Volume 39, Number 9 · May 14, 1992
Storm over India
By Edward W. Desmond
Anatomy of a Confrontation: The Babri Masjid-Ram Janmabhumi Issue
edited by Sarvepalli Gopal
Viking/Penguin, 240 pp., 195 rupees
The future of India may have been prefigured in early 1990 in a riot between Hindus and Muslims which took place in the town of Mathura, two dusty hours drive from New Delhi. The violence broke out after a procession of Hindus carried a statue of Ganesha, a Hindu god, to the wall of the seventeenth-century mosque in the town's center, and proceeded to install it in a niche previously cut into the wall. Local Muslims, enraged by this insult to their sacred precincts, ran to the mosque, and soon stones started flying. For two days mobs surged through the streets, leaving perhaps three hundred people injured and forty houses and shops gutted. Not long afterward, the Hindu leader who had organized the Ganesha procession was arrested.
Review, 5264 words
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