Quotes of the Day

India is changing fast. A few years ago, a bomb attack on a holy Hindu site would have sparked riots. A few months ago, there would have seemed little doubt that Islamist groups linked to Pakistan carried it out. That neither is a certainty today reflects a nation, and a subcontinent, in profound change.

On Tuesday night, two crude devices—unidentified explosives packed into pressure cookers and fitted with a timer—exploded within minutes of each other at a temple and a train station in Varanasi, the greatest of all Hindu pilgrimage centers on the Ganges in northern India. Police say 21 people were killed and more than 60 injured. Fearing a violent Hindu backlash, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh appealed for calm and put security forces on high alert across the country.

Singh's caution reflects the subcontinent's history of Hindu-Muslim violence. Hindu-majority India and Muslim Pakistan were born in the sectarian bloodbath of partition, and three wars the the Kashmir insurgency have kept relations between the communities strained. Just four years ago, the death of 59 Hindus in a burning railway carriage—at the time thought to have been set alight by a mob of Muslims, but now ruled an accident—sparked an anti-Islamic pogrom across the western state of Gujarat in which 2,000 more Muslims died. And yet, 24 hours after the Varanasi bombings: no Hindu riots, no Hindu nationalist stoking the crowds, no knee-jerk accusations from the security services.

Asked who might have carried out the attack, a senior Indian intelligence operative told TIME: "There aren't any definite pointers as yet. Given the target, it's probably an Islamist group, but there's nothing to connect them to Lashkar-e-Toibaa"—a reference to the Pakistani militant group fighting in Kashmir with links to the Pakistani establishment that has carried attacks across India and, until recently, was routinely fingered for any act of violence here. The officer added that the amateur nature of the devices suggested the bombers were poorly funded, and most likely had no support from any government.

What has changed? Since 2004, India and Pakistan have been engaged in their first-ever meaningful peace process and taken significant steps to normalize relations. What's more, India's Hindu right wing, which rose to prominence by stoking sectarian hatred and held power from 1997 to 2004 under the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), is in disarray. The party has yet to recover from its election defeat two years ago and the round of bitter infighting that followed.

Some argue, moreover, that India's leaders are showing the maturity that comes with the country's new position in the world. Brahma Chellaney, strategic studies professor at New Delhi's Centre for Policy Research, says that coming a few days after a state visit by U.S. President George W. Bush, the bombs were timed to "deflate the elation" in India at its simultaneous economic and geopolitical emergence. For the same reason, India's reaction was muted. "If you react strongly, you diminish your standing in the world," he said. "These people want to belittle India. For that reason, India will react in its own way."

But who is behind the latest bombings, the latest in a string of recent attacks? In August 2003, two bomb blasts in Bombay killed more than 50 people. In September 2004, around 30 people died in a gun attack on a temple in Gujarat. And last October, more than 60 were killed in a series of bomb blasts in Delhi. Another Indian intelligence officer who spoke to TIME linked Tuesday's bombings to amateurish attacks late last year in the tech towns of Hyderabad and Bangalore, and possibly the Delhi blasts too. In Hyderabad last October, a suicide bomber blew himself up 200 yards from the Andhra Pradesh state Chief Minister's office, killing only himself. And in Bangalore in December, a man ran into a conference at the Indian Institute of Technology and hurled several grenades which failed to explode, before firing a AK-47, killing a professor. "Some say it's all the same cell," said the first intelligence officer. "And if there are any substantive indications at all, they point to a group that came over from Bangladesh."

It would be naive to think that India has shed its Hindu chauvinism overnight. After the latest attack, former BJP Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani announced he would he embarking on a "yatra," a cross between a march and a pilgrimage, to protest the pandering to "minorities" — meaning Muslims — that he said had led to the bombings. Moreover, as relations with Pakistan warm, India's nationalist hawks are all too eager to find another "anti-India" bogeyman in the rising Islamic fundamentalist movement in India's its eastern neighbor, Bangladesh. Nor is the absence of a riot much to celebrate. But given the subcontinent's bloody, sectarian history, it's a start.

• Explosions at a Hindu holy site provoke a surprisingly muted response. But the mystery of who's responsible for them remains