Indian government struggles to maintain order

For his part, Chief Minister Modi has steadfastly refused to condemn the Hindu rioters. While Prime Minister Vajpayee told the nation in a televised address, "Whatever the provocation, people should maintain peace and exercise restraint," Mr. Modi has taken to quoting Newton's law of physics.

"Every action has an equal and opposite reaction," Modi told reporters. "The five crore (50 million) people of Gujarat have shown remarkable restraint under grave provocation."

The roots of this conflict in Gujarat stretch almost 1,000 miles to the central Indian town of Ayodhya, where Hindu mobs destroyed a 500-year-old Muslim mosque in 1992. Muslims say the mosque is their property, and was built by the Moghul conqueror Babur the Great. Hindus say the same site was the birthplace of their god Rama.

Top BJP leaders, including current Home Minister L.K. Advani and Education Minister Murli Manohar Joshi, urged thousands of orthodox Hindus to converge on Ayodhya in 1992 to push for the handover of the Babri Mosque property to Hindus. The mob ultimately tore down the mosque, an act that set off riots nationwide that claimed more than 2,000 lives.

In the halls of parliament, many BJP members blamed the opposition for the violence and groused about the pressure from their top leaders to back off from the Ayodhya issue.

"The opposition failed to condemn the attacks effectively. [The train bombing] has naturally hurt the Hindus in the state and was quite natural for them to take revenge on those who killed many of their innocent brothers...." says Jayaben Thakkur, a BJP lawmaker from Gujarat. "They could not tolerate their brothers and sisters being burnt alive."

As recently as December 2000, Vajpayee himself defended the Ram Janmabhoomi (Rama birthplace) movement, saying, "The construction of Ram temple at Ayodhya is an expression of national sentiment that remains unrealized."

With the Ayodhya temple-mosque dispute awaiting a ruling from the nation's Supreme Court, Hindu stone masons are nearly finished carving the hundreds of sandstone columns that would be used to build a new Ram temple at the disputed site. Leaders of a Hindu movement called the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, or World Hindu Congress, had originally given the government a March 15 deadline to resolve the dispute before they would begin to assemble the temple, with or without permission. Under pressure from the government, the VHP is now considering a delay in that deadline.

Yet while some critics say the BJP is using the current turmoil in a last gasp to win support from their hardest-core activists, other observers say that the temple movement is likely to wane.

"Jaswant Singh (the foreign minister) has been telling his party members, 'You cannot make the same soufflé rise twice,'" says Mr. Nandy. "The BJP is after power, they're not after a temple."

As for the long term, Mr. Nandy says, "I'm afraid it doesn't look good. The atmosphere is vitiated now. It is just waiting for someone to cast the next spark, and it will burst into flames again. There will be small riots off and on."

• Freelance reporter Liz Mathew contributed to this report from New Delhi.

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