Writer V S Naipaul calls Hindu militancy a "creative force" and "a necessary corrective to history" while writer Salman Rushdie says the Trinidad-born author "comes across as a Hindu nationalist" and a "cheer leader for the Bharatiya Janata Party".

In separate interviews on India in the millennium special issue of the Outlook, the two literary figures and Nobel laureate Prof Amartya Sen have argued about their views on India, Hindutva and the BJP, a release from the weeklysaid.

Prof Sen said he did not share BJP's interpretations of "Indianness" and "Hindutva" and expressed hope that the days of breaking mosques and terrorising Muslims or Christians will not return "with the greater self-confidence of the BJP".

Asserting that advent of Christianity did not damage India the way Islam did, Naipaul said "in art and history books people write of Muslims arriving in India as though they came on a tourist bus and went away again. The Muslim view of their conquest is a truer one. They speak of the triumph of the faith, the destruction of idols and temples, the loot, the carting away of the local people as slaves."

Rushdie said when Naipaul "writes articles which the BJP can use as recruiting material, it's a problem".

Asked if India had not been partitioned would have worked, Naipaul said "Islam is a religion of fixed laws. This goes contrary to everything in modern India."

In an open letter to the Pope, a group of eminent personalities and artistes accused the pontiff ofvisiting India to convert the Hindus.

Referring to the open statement that salvation had to come only through Christ and not through any other faith, they said "this is where, as the encyclopaedia of Britannica observes, Christianity is intolerant towards other faiths.

This intolerance makes Christianity aggressive in efforts to convert others."They have expressed concern over the purpose of the papal visit and "modalities for new evangelisation of Asia" and described the term evangelisation as a "dignified substitute" for its less dignified cousin "conversion".

Stating that they make no demand of the Pope, the intellectuals said "we only want to tell you that religious conversion, which seems to be synonymous with the papal work, is violence, pure and simple, particularly against the Hindu faith, which does not believe in conversion."

Prominent among around 20 signatories to the letter were artistes Padma Subramaniam and Sonal Man Singh, eye-surgeon S S Badrinath, Hindi scholar Vidya Niwas Mishra,Justice Krishna Swamy Reddiar and former CBI director C B Narsimhan.