Ayodhya and Beyond - 1992 - 2012

                                          Ayodhya and Beyond

Hindu extremism has failed to take hold in India, says writer and historian Patrick French, 20 years after the deadly riots that followed the demolition of the Babri mosque.

The past decade at least, those fanatics at the  Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) have been celebrating something that they call “Shaurya Diwas” or Day of Valor on December 6, the day in 1992 that an outnumbered group of incredibly valorous young men charged a heavily armed and dangerous structure that was prepared and ready to defend itself with deadly force, while cunningly disguised as an empty and run-down 16th-century mosque. Yet most of us lived in blissful ignorance of the VHP’s joyful celebration, seeing as we have mildly more interesting things to do, like breathing. But this year, the internet made us notice. On Twitter, Shaurya Diwas raced to the top of its algorithm’s selection of globally trending topics, usually reserved for such topics of worldwide importance as Twilight.

When young men with saffron flags stood on the broken dome of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya in December 1992, looking exceptionally pleased with themselves, it appeared that Indian politics had changed.

“On December 6, 1992, a superstructure called the Babri Masjid standing in the city of Ayodhya, came crashing down. It remains even today a traumatic event for the nation, because modern Indians not yet been weaned on a true history of India but on Macaulayian version view the destruction of the structure as criminal vandalism. However, the real act of vandalism was the superstructure built on a hoary and existing temple, and the vandals came from abroad to  demolish the temple, and to build a mosque on the same spot.” wrote Subramaniam Swamy in an article Babri Masji Demolition and Nation Building on 4th December 2012.

Just to throw some light on what was said by Subramaniam Swamy above : The city of Ayodhya is regarded by Hindus to be the birthplace of the God-king Rama and is regarded as one of India's most sacred and religious sites. In 1528, after the Mughal invasion, a mosque was built by Mughal general Mir Banki, who reportedly destroyed a pre-existing temple of Rama at the site, and named it after Emperor Babur. For several years, the site was used for religious purposes by both Hindus and Muslims. After independence, several title suits were filed by opposing religious groups claiming possession of the site.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) used the Ayodhya debate as a major campaign issue in the 1989 elections. In September 1990, BJP leader L. K. Advani started Rath Yatra, a tour of the country to educate the masses about the Ayodhya struggle.

In a 2005 book former Intelligence Bureau (IB) Joint Director Maloy Krishna Dhar claimed that Babri mosque demolition was planned 10 months in advance by top leaders of RSS, BJP and VHP. Dhar claimed that he was directed to arrange the coverage of a key meeting of the BJP/Sangh Parivar and that the meeting "proved beyond doubt that they (RSS, BJP, VHP) had drawn up the blueprint of the Hindutva assault in the coming months and choreographed the ‘pralaya nritya’ (dance of destruction) at Ayodhya in December 1992. The RSS, BJP, VHP and the Bajrang Dal leaders present in the meeting amply agreed to work in a well-orchestrated manner." Claiming that the tapes of the meeting were personally handed over by him to his boss, he asserts that he has no doubts that his boss had shared the contents with the Prime Minister (Rao) and the Home Minister (S B Chavan). The author claimed that there was silent agreement that Ayodhya offered "a unique opportunity to take the Hindutva wave to the peak for deriving political benefit."


Mark Tully a BBC correspondent was a witness to this destruction. In an article: Tearing down the Babri Masjid, he recounts how on 6 December 1992, he was standing on the roof of a building with a clear view of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. This was the day the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and other organisations supporting it were to begin work on building the temple, but they had given a commitment to the government and the courts that it would only be a symbolic start, a religious ceremony and no damage would be done to the mosque.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/2528025.stm

In the year following the demolition, there were reasons for fear. Across the nation several thousand people, most of them Muslim, were killed in riots; a series of bombs exploded in Bombay (now Mumbai), orchestrated by a Dubai-based crime and terror mafia; and minorities (including Hindus in far-away Karachi) became the target of persecution. The destruction of the Mosque sparked Muslim outrage around the country, provoking several months of intercommunal rioting in which Hindus and Muslims attacked one another, burning and looting homes, shops and places of worship. The ensuing riots which spread to cities like by riots in Bombay, Surat, Ahmedabad, Kanpur, Delhi and several others, eventually resulted in 1,500 deaths. The Mumbai Riots alone, which occurred in December 1992 and January 1993, caused the death of around 900 people, and estimated property damage of around  9,000 crore ($3.6 billion). The demolition and the ensuing riots were among the major factors behind the 1993 Mumbai bombings and many successive riots in the coming decade. Banned jihadi outfits like  Indian Mujahedeen cited demolition of the Babri Mosque as an excuse for terrorist attacks.

