Date: Sat, 16 Mar 2002 20:03:24 +1300 From: Margaret Trawick <trawick-AT-clear.net.nz> Subject: Marx was right - sort of .... ... because if religion were an opiate, then all religiously inclined people would be nice and calm and sedated. I think some other CNS-active drug is taking hold here. Any guesses? MT http://college4.nytimes.com/guests/articles/2002/03/16/908213.xml New York Times March 16, 2002 International In Religious Tinderbox, India Snuffs Spark By SOMINI SENGUPTA AYODHYA, India, March 15 - Today was the day on which the country had braced for the worst under Hindu hard-liners' threats to conduct a prayer session on land where they had already torn down a 16th-century mosque. Instead of the huge, unruly mobs that authorities had girded against, several hundred people went on a short, angry march in this northern town of 40,000, which was preventively packed with nearly 10,000 police and paramilitary forces. About 1,000 people, a modest number by Indian standards, were picked up for trying to invade the site. The police said most were local residents. A deal between government officials and the leaders of the movement seeking to build a temple to the Hindu God Ram allowed Hindu nationalists to ferry through town two carved sandstone pillars, roughly four feet long, on a bright orange tricycle rickshaw and to consecrate them at a prayer service, but the militants were not allowed to hold the ceremony anywhere near the disputed land, as they had sought. Agreeing to one of the temple lobby's most significant demands, New Delhi sent a high-ranking official to join the prayer service and to accept the pillars from Mahant Ramchandra Paramhans Das, the movement's 93-year-old religious leader. The handling of the Ram temple issue has become not only a measure of India's integrity as a secular democracy but also a delicate political test for the Bharatiya Janata Party, which leads the country's coalition government. The Hindu nationalist B.J.P., as it is known, also has strong ties to the Hindu hard-liners who in December 1992 converged on the disputed site here in Ayodhya by the thousands and tore down the Babri mosque. More than 1,000 died in ensuing Hindu-Muslim riots. Today's arrangement enabled the party to avoid a confrontation with the temple advocates, who are among its most fervent loyalists. The deal also offered the temple lobby, led by the World Hindu Council, the opportunity to proclaim victory: after all, they said, they got their people on the streets and handed over temple pillars to a high-ranking government official. Leaders of the World Hindu Council said acceptance of the pillars, called shilas, signaled that the government agreed in principle to the idea of erecting a Ram temple here. The deal instantly opened the B.J.P. to a tongue-lashing from its opponents, with Sonia Gandhi, leader of the archrival Congress Party, declaring that acceptance of the temple pillars was tantamount to "openly, openly collaborating" with the Hindu hard-liners. B.J.P. officials dismissed the charges, saying they had accepted the pillars for safekeeping. Leaders of the temple movement, too, felt the wrath of the movement's most radical activists. Even before the prayer service had finished, boisterous demonstrators accused their leaders of selling out. As for local officials, with a much- dreaded confrontation averted, they declared victory. The area's divisional commissioner, Anil Kumar Gupta, said that the procession had allowed activists to vent, even if it had violated the temporary injunction against public gatherings. "That was part of our strategy," he said. "If we had stopped them right from the beginning it might have been considered a provocation and things might have gotten out of hand." Hindu-Muslim violence did flare elsewhere in India today. A Muslim man died in Ahmedabad, the scene of sectarian riots two weeks ago that killed more than 600 people, most of them Muslims. After a bus was set afire and shops were looted, curfews were imposed in three neighborhoods. In Bombay, as the World Hindu Council rallied at temples across the city, nearly 10,000 people were placed under "preventive" arrest. In Hyderabad, Hindu and Muslim women formed a human chain and contained Hindu-Muslim street clashes. But here in Ayodhya, the epicenter of Hindu fanaticism, the march was more circus than fury, with the paramhans, or supreme leader, as its main attraction. By midmorning, supporters were gathering. The paramhans assured reporters that he would consecrate the pillars at the auspicious hour of 2:15 p.m. He would not say where or how, promising press updates by the hour. Shortly before 2 o'clock, at what seemed the hottest part of the day, the procession began. The cycle rickshaw loaded with the temple pillars started on its way, and a group of several dozen people almost instantly grew into the hundreds. People spilled out of the nearby buildings and trickled in from the narrow alleys. "If a Hindu's blood doesn't boil, he's not a Hindu," went one slogan. March leaders exhorted people to step out of their houses. "Come on down!" one of them yelled. For a while, it seemed unclear how large and restive the crowd would become, or how resolutely the marchers would seek to defy the court order and head to the disputed site. But in the end they got nowhere near it. --- from list postcolonial-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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