AYODHYA: Although it may not be obvious at first, Muhammad Hashim Ansari and the Hindu leader Ramchandra Paramhans have a lot in common.

Each has dedicated his life to serving his god - Allah and Ram, respectively. Each also claims the same piece of land, a weedy hilltop here where a 500-year-old Muslim mosque once stood and where Hindus believe their god Ram was born.

Activists threatened to carry pre-carved stones to the site on Friday to start construction - an act that ignores Wednesday’s Supreme Court ruling, which said that neither side would have access to the disputed land until a resolution was decided in court.

In reaction to the ruling, Paramhans threatened to commit suicide if he was not allowed to go to the site and perform a Hindu ceremony and began construction of a new Ram temple. Ansari, however, merely grinned.

“I will do what I promised, and let the government come and stop me,” says Paramhans, president of the Ram Janmabhoomi Trust, which is fighting for Hindu control of the site. “I have many options; it is possible that I will commit suicide also. I have committed my whole life to Ram, and I will end my life in service to Ram,” he says.

In a country that is avowedly secular but where religion permeates every activity of daily life, the temple-mosque dispute has sent tremors through villages and towns. It is the raw divisive power of this dispute that has caused deadly riots over the past decade, including 700 deaths in the past two weeks in the western state of Gujarat.

It is the same emotive power that has helped the Hindu nationalist BJP climb to its current leadership position in the government.

But while this week’s court decision does not solve the temple- mosque dispute, it could serve as a turning point for the Hindu-right political movement and determine the role that religion plays in Indian politics.

“There is a growing conservatism in Hindu society, and the Hindu right are here to stay for the next 10 years,” says Kanti Vajpai, a political scientist at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.

Even so, he says, “they have shown their limits. And they are deeply divided.”

On one side of this divide are Hindu moderates such as BJP- leader and Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, who wants to stay in power and improve Indian society through institutions such as schools and social agencies.

The other side urges more-radical action to mobilize Hindus, including the movement to build the Ram temple in Ayodhya.

Building the temple would presumably pull in hardcore Hindu ideologues in the next election and allow Hindu-right parties to rule without the need for coalition supporters. It is this hard political calculus that could bring down the ruling coalition in New Delhi led by Vajpayee, who is torn between holding together the Hindu hard core and building up his party’s reputation as a mature governing force.—Dawn/The Christian Science Monitor News Service.