Hindu Pride

By Michael S. Serrill

It was an uprising that unsettled all of India. On Dec. 6, 1992, thousands of Hindu zealots stormed a 464-year-old Muslim house of worship in Uttar Pradesh state called the Babri mosque and razed it, many of them ripping at the stones and mortar with their bare hands. Subsequent Hindu-Muslim rioting across the country left more than 1,000 dead. When the mosque was destroyed--according to legend, it had been built on the birthplace of the Hindu god-king Ram--many feared that if the leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party who egged on the fanatics ever came to power, it would mean civil war.

The B.J.P. has taken power, at the head of a combustible 17-party coalition, and shocked the world with its five nuclear blasts. But despite the tests, the B.J.P. and its program are in fact much less volatile than they were a few years ago. The party has been forced to make a series of compromises in its climb to power. And its portly, affable Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, 71, is a scholarly moderate who last week, as he was garlanded with flowers by A-bomb celebrators, posed conspicuously with Muslim well-wishers.

Indeed, some analysts see the nuclear tests as a gesture to B.J.P. hard-liners angry at Vajpayee for yielding on too many of the core issues on the Hindu nationalist agenda. "The party hawks wanted to extract their pound of flesh on the nuclear issue," says Imtiaz Ahmad, a political scientist at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. "They felt too many other concessions were being made by Vajpayee."

Among the priorities the B.J.P. has relinquished: the construction of a new shrine to Ram at the site of the Babri mosque; repeal of marriage and divorce laws "pandering" to Muslims; doing away with favored status for Jammu and Kashmir, India's only Muslim-majority state.

The recent moderation on the part of the B.J.P., coupled with the decline of the secular Congress Party, has helped it rocket to prominence. In 1984 the party held just two seats in India's lower house of Parliament; by 1991 it had 119. Today it holds 179 seats out of 545 and took power by cobbling together a coalition of socialists, nationalists and regional parties with vastly different agendas.

The decision to explode the nuclear devices fits snugly into the B.J.P.'s somewhat paranoiac view of its world: that India is sliding into chaos, with insurgencies in Kashmir and the northeastern jungles threatening its stability, China trying to stretch its influence through Burma into the Indian Ocean, and Pakistan secretly developing nuclear missiles that can target Indian cities. B.J.P. strategists argue that India needs to be ready to defend itself.

Indian Muslims--more than 120 million strong--fear that the swelling of Hindu pride will increase sectarian tensions. The nuclear tests should not be an occasion for "jingoistic euphoria," warned the Hindu, a national daily. But since the B.J.P. has a long history of whipping up just such sentiments to improve its political standing, it seems inevitable that Vajpayee and company will try to ride India's new membership in the nuclear club all the way to a majority government.

--By Michael S. Serrill. Reported by Tim McGirk/New Delhi

With reporting by Tim McGirk/New Delhi