India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

by Ramachandra Guha

In these Parliamentary elections of 1991 the BJP won 120 seats, up thirty-five from the last time. It also won the assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh. It was now in power in four states in northern India (Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Himachal Pradesh being the others). Clearly, the Ram campaign was paying political dividends. Riots were being effectively translated into votes. At the same time, these successes at the polls had led to a crisis of identity. Was the BJP a political party, or was it a social movement? Some leaders thought the party should now put the mosque-versus-temple controversy on the back burner. It should instead raise broader questions of economic and foreign policy and work to expand its influence in south India. On the other side, the VHP and the RSS were determined to keep the spotlight on that disputed territory in Ayodhya. In October 1991 they acquired the land around the mosque and began levelling the ground, preparing for temple construction.

  In July 1992 a team from the central government was sent to study the situation. They found that there had been ‘large-scale demolition’ on the disputed site, and the building of a ‘large concrete platform’, both developments in clear contravention of court orders demanding that the status quo be maintained. To their dismay, the Uttar Pradesh government, headed by the old RSS hand Kalyan Singