"Holy Work" Destroys All Peace in India

THEY CALLED IT KAR SEVA (HOLY WORK), BUT THE consequences were devilish. To the sounds of conch shells and clashing cymbals, a mob of Hindu fanatics wielding pickaxes, crowbars and bare hands descended upon the Babri mosque in the northern town of Ayodhya and razed it. Never mind that the Supreme Court of India, eager to preserve the nation as a secular state in which all religions are respected, had ordered that the mosque be left alone. The existence of the mosque, built by a nobleman of a Mughal Emperor in 1528 on the spot where the Hindu god Rama is said to have been born thousands of years earlier, was deemed an insult by many Hindus, egged on by politicians eager to convert fervent faith into political power.

| But the destruction equally enraged Muslims -- roughly 12% of India's population of 870 million -- and ignited the gravest crisis in India since the religious massacres that followed independence in 1947. Muslim and Hindu mobs armed with knives, hatchets and fire bombs attacked each other's houses of worship, homes and people in Bombay, Calcutta and other cities. A semiofficial death count topped 1,000, though the true toll was believed to be much higher. Muslim mobs burned Hindu temples and homes in the neighboring, predominantly Islamic countries of Pakistan and Bangladesh; more than 30 people were killed in Pakistan. Even in far-off Britain, 12 Hindu temples were torched.

India's Parliament met but could conduct no business; legislators only banged their desks and screamed insults at one another. Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao came under heavy fire for indecisiveness and overly conciliatory gestures toward extremists. In response, he ordered the arrest of two senior leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party, a Hindu nationalist group that has become the second largest political organization in India, on charges of inciting violence. If convicted, they could be imprisoned for 11 years. Rao also banned three Hindu organizations and two fundamentalist Muslim ones and at the same time promised Muslims that his government would help rebuild the Ayodhya mosque -- moves that some Hindu leaders warned might spark more resentment and violence. At week's end army troops were slowly bringing the violence under control. But the long-run survival of secularism and tolerance in the world's most populous democracy was by no means assured. (See related story on page 47.)