WHEN you think about it, it seems absurd: people are willin to die or kill for a modest, three-domed mosque in a small north Indian town.
Shouting to a deity, young Hindu fundamentalists wield crowbars and pickaxes, break through police cordons, scale barbed-wire fences and demolish a 500-year-old structure. In the process, they hurl the world's largest democracy into chaos. With clumsy handling, the dispute could even spark another Indo-Pakistani war, this time fought in the shadow of nuclear conflagration.
The mosque, built in 1528 in the holy town of Ayodhya, was called Babri Masjid, after the Muslim conqueror who founded the Mughal dynasty. It sat, traditionalists say, on the ruins of an older temple, built where Rama, the seventh incarnation of the Hindu god Lord Vishnu, was supposedly born. (Vishnu's eighth incarnation was Krishna, of Hare Krishna fame.) Even before Indian independence in 1947, some Hindus were calling for the mosque's removal in order to rebuild the temple. Since 1986, it has cost India several thousand lives and two governments. In the coming weeks and months, expect more of the same.
Cynics like to see in the agitation nothing more than political opportunism, something like George Bush's appeal to the religious right. The slogan "Mandir!" ("temple," for the temple at Rama's birth site) catapulted the right-wing BJP (Indian People's Party) to its status as India's major opposition party. According to India Today (India's Time magazine), a recent meeting of BJP moderates and hard-liners brought agreement on no other common cause. They decided to play their old, religious trump card.
It is possible, however, to tell another tale. On this view, those frenzied blows last week hammered home the truth of the Roman philosopher Lucretius' ancient indictment: Religion can and does persuade people to do evil. In fact, the political cynics ignore the devotional fervor that led thousands of Hindus to travel to Ayodhya, then to cheer on the demolition with shouts of "Jai Shri Ram" ("Hail Lord Rama"). If Hindu sentiment had not been genuine, the leaders of the BJP could not have played with devotional fire.
But both of these views -- Ayodhya as political opportunism or as religious evil -- are only partial truths. They miss what gives every American a stake in the events. When Babri Masjid was demolished, deep strains in Indian society snapped. Try them out. The names are different, but the problems should sound familiar:
