LUCKNOW/NEW DELHI, 21 March — An Indian court pledged yesterday to speed up hearings of a half-century-old legal case over a disputed site at the root of the country’s worst religious bloodletting in a decade.

The decision by the Allahabad High Court to begin daily hearings and appoint more commissioners to take evidence came as opposition lawmakers renewed calls for Home Minister L.K. Advani to quit over the violence in western India.

"What’s happening in Gujarat is state-sponsored terrorism," Ranghuvansh Prasad Singh, lawmaker from the opposition Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), shouted in Parliament. His party accuses the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of a profound bias against India’s more than 120 million Muslims.

More than 700 people, mainly Muslims, have been killed since Feb. 27 in violence fueled by a Hindu-Muslim dispute over the site in Ayodhya. The politically explosive Ayodhya case is one of the most complex ever faced by an Indian court, involving claims by fundamentalist Hindus that their deity Ram was born on the site before recorded time. The witnesses include historians and archaeologists.

Ten years ago, a frenzied Hindu mob demolished a mosque at the site, triggering riots in which 3,000 people died. The central government asked the Allahabad High Court to accelerate hearings after the latest violence broke out. But lawyers said it could still take at least a year to get a verdict in the case which has been pending before the courts for more than half a century.

The hard-line Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) — from the same ideological family as the ruling Hindu extremist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) — has repeatedly threatened to storm the site where the 16th-century Babri Mosque once stood. Irate over the court case’s slow progress, it held a special ritual ceremony last week in Ayodhya to bless its plans to build a magnificent temple on the spot, though it obeyed a court order to hold the ritual outside the disputed area.

Meanwhile, a top Hindu leader, Ramchandra Paramhans, said that temple movement had a "hidden supporter" in Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee. "Vajpayee wants to support us but is bound by the coalition politics as the BJP did not have a majority to form a government on its own," he said.

The fundamentalists say the Babri Mosque was built by Mogul invaders and want a temple to redress the perceived insult and reclaim a Hindu identity they say was stifled by Muslim and then British colonial rule. So far, only 23 witnesses out of nearly 200 have given evidence and many others have died before being heard.

A three-judge bench of the Allahabad High Court said in its ruling given in Lucknow that it would name extra officials to take evidence to speed up hearings.

Legal proceedings began in 1950 but were all but forgotten until being raked up again in a Hindu revivalist wave in the late 1980s and early 1990s, culminating in the mosque’s destruction.Since then the Ayodhya dispute has become a rallying call for Hindu hard-liners, a cause of fear for minority Muslims and a problem for whichever government has been in power.

Muslim lawyer Zafaryab Jilani welcomed yesterday’s ruling but said the court could still take a year just to hear evidence. "After that, it is up to the court to give the final verdict."

The dispute has trapped Vajpayee between his hard-line Hindu supporters and his secular allies in the coalition government. Vajpayee yesterday urged Hindu hard-liners to defer their campaign to build the temple on the disputed site.