The Rise of Goliath

by AK Bhattacharya

  Even as protests and rallies disrupted normal life in the capital and in many other cities of India, many questions arose. Did the decision on implementing the Mandal Commission disregard the importance of merit and capability in government jobs and educational institutions? By implementing the Mandal Commission’s recommendations, the government was seen to have ushered in social reform and secured social justice for the backward classes. But at what cost this was achieved continued to be debated.

  A related question pertained to the necessity of introducing a sunset clause along with the decision to expand the quotas. A sunset clause would have helped governments in the future to automatically phase out the reservation quotas once the goals of social justice were secured. The question that agitated people was whether introducing reservations without that sunset clause was a long-term disruption for governance. There were more disturbing questions. Were economic criteria for extending the reservations ignored? Was it a blow to India’s syncretic and secular fabric where minorities like Muslims and Christians were left out of the reservation policy for backward classes? Even as the demand for more reservation of government jobs and seats in educational institutions continues to be made more than two decades after that abrupt decision, no government has so far found an answer to most of these questions.

  CHAPTER 17

  THE POLITICS OF THE MANDIR

  The demolition of the Babri Masjid happened on 6 December 1992, under the watch of the P.V. Narasimha Rao government at the Centre. In Uttar Pradesh, the chief minister was Kalyan Singh of the BJP. But the clock had begun ticking in an ominous way from 1989. In spite of the Allahabad High Court order on 14 August 1989 that directed that status quo of the disputed mosque should be maintained, political parties, including the Congress, the VHP and the BJP, had started making efforts towards a Shilanyas ceremony, which essentially meant laying the foundation of the temple with the help of sanctified stones. The role of the BJP and the VHP is quite well-publicized, but that the Congress too had an equally significant role is what makes the entire disruption of the temple demolition more problematic.

  The Rajiv Gandhi-led Congress government did not hesitate to play a soft communalism card as it came close to facing the electorate at the end of its five-year-long tenure. This was largely due to its realization that it could hardly make any inroads into the Hindu vote bank that the BJP had so solidly built and nurtured over the previous few years and nor could it hope to gain anything substantial from the Muslim because of its flip-flop over the famous Shah Bano case. This was because after having first taken a bold step in supporting the apex court’s verdict in 1985 that in effect enforced a common personal law for all Indians irrespective of their religion, Gandhi succumbed to pressure from orthodox Muslim clergy and the All India Muslim Personal Law Board, which argued that the apex court’s verdict was against the spirit of sharia, the Islamic personal laws for Muslims, mandated by the Quran. After about a debate for over one year on this issue, Gandhi developed cold feet and brought in a new law, the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, 1986, to set aside the judgment of the Supreme Court on the Shah Bano case. At the same time, Gandhi in early 1986 paved the way for the opening of the locks of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, thereby allowing the worship of Hindu gods kept inside the precincts of the mosque. Such moves from Gandhi presented the Congress to the voters as a party that was either prevaricating or ambiguous about what it stood for.

  Not that Gandhi had not been advised to desist from following a soft communal approach on the question of Babri Masjid. UP chief minister at that time Narayan Datt Tiwari met Gandhi and advised that the Babri Masjid issue should be treated as a local issue and left to the state government. There were reports that the influential local Shia community might agree to relocating the mosque to a different site and allow the construction of a Ram temple at Ayodhya in return for an amicable settlement of the dispute. However, such suggestions fell by the wayside. Going by the account given by B.G. Deshmukh (A Cabinet Secretary Looks Back: From Poona to the Prime Minister’s Office), it would appear that major political parties, including the Congress and the BJP, saw electoral dividends from such an issue. Thus, no serious attempts were made to defuse the crisis or find an amicable solution to the problem. Tiwari made yet another suggestion to Gandhi, which too was turned down—let the Shilanyas ceremony at the mosque site be held as early as possible, perhaps in April or May of 1989 so that it could be sufficiently distanced from the holding of the general elections to prevent any adverse impact on the Congress’s Muslim vote bank. But Gandhi was keen on pursuing a soft Hindu line to retain his government at the Centre. The calculation was that by permitting the Shilanyas the Congress would woo away the Hindu vote bank that the BJP was relying on. The chief secretary of UP was asked specifically to earmark a plot of land in the undisputed portion of the Babri Masjid site, where the Shilanyas could take place on 9 November 1989.1

