From: aqureshi@usc.edu (Amer R. Qureshi)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.pakistan
Subject: Riots in India (12/15/92)
Date: 15 Dec 1992 14:10:36 -0800
Organization: University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: girtab.usc.edu

Los Angeles Times (Dec. 15, 1992) <World Report Section>

RIOTS REVEAL FLAWS IN INDIA ESTABLISHMENT
Every major institution failed.  Now the country strives to regain seclarism

--by-- BOB DROGIN	Times Staff Writer

NEW DELHI -- As fires and riots raged onall sides in the capital's crowded
Seelampur District last week, fire department Deputy Inspector Santokh Singh
leaned wearily against a brick wall, took off his battered yellow helmet and
rubbed his beard.
	"It is awful, terrible," he said, shaking his head.  "So much hatred.
So much bloodshed.  What will become of us?"
	Similar questions are being asked across India today as the world's
largest democracy struggles to regain its balance from a week of savage
bloodletting and seeming madness over the Dec.6 assault by militant Hindus on
the Muslim mosque at Ayodhya.  The answers are not encouraging.
	Not since the slaughter of partition and independence 45 years ago has
the vast country seemed so consumed by communal conflagration.  The level of
carnage -- more than 1,250 were killed, according to government-controlled
media, but official sources say the toll is much higher -- was less important
than the fact that religious riots spread so far, so fast and so furiously.
	Even worse, virtually every major institution failed: An indecisive 
prime minister and the weak central government appeared helpless to prevent
or deal with the mounting crisis.  The second-largest political party and the
largest state government openly defied a Supreme Court order to protect the
mosque.  Indian and foriegn journalists were systematically assaulted while
hundreds of state police looked on and did nothing.
	The national Parliment could not control its own members for six
shrieking sessions and was finally adjourned in despair for a week.  In city
after city, paramilitary and police troops fired aging single-bore rifles and
submachine guns into unarmed crowds.  In some cases, Hindu police joined or at
least stood by during anti-muslim roiting.  Unofficial sources say 80% of the
victims were Muslims.
	To the outside world, the issue was arcane at best.  Militant
fundamentallist Hindus attacked and demolished a shabby, crumbling 16th-Century
mosque that they said was built over thebirthplace of Lord Rama, a warrior-king
seen as an incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu.  The mosque had not evern been
used since 1948, when the dispute first arose.
	But Ayodhya stood as a symbol for a host of ancient religious
grievances in a country where the overwhelming Hindu majority somehow feels
oppressed by a Muslim minority.  Political demagogues and Hindu fanatics in the
Bharatiya Janata Party rose to power by exploiting religious tension and
callling for the creation of a fundamentalist Hindu state and the start of the
Ram Rajya, the Empire of Ram.
	To Hindus and Muslims alike, therefore, Ayodhya goes to the heart of
whether the country maintains the secular identity guaranteed in its
constitution.  And it raises the question of the rights of the Muslim minority
in an increasingly fractious, multi-religious society.
	"India is experiencing the kind of polarization that never took place
before," said Prof. Saifuddin Soz, a moderate member of Parliment who is active
in the National Council for Integration, a government-led group that seeks to
heel the nation's divisions.  "This was an attack on the very edifice of
secularism in India.  The damage is very deep."
	"The lessons of this week for 100 million Muslims is we have no
protection," said Saeed Khan, a print-shop owner and former Delhi municipal
counselor.  "Our mosque couldn't be protected.  And once the riots began, we
were the targets, not only of Hindus but of the police."
	"India's secularism is only on paper now," said Syed Abdullah Bukhari,
the burly, bearded imam of the Jama Masjid in Old Delhi, the country's largest
and most important mosque.  "This is the death of secularism."
	Such dire sentiments are widely shared here by academics, clerics,
columnists and politicians.  But a few aren't so sure.
	India is a vast and resilient nation that has survived severe shocks
before and surely will again, they say.  The country is so immense -- with a
population of 138 million, Uttar Pradesh state alone, where Ayodhya is located,
has more people than Japan, England, France or Germany -- that problems tend to
get swallowed in a complex national weave that often seems a universe unto
itself, cut off and unique from the rest of the world.
	Since independence, India has repeatedly endured carnage, rage and
revolt.  There were three full-scale wars with Pakistan, bloody riots and 
successionist rebellions, and the shocking series of political assasinations --
from Mahatama Gandhi to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to her son, former Prime
Minister Rajiv Gandhi.  The country survived.
	"You know we are in the middle of a hurricane now," said M.J.Akbar, a
former member of Parliament and prominent newspaper editor in Calcutta.  "It's
very difficult to see how much damage a hurricane is doing while it's under
way.  And it's very difficult to remember that the sun will come out again."
	Certainly India's prime minister, the eer-cautious P.V.Narasimha Rao,
hopes the storm of violence will pass with little effect.  At a news conference
at his residence Friday, the frail, 72-year-old leader of the congress of the
congress party insisted the worst was over and "the normal life of harmony in
India will continue."
	"India has gone through these upheavels before and come out many times
stronger," he said.  "I do not think this will be a permanent setback."
	Rao insisted he bore no blame for the crisis, saying he relied on Uttar
Pradesh state government, then controlled by the Hindu Fundamentalist Party, to
provide security at the much-disputed mosque even after 200,000 Hindus had
gathered vowing to destroy it.  "I do not think the responsibility lies on me,"
Rao said.
	Where the blame belongs is now less important, perhaps, than where the
future lies.  Doubts are growing about Rao's ambitious economic reform program,
the most significant restructuring of India's socialist economy since
independence.  Over the past 16 months, his Cabinet has moved steadily, if
slowly, to reduce the deficit, cut spending, liberalize foreign investments
laws and lower tarrifs, among other key reforms.
	"Yes, there will be some temporary setbacks," Rao conceded, but he
added that the "merits of the economic reform program are so obvious it will
not fail."  Others are less sure, because Rao is now seeking alliances with the
country's communists to hold his minority government together.
	The political situation is also less than encouraging.  For one thing,
Rao publicly promised to rebuild the Ayodhya mosque.  If he does so, it would
mean dismantling the makeshift Hindu temple already erected on the site, a 
near-certain recipe for more riots.  If he doesn't, he forfeits critical Muslim
support necessary for his programs.
	"Each time, the hurricane gets worse," Akbar said.  "I suppose
societies don't crumble so easily.  But I know the hurricane's fury is
intensifying.  And this is the worst yet."
Newsgroups: soc.culture.pakistan,soc.culture.bangladesh