The next victim may well be the 11-month-old government of Prime Minister V. P. Singh. Singh, a centrist, faced a no-win decision: pander to the Hindu majority and abandon the ideal of secularism, or crack down on them and alienate a vast voting bloc. Choosing the latter, he managed to please no one; Singh will be hard pressed to survive a confidence vote set for Nov. 7. The Hindu fundamentalists who once supported him have deserted his coalition; and rather than congratulate Singh on his defense of secularism, India’s other parties immediately began plotting to exploit the situation. From its unaccustomed position in the opposition, Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress Party criticized Singh for “letting the country get engulfed in communal passions.” Gandhi hopes the crisis will clear the way for a return to power, possibly in some form of coalition with a breakaway faction of Singh’s own Janata Dal Party, possibly led by recently deposed deputy prime minister Devi Lal, a popular figure among powerful rural landowners.
Tense border: If no one can form a government, Indians will have to go to the polls for the second time in as many years. Elections, notoriously violent in India, could be more chaotic than usual amid the current sectarian hysteria. The Hindu-Muslim clashes come on top of troubles in Punjab, where at least 20 people die each day in battles between Sikh militants and government forces and terrorist strikes; Kashmir, where Indian and Pakistani troops face each other across a tense border and separatists do battle with New Delhi’s troops, and Assam, where several tribes are also waging a long-fought and bloody insurgency.
The focus of the latest Hindu-Muslim carnage is Ayodhya, a holy city in the backward but densely populated northern state of Uttar Pradesh. Ayodhya is the site of a mosque built in 1528, by Babar, the first Mogul emperor. Though they haven’t worshiped at the mosque since Hindus broke in and placed idols there 40 years ago, India’s 110 million Muslims still claim it as their own, and have called upon New Delhi to protect their holy site. Hindu fundamentalists say it stands at the place where Ram, the Hindu warrior god, was born. They dream of rebuilding the legendary temple to Ram which they say once stood on the spot. The dispute, which triggered widespread religious tension in the nearby state of Bihar last year, came to a head in late September. Lal Kishen Advani, chief of the Hindu fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), boarded a Toyota van designed to resemble an ancient Hindu chariot and embarked on a cross-country trip toward Ayodhya, rallying Hindus to tear down the mosque and build a new temple. Along the way, Advani presided over rituals in which 101 zealots offered a pot of their blood to his cause, and another supporter pierced his arm with a trident and put a blood mark on Advani’s forehead.
Alarmed by the violent mood of Advani’s trek, and by the communal clashes which sprang up in his wake, Singh ordered Advani arrested before he could reach the town. But that only inflamed his followers among India’s 700 million Hindus. Last week hundreds of thousands of Advani’s followers converged on Ayodhya–bent on tearing down the mosque at the precise moment astrologers had determined it would be most auspicious to do so. The result was an epic series of clashes over three days in which saffron-cloaked holy workers and thousands of bearded monks–their naked bodies daubed with holy ash–charged the thousands of police Singh had dispatched to protect the mosque. Police beat them back each time, using bamboo clubs, tear gas and live ammunition–though one group of about 500 Hindu militants did manage to break through and knock a few symbolic chips from the mosque walls. At least 30 people were killed by police bullets, and hundreds wounded. The sectarian violence quickly spread to other cities across India, and even to Bangladesh, India’s Muslim-majority neighbor, where a curfew was declared in the capital of Dhaka and the port city of Chittagong after at least one person was killed in anti-Hindu riots.
Politics as usual: The killings might have been avoided had India’s politicians focused more on governing the country than on exploiting its divisions for their own political advantage. Earlier this year it was Singh himself who had first injected the highly charged issue of caste into electoral politics by announcing a sweeping affirmative-action plan to reserve government jobs for lower Hindu castes. The move, widely interpreted as an effort to buy the allegiance of the 43 percent of the population that is lower-caste, sparked riots and self-immolations by upper-caste Hindu students. Advani seized on these passions in launching his crusade to demolish the Ayodhya mosque. “The BJP felt its influence undercut by the decision [on job quotas],” said a top government official in New Delhi. “So it retorted with a macabre plan of inciting the Hindu religious fervor to create an even bigger vote bank for itself.” As a protest against such opportunism, thousands of secularist Indians in Trivandrum, Calcutta and New Delhi formed human chains in a show of national unity. But Hindu militants weren’t impressed. “Those who criticize us are slaves of Muslim fundamentalists,” said a top Advani lieutenant. “We salute those who laid down their lives to liberate the birthplace of Ram.” Those sounded like more fighting words.
