Skip to main content

Ayodhya Politics – 2



Rajiv Gandhi tried to run with the hare and hunt with the hound, as one of the observers wrote after the Shah Bano and Ayodhya episodes. He had to please both the sections of the population, Hindus and Muslims, in order to tide his party over the revolt from eminent leaders such as V P Singh and Arun Nehru as well as the Bofors scandal.  He addressed a huge gathering in Faizabad (near Ayodhya) and promised Ram Rajya to the people.  Just a few weeks before the general elections in 1989, Rajiv Gandhi sent home minister Buta Singh to participate in the shilanyas ceremony organised by VHP in Ayodhya.

The tactics didn’t yield dividends, however. Congress did not win the majority in the elections and a coalition government led by V P Singh came to power. BJP also became a force to reckon with winning 85 seats in the place of the former 2.  BJP leader L K Advani hit upon an idea to further strengthen the party; he organised a rath yatra from Somnath in Gujarat (a place where the Shiva temple had been repeated razed by Muslim invaders) to Ayodhya.  Many of the Hindus were inflamed by V P Singh’s decision to implement the Mandal recommendations on job reservations.  The mood was just right for an emotive rath yatra.  

Advani’s air-conditioned Toyota van moved from city to city, escorted by VHP militants. “The march’s imagery was,” writes Ramachandra Guha in India after Gandhi, “religious, allusive, militant, masculine and anti-Muslim.”  Advani accused the government of appeasing the Muslims and practising “pseudo-secularism.”  A Ram temple in Ayodhya was projected as the symbolic fulfilment of Hindu pride and aspirations.

Advani’s rath yatra ended up as a rakt yatra.  His volunteers clashed with the security personnel leading to at least twenty deaths.  Many religious riots broke out in UP.  In Guha’s words, “Hindu mobs attacked Muslim localities, and – in a manner reminiscent of the grisly Partition massacres – stopped trains to pull out and kill those who were recognizably Muslim.”

V P Singh lost the Prime Minister’s chair to Congress’s Narasimha Rao and BJP’s position in the Lok Sabha improved with 120 seats.  VHP and RSS acquired land around the Babri Masjid and started preparations for constructing the Ram Mandir.  Court orders were blatantly flouted.  The chief minister of UP, Kalyan Singh, turned a blind eye. 

20,000 troops of paramilitary forces were stationed off Ayodhya as more than 100,000 volunteers moved in carrying trishuls, bows and arrows.  Even before the troops were ordered to move in, the volunteers did their job which was apparently well planned much ahead.  “Ek dhakka aur do, Babri Masjid tor do,” Sadhvi Ritambara’s scream became the mob slogan. Soon the mosque was a heap of rubble.

Advani later claimed that the demolition moved him to tears.  The Sarayu wept tears of blood.

The Sarayu continued to weep as riots broke out in city after city killing at least 2000 people in the two months that followed the demolition.

“No revolution is possible by shedding tears,” roared the Tiger of Mumbai, Bal Thackeray.  He encouraged bloodshed as a sacrifice for the sake of the Akhand Hindu Rashtra.  Hindus and Muslims killed one another in Mumbai and the Tiger fed on the blood.

Hatred is a very potent force.  It has caused a lot of problems in the world, as Maya Angelou said, but has not solved one yet. Hindu-Muslim hatred grew like cancer in the country.  The altercation between Muslim vendors and Hindu volunteers in Godhra in 2002 was just one of the many avatars of the quintessential hatred that came to mark Hindu-Muslim equation in the country.  A whole compartment of a train was engulfed by the fire of hatred.  58 Hindu kar sevaks returning from Ayodhya perished in that fire.

Within hours riots broke out all over Gujarat.  Thousands of Muslims bore the brunt of arson, looting, vandalism and rapes. Chief Minister Narendra Modi justified the violence calling it a “chain of action and reaction.”

The chain of action and reaction binds the Indian mindset to one of the two poles that mark the country’s politics today: Hindu-Muslim, or, in a recent avatar, Hindu-Traitor.  Ayodhya is a symbol of that polarisation.  The place certainly belonged to Hindus once upon a time.  No one can deny the sanctity of the place in the Hindu beliefs and traditions.  But history plays its own inevitable games and like many other temples the Ayodhya temple too was probably replaced by a mosque.  Is it possible to rectify an error by replicating the same error?

A staunch BJP loyalist told me the other day that the Ayodhya temple is “a matter of self-respect” for Hindus.  Not all Hindus may agree with him but a considerable section will, I think.  My question why self-respect has to be rooted in medieval darkness elicited no response from him though he is a learned person.  Eventually I became his ‘enemy’ merely because I questioned some of his views.  He is a symbol of a lot of people I meet these days.  Everyone has a religion.  And everyone is very edgy about that religion.  It is as if religion is a very brittle, gossamer thing just waiting to shatter into smithereens the moment somebody pokes a finger at it.  This atmosphere in the country makes me feel smothered.  I write in order to redeem myself from that feeling.  Ayodhya is just one of the many issues that create such a vitiated atmosphere.  That’s why I pursued the topic.  I would like to take a look at the court verdicts related to the issue as well as the ‘discoveries’ of the Archaeological Survey of India.  Maybe, in the next post. 


