrorist groups, confiscate their property and intercept communications, has to be passed by both lower and upper houses of Parliament before it becomes law. POTO was approved by the Cabinet in October but could not be passed in the last session of Parliament due to intense opposition.

Provisions of the bill have been in force since early this year, but it stands to lapse on April 6 if not approved by Parliament.

"With India being plagued by the menace of terrorism, in Kashmir, in the northeast, we need a tough law to tackle this," a government spokesman said.

A report in The Indian Express yesterday said that 62 people, all Muslims, were arrested under POTO after a train carrying Hindu activists was torched on Feb. 27. Fifty-eight people lost their lives in the train attack and over 700 people, mostly Muslims, were killed in ensuing communal clashes in Gujarat.

The Express said no one had been booked under POTO for sparking the sectarian riots, although more than 800 arrests had been made by the local administration. The central government has banned a Muslim organization under POTO, the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), but refused to ban hard-line Hindu groups aligned with the BJP.

"If the government is really serious about fighting terrorism, it should use POTO against Hindu hard-liners as well who have killed several innocent people in Gujarat," an opposition MP told AFP. "So far we have seen it in use against members of one community alone, which is not fighting terrorism."

The Hindu newspaper said a clutch of provisions in the bill, including the use of confessions made to the police and strict rules for bail, "are extremely worrying from a civil rights point of view".

"The question is whether such a severe piece of legislation can be trusted in the hands of a government which has displayed little or no sign of being fair and even-handed," it queried. "The answer is quite unequivocally no."