Word: bjp
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...Indians would agree. Usually, it's the Muslims who feel like victims. The presence of a coalition government in New Delhi led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which draws support from the VHP, has prompted many Muslims to cry foul. They claim the BJP is anti-Islam, discriminates against Muslims in the civil service, and ignored last year's rampage in Gujarat state, when Hindu mobs killed 2,000 Muslims and injured and raped thousands more...
...seemed state prosecutors would convict few Hindus for their part in the riots. But last month India's Supreme Court ordered a retrial. And last week's events signaled an apparent further widening of the gap between the Indian establishment and the VHP, when months of rancor over the BJP's delay in building a temple to the Hindu god Ram at Ayodhya spilled over into the streets...
...scene of the blasts, Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani declared, "Pakistan's nefarious designs are not limited to Kashmir or Punjab but to the whole of India." He specifically cited his suspicion that "SIMI has been acting in conjunction with the Lashkar-e-Toiba." Similarly, Gujarat's BJP chief minister, Narendra Modi, who returned to office last November on a wave of Hindu self-assertion, blames what he calls Pakistani secret-service "modules." And he denies any personal responsibility for sparking an anti-Hindu backlash. "There is a fashion to blame everything on Gujarat," he tells TIME...
...India's standards, though, reactions to the blasts were relatively subdued. There was no violent Hindu response, as has happened so often in the past, and the charges against Pakistan seemed somewhat half hearted. Even Bombay's BJP-allied Shiv Sena party, normally vociferously anti-Pakistan, held an uncharacteristically silent protest march. The change from a year ago?when India and Pakistan were on the brink of war and New Delhi seized any opportunity to point a finger directly at Islamabad?is "striking," says a Western diplomat in Delhi. "India knows that this is a local issue, but 18 months...
...home, however, the BJP government is showing none of the same sensitivity. Perhaps the most divisive issue between Indian Muslims and Hindus is the disputed holy site of Ayodhya, in the north. When a Hindu mob tore down the ancient mosque at Ayodhya during a BJP rally in 1992, it sparked bloody riots across the country and Bombay's first bombing campaign?a deadly day of strikes in March 1993 by the city's Muslim underworld that killed 257 people. Last week, on the same day as the latest Bombay blasts, the government-run Archeological Survey of India (ASI) lent...