Comments

  1. The apex court is running away from its responsibility to deliver a verdict. Thanks for giving voice to your very correct and hard-hitting views through this blog. Personally I feel that discoveries or archeological facts don't matter in the practical sense when faith of the majority community comes into picture. The Muslim community should voluntarily handover the place to the Hindu community and bargain for peace in return.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The issue is so emotive that the SC will find it difficult to give a verdict. It is impossible to please both the parties concerned. So it has given that responsibility to the parties themselves.

      Facts don't matter in such cases, you're right. Emotions do. Your suggestion that the Muslims could make a sacrifice is welcome provided they are willing to do that. Perhaps they should learn that such magnanimity will pay off in the long run.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why I won’t vote

From Deshabhimani , Malayalam weekly Exactly a month from today is the Parliamentary election in my state of Kerala. This time, I’m not going to vote. Bernard Shaw defined democracy , with his characteristic cynicism, as “ a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve .” We elect our government in a democracy. And the government invariably sucks our blood – whichever the party is. The BJP and the Congress are like Tweedledum and Tweedledee though the former makes all sorts of other claims day in and day out. BJP = Congress + the holy cow. The holy cow has turned out to be quite a vampire and that makes a difference, no doubt. In our Prime Minister’s algebra, it is: (a+b) 2 which should be equal to a 2 and b 2 . There is an extra 2ab which is the holy cow. In George Orwell’s Animal Farm , the animals revolt against the human master and set up their own nationalist republic. Soon politics develops in the republic and some pigs become leaders. The porcine

Prelude to AtoZ

  From Garden of 5 Senses, Delhi [file pic] Hindsight gives an unearthly charm and order to the past. There can be pain too. A lot of things could have been different, much better, if only we possessed the wisdom of our old age back in those days. As a writer put it, Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear and a lot of those guys must have thought, “I wish I had known this some time ago.” Life is a series of errors with intermittent achievements. The only usefulness of the errors may be the lessons they teach us. Probably, that is their purpose too. We are created to err so that we learn, I dare to put it that way. I turn 64 in a month’s time. It’s not inappropriate to look back at some of the people whom life brought into my life so that I would learn certain lessons. No, I don’t mean to say that life has any such purpose or design or anything. Life is absurd. People come into your life as haphazardly as vehicles ply on your road or birds poop on your head. Some of these people change the chemist

How Arvind Kejriwal can save himself

Narendra Modi and Amit Shah have a clear vision. Eliminate all opposition. Decimate them or absorb them. My previous post [link below] showed a few people decimated by them. Today let’s look at the others: those who are saved by joining the Bharatiya Janata Party [BJP]. 1. Himanta Biswa Sarma  This guy was in Congress and faced serious charges related to the multi-crore Saradha chit fund scam. He also faced corruption charges related to drinking water supply in Guwahati. His house was raided by the Central Bureau of Investigation [CBI]. Then he switched over to BJP and all his crimes just vanished. It’s as simple as taking a dip in the Ganga and all your sins are forgiven. Today he is the chief minister of Assam. Nothing is heard of all the charges that were levelled against him. 2. Amarinder Singh  This former Captain in the Indian Army was a Congressman until Modi’s Enforcement Directorate [ED] started raiding him, his son and his son-in-law. He put an end to all those raid

The Good Old World

Book Review Title: Dukhi Dadiba and irony of fate Author: Dadi Edulji Taraporewala Translators: Aban Mukherji and Tulsi Vatsal Publisher: Ratna Books, Delhi, 2023 Pages: 314 If you want to return to the good old days of the late 19 th century, this is an ideal novel for you. This was published originally in Gujarati in 1913. It appeared as a serial before that from 1898 onwards in a periodical. The conflict between good and evil is the dominant motif though there is romance, betrayal, disappointment, regret, and pretty much of traditional morality. Reading this novel is quite like watching an old Bollywood movie, 1960s style. Ardeshir Bahadurshah, a wealthy Parsi aristocrat in Surat, dies having obligated his son Jehangir to find out his long-lost brother Rustom. Rustom was Bahadurshah’s son in his first marriage. The mother died when the boy was too small and the nurse who looked after the child vanished with it one day. Ratanmai, Bahadurshah’s present wife, takes her

The Blindness of Superficiality

An Essay on Anees Salim’s novel The Blind Lady’s Descendants Superficiality is a deadly human vice though most people seldom realise it. It is easy to live on the surface of everything from one’s profession to religion. Anees Salim’s novel, The Blind Lady’s Descendants , tells us a story of superficiality as lived by quite many people. Amar, the protagonist of the novel, is 26 when he thinks that life is not worth living. He became an atheist at the age of 13. He had become a half-Muslim at the age of 5 when his little penis was circumcised partly since he ran away in pain during the process. Amar’s atheism, however, is as superficial as most believers’ religion is. What initiated little Amar to atheism is “Dr Ibrahim’s farting fit.” Islamic prayer has to follow many a rule. “If you break wind during namaaz, you break a big rule, and you are to discontinue the prayer then and there, with no second thoughts.” Little Amar was unable to control his giggles as Dr Ibrahim struggled to