Ayodhya threatens India's government

Hindu hardliners say they are determined that a temple will be built on the disputed site

NEW DELHI, India (CNN) -- The dust has settled after another round of the disputes over the site in Ayodhya contested by fundamentalist Hindus and Muslims who are no less adamant and no more willing to compromise.

Once again it has given rise to Hindu Muslim violence which has tarnished India's image as a secular democracy.

Once again lives have been lost, and once again there has been no outcome -- the stalemate continues and it seems likely that the wind will get up again and another dust storm will mire India.

The tightrope walk Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee has performed to get through this round of the Ayodhya conflict shows how tenuous his position is.

His Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is a member of what is know as the "sangh parivar" -- a group of organizations all owing allegiance to the extreme Hindu RSS, or National Voluntary Service Corps.

The RSS, along with other organizations it has spawned, were again at the forefront of the temple campaign, but Vajpayee couldn't be out there with them because his coalition allies would not tolerate that.

More by Mark Tully Tully's India archive    FOCUS Rebuilding a temple's future  • Ayodhya: India's religious flashpoint    IN-DEPTH India's religious strife    RESOURCES Gallery: Aftermath of religious strife  Gallery: Hindu-Muslim violence flares up     CNN.com Asia More news from our Asia edition

With one exception they are all anxious to avoid being identified with the RSS in any way.

Adamant extremists

The hard core of the BJP demanded some acknowledgement that Vajpayee wanted the temple to be built and supported their demand to hold a ceremony to mark the start of construction.

Vajpayee just scraped by because the Supreme Court ruled against the ceremony as the ownership of the land in Ayohdya where it was to be held was under dispute.

But Vajpayee's allies were not amused when the government's lawyer told the court the government wanted the ceremony to go ahead.

The RSS has reacted angrily to the compromise which allowed a ceremony to take place on undisputed land and some stone carved for the temple to be accepted by a representative of the prime minister.

The group has warned Muslims they should understand "their safety lies in the goodwill of the majority," refusing to condemn the riots in Gujarat which followed the reaction to the burning of some of its supporters in the train in which they were returning from Ayodhya.

The RSS has not accepted that its supporters were behaving in a provocative manner and has accused the press of misreporting the incident. The head of the trust set up to build the temple has threatened to take the disputed land by force.

Elections unaffected

Thousands of troops were deployed in Ayodhya last week to deter a repeat of secular riots

All this comes at a time when the fortunes of the BJP are at a low ebb as the results of last month's State Assembly elections showed.

When in the past the party lost ground, the extremist wing has taken over blaming the setbacks on a failure to pursue the Hindu agenda.

Judging by the tone of the RSS statements it seems that a new challenge to Vajpayee, always himself a moderate, has begun.

If Vajpayee falls off his tight rope the government may well fall too and the brakes will be taken off the temple movement. If the past is anything to go by that will mean more rioting and more bloodshed.

But recent events have yet again shown the limited support the RSS enjoys.

The Hindu Muslim violence has been confined, except for a few incidents, to Gujarat, the state where the train incident took place.

All the evidence goes to suggest that the BJP government there did nothing to prevent the violence when it broke out, and once firm action was taken the situation was brought under control, although sporadic incidents of violence are still being reported.

The government's refusal to allow the ceremony on the disputed land in Ayodhya to go ahead didn't evoke widespread condemnation.

The mob who did protest by breaking into the State Assembly building in the capital of Orissa have been condemned.

The prime minister himself has said he doesn't think that Ayodhya influences elections one way or the other.

But the RSS still believes it can achieve Hindutva and ignores the cost of its campaigns -- the fear and alienation they create amongst the country's vast Muslim community.

More than one hundred and twenty million in number, the Muslims have a right to a place of honor in India just as much as the Hindus do, but to say that, according to the RSS, is to support "Pseudo-secularism" or to "pamper the minorities."