7 Hindu Nationalist Leaders Released : India: They were suspects in an alleged plot to destroy a mosque. Their seizure prompted strong protests.

Seven Hindu nationalist leaders on Tuesday walked out of government guest houses where they were being confined after a judge ordered them freed.

The men, including Lal Krishna Advani, president of the country’s largest opposition party and a member of India’s Parliament, had been detained on charges of having been party to an alleged plot to destroy a mosque so a Hindu temple could be built on the site.

The Dec. 7 arrests of the leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, had touched off raucous walkouts in India’s legislature and calls for protest strikes.

In the Uttar Pradesh state assembly, about 40 lawmakers were badly hurt when BJP members and rival lawmakers hurled microphones, chairs, glasses and shoes at each other in a pitched battle that lasted 25 minutes.

The BJP leaders were supposed to be taken to court in the Uttar Pradesh capital of Lucknow on Monday, but government officials claimed that for security reasons, they could not bring the men in. Defense lawyer K.K. Sood accused the government of delaying tactics.

After debates before a packed courtroom, Vijay Varma, the presiding special magistrate, said he had “no option but to release the accused.” Legal experts said that the government of Uttar Pradesh, where charges against the men were drawn up, had the right to keep them in custody for only 15 days.

The magistrate’s ruling left the case against the BJP leaders in limbo. After a probe by the Central Bureau of Investigation, they were among 40 people who were accused in a supposed conspiracy to destroy the mosque in the Uttar Pradesh town of Ayodhya.

On Dec. 6, 1992, 4,000 Hindu activists armed with crowbars and pickaxes destroyed three domes of the 464-year-old edifice, despite an order from India’s Supreme Court banning the destruction of the mosque.

The government contends there was a plot; the BJP says the Hindu zealots were acting solely on their own.

Former BJP President Murali Manohar Joshi, one of those released under the magistrate’s order, said the decision of the government not to bring him and his colleagues to court proves that the charges against them are “baseless.”