|
|
Article: India's holy war; The Ayodhya row revived in India.(Asia)(Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's declared support of building a Hindu temple on the site of the destroyed Babri Mosque)(Brief Article)
- Article from:
- The Economist (US)
- Article date:
- December 16, 2000
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2000 Economist Newspaper Ltd. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
|
AS PRIME minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee holds the 23 parties of the ruling coalition together by holding some of them down. In particular, he holds down the ideologues in his own Bharatiya Janata Party ( BJP ), whose Hindu-nationalist appeals send shivers down the spines of India's secularists. So when Mr Vajpayee himself starts talking like an ideologue, people become nervous.
It happened on December 6th, the eighth anniversary of the destruction by Hindu zealots of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya, in Uttar Pradesh, which set off clashes between Hindus and Muslims in which over 2,000 people died. Mr Vajpayee, normally a critic of such excesses, said that the ...