New Delhi: The Dalai Lama brought religious leaders together on Saturday to mull some of India's most pressing problems, from gender violence to widespread poverty, while praising the country's religious harmony as proof to the world that different communities can live peacefully together.
The Tibetan Buddhist spiritual leader has lived for decades in exile in India's Himalayan foothill city of Dharamsala, after fleeing China following a failed 1959 uprising.
India must show its own example of religious harmony to the rest of the world, the Dalai Lama said in opening the two-day interfaith meeting in New Delhi.
"India is the only country where all major world religions live together, not only in modern time, but over 1,000 years," he said.
The meeting's agenda included discussions on enormous and seemingly endemic problems in India, including poverty, attacks on women, environmental degradation and communal violence. India has been in a state of soul-searching since national elections stirred up questions about the nation's identity and ambitions as it pushes for rapid economic growth and 21st century technologies while trying to balance the needs of three-fourths of its 1.2 billion population still living on less than $1.25 a day.
The landslide victory by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, which ousted the dominant Congress party from power, left some worried that his association with Hindu hardliners could encourage violence between Muslims and Hindus, who make up 80 percent of the country's population.
The Dalai Lama stressed there was no justification for people fighting faith.
"If you look at television or in the newspaper, I think this very moment, some people (are) killing in the name of religion," the Dalai Lama said. "For economy reasons or political power, of course it's very sad but understandable. But killing in the name of faith, for different religious faith, unthinkable."