  Simultaneously, the Congress government under Gandhi went ahead with its plans to hold the general elections on 22, 24 and 26 November 1989.2 The election schedule was decided at a Cabinet meeting held on 16 October. The electoral calculations behind the advancement of the elections were too obvious to be ignored. The Chief Election Commissioner, Peri Shastri, was clearly upset. Deciding the election schedule is a prerogative of the Election Commission, and here was a government that had taken a decision on the days when elections could be held. Cabinet Secretary B.G. Deshmukh was sent to the Election Commission to discuss the dates with Shastri and explain why the government had decided on those dates after keeping in mind the administrative exigencies. Soon, the Commission announced the election schedule as the government under Gandhi had desired. That was an era before T.N. Seshan took charge of the Election Commission about a year later and gave the organization the power and authority that it by and large continues to enjoy even about three decades later.

  On 9 November, when the Shilanyas took place adjacent to the mosque in Ayodhya, Gandhi was not present there, but an impression was created that the entire event had the blessings of the top Congress leadership. Not surprisingly, the Congress campaign for the general elections was kicked off from Faizabad, the district headquarters of Ayodhya. Gandhi was present at that time and he made the grand announcement that only the Congress could re-establish ‘Ram Rajya’ in the country, a hint at the construction of the Ram temple. During the election campaign, Gandhi was advised by a few of his bureaucrats that he should at least make a statement clarifying that the Babri Masjid would never be demolished, since the Congress manifesto had stated that the party was for the ‘construction of a temple without dismantling the mosque’. A combination of factors—the charges of Bofors bribery and Muslim disenchantment with the Congress for its soft Hindutva agenda—led to Gandhi’s party fetching only 197 Lok Sabha seats, about seventy seats short of what would have given the party an absolute majority to form a government on its own. This was more than what V.P. Singh’s Janata Dal could win—143. But Gandhi was of the view that the popular verdict was against his party and decided not to stake any claim to form the government with the help of some other regional parties, leaving the field open for Singh to forge a coalition with the outside support of the BJP with eighty-five seats and Leftist parties with forty-five seats.

  In retrospect, Gandhi paid a price for adopting a soft Hindutva stance. He ignored the writing on the wall. On the other hand, Singh reaped the dividends for filling in the void created by Congress’s exit from the Muslim vote bank. Delivering his only Independence Day address in 1991, Singh announced that there would be a Central government holiday on the birthday of Prophet Muhammad.

  If Gandhi laid the grounds for Hindu mobilization through the Ayodhya movement, the role of the state media could not be ignored either in contributing to an environment that reignited religious fervour among the Hindus. Doordarshan, which had a complete sway and indeed monopoly over the electronic media in the 1980s, got two religious series based on Hind
u epics Ramayana and Mahabharata aired for several years. The Ramayana serial made its debut on Doordarshan in early 1987 and the Mahabharata a year later. Two of the Mumbai film world’s popular and successful directors were roped in to produce the serials—Ramanand Sagar for Ramayana and B.R. Chopra for Mahabharata. Every Sunday morning during that period, the streets in large parts of India would virtually become empty as people would remain glued to their television sets devouring the exploits of their religious and epic heroes like Ram and Yudhishthir. These serials were defended on the ground that these were popular epics, but there was no gainsaying that the telecast of those two serials on Doordarshan did help promote a Hindu sentiment among people. For the political parties, be it the Congress or the BJP, the Hindu voter’s mind had become a fertile ground for exploiting it for electoral gains.

