India

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India is a nation full of contradictions, and it is nowhere s evident as in the relationship between religion and politics. In constitutional theory, and usually in practice, it is a secular state. But it is a state with an overwhelming majority of one religion (Hindu) locked in a history of mutual animosity with its largest minority (Muslim). It is also a nation that has been governed virtually all of its independent life by one political party. Frustrated opponents strike out time and again for the tools to bring it down.

Manil Suri, a professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, will discuss his first book,The Death of Vishnu, which is about the social and cultural divisions in India, at a free public lecture at 7:30 tonight at Goucher College's Kraushaar Auditorium, 1021 Dulaney Valley Road, Towson. For more information, call 410-337-6333. Sun music critic Tim Smith is on vacation. His column does not appear today.

The motive for terrorism in Tamil Nadu may stem from ethnic violence in Sri Lanka, a foreign country where Tamils are the minority and where Rajiv Gandhi sent Indian troops. It is not the basis of violence in Kashmir, where many seek independence; in Punjab, where Sikhs seek autonomy; or across the northern Hindi Belt, where parties are at each other's throats and tensions are fierce among Hindu castes and with Moslems.The bomb at Sriperumpudur in Tamil Nadu killed more than Rajiv Gandhi, aged 46, grandson of the nation's founder, son of its powerful leader, English-educated airline pilot with an Italian wife, the non-political son, accidental man of destiny, former prime minister and potential savior of the nation.

BANGALORE, India -- Two months ago, India and Pakistan appeared headed for a nuclear war. Colin Powell, the U.S. secretary of state and a former general, played a key role in talking the two parties back from the brink. But here in India, I've discovered that there was another new, and fascinating, set of pressures that restrained the Indian government and made nuclear war, from its side, unthinkable. Quite simply, India's huge software and information technology industry, which has emerged over the last decade and made India the back-room and research hub of many of the world's largest corporations, essentially told the nationalist Indian government to cool it. And the government here got the message and has sought to de-escalate ever since.

The documentary India begins tonight on MPT. And the six-hour miniseries will tell you more about India than you probably wanted to know. But the sub-continent is laid out, probed and oohed and ahhed over with such enthusiasm by host Michael Wood that viewers may just be swept up in the whole enterprise. One of the great pleasures in this series is that India is so un-American. There is simply very little about India that is comparable to this country or continent. And this production is beautiful.

London.- "We do not accept the Indian claim that [Kashmir] is part of India, and I daresay if you could get an honest reading of the positions of the Soviet Union and China you will find out just about the same,'' said Robert Oakley, U.S. Ambassador to India, last August.True enough, but Kashmir matters a great deal to India. The dispute over India's only Muslim-majority state, annexed in contro- versial circumstances in 1947, has been the trigger for two of India's three wars with Pakistan, and 3,700 people have been killed in the anti-Indian rebellion that has raged in Kashmir for the past two years.

New Delhi, India -- FOR MONTHS this spring and early summer, the headlines every day in Delhi horrified Indians of all classes and castes: The country's valuable gold was being physically removed and shipped to London.Four tons on July 4, 20 tons on July 7, 10 tons on July 11, 12 tons on July 18. Nothing in this troubled country has shaken people so much as what has seemed to many to be almost an existential draining of the national blood."Gold is the Indian peasant's security; there is great sentiment for gold," Inder Malhotra, former editor of the Times of India and now a prominent columnist, told me. "Indians cannot hold gold outside of India.

The specter of mayhem between Hindus and Muslims in India is nothing new. The hostility dates back many generations. Nothing that has happened in recent years comes even close to the butchery that accompanied the partition along religious lines of the old British colony 45 years ago into India and Pakistan. But the wave of rioting in the past two months has some ugly elements not previously seen in what is blandly termed communalism there. They strike at the foundation of the Indian republic, the heritage of Gandhi and Nehru.