Gandhi warns of Hindu threat in India

Rahul Gandhi, the heir apparent to India’s ruling Congress party, said last year that radical Hindu groups could pose a bigger terrorist threat to India than Pakistan-based Muslim militants, according to diplomatic cables obtained by whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks.

The remark by Mr Gandhi, who is seen as India’s prime minister-in-waiting, was pounced on by the Hindu nationalist opposition Bharatiya Janata party, which said on Friday it would “seriously compromise India’s fight against terror and also our strategic security”.

According to the cable, Mr Gandhi expressed his concern at “homegrown” Hindu extremism to Timothy Roemer, US ambassador, at a lunch last year, after the ambassador asked about the threat posed by Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistan-based group behind the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks.

Mr Gandhi cited “evidence of some support” for Lashkar-e-Taiba among India’s Muslim minority but said “the bigger threat may be the growth of radicalised Hindu groups, which create religious tensions and political confrontations with the Muslim community”, the cable said.

While Mr Roemer said Mr Gandhi was referring to tensions created by some of the BJP’s more polarising figures, such as Narendra Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat state, talk of “Hindu terror” has intensified since 2008, when authorities arrested 10 Hindus, including an army officer, on suspicion of res­pon­sibility for a bomb attack on a Muslim community.

Manish Tiwari, a Congress party spokesman, said on Friday that Mr Gandhi merely intended to convey that “terrorism and communalism of all kind is a threat to India. We need to remain vigilant against all acts of terrorism of all kinds, no matter who commits them.”

The cable offers insights into the intensely media-shy Mr Gandhi, whom Mr Roemer described in February this year, in a separate cable, as “increasingly sure-footed in his political instincts”. But the leaked documents will inflame tensions between the Congress party and the BJP, at a time when parliament has been paralysed for weeks by a scandal over the allocation of telecommunications ­spectrum.

Separately, a 2005 cable reported on the frustrations of the International Committee of the Red Cross at India’s “regular and widespread” torture of prisoners in the restive Muslim-majority Kashmir region.