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Reuters News Articlehttp://www.reuters.co.uk/newsPackageArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&stor yID=533436§ion=new India's Hindu nationalists seek future after defeat Tue 22 June, 2004 05:56 AM By Maria Abraham BOMBAY (Reuters) - India's Hindu nationalists have begun their first major review of why they were thrown out of office in an election defeat last month and where to go next ahead of critical state polls. Amid fears the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will become more pro-Hindu after its bid for the political centre failed, hardliners have already vetoed debate over the fate of Gujarat state chief minister Narendra Modi, condemned by the country's top court over the religious bloodshed there in 2002. Officially, more than 1,000 people, most of them Muslims, were burned and hacked to death after 59 Hindu pilgrims, including women and children, were burned alive aboard a train in Gujarat in 2002. Rights groups say more than 2,000 died. The BJP's ousted moderate prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, has said Modi -- labelled a "modern day Nero" by the Supreme Court -- was a major reason for the party's loss at a time of a booming economy. But his call to discuss Modi's removal, and personal view he should go, has been rejected. "The Gujarat issue is over," BJP general secretary Pramod Mahajan told a news conference on Monday in Bombay where the three-day meeting of the BJP's national executive will be held. "The matter is over as of now." Analysts say the BJP's handling of the Modi issue is a rebuff to Vajpayee and a sign of a shift to the right. "What all this signals is a return to muscular Hindutva (Hindu-ness)," said The Hindu daily in an editorial headlined "L'affaire Modi", adding Modi was an enduring symbol of what it called "jihadi Hindutva" for hardliners. Hindutva is the ideology of an umbrella of Hindu organisations, including the BJP, which stresses greater primacy or prominence to Hindu religion, history, morals, culture and philosophy in India's political, social and public life. India is constitutionally secular but majority Hindu. Muslims comprise about 12 percent. CLEAR SIGNAL "There is a war now between the hardliners and the moderates," Maharashtra Times editor Bharat Kumar Raut said. By dropping the Modi issue, the BJP has given a clear signal of where it is headed, he added. After the BJP failed to retain power on a moderate platform of good prosperity and peace with Pakistan, hardliners in the party argued it should return to the Hindu themes that brought it to power in the late 1990s. That includes a divisive campaign to build a Hindu temple on the site of a mosque razed by Hindu mobs in 1992, which triggered the country's worst religious bloodshed since independence in 1947. The BJP executive, which opens on Tuesday but begins its formal talks on Wednesday, will also discuss its campaign strategy and stance ahead of state polls in Maharashtra -- home to India's financial hub, Bombay -- due this year. Vajpayee is seeking to meet Bal Thackeray, the radical figurehead of Maharashtra's Shiv Sena party, which often uses violence to enforce Hindu morals, to discuss their continued alliance before the Maharashtra polls, local media reported.
