Praying to Angry Gods.(Kashmir dispute)

For some extremist Hindus, going nuclear was a near-religious experience. After India tested a bomb in 1998, an influential right- wing Hindu group, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), wanted to organize religious pilgrimages to the test site in Pokhran. It even made plans to build a temple there dedicated to the goddess Shakti.

India's leadership quashed the Pokhran pilgrimage idea, but religious fervor continues to underlie tensions in volatile South Asia. Like the United States, India is a massive democracy whose Constitution mandates secularism. Yet in New Delhi, too, the political mood has grown deeply religious. To galvanize voters, many of whom are devout, politicians in the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have begun to play up a brand of muscular Hindu nationalism. This stoking of religious passions bears much of the blame for last year's disastrous riots in Gujarat, in which hundreds of Muslims were killed. Even more worrying, though, are the BJP's plans to flog both Islamic terrorism and the Pakistani threat in next year's elections. With positions hardening in both New Delhi and Islamabad, the world's next religious conflict could well be nuclear.

America's war on terror dovetails neatly with India's own concerns, which stem from the long-running territorial dispute over Muslim- majority Kashmir. That has emboldened BJP hard-liners. Last year L. K. Advani, whose cross-country procession to Ayodhya in the early 1990s helped trigger the controversial destruction of the Babri Mosque, was promoted to deputy prime minister. In December, Narendra Modi, the Gujarat chief minister, won re-election overwhelmingly after waging an unabashedly Hindu nationalist campaign. And earlier this year the government toughened India's military policy, adding a clause that allows use of nuclear weapons in response to a chemical or biological attack. "Prior to this, they were just saying a ...