Back in 1992, two political impulses appeared to be on the rise: self-assertion by disadvantaged castes and the use of Hindu identity as a mass rallying cry for voters. While the first has revolutionised democratic politics, and is still mutating today, Hindutva has faded away as a significant electoral force. There will always be vociferous people who believe that Hindus are a voiceless majority facing insidious persecution from "pseudo-secularists" - but their influence is declining or so I believe and I am constantly told how wrong I am.

Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) politicians who are strongly associated with Hindutva, such as Lal Krishna Advani and Narendra Modi, now spend much of their time trying not to look like extremists. Mr Advani ostentatiously praised Mohammed Ali Jinnah's "forceful espousal of a secular state" while on a visit to Pakistan in 2005, while Mr Modi is trying to build links to Gujarati Muslim leaders with a view to detoxifying his reputation.

During the assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh (UP) earlier this year, the BJP's efforts to use a divisive figure like  Uma Bharti to promote its cause turned out to be a disaster: rather than offering a vision of the future, she seemed to represent a discredited past. Even the constituency of Ayodhya itself was lost by the BJP to the regional Samajwadi Party, and only three out of every 20 voters across UP plumped for the BJP. The victor in Ayodhya, a student leader named Pawan Pandey, explained his success: "The common man does not believe in false temple politics. Everybody wants development and good governance."

More significantly, India has become richer since 1992. Increasingly, voters do not see political parties as the potential answer to their problems. That increasing economic prosperity will lead to less fanaticism has always seemed a reasonable assumption. However, for 10 years at least, there’s been a one-word answer to that hope, one that all of us have tried to explain away as exceptional, or alternatively have tried very hard not to think about. And that one word is: Gujarat. The riots of 2002 happened in one of India’s fastest-growing states. Since then, it has continued to grow fast, if less so than before, while simultaneously creating horrendous little ghettoes for Muslims. That is, indeed, a plausible future for the rest of the country even if it performs well economically. The plethora of stories coming out of Gujarat about how communal tension has gone down misses the point — if one community retreats from public life and accepts its second-class status, that doesn’t count as moving on, but as moving back.

That’s why, although Ayodhya and the aggressive attack on secularism it represents seems a product of distant decades, imagining we could move on without recognizing and correcting the damage it’s done us is wishful thinking, and dangerous. Such thinking lay behind the hasty praise showered on the Allahabad High Court’s verdict on the Ayodhya dispute two years ago, instead of the concern that should have been expressed that a property dispute was being treated by our apolitical and irreligious judicial system as a question of religion and history.

Where possible, people will avoid the state and choose a workaround. Economists will tell you that when individuals have "skin in the game", they are less likely to riot. Communal violence at times of social stress will continue, but it is much less common. Contrary to the fears expressed in 1992, the people of India show little sign of wanting either a religious state or a fascist take-over.

Wherever we were, and whatever our identity, whether we were political or apolitical, passionate or apathetic, the new imagination challenging credulity touched us all, transforming each of us to the degree he or she was affected. Such was the cataclysmic nature of 6 December, 1992, forever etched in the annals as the day on which a medieval mosque in Ayodhya was demolished to undo the wrong of history. For “that medieval structure”, it was claimed, was built on the spot where Bhagwan Rama was born. To commemorate the date as the day on which the Babri Masjid was destroyed is to render banal its significance.


The demolition of the Babri Masjid on 6 December 1992 was not an isolated event. It was the culmination of a long build-up process. BJP leader LK Advani’s Rath yatra from Somnath in Gujarat to Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh between 25 September and 30 October 1990 had left many parts of the country communally polarised. Given the intense heat generated by the Hindutva outfits across the country over the Rama Janmabhoomi issue subsequently, an explosion of emotions was expected. It happened in the form of the demolition of Babri Masjid, which, according to the claims of the Hindutva outfits, stood on the birth site of Lord Ram. Communal riots followed the incident which claimed more than 2000 lives. In hindsight, 20 years down the line, nothing much has changed regarding the status of the site. The communal heat has dissipated long since and the BJP is no more even the favoured political party of Hindus in Faizabad, the district in which Ayodhya is located. What remains now are court cases. 

As we commemorate the destruction of the Babri Masjid, “us” and “them” are, once again, divided sharply over the suitability of Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi becoming the prime minister of India. The battle rages on. Hence little has changed for us.