Former US president Bill Clinton urged India not to polarize itself along religious lines if it wanted to be the "right kind" of world power.

Clinton, in a speech broadcast to a New Delhi conference late Saturday, said the Hindu-Muslim riots that left 2,000 dead last year in India's state of Gujarat were one of the saddest events since he left office in 2001.

He urged India to sort out its communal problems as it headed to becoming a "giant" on the world stage.

"To identify and categorize people based on faith will keep India from becoming the right kind of giant in the 21st century," Clinton said in remarks released by the conference's host, India Today magazine.

Clinton, who is widely respected in India for his 2000 state visit, had helped raise funds for the victims of an earthquake in Gujarat

that killed 20,000 people and left 250,000 homeless.

The former president said the quake, which came weeks after he left the White House, had showed him that Hindus and Muslims could work together in the western Indian state.

Riots broke out across Gujarat, the largest state ruled by Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's Hindu nationalist BJP party, after a Muslim mob in February 2002 torched a train carrying Hindu activists, killing 58.

Most of the victims of the subsequent bloodshed were Muslim, and the state administration was accused by human rights groups of turning a blind, or even sympathetic, eye to the vigilante violence.

The Indian government was blasted over the riots by the opposition and human rights groups, but the United States and other major Western countries refrained from publicly criticizing the handling of the violence.