The Dalai Lama is to convene an unprecedented meeting of Indian faith leaders in an effort to encourage religious harmony in the emerging economic power.
Aides said the Buddhist spiritual leader was concerned about rising religious and ethnic tensions in India, alongside other important issues from environmental degradation and natural disasters to discrimination against women.
“His Holiness is concerned by the things that are happening. The aim is to come up with an action plan to promote religious harmony,” spokesman Gelek Namgyal said.
Though aides stressed that the initiative was apolitical, it comes amid concern at increasingly fractious relations between majority Hindu and minority Muslim populations in the country.
In the election campaign earlier this year, candidates from the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) were accused of playing on deep-seated sectarian prejudices to boost support.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who took power after a landslide victory in May, told supporters during the campaign that refugees from Bangladesh, who are largely Muslim, should be deported, while suggesting that India was the “natural home” of Hindu refugees.
Modi’s supporters say the prime minister believes in a true equality for India’s minorities by ensuring fair opportunities and development for all of the country’s 1.6 billion people. His critics accuse him of undermining decades of official secularism.
One BJP minister said recently that profits made from slaughtering cattle for export — a trade dominated by Muslims — funded terrorism, while another BJP official said Muslim religious schools were “manufacturing terrorists.”
Politicians and activists from a variety of hardline Hindu organizations have claimed that Muslims in India engage in “love jihad,” a supposed systematic campaign to convert Hindu women through marriage. Some Christian groups have backed the allegation, which is denied by Muslim community leaders.
Since fleeing to India from Tibet in 1959, the Dalai Lama has scrupulously avoided any intervention in Indian domestic politics.
Aides said the meeting had “nothing to do with any political party being in power” and simply stemmed from the Nobel peace laureate’s concern for the country which has hosted him for decades.
“Religious leaders have a great role and influence here in India. After living here for so long, he wants to do something for this country,” one aide said, adding that when “politicians disharmonized,” it was possible for religious leaders to “bring harmony.”
Representatives of all faiths are expected to participate in this weekend’s meeting, including Hindu guru Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, a senior Shiite cleric, the archbishop of Bombay and leaders of India’s small Jewish community.
The conclave was originally scheduled early this week, but would have clashed with the first visit to India of Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), which begins today.
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