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Renewed Indian threat over
Babri
By Ranjit Devraj
NEW
DELHI - A Hindu fundamentalist group close to Prime
Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's Bharatiya Janata Party
(BJP) and responsible for the demolition 10 years ago of
a 16th-century mosque has warned that it will lay claim
to mosques across India built over demolished Hindu
temples by past Muslim invaders.
The firebrand
leader of the powerful Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) or
World Hindu Forum, Praveen Togadia, said parliament
should immediately move to overrule ownership disputes
that have prevented it from carrying out a plan to build
a grand temple on the site in Ayodhya town in northern
Uttar Pradesh state.
That was where the Babri
Masjid stood until it was torn down on December 6, 1992
by Hindu fanatics led by the VHP and several leaders of
the BJP, including Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna
Advani - the man most closely associated with the
movement to build the temple.
"If our demand
that the entire 77 acres of land is not handed over by
February 22, when the dharam sansad [grand
assembly] meets in Delhi, we will mobilize a people's
movement across the country which will take over
thousands of mosques that were built over demolished
Hindu temples," Togadia said.
Vajpayee, who came
to power in 1998 mainly as a result of the VHP movement
to build a temple dedicated to the Hindu warrior god
Rama at Ayodhya, recently made moves to get vacated a
court stay on all religious activities at the disputed
site. This has drawn flak from top Muslim leaders like
Syed Shahabuddin, who say that the VHP's moves show that
it has not much of legal leg to stand on and may lose
its claim to the disputed land in the Supreme Court.
Vajpayee, who has publicly regretted the
demolition of the Babri Masjid, is also hemmed in by
secular regional parties on which he depends to keep
afloat the 21-member National Democratic Alliance (NDA)
that is led by the BJP.
Yerran Naidu, who leads
the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) that rules southern Andhra
Pradesh state, said the NDA's program has explicitly
forbidden any revival of the Babri Masjid issue. Said
Shambu Shrivasatava, leader of the Samta Party, another
major constituent of the NDA, "There will be
repercussions if the BJP revives their temple building
agenda."
Yet Vajpayee, considered a moderate in
the pro-Hindu BJP, cannot ignore the fact that it was
hard-line Hinduism that recently won for the party a
landslide victory in elections held for the state
assembly of western Gujarat, torn last year by a vicious
anti-Muslim pogrom.
Even as Togadia warned of
further "popular" attacks on mosques, Muslim leaders
were calling for the restoration of the Babri Masjid at
Ayodhya. Addressing a massive gathering at Delhi's
Fatehpuri mosque, its grand imam, Maulana Mufti
Mohammad Mukkaram Ahmed, called for an early settlement
of the issue by the courts.
Ahmed demanded that
the government intervene immediately and stop continuing
threats to the lives, property and rights of Muslims and
other minorities and that it allow the courts to settle
the issue of ownership of the Babri Masjid site. "If the
government hands over the site on which a mosque stood
for the construction of a temple, it will stand in
violation of every secular principle enshrined in the
constitution," said Prashant Bhushan, human rights
activist and senior advocate in the Supreme Court.
Opposition to the government move to get the ban on
religious activity at the Babri Masjid site lifted has
most of all come from the opposition Congress party,
which swears by secularism, but has been out of central
power since it lost the 1996 general elections.
Shell-shocked by its humiliation in the Gujarat
state elections last year, the future of the Congress
party now rests on the result of elections in northern
Himachal Pradesh state. Polling is scheduled there for
February 26, along with the three northeastern states of
Meghalaya, Nagaland and Tripura.
In its bid to
regain its status as the country's main political party,
the Congress is now busy forging a series of alliances
with regional parties and cashing in on the discomfort
experienced by constituents of the NDA with the BJP's
temple agenda.
Said J N Dixit, former foreign
secretary who recently joined the Congress party, "Our
aim is reacquire the Congress's identity as the
instrument of change."
The Congress party, which
led India to independence in 1947 and set the secular
tone for the country's constitution, has been the main
victim of the BJP's pro-Hindu drive that is based mostly
on the single issue of building a temple at the Babri
Masjid site.
(Inter Press Service)
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