Word: muslim
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...ordered the arrest of two senior leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party, a Hindu nationalist group that has become the second largest political organization in India, on charges of inciting violence. If convicted, they could be imprisoned for 11 years. Rao also banned three Hindu organizations and two fundamentalist Muslim ones and at the same time promised Muslims that his government would help rebuild the Ayodhya mosque -- moves that some Hindu leaders warned might spark more resentment and violence. At week's end army troops were slowly bringing the violence under control. But the long-run survival of secularism...
...plume of dust, the central dome of an ancient Muslim mosque in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh collapsed under the blows of 4,000 Hindu fanatics last week -- and shook the subcontinent to its foundations. Like the three domes that crowned the 464-year-old Babri mosque, the three pillars of the modern Indian state -- democracy, secularism and the rule of law -- are now at risk from the fury of religious nationalism...
After a week of violence, the thousands of kar sevaks, or Hindu holy workers, who destroyed the Muslim shrine in the belief that it covered the birthplace of the Hindu god Rama, have been driven off. Army and police units have restored a semblance of order after Muslim-Hindu rioting left more than 1,100 dead and 4,000 injured. The government has banned three Hindu and two Muslim organizations and arrested the leaders of the major opposition party...
...Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao will have to do much more to heal the deep tear left in India's political fabric. What was challenged at the mosque was not merely a Muslim presence on a piece of ground held sacred by two religions, but the notion that India, a Third World superpower, can remain what its 20th century founders intended it to be: a tolerant, secular state of many ethnic identities, religions and languages...
...India's 700 million Hindus were repelled by the violence of the fanatics. But the Ayodhya riot ignited forces that lie just under the surface of the vast multicultural state. Indian democracy has survived by balancing the interests of many groups, particularly those of the Hindus and the Muslims, now 110 million strong, who stayed behind when India was partitioned in 1947. But militancy on one side breeds it on the other. In the wake of the Babri mosque's destruction, Syed Ahmed Bukhari, a Muslim religious leader, vowed to lead a mass march of his own to the site...