2nd Hindu Effort to Storm Mosque Fails : India: At least 31 more die in violence sparked by dispute. Crisis in beleaguered government coalition deepens.

Thousands of Hindu fundamentalists failed in a new attempt today to storm an ancient shrine claimed by Muslims, and at least 31 more people died in violence sparked by the dispute.

A government minister resigned to protest Prime Minister Vishwanath Pratap Singh’s attempts to block construction of a Hindu temple on the disputed site, deepening the crisis in his beleaguered coalition.

Armed paramilitary troops blocked about 5,000 Hindus from attempting to re-enter the mosque in Ayodhya, which has been the center of a decades-old dispute between India’s Hindu majority and Muslim minority.

Hindu fundamentalists broke through police cordons Tuesday and chipped away bricks and bits of plaster from the one-story mosque, which they want to replace with a temple.

At least five Hindus were killed and 20 injured when police opened fire to throw back the rioters. One of the injured died of his wounds today.

Press Trust of India said at least 30 other people were killed in street battles between Hindus and Muslims in four widely separated cities.

At least 170 people have been killed in the last eight days, and Singh’s 11-month-old government has been pushed to the verge of collapse. The Hindu fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party withdrew support from the governing coalition last month to protest government policy on the temple project.

The desertion left Singh without a majority in Parliament, but he has said he will win a vote of confidence scheduled for Nov. 7.

Singh’s attempts to ride out the religious and political crisis received another setback today when the deputy minister for sports, Bhakta Charan Das, resigned to protest the police action at Ayodhya.

Das, a Hindu, accused Singh in his resignation letter of “lack of foresightedness” in tackling the crisis.

The dispute also triggered violence in neighboring Bangladesh, an Islamic nation, where Muslim mobs attacked temples and Hindu shops and homes after hearing of the situation in Ayodhya. Authorities clamped curfews on the capital Dhaka and the port city of Chittagong to curb rioting.

In Ayodhya, volunteers of the fundamentalist World Hindu Council said they would make another attempt to storm the mosque Thursday.