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SRINAGAR, India, March 3 (AFP) - Muslim militant groups in Kashmir -- India's only Muslim-majority state -- have seized on a sudden eruption of sectarian violence as pointed justification for their armed separatist campaign.

Several outlawed groups are arguing that Hindu-Muslim clashes in the western state of Gujarat that have claimed hundreds of lives prove once and for all that Muslims are unwanted and unsafe in this overwhelmingly Hindu country.

Muslims are believed to comprise the vast majority of victims in the Gujarat carnage, which was triggered by a Muslim attack on a train carrying Hindu activists.

Kashmir's dominant militant group, Hizbul Mujahedin, condemned Wednesday's train massacre which left 58 dead, but added the subsequent revenge killings of Muslims pointed to deep flaws in India's supposedly secular polity.

"At this crucial stage all Indian Muslims should stand united," Hizbul's chief commander Saif-ul-Islam said in a statement.

"So-called Indian secularism has again been exposed," he added.

Another militant group Jamiat-ul-Mujahedi said the riots that saw entire Muslim families burned alive in their homes had vindicated the "two-nation theory" of the founder of Pakistan, Ali Mohammed Jinnah.

Jinnah fought alongside other Indian leaders for independence from Britain in 1947, but also sought a separate state for Muslims, which became Pakistan.

"The incidents have proved beyond doubt that Muslims are not safe in India," Jamiat's spokesman Jameel Ahmed told AFP.

Both Hizbul and Jamiat are fighting against Indian rule in Kashmir and want the state to become part of Pakistan.

The profound sense of anger at the apparent indifference of the state security apparatus as Hindu mobs went on the rampage in Gujarat was not restricted to Kashmiri militants.

"The government of India has miserably failed to safeguard the life and property of Muslims in Gujarat," said Moulvi Umar Farooq, Kashmir's chief cleric and an influential leader of the region's main separatist alliance.

"Every heart is brewing with anger in Kashmir," he added.

"Fundamentalists, be they Muslims or Hindus, are a small minority everywhere," said student Yasmin Ara.

"Yet the disruptive power of their ideas and the potential of their threat to peace cannot be underestimated," she added.

Ara blamed the Gujarat government for acting too late to save Muslims from the "expected Hindu backlash" following the train attack.

The Hindu activists on the train on Wednesday had been returning from the town of Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh state, where thousands of Hindus have been gathering in defiance of court orders to build a temple on the ruins of a 16th-century mosque razed by Hindu zealots in December 1992.

The destruction of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya triggered independent India's worst Hindu-Muslim riots in which more than 2,000 were killed -- most of them Muslims.

Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, who described the Gujarat violence as a "disgrace to the nation," is under intense pressure to stop the temple-building drive lest it spark another eruption of sectarian unrest.

The local media in Kashmir was critical of Vajpayee's Hindu fundamentalist BJP party, which heads the federal coalition government.

"The government has proved to be very weak and unworthy of leading the country. The gore in Gujarat and the manner in which the situation has been handled proves that," said an editorial in the leading English daily Greater Kashmir.

The Kashmir Observer said: "Religious bigotry, inevitably, leads to violence and then thrives on it.

"For a country like India, the rise of fundamentalism, particularly among the majority community, has severely dented its image." 

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