POLITICS-INDIA: Temple-building Dispute Claims at Least 57 Lives

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Feb 27 2002 (IPS) - Plans by the fundamentalist Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) or World Hindu Forum to construct a temple where it demolished a mosque in 1992 claimed its first victims Wednesday, when 57 of its volunteers were torched to death in the western Indian state of Gujarat.

The victims were part of a large contingent of VHP activists returning by train from Ayodhya town in northern Uttar Pradesh state, where the 16th century Babri Masjid once stood.

This is also where the VHP has vowed to begin building a temple to the Hindu warrior deity Rama on a deadline set for Mar. 15 – a campaign that has pushed up communal tensions in the disputed holy site.

News reports Wednesday evening said 57 bodies have been recovered after mobs set on fire one of the cars of the Sabarmati Express in Godhra town in Gujarat. The train originated from Faizabad station near Ayodhya. The death toll could continue to rise.

Another 80 persons were admitted to the civil hospital in Godhra town, which has been placed under strict curfew. Combing combing operations have also been mounted to search for the perpetrators of the tragedy, Jayati Ravi, collector (chief administrative officer) of Vadodara city, said after touring Godhra.

News reports also cited as witnesses saying that the torching was preceded by a scuffle that had broken out between the VHP volunteers and the local people of Godhra, a town where violence has broken out in the past between Hindus and minority Muslims.

Both Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Interior Minister Lal Krishna Advani have appealed to the VHP, which is closely affiliated to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to which they belong, to call off the temple-building plan.

Vajpayee declared that the issue could not be solved by confrontation but through peaceful discussion with religious leaders or through the courts. “Peace and law and order would be maintained at all costs,” he warned.

“I appeal to the VHP to stop their campaign and cooperate with the government in establishing peace and brotherhood in the country,” Vajpayee said.

But VHP leader Acharya Giriraj Kishore rejected the calls for peace and said there would be no going back on the plan to begin construction on Mar. 15. Earlier, VHP leaders said matters of faith could not be decided by the courts.

Following an all-party meeting on the temple issue convened by Vajpayee, Tuesday, at the request of opposition leader and Congress party chief Sonia Gandhi, Advani warned the VHP that it was “embarked on a course of action in Ayodhya which is fraught with dangerous consequences”.

“Crores (tens of millions) of our countrymen want the Ram Temple to be built at Ayodhya but they want it to be built lawfully and peacefully,” said Advani, the politician most closely associated with the temple building campaign.

Advani said the “mass exercise which can only lead to flagrant defiance of court orders,” referring to the VHP’s inviting hundreds of thousands of people to converge on Ayodhya, were Hindu rituals were conducted at the weekend as prelude to temple construction.

Twelve years ago, Advani drove a motorised chariot across the country to drum up support for the temple, leaving in his wake a trail of communal riots and mayhem but winning popular support from majority Hindus for the BJP.

In December 1992, Advani, Vajpayee and other leaders from the BJP were present when volunteers from the party, the VHP and affiliated pro-Hindu organisations tore down the tri-domed Babri Masjid at Ayodhya built by invading Muslims in the 16th century.

At least 3,000 people were believed to have died in communal strife and rioting unleashed across the country in the wake of the demolition, with the worst violence occurring in the western port city of Mumbai.

When the BJP finally came to power in 1998, leading a multi-party coalition, it was forced to shelve the temple-building campaign because of pressure from its secular regional allies in the ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA), whose support continues to be critical.

At a Tuesday night discussion of the issue in Parliament, several NDA members said they were not satisfied with the government’s assurances that a status quo at the site ordered by the court would be maintained. They said they wanted a halt to the VJP plan to gather a million people at Ayodhya by Mar.12.

Many of the volunteers who have been streaming into Ayodhya or have been traveling to and from the town are from western Gujarat state, which is run by a BJP government and where Wednesday’s massacre occurred.

The current crisis has its genesis in attempts by the BJP provincial government in Uttar Pradesh to cynically use the temple issue to shore up dwindling popularity among a disenchanted electorate for state assembly elections held earlier this month.

But the attempt failed miserably. When final results were available Monday, the BJP found itself relegated to third place behind the Samajwadi (socialist) Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) or All People’s Party, both of which bitterly opposed the temple campaign.

In fact, the BJP also lost elections in three other states, western Punjab, northern Uttaranchal and north-eastern Manipur where provincial elections were held this month, threatening the party’s leadership of the ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA) at the national level.

This would mean that the BJP has now been reduced to leading a shaky multi-party coalition at the centre and directly ruling Gujarat, while its arch rival the Congress party rules 14 major states and leads a powerful ‘secular’ opposition in Parliament.