By IOL South Asia Correspondent

NEW DELHI, February 28 (IslamOnline.net) - Over the last two weeks trouble has been brewing over demand by a Hindu nationalist group to be allowed to offer prayers to the Indian goddess of knowledge in a Muslim mosque in the central Indian town of Dhar.

Since 1998, Muslims had been allowed to offer Friday prayers every week and Hindus could pray only once a year in spring at the Bhojshala Kamal Maula mosque at Dhar in Madhya Pradesh state.

As a result of the Hindu agitation, both state and federal governments gave in and now Hindus will be allowed to spend the full day on Tuesdays, while Muslims will continue to have access on Fridays between 1-3 pm to offer Friday prayers.

Interestingly there is no idol inside the building to which Hindus could pray. The next agitation has already started to place an idol of goddess Saraswati in the mosque.

Federal Tourism Minister Jagmohan said Thursday, February 27, that he had written to the state government asking it to allow Hindus to pray at the mosque every Tuesday instead of once a year and allow them to carry in "prayer material" like rice, flowers and incense.

Earlier, the Hindus were not allowed to carry such material inside the mosque.

It is a well-practiced ritual to gain access to Muslim places surreptitiously or after an agitation.

Once they gain access, Hindu nationalists continue enlarging both their inside presence as well as their demands for more or total control.

Mosques, mausoleums, graveyards and other Muslim historical places bear witness to this slow encroachment across the country.

The fact that Muslims see the federal government as partisan to Hindus is evident from its suggestion that Muslim entry to the mosque be confined to between 1 and 3 pm on Fridays, while Hindus would be allowed entry from sunrise to sunset every Tuesday.

Under the federal scheme Hindus not only get a weekly entry [instead of the earlier once a year] but also an entire day compared to two hours a week for Muslims.

Agitation by the Hindu nationalist group, Hindu Jagran Manch (HJM-Hindu Awakening Forum), has led to communal riots in three towns of Madhya Pradesh, including Dhar this month.

On February 20, a curfew was imposed on three towns following the disturbances.

Muslims fear that this could be yet another focus for staging more anti-Muslim pogroms in the state like the one in the western state of Gujarat last year.

The HJM is a front organization of the RSS, a conglomerate of anti-Muslim, anti-Christian organizations to which the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) also belongs.

BJP leads the ruling federal coalition. This is why organizations like HJM are allowed to get away with their anti-minority acts.

RSS organizations like the BJP and HJM are not completely free to do as they wish because the government in Madhya Pradesh state is run by the Congress Party, which is formally wedded to secular principles.

The federal government, widely seen by the Muslim community as being anti-Muslims, has to depend on the state government to implement its scheme.

Since the BJP won state assembly elections in Gujarat on a clearly anti-Muslim platform, its leaders along with other RSS affiliates, have been declaring that they would replicate the "Gujarat experiment" all over the country.

In short, the Gujarat experiment consisted of continuous anti-Muslim propaganda and provocation, which led to massive violence, which consolidated the majority Hindu vote in favor of the BJP.

This is exactly what the BJP' s affiliate, HJM, has been doing in Dhar for quite sometime.

The Kamal Maula mosque was taken over as a protected monument by the British in 1904.

In 1935 Muslims got back the permission to offer prayers in the mosque. Over the years, Hindus too started praying there once in a while.

In 1997, a Hindu-Muslim riot broke out in the town, but it had no connection to the mosque. In 1998, the administration closed the mosque to the public.

After that Muslims were allowed to pray there on every Friday and Hindus once a year in spring.

The state chief minister wondered recently as to how could the Hindus pray to goddess of knowledge when there was no such idol in the mosque.

The HJM has claimed, without substantiating the claim, that the idol that was once there in the mosque was taken away by the British.