Next Step : The New Fundamentalists: Now, It’s the Hindus’ Turn : Ancient hatreds fueled the storming of the India mosque, but politics is involved, too.

Surrounded by towering barbed wire, machine-gun nests, remote-surveillance cameras and hundreds of heavily armed troops, a senior Indian state police official sat down for a moment last week inside the 16th-Century Babri Masjid mosque and tried to explain how this simple structure has become the focal point of South Asia’s latest holy war.

It was the day before 15,000 frenzied Hindu fundamentalist pilgrims stormed the mosque and began tearing it to pieces in the name of their legendary demigod, Lord Rama, who many Hindus believe was born on that spot. The police officer had just finished leading a small group of journalists on a tour of the disputed Muslim shrine, which had been placed off-limits to all worshipers in hopes of preventing the kind of destruction that ultimately occurred.

“I am completely against this Hindu fundamentalism, mind you,” said the officer, himself a Hindu descendant of Rajput kings who, centuries ago, fought to the death against the Islamic Mogul emperors who had built this mosque and thousands of others on the sites of ancient Hindu temples.

“But I do understand the sentiments. Of course, some politics is there. But that is not the main thing. Every action, you see, has a reaction. If some Muslims turn into fundamentalists, then the Hindus begin to feel they should convert themselves as well. What you are seeing in India today,” the officer said, “is a simple case of fundamentalism creating fundamentalism.”

And so it was, just 24 hours later, that wave after wave of those Hindu neo-fundamentalists--doctors, lawyers, peasants and holy men--broke through police barricades erected to guard the mosque, chanting, “Lord Lord Ram; Long Live Ram.” They braved tear gas, bullets and cane charges in a bloody attack that reached the inner shrine where the police officer had been sitting a day before.

Within hours, Muslims attacked celebrating Hindus in many Indian cities and towns, fueling a cycle of violence that has left as many as 250 dead and the government of Indian Prime Minister Vishwanath Pratap Singh, who had staked his political future on protecting that mosque, on the brink of collapse.

Meanwhile, more than 1,000 miles away, wild-eyed Muslims poured out of their houses in Bangladesh, Hindu-dominated India’s Islamic neighbor to the east, setting fire to Hindu temples in an orgy of religious retaliation that left more dead and the nation’s two major cities under 24-hour curfew.

And in Pakistan, India’s Islamic western neighbor where a Muslim-fundamentalist-backed government has just won control, there were angry condemnations at the highest levels of society.

This chain reaction of bloodletting, analysts say, threatens to plunge the Indian subcontinent into its worst grass-roots religious warfare since British colonial rulers partitioned the region along Hindu-Muslim lines more than four decades ago.

Behind it all, according to many analysts and to militant Hindus, is the truth voiced by that senior police official: In a region where religion has long defined both one’s nation and oneself, fundamentalism seems to beget fundamentalism.

The mosque-temple controversy in India’s sacred town of Ayodhya has long been a political as well as religious dispute. Many blame the leaders of India’s warring political parties for encouraging Hindu-Muslim rivalry in a cynical search for votes.

The prime minister has called Ayodhya a critical test of India’s constitutional underpinnings as a secular state, in which the more than 750 million Hindus and 100 million Muslims enjoy equal rights, along with smaller minorities of Christians and Buddhists. Portraying himself as a committed socialist and secularist, Singh has warned that India’s image as a Gandhian haven of religious tolerance will be tarnished if the Hindu militants succeed. The fundamentalists vow to tear down the entire mosque and replace it with a multimillion-dollar temple honoring what they believe to be the birthplace of Rama.

Singh’s secular crusade appears also to be aimed at securing the Muslim vote. His shaky 10-month rule has depended on support both from India’s leftist parties and its increasingly powerful right-wing Hindu fundamentalist party.

Singh was bound to lose the support of the fundamentalists, most political analysts say. By abandoning them early, his party could attract Muslim support and emerge stronger in new elections.

Similarly, the Hindu fundamentalist party, whose strength in Parliament grew from two seats in 1984 to 82 last year, has used the Ram temple issue in a strategy that they hope will now bring them to power.

Behind the politics, however, there is something far more emotional and potentially explosive: a mass movement of Hindu fundamentalism that, while it may have been nurtured by politicians, has taken on a life of its own.

It is a movement rooted in the 1947 partition of the subcontinent creating the Islamic state of Pakistan--whose eastern section later became Bangladesh--and predominantly Hindu India. This dissection triggered widespread massacres that killed hundreds of thousands of Hindus and Muslims and left deep scars for succeeding generations.

Hindu fundamentalism is also a reaction to the recent Islamic fundamentalism spreading from nearby Iran through the Muslim nations and communities of South Asia after the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s Islamic revolution overthrew Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi in 1979.

Now, with new strength and zeal stemming from last week’s successful assault on the governmental barriers arrayed to stop it, it is a movement likely to transform the social and political scene.

