THE 2,500 YEARS' WAR

Julian Manyon says that the

intercommunal violence in India is likely to get a lot worse

Ahmedabad THERE are times in this business when you feel you have made a mistake, perhaps a fatal mistake. Such a moment came as our car turned a blind corner in the back streets of this town and we found ourselves in the middle of a seething Hindu mob. The mob was busying itself tearing down a small Muslim mosque, wiry men in sweatstained shirts going at it with hammers, crowbars and their bare hands, while saffron-coloured banners fluttered overhead. But at the sight of our camera the throng turned its attention to us. With reflex speed, hands reached for stones and the first projectiles were banging against the sides of the car as, thankfully, we saw an opening in the crowd and our terrified driver, himself a Hindu, put his foot down and steered us to safety.

Down the road from the mêlée we stopped next to a police post, a large tent apparently set up for the emergency. Inside, khaki-uniformed men lay somnolent on camp beds while their officer dozed in a plastic chair. Feeling the sense of righteous outrage which generally accompanies escape from physical assault, I attempted to interest the policemen in the destruction of the mosque, which appeared from our brief inspection to be several hundred years old. Perhaps, I suggested in what I hope was not too colonial a manner, the police might consider attempting to disperse the crowd.

The officer, a plump, mustachioed man, smiled evasively. 'Sorry, sir,' he said, 'We are assigned to this crossroads and it is the limit of our responsibilities.' The crossroads was empty and the only threat to public order came from the solitary wanderings of an emaciated holy cow, but the policemen would not budge.

The storm of criticism which has fallen on the Indian government's head since the mob violence broke out and hundreds of Muslims were beaten to death or burnt alive centres on police inaction and the reasons for it. Questions normally condemned as irresponsible, such as whether the Hindu-dominated police are reluctant to protect Muslim communities and whether the religion-based BJP government has further `saffronised' them, are now being voiced, despite all the damage this may do to the notion of secular impartiality that has sustained the Indian edifice since independence. My colleague Venkat Narayan, who accompanied me in Ahmedabad, is, as he puts it, a 'proud Hindu' who also strongly believes in the secular ideal. As we drove away from the mosque area, he attempted to exorcise his worries about police behaviour by telephoning their headquarters to report the mob's activities, but his phone call was met with a brusque query from the officer on duty.

'What did you say your name was?'

'Venkat Narayan.'

'That can't be true. No Hindu would phone us to say that a mosque is being destroyed. What is your real name?'

Venkat, who is justifiably proud of his work for ITN as well as of his presidency of the Foreign Correspondents' Club of India, visibly stiffened,

'I am the journalist Venkat Narayan. What is your name?' The line from police headquarters went dead.

Venkat. the most humane and civilised of men, found that experience shocking, and the hours that followed even more so as we toured some of the Muslim enclaves swept by the tide of Hindu rage. Small groups of people huddled amid burnt-out dwellings, while debris which had been personal belongings lay scattered in the dust. Some areas seemed virtually empty. Thousands of Muslims have taken refuge in mosques and schools where women and children sit packed together in the sun rather than run the risk of trying to return to their homes. What drove them out was the murderous arson of the Hindu gangs which, when they could not set fire to concrete buildings, tried to suffocate their occupants by sealing the windows after flinging smoking brands inside.

Among the victims being treated at a makeshift clinic, a four-year-old boy called Shabir called out for his parents as medics tried to clean his wounds. The staff have not yet tried to tell him that both his mother and father were burnt to death in the blaze that consumed their home.

The police commissioner of Gujarat, a BJP appointee, has attempted to explain his men's failure to stop the slaughter by saying that policemen cannot be expected to be 'exempt from the mood of the community' — in this case a Hindu community bent on terrible revenge for the murder of some 60 of their co-religionists on a train returning from the religious hot spot of Ayodhya. Venkat told me simply, 'I feel very ashamed.'

The events of the last week have exploded the BJP government's frequently voiced claim that relations between the Hindu and Muslim communities have improved under their stewardship. Indeed, some now believe that events are poised more dangerously than after any of the previous outbreaks of what is euphemistically termed communal violence. The government, already locked into a strategy of tension with its nuclear-armed neighbour Pakistan, is now confronting the internal consequences of the divisive Hindu nationalist ideology which brought it to power. Such are the forces that have been unleashed among the normally tolerant Hindus that the government may simply be unable to exercise moderation, even if it wished to, in the next act of the drama due to unfold at Ayodhya later this month.

At the root of these problems — for this is India — is a myth which cannot be precisely dated but must be at least 2,500 years old and whose emotional resonance has been compared to Britain's Arthurian legend. The myth is that of Rama, the warrior prince from ancient Ayodhya, who led an army of monkeys to liberate his bride Sita from the clutches of the demon king of Sri Lanka. Sita, whose reputation was unfortunately blemished by her abduction in that far off un-PC age, came to a sticky end. But Rama entered the pantheon and now sits at the heart of the Hindu identity. His deeds are known to every schoolchild, and his name is routinely exploited by every politician in the BJP.

'Had I not played the Ram factor effectively,' the present minister of home affairs declared after one election, 'I would definitely have lost in New Delhi.'

At the heart of the Ram factor is the belief that Hinduism is the world's original religion and that many of its holy places, above all Rama's mythic shrine at Ayodhya, were defiled and destroyed by India's Muslim conquerors — an injustice which now, hundreds of years later, must be reversed. The movement, strongly identified with the BJP. achieved its first goal in 1992 when Hindu extremists tore down the great mosque at Ayodhya, setting off violence in which some 3,000 people died. Now, at the most inopportune moment imaginable. the Hindu militants seem determined to complete their grand scheme by erecting the pillars of a new temple to Rama close to arid possibly atop the ruins of the mosque — an act of religious retribution which they claim will mark the rebirth of the Hindu nation and which they say must get under way on 15 March, The BJP government and its Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, are now facing a classic dilemma fraught with danger: whether to try to restrain their own hardline supporters, if necessary with police batons and tear gas, or give ground to their demands and set off a chain of unforeseeable and possibly tragic consequences. At stake is nothing less than the social compact which has held India together since independence and, as the fires of Ahmedabad still smoulder, the security of some 125 million Muslims, the second largest Islamic community in the world.

Julian Manyon is ITN's Asia correspondent. This article is also reproduced for ITN online and can be seen at wwwitn.co.uk