Atal Bihari Vajpayee, head of Hindu nationalist BJP, greets reporters after being named prime minister. (AP Photo)

By Kenneth J. Cooper
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, June 19, 1998; Page A27

AHMADABAD, India – Pepsi and Coke trucks have been intercepted and robbed, and a Baskin-Robbins ice cream shop has been torched. Christian services have been disrupted, and the home of India's most famous artist, a Muslim, has been ransacked.

Since the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party rose to national power three months ago, energized Hindu activists have been on the march – sometimes violently – in states governed by the BJP. Activists allied with the party have vandalized vending operations of American consumer products to protest U.S. sanctions against India for conducting five underground nuclear tests last month.

"Pepsi and Coke are the pride of America . . . their spinal cord. We have to break this," declared Anil Jha, president of the student body at Delhi University, where students last week smashed bottles of Coca-Cola and ransacked campus canteens that served the soft drinks.

The BJP runs the local government in New Delhi, the national capital, while its campus chapter controls the university's student government and has led the anti-American protests – a rare instance in which the party's connection to such violence has been indisputable. Elsewhere, Hindu activists operating under the banner of allied groups have done the vandalizing, allowing BJP leaders to disavow criminal involvement.

The BJP government, led by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, is sending out two messages. On one hand, party officials have typically stopped short of condemning the violent protests, and Vajpayee's budget seeks to promote economic self-reliance with an 8 percent increase in import duties. On the other hand, the government has approved 50 projects totaling more than $600 million in new foreign investment and plans for increased investment to help blunt the impact of the new sanctions.

But the government's promise to eliminate bureaucratic snags may not be enough to woo foreign investors whose attraction to the nation's large consumer market had already begun to wane. One Western diplomat said that while the BJP-led government had not imposed a feared ban on foreign investment, "it's hard to see they're doing much to favor it."

American companies that came to India after a previous government further opened the economy in 1991 have played down Hindu nationalist attacks for fear of provoking an even stronger reaction. "We are not disturbed by disturbances here and there," said Rajiv Varma, manager of India operations for Baskin-Robbins, whose franchise in the northwestern city of Ahmadabad was burned last month.

Deepak Jolly, a Pepsi spokesman, said that the company had lobbied Indian businesses for support in the aftermath of the attacks, and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry strongly condemned the vandalism. "Things have improved," he said. Coca-Cola's spokesman in India did not return phone calls.

The anti-American protests have been centered here in Ahmadabad, a textile center where Mohandas K. Gandhi conceived the strategy of self-reliance, or swadeshi in the Hindi language, to challenge British colonial rule. In 1930, Gandhi led a march from his religious retreat here to the Arabian Sea, where he made salt and provoked his own arrest to protest a colonial tax.

Ahmadabad is the largest city in Gujarat, one of a half-dozen states governed by the BJP, and the Hindu nationalist party also controls the municipal government. The state is one of India's most industrialized, home to the booming port of Kandla and a magnet for foreign investment.

In what appeared to be a well-planned attack, young men riding on three motor scooters pulled alongside a Pepsi truck a week after the nuclear tests and chanted anti-American slogans, drawing a crowd that hauled away crates of the soft drink. The next day, a half-dozen young men intercepted another Pepsi truck, breaking bottles and setting fire to the truck. A Coke truck driver was robbed and his vehicle stoned a few days later, but the company did not complain to police.

Local newspapers attributed the attacks to the Bajrang Dal, a militant youth group that – like the BJP – is affiliated with a Hindu nationalist brotherhood. Police arrested 16 people on robbery charges in connection with the Pepsi truck attacks, but Police Chief Hira Lal dismissed the robberies as the "spontaneous reaction" of underprivileged youths. A preliminary investigation, he said, indicated that a May 26 fire at the Baskin-Robbins outlet was unrelated to U.S. sanctions.

"You are unnecessarily affecting your own [U.S. economic] interests by highlighting these minor, petty things," Lal advised an American reporter.

In March, as an election vote-count showed the BJP emerging as parliament's largest party, Hindu nationalists disrupted a Christian prayer service in Baroda, another city in Gujarat state. Activists from the Bajrang Dal and World Hindu Council, another nationalist group, barged into the service and assaulted Pentecostal worshipers. Hindu nationalists oppose conversions that would expand a tiny Christian minority that makes up less than 2.5 percent of India's 950 million people.

Other attacks on Christians have occurred this year in western Maharashtra state and northern Uttar Pradesh state. Maharashtra, where Bombay is situated, is ruled by a coalition of the BJP and Shiv Sena, a smaller Hindu nationalist party. In Uttar Pradesh, the BJP leads a coalition government.

In Maharashtra, Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray has called for a boycott of Coke and Pepsi to protest the sanctions. The state government has also empowered its culture minister to police sexually suggestive lyrics in rock concerts and Hindi-language films as well as scripts of theatrical productions – restrictions that have had their greatest impact in Bombay.

In early May, Hindu activists threatened M.F. Hussain, India's most prominent artist, and ransacked his Bombay home because he painted a Hindu goddess in the nude. The assailants considered the painting sacrilegious even though the Hindu pantheon were naked in classical renderings and were clothed only after Indian artists came under the influence of British Victorian values. Hussain later apologized.

So far, it seems, the anti-U.S. protests have not succeeded in putting the targeted American companies on the defensive, and Baskin-Robbins has continued to add outlets.

Special correspondent Rama Lakshmi contributed to this report.