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Between May and July 2000, a series of bombs went off at twelve places of worship in different towns in south India. Most of these were churches, but a Hindu temple and a mosque were also targeted and damaged. Anti-Christian hate literature purported to have been distributed by Hindu chauvinist groups was found at the sites of many of the blasts. Fingers of suspicion were initially pointed at Hindu groups who have, in recent years, been involved in violent attacks on Christians in large parts of India. However, in July 2000, police and Union Home Ministry sources claimed to have discovered evidence of a hitherto little-known Muslim group, the Deendar Anjuman, in masterminding the blasts, accusing it of seeking to provoke further hostility between Hindus and Christians. The Indian press gave much publicity to these reports, indeed much more so than it had to confirm evidence of earlier Hindu attacks on Christian churches and priests. The manner of reporting about the alleged role of the Deendar Anjuman in the incidents strongly suggested that the events were given the image of a Muslim- Christian confrontation or as yet another expression and evidence of Muslim "terrorism" and Islamic "fundamentalism." Further, the distinct impression was intentionally created that Hindu militant groups, whose role in previous attacks on Christians in India had been clearly proven, had been all along wrongly blamed, and that behind much of the current anti-Christian wave in India was a hidden "Islamic" or "Pakistani" hand. For right-wing Hindu organizations, the attacks came as a blessing in disguise, which they sought to use to absolve themselves of accusations of violent anti-Christian activity in order to salvage their sagging public image, which had attracted sharp criticism at home and abroad.
In the wake of the attacks, many Indian papers went so far as to claim that the alleged involvement of the Deendar Anjuman in the incidents was part of a larger Pakistani plot engineered by its secret service, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) to instigate Hindu-Christian conflict and, thereby, further destabilize India.1 It was said that the next target of the attackers had been the famous temple at Tirupati in Andhra Pradesh, which they had planned to blow up, thereby triggering large scale communal rioting all over south...