Students and University District community members joined the UW Indian Student Association (ISA) in a candlelight vigil yesterday night to mourn the victims of the Mumbai attacks in India. Indian officials confirmed 171 deaths and 294 injured victims of the attacks yesterday afternoon.

There were 10 separate attacks in the city of Mumbai, India between Nov. 26 and 29, involving hotels, transportation centers, a Jewish center, a movie theatre and a café popular with tourists. One of the 10 terrorists was captured alive and claimed to be a member of a Pakistani terrorist organization known as Lashkar-e-Taiba.

“I was like, ‘Oh God, not again [when I heard about the attacks],’” said Shelini Briyadarshini, a foreign graduate student in the construction management program. “This has been happening in a lot of cities back home, so this was another one in a sequence of attacks. Only in 2008, we’ve had six attacks in different cities, which are very real and have cost a lot of lives.”

The ISA decided to hold the candlelight vigil to mourn the lives lost in the attacks spanning three days of violence.

“We wanted to convey a message of peace, especially to the campus, and to show that we are against terrorism,” said Rakendu Shukla, president of the ISA. “This is the time to unite, essentially, and it is not the time to look at race or religion or anything like that. We need to come together as one against terrorism.”

The vigil consisted of a nondenominational prayer, as well as a number of short speeches, including a speech from David Longnecker, a representative of the humanitarian organization Art of Living Foundation.

Longnecker stressed the importance of outreach and dialogue in preventing events like the Mumbai attacks.

“I think it’s important that we reach out to everyone and let them feel that we all belong together,” Longnecker said.

“As long as there is this separation of religion or country, we will continue to lose our big identity that we all belong to the human race. If we get to know people as individuals, then things like this won’t happen because we will see the humanness in each other, instead of an enemy or a foe.”

Another speaker was Elie Estrin, rabbi at the UW Chabad House. Estrin condemned those responsible for the Mumbai attacks and implored the crowd to respond to them with acts of kindness.

“I think the most important thing is in two parts, two parts of a whole,” Estrin said. “The first part is that first of all, we have to recognize that there is such a thing as evil, and wantonly killing people and just shooting and hurting people just for the sake of political or religious reasons is absolutely immoral and ungodly.”

However, Estrin encouraged positive actions to rise from the tragedy of the attacks.

“The second half is that from the perspective of all normal, decent human beings, our response has to be acts of goodness and kindness to the point that the entire credo of terrorism can be drowned out,” he said. “That should spur on even more acts of goodness and kindness to the point that terrorism doesn’t hold sway.”

Reach reporter Anthony Michael Erickson at news@dailyuw.com.