  The trigger for the BJP’s resolve to speed up its Ram temple agenda seems to have come also from the V.P. Singh government’s decision to implement the Mandal Commission’s recommendations. The BJP view was that such reservations would hurt its Hindu vote bank by splintering it into castes. While the BJP would gain by consolidating the Hindu community as a vote bank, reservations for jobs on the basis of caste had the potential of fragmenting the same vote bank and encashing that would become more difficult for a party like the BJP.

  Less than a month after the National Front government’s decision to implement the Mandal Commission, Lal Krishna Advani decided to undertake his famous Rath Yatra in September–October 1990, whose sole goal was to mobilize support among Hindus across the country for building the Ram temple in Ayodhya. The Rath Yatra was expected to culminate in a Kar Seva at the Babri mosque site by the end of October.

  In less than a month of Advani beginning his tour of the nation on 25 September 1990, the V.P. Singh government made a serious attempt at finding a solution to the question of the VHP demand for a temple in that complex and protecting the monument. Indeed, on 19 October 1990 the government came out with an ordinance that seemed to suggest that a solution had been found, with the Babri mosque and the land around it to be kept as government land and the area surrounding it to be handed over to those who wish to build a memorial for Ram. However, distrust and refusal of some forces within the BJP and the VHP to agree to that arrangement led to the revocation of the ordinance just four days later on 23 October 1990. That was also the day when Advani’s Rath Yatra came to a premature end as he was arrested in Samastipur by the state government of Bihar, which was then headed by Chief Minister Lalu Prasad. That arrest, however, did not end the kar seva (self-less service rendered physically by believers with their hands) and UP Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav had to use force to defuse the crisis on 30 October 1990, as the devotees climbed the domes of the mosque and hoisted saffron flags on them.

  The BJP leadership took serious exception to the way the V.P. Singh government and the Mulayam Singh government in UP dealt with its Ayodhya movement. The BJP withdrew its support to the Janata Dal government at the Centre. As Chandra Shekhar, too, had left the Janata Dal with sixty-four MPs, the Singh government fell on 10 November 1990. Even as Chandra Shekhar formed a minority government with support from the Congress, the country’s political situation got even more fragile. According to one estimate,3 the frequency of incidents of violence increased and there were about 750 deaths and 1400 injuries resulting from communal riots relating to the Ramjanambhoomi-Babri Masjid issue between September 1989 and November 1990.

  Advani’s Rath Yatra began in Somnath in Gujarat on 25 September 1990. The next couple of months saw a series of dramatic developments that further complicated the political situation. The ordinance that had seemingly found a solution to the dispute was withdrawn. Advani was arrested in Bihar. Violence erupted in Ayodhya and in particular around the Babri mosque site with kar sevaks marching there in a procession. The Uttar Pradesh government under Mulayam Singh Yadav as the chief minister cracked down on the kar sevaks. The BJP in retaliation withdrew its support to the government, which led to the fall of the V.P. Singh government in November 1990.

  The Demolition

  In June 1991, the political situation changed with P.V. Narasimha Rao of the Congress becoming prime minister at New Delhi and Kalyan Singh of the BJP forming his government in Uttar Pradesh. Within months of Kalyan Singh taking charge of UP, the state government issued notifications for land acquisition around the mosque, and even the high court passed orders allowing the UP government to take possession of the acquired land, but prohibiting permanent construction.

  A worried Rao convened a meeting of the National Integration Council in New Delhi and secured the assurance from Kalyan Singh that nothing unlawful would be allowed to take place. However, the UP government continued with the steps that were needed to further the VHP–BJP agenda on the Ram temple at the disputed site. In February 1992, the boundary wall around the mosque was constructed and a month later the government handed over the 42 acres of land acquired in 1989 to the Ram Janmabhoomi Nyas for building the Ram Katha Park around that area. Between March and July 1992, all other structures on the acquired land were demolished, digging and levelling operations were undertaken and the construction of concrete platforms started. It was only on 15 July that the high court issued orders prohibiting any further construction work on that site. By the end of July, thanks also to the Supreme Court’s intervention, all construction activities at the site came to a halt. On 30 and 31 October 1992, the date for the next kar seva was announced and that happened to be 6 December 1992. A worried Rao government convened a meeting of the National Integration Council—which was boycotted by the BJP—and passed a unanimous resolution: ‘The NIC meeting after considering all aspects of the Babri Masjid-Ram Janambhoomi dispute and the report of the Government extended its whole-hearted support and cooperation in whatever steps the Prime Minister considered essential in upholding the Constitution and the rule of law and in implementing the Court orders.’ The ball was in Rao’s court.