This religious wave is perhaps best explained by militant Hindus themselves--peasants, elderly women and holy men, lawyers, doctors and rich businessmen--and by the fanatical leaders who steered them into last week’s assault on the holy shrine of Ayodhya.

“Arrest me! Hit me! Shoot me! Kill me!” screamed Rao Indrajit Singh, a well-dressed rural landowner from the Indian state of Rajasthan, as he and thousands of other militant pilgrims taunted a large force of riot police on the main bridge leading into Ayodhya.

It was just after sunrise on the day set by pundits of the World Hindu Council as most auspicious for destruction of the mosque and beginning temple reconstruction. The council’s movement has dubbed pilgrims like Rao Indrajit Singh and the estimated 15,000 others who stormed Ayodhya last week, kar sevaks, or religious construction volunteers. And their pre-dawn assault against police barricades on the mile-long bridge over Ayodhya’s sacred Saryu River was the first of scores that flared throughout the day.

Later, after his group was repelled in a police counterattack, Singh wiped the tear gas from his eyes and explained: “We are very astonished by all of this. We are poor people, and the police, they are Hindus, too. And still they beat us up.

“We are doing this only for our god, Lord Ram, and for our nation, Hindustan (the Hindu State). This is India. This is Hindustan. They can’t stop Hindus from going to their temple in Hindustan. This is not, after all, Pakistan.”

The battle for the bridge was one of the few the Hindu militants lost. They burst through most of the other barricades--into the mosque itself--largely through the deliberate laxity and sometimes connivance of the mostly Hindu police. It was a breakdown in the state’s front line of defense; one that illustrated how deeply the revivalist tide has reached into Hindu society.

“I am here doing my duty--it is for money and bread,” said one state riot policeman who stood aside to let the pilgrims through one of the barricades. “In my heart, there is something else. In my heart, I am Hindu. In my heart, there is Lord Ram.”

Such religious betrayal of the state inspired pilgrims to chant a Hindi-language rhyme: “Bohut achche baath hai! Police hamare saath hai!” --”Isn’t it great! The police are with us!”

Laxman Ram Dubey was with the pilgrims, too. The aging social worker was among hundreds of local residents who joined with thousands of kar sevak pilgrims--many of whom had walked dozens of miles through remote villages and farms to evade a police dragnet.

“This is not politics,” Dubey said. “It is a question of 780 million Hindus who have gotten a brain hemorrhage from this government and the courts. It is a question of history. And it is a question not of Hindu fundamentalism but of Muslim fundamentalists who want to take over India.”

Dubey’s reference to the courts involves a case pending since 1949, when an idol of Lord Rama mysteriously appeared in the inner sanctum of the Babri Masjid mosque. Hindu leaders quickly got a court injunction, and, from that day onward, not a single Muslim has been able to use the mosque for prayers.

Instead, the idol has become the focus of an elaborate shrine which is attended by revolving teams of Hindu monks and musicians who have chanted holy prayers to Lord Rama continuously for 41 years.

There have been more suits and countersuits; judgments and counter-judgments; injunctions and counter-injunctions. The case remains before India’s moribund courts--a case centered on the birth of a demigod considered one of the most popular incarnations of the Hindu deity Vishnu and sometimes depicted as possessing as many as 10 arms.

Prime Minister Singh has repeatedly called upon Hindus and Muslims to wait for a court verdict before they act. But the Hindu pilgrims clearly had more faith in their demigod than in their nation’s courts.

“When the invader Babar (a Mogul conqueror) destroyed our temple, did he get a court order?” asked Ashok Singhal, the World Hindu Council leader who has spearheaded the group’s campaign.

In a bedside interview at Ayodhya’s Sri Ram Hospital, where he was being treated for a head wound from the day’s clashes, Singhal described the fundamentalist wave his group has helped launch as “nothing short of a national uprising. . . . The Hindus have to show their power. It has to be done.”

Without the actions of his militant movement, Singhal added, the politicians “will go on appeasing the Muslims for their votes until this becomes an Islamic state. They can go to that extent. But, from today, that is all finished.”

In New Delhi, a prominent and well-educated Hindu banker spoke ominously of the future.

“It was a stream,” he said of the Hindu revivalist movement. “Now it’s a river. And it will become an ocean. They have tasted blood, and now it will flow with even more vigor.”

The Legend of the Hindu Hero

The temple that is the focus of the current religious bloodbath in India is dedicated to Rama, according to Hindu belief, the most popular incarnation of the deity Vishnu. Rama is especially famous in Hindu legend for slaying the 10-headed demon Ravana with a magic arrow.

Born into a royal family, Rama, is said to have married the beautiful Sita before being deprived of the throne of Ayodhya--site of last week’s Hindu-Muslim clashes. Sita was later abducted by Ravana and taken from what is now India to Sri Lanka. Aided by the monkey king Hanuman, whose subjects built a bridge over the ocean in just five days, Rama crossed into Sri Lanka and joined battle with his adversary’s demons.