Last week’s fighting flared in places that hadn’t seen such trouble since 1947, when Britain partitioned its former colony into secular India and Islamic Pakistan. In Delhi, Bombay, Bangalore and dozens of other cities, outraged Muslims took to the streets to protest the desecration, Hindus retaliated and the mostly Hindu police cracked down hard. Muslim mobs in Pakistan and Bangladesh sacked Hindu temples, Indian businesses and a few diplomatic offices. More than 1,100 Indians died-mostly Muslims killed by police. Indian politics was at a watershed: the country’s first major religious party was seriously challenging the very basis of the state. “What happened in Ayodhya is a disaster for India that can be compared with the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi,” charged Saifuddin Soz, a Muslim member of Parliament from Kashmir. “In India today you have 120 million Muslims … under threat from a fascist party.”
The showdown may have been inevitable. India’s founders faced more than their share of the kinds of ethnic and religious tensions that can tear a modern nation apart. But they expected these to ease with independence. The British, they charged, fomented hatred between the majority Hindus and the huge Muslim minority. They pledged to deliver the masses from the poverty that exacerbated ethnic differences. This teeming, polyglot country was to be a “Socialist, secular, democratic republic,” as the 1949 Constitution put it. When a leading Muslim figure of the era told Jawaharlal Nehru such a nation could never survive on the Subcontinent, the country’s first prime minister replied: “He’s so ignorant he doesn’t even know about Yugoslavia.”
But some Indians never bought Nehru’s attempt to define nationalism in secular terms. They insisted that India is Hindu at its core. Muslim author Sayeed Naqvi recently wrote of hearing Hindu demonstrators at Ayodhya shouting: “For Muslims there are only two destinations-Pakistan or the graveyard.” The Hindu nationalists, said Columbia University professor Ainslie Embree, have always considered Muslims “an alien element in Indian society.” Gandhi, whose first fast for peace helped calm the 1947 rioting, was shot by a fanatical Hindu who believed the Muslims were receiving special treatment. Hindu nationalists ever since have played to the same fear and resentment. They charge, for example, that Muslims are trying to takeover the country by ignoring the country’s voluntary birth-control program. Repeated scandals have soured the public on the Congress Party, which has ruled almost uninterruptedly since independence; the nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and other right-wing groups promise to bring about pure, honest government. Meanwhile, a guerrilla war by Muslim separatists in Kashmir has allowed Hindu politicians to play to fears of a fundamentalist threat. They point to the rise of militant Islam not only in Pakistan but also in the newly created Central Asian republics, where it had been held in check by India’s old ally, the Soviet Union. But their most effective organizing tool by far has been the Babri mosque.
The mosque was built in 1528 by the Muslim Mogul ruler Babar, who then ruled India. Some have claimed ever since that Babar desecrated the birthplace of Lord Ram, one of the best-known gods among Hinduism’s thousands of deities. The first riot over the mosque was recorded in 1855, as the Mogul Empire was in terminal decline. In 1949 figurines of Lord Ram suddenly appeared in the mosque. A district magistrate ruled they had been smuggled in by Hindu zealots; Hindus called it a miracle. The magistrate ordered the mosque padlocked, finessing the issue for the next 37 years. But six years ago the government of Rajiv Gandhi permitted the locks to be removed, hoping to win Hindu votes. That tactic backfired when the fledgling BJP, which held just two seats in Parliament, made demolishing the mosque the centerpiece of its platform. In 1989 it won 85 seats. Mass riots at the site in 1990 brought down the government. And in elections the following year, the BJP became the main parliamentary opposition, with 119 of 545 seats.
The next elections are more than three years off, but Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao is scrambling to restore the government’s authority. In the immediate aftermath of the Babri mosque’s destruction, he moved with uncharacteristic vigor. The top BJP leaders were arrested, and five militant groups were banned. But the arrests could prove counterproductive. Gandhi and Nehru gained support during jail terms. Meanwhile, the two aroused religious communities were gearing up for a new confrontation over Babri mosque. Muslim youth groups vowed to rebuild it; BJP leaders insist they’ll build a temple to Lord Ram on the site. Rao hedged. “Anything is possible,” he said. After last week, nobody could dispute that.