  Within a day of the resolution, passed by the National Integration Council, Rao ordered the stationing of central paramilitary forces near Ayodhya. After holding a series of hearings in the last week of November, the Supreme Court observed that it had been assured by the state government that no construction activity would be allowed to take place at the disputed site and the kar seva to be performed would be only of a symbolic nature. The Court also appointed an observer, who would monitor the developments on 6 December that eventually turned out to be one of the biggest political disruptions to have hit India.

  On that fateful day of 6 December 1992, the mobs that had assembled as kar sevaks around the Babri mosque from the morning became large and uncontrollable by early afternoon. With exhortation from senior leaders of the BJP and other Hindutva parties, the kar sevaks soon climbed on to the domes of the Babri mosque. The demolition exercise began soon thereafter. By 4.30 p.m. that day, the Babri Masjid was demolished.

  Why weren’t the Central paramilitary forces called in to control the mob? One explanation was that the local law enforcement agencies feared a breakout of widespread violence if the paramilitary forces, which had been stationed near Ayodhya, were to be summoned. The forces would have had to open fire, resulting in the killing of thousands of people assembled near the mosque and the fallout of that would have been more unmanageable.

  But the account of then Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao points the finger at the state administration in Uttar Pradesh. As many as fifteen companies of paramilitary forces (between 1200 and 2250 men) were ready to move to Ayodhya from Faizabad, where they had been stationed since the morning of 6 December. The distance between Faizabad and Ayodhya was less than seven kilometres. It would have taken about half an hour for the forces to move in. The Union home secretary in Delhi had been impressing upon the state administration from the morning to summon the paramilitary forces. But the law required that such paramilitary forces could move in only after a local magistrate had given permission and accompanied the Centr
al forces to the site. This permission was neither refused nor given.

  Rao writes:

  Even at the very last moment when the force had actually moved hallway towards the structure, at 2.20 p.m. – by which time the demolition was going on, but could have stopped even then – the deliberate act of the magistrate in not allowing the Central force to proceed further and thus officially aborting the very last possibly successful attempt to save the structure, became transparently visible, and will always be cited as a wanton and mala fide step to stop the saving of the structure.4

  It was a dangerous combination of a state government that was reluctant to give permission to a central force to prevent the demolition of the structure and a Centre that failed to read the intentions of the state government, perhaps guided by its political agenda.

  A Tale of Two Disruptions

  The acceptance of the Mandal Commission and the demolition of the Babri Masjid were both disruptions and both interconnected. One led to the other. It is debatable whether V.P. Singh would have shown the same urgency in rolling out the plan for reservation of government jobs and seats in educational institutions for other backward classes if he had not sensed the BJP’s grand plan to ramp up its Hindutva consolidation efforts through the movement for building a Ram temple at Ayodhya. Conversely, it is also arguable that if the BJP leadership had not sensed that V.P. Singh was feeling uncomfortable with the durability of his government and coalition and could plan some disruptive move to consolidate his voters’ base, it would have likely gone a bit slow in ratcheting up its temple movement.

  There was a third element in this equation—P.V. Narasimha Rao of the Congress and the party’s relatively newfound love for nurturing the Hindu vote bank. It is not just Rajiv Gandhi, who had allowed the Shilanyas at the Babri Masjid site and launched his 1989 election campaign from Faizabad, but even Rao was not politically averse to bringing the Congress closer to espousing Hindu sentiments.