MADRAS, India -- Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's government may fall if the troubles concerning the controversial plan to build a Hindu temple at a site formerly occupied by a mosque escalate further.
Vajpayee's Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party -- which heads a coalition government with nearly half of its five-year term remaining -- finds itself in a dangerous corner after Muslim fanatics torched a train carrying Hindu activists to the temple town of Ayodhya in central India on Feb. 27, killing nearly 60 people.
In a scene reminiscent of the bloody partition days of 1947 -- a time when trainloads of Muslims and Hindus were butchered following the division of the subcontinent into Pakistan and India -- the most recent railway massacre, in the western Indian state of Gujarat (which shares a border with Pakistan), has unnerved the Vajpayee government.