The city of Varanasi, reeling from a deadly triple bomb attack, is India’s holiest Hindu site where pilgrims flock to wash away their sins in the sacred River Ganges and to die.
Millions of devotees each year visit the ancient temple-studded town targeted late on Tuesday by what police called ”suspected terrorists” — a usual official term for Islamic extremists — killing 23 people and injuring 68.
”Varanasi is the heart of Hinduism. It’s to the Hindu religion what Mecca is to Islam and the Vatican is to the Roman Catholics,” said New Delhi-based religious author Renuka Narayanan, an authority on Hinduism.
”It’s one of the seven salvation cities or ‘moksha puri’ and it’s every good Hindu’s wish to be cremated there,” she said.
According to Hindu teachings, dying in Varanasi, formerly known as Benares, is auspicious as it offers a chance to achieve ”moksha” — release from the painful cycle of birth and death.
Believed to be around 2 500 years old and renowned as a centre of learning, the city is famed for its ghats or embankments along the Ganges.
The ghats, mainly used for ritual washing, bathe in a rosy light at dawn when pilgrims come for a dip, to pray to the rising sun and perform yoga. Naked holy men sit in meditatation, contorting their bodies into pretzel-like poses.
But there are also ”burning ghats” to which bodies, swathed in white cloth, are carried on bamboo stretchers through the city’s twisting alleyways for cremation.
Some poor people cannot afford enough wood or any wood to cremate their relatives so it is not unusual to see partly burnt bodies or corpses floating down the Ganges.
The city of 3,7-million people — also famed for its silk gold-embroidered saris that are essential items in any Indian bride’s trousseau — brims with Hindu mythology.
Wandering down almost any street, a visitor will discover a Hindu image or a shrine to a deity. Many foreign tourists come in a quest to understand the religious side of India which is majority Hindu but officially secular.
The first explosion boomed out as devotees assembled for evening prayers at a temple called Sankat Mochan known as the ”Liberator of Troubles,” one of the city’s most popular temples.
Tuesdays are especially busy at the shrine when special services are held for the Hindu monkey deity Hanuman.
”Tuesday is special to Hanuman,” said Narayanan. ”The attackers knew there would be a maximum crowd on a Tuesday.” Several wedding parties were also inside the compound.
Within minutes, two further explosions rocked the main railway station. Police also found several unexploded bombs across the city which also contains a large number of Muslims.
Attacks on religious sites in India, where Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and Buddhists have lived side by side since time immemorial, always fan fears of communal violence.
The last severe outbreak of religious bloodshed was in early 2002 in the western state of Gujarat where Muslims were blamed for torching a train and killing 59 Hindu activists.
An inquiry later ruled the blaze was an accident but at least 2 000 people, mainly Muslims, were hacked, burnt or shot to death in the ensuing bloodshed.
India was on high alert on Wednesday to guard against a religious backlash, but Narayan says she believes that by targeting Varanasi ”and hoping to set Hindus against Muslims, the attackers miscalculated badly because Varanasi in its heart has an enmeshed culture of Hindu-Muslim coexistence”.
”By hurting Hindus, they hurt everybody,” she said. – Sapa-AFP