Shabnam Hashmi never imagined herself leading an international campaign
until she came from New Delhi to New York in July to implore Indian-Americans
not to send money to militant Hindu organizations in India that she says are
leading the country away from secularism into Hindu nationalism and religious
violence.

What put Ms. Hashmi on the road with her one-woman tour -- she spoke in a
telephone interview from Atlanta after stops in the Midwest, Texas,
California and Seattle -- were the Hindu attacks on Muslims in the state of
Gujarat beginning in late February that left hundreds dead, according to
Indian government figures. Independent Indian and international human rights
groups have estimated that at least 1,000 people were killed, possibly 2,000
or more.

The attacks on Muslims in Gujarat and the destruction of 360 mosques followed
the killings by Muslims of 59 Hindu activists who were returning on a train
from the ruins of a mosque in Uttar Pradesh that had been destroyed by Hindu
mobs in 1992.

The anti-Muslim violence also raised concern among some American experts on
India, who now echo Ms. Hashmi's fears, especially because India's national
government is led by a Hindu nationalist party.

"The response has been very good," said Ms. Hashmi, a Muslim by birth but an
agnostic now. Her message about the dangers of condoning or supporting mob
violence, as the Indian news media report is done by Hindu nationalist
politicians and their backers in the United States, draws on a painful
personal history. In 1989, her brother, Safdar Hashmi, a street theater
director and writer, was killed by a hired mob after he lent his support to
striking industrial workers in India. She started a foundation in his memory
to aid artists and intellectuals.

Ms. Hashmi and her husband, Gauhar Raza, a government scientist who also
makes documentaries, went to Gujarat in April and came back with a 30-minute
video, "Evil Stalks the Land," which intertwines footage from the history of
Hindu fundamentalism and interviews with survivors of the Gujarat massacres.

Ms. Hashmi returned to Gujarat to spend three months talking to victims. She
says that she believes hundreds of women were raped and that many of them
were killed by Hindu militants in the kind of systematic assaults that
characterized ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Rwanda.

"There are a lot of Indian-Americans who are very disturbed at what's
happening in India," Ms. Hashmi said. "But at the same time, the amount of
money that is being pumped from America into these right-wing organizations
is terrible."

She echoed the conclusion of India's Human Rights Commission in citing the
World Hindu Council, along with other national and local Hindu organizations,
as among the groups responsible for the attacks in Gujarat. The council has
denied any link. Ms. Hashmi said Indians in the United States had to guard
against the possibility that groups here were funneling money to militants.
She urged Americans in and out of government to start investigating
organizations that might be supporting anti-Muslim terror.

In Washington, Robert M. Hathaway, director of the Asia program at the
Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, said Indian journalists were producing
enough evidence of the complicity of Hindu nationalist organizations and
their ranches abroad in the killings in Gujarat to demand some response in
the United States.

"Indian journalists seem to have uncovered some very damaging and what look
to me to be persuasive ties between fund-raising activities in the United
States and some of these groups who had some shadowy role in the Gujarat
violence," Mr. Hathaway said. But he added that for Americans the evidence
was still secondhand, "which is why I thought it would be useful to have some
sort of
investigation by people who do have the ability to look at financial
transactions and transfers."

In testimony in June to the United States Commission on International
religious Freedom, a body created by Congress, Mr. Hathaway, formerly the
South Asia specialist for the House International Relations Committee, was
critical of the extremely low-key reaction in Washington to the Muslim deaths
in Gujarat.

"Friends of India should have taken the lead in raising this on the floor of
Congress, with a constructive initiative, not some bash-India
initiative," he said. "Something that says, `If things like this were to
happen on a frequent basis, that does undermine the public and
political support in this country for the creation and maintenance of this
new relationship with India.' "

Mr. Hathaway also told the commission that the American ambassador in India,
Robert Blackwill, should have gone to Gujarat in the wake of the violence. It
would have sent a message, he said, "that we do care about Muslims as well as
going after terrorists."