Word: bjp
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...That's exactly what the BJP did in the early 1990s. Sensing that the glory days were over for the Congress Party, which governed India for most of the years after independence, it started a rambunctious campaign to build a temple on the mosque's site. The campaign captured public imagination and the BJP did well in the general election of 1991. In 1992, it brought its masses to the mosque once again. As BJP leaders, including L.K. Advani, now the country's Home Minister, watched - professing to be shocked - trained kar sevaks (holy volunteers) broke down the mosque with...
...bombs simultaneously exploded in Bombay, some of them near Hindu targets. At about 300, the body count was alarming and the message was clear: the Muslim community was telling the Hindus to cool it or real war would break out. The Hindus relented, but voted increasingly for the BJP. The party took power for 13 days in 1996 in a doomed coalition. After elections in 1998, it cobbled together a stronger alliance, which insisted that hard-line Advani - legally charged with being responsible for the mosque's destruction - be replaced with the more moderate Vajpayee as the prime ministerial candidate...
...peculiarity of the episode in December 1992 was the collusion between the Congress government in New Delhi and the main opposition party of the country, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which was in the forefront of the movement to destroy the mosque built, it said, where the revered Hindu god Rama was born. The Congress Prime Minister at the time, P.V. Narasimha Rao, in a modern variation of the Nero legend, slept while the mosque was being destroyed. Even his Cabinet colleagues were not allowed to disturb his sleep, according to numerous statements made by them (after he lost power...
...BJP, died a political death. At least the latter was not duplicitous. But that clarity has been fogged by the nature of the first BJP Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, a liberal at heart though not always in action. An attendant problem is the nature of the coalition that runs India now: most of its members do not share the Hindu ideology of the principal party and want a settlement of the dispute through the courts...
...zealots to start construction of a temple at the disputed site this month; it snapped when Muslim fanatics attacked a train in Godhra, Gujarat, and killed Hindu pilgrims returning from Ayodhya. In its first test of lynch-mob politics, the government of Vajpayee in New Delhi failed, while the BJP administration in Gujarat could barely conceal its support for those mobs. Paradoxically, Muslim fundamentalists, like the hectoring, acid-tongued Syed Shahabuddin, created a platform for the Hindu resurgence in the 1980s with their virulent and purposeless rhetoric. Their successors in 2002 have provided Hindu fanaticism with another cause...