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KARACHI, March 1 (AFP) - Police were Friday deployed around the temples of Karachi's small Hindu community for fear of attacks triggered by communal bloodletting in neighbouring India.

"Although no demonstration has been announced, the police force has been deployed around temples as a precautionary measure," said Tariq Jamil, the chief of police in Pakistan's biggest city.

The Pakistani press on Friday blamed the India's Hindu nationalist-led government for the sectarian violence in the western state of Gujarat, which has claimed nearly 200 lives since Wednesday.

"For a country like India, that likes to flaunt its secular credentials, the rise of fundamentalism among the majority Hindu community has severely dented its image," The News wrote in an editorial.

The fighting broke out Wednesday when a Muslim crowd ambushed a train carrying Hindu activists, killing 58 people.

"The gruesome attack is indeed unfortunate but that does not take away from the fact that India's self-professed and oft-repeated claim to secularism is just that: self-professed and often repeated, but not substantiated by India's track record," wrote the Dawn.

"We cannot but see a parallel in this for Pakistan which has often been at the receiving end of international opinion: frequently being labelled -- usually at New Delhi's goading -- a fundamentalist state."

The newspapers said the unrest was the fault of Hindu hardliners who have stepped up their campaign to build a temple in the northern city of Ayodhya on the site of a mosque razed by zealots in December 1992.

Right-wing Hindus believe the 16th-century Babri mosque was built atop the birthplace of the god Ram.

"The Babri Masjid's destruction had symbolized the larger malaise of (the) Hinduization of India, despite New Delhi's secularist claims," wrote The Nation, which said India's minorities "are increasingly vulnerable."

"There can be no peace in India, or the region, unless New Delhi shuns internal bigotry and adopts a foreign policy of peaceful coexistence," it wrote.

India was divided at independence from Britain in 1947 between secular but Hindu-majority India and the separate Muslim homeland of Pakistan.

The nuclear-armed rivals have been locked in a tense military standoff since mid-December, when India's parliament was attacked by Islamic militants New Delhi linked to Pakistan.

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