The BJP calculated that a campaign around the Ayodhya issue - which had received scant attention beforehand -would prolong the anti-Mandal agitation on another front, galvanizing the Hindus against the Muslims behind an upper caste leadership, increasing the BJP's political fortunes, and in the process nipping lower caste hopes and self-organizing efforts in the bud.
Much to the satisfaction of the Congress, the anti-Mandal and Ayodhya agitations quickly brought down the Janata Dal government, and tied up the Mandal legislation in the Supreme Court.!
The Congress has gone to great lengths to avoid annoying the BJP and its supporters. On the one hand, its state of protracted internal crisis - deepened by last year's assassination of Rajiv Gandhi — has made it highly vulnerable to the BJP's forward march, having already lost three key states to the BJP's control. On the other hand, as it plunges into the
Benazir Bhutto.
Sharif was quick to call a "day of mourning and protest" on December 8, which was marked by outbursts of violence directed at the country's Hindu minority. There have been similar scenes in Bangladesh.
The West is showing greater concern than usual over recent events in India — primarily out of fear that the government's neo-liberal programme of economic reforms may be thrown into doubt.
The spectre of the Emergency
The Congress Party — the only genuinely all-India party — is eager to overcome its chronic crisis of rule. With the emergence of an openly Hindu communalist party as a major player, with the frenzy of greed, corruption and gangsterism that have infected
Indian life in the course of the "modernization" of the past decade — and with the repression that has greeted mushrooming working class protests against the reforms -the real threat is the eventual imposition of an authoritarian civilian regime like that of the Emergency period of 1975-77.
At that time, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi - invoking the supposed threat from the Hindu far-right — declared Emergency Rule and carried out a repression directed primarily at the trade union movement and the left.
Emergency Rule or not, the authoritarian drift of Indian politics continues unabated. * 1. On November 16, the Supreme Court released its decision on the Mandal Report, largely upholding the 1990 legislation. The decision was followed by violent anti-Mandal protests throughout the north. The Hindu International Edition, November 28, 1992. 2. The BJP has waged an aggressive campaign for the expulsion of Bangladeshi migrant workers, particularly the Muslims. Not to be outdone, the Congress central government sent the army into a New Delhi slum in the middle of the night, where they packed 132 Muslims into a truck and shipped them off to Bangladesh. When it was later discovered that they had in fact been legal residents in India who had come from Pakistan, they were allowed to return. "Operation Pushback", Economic and Political Weekly, November 7, 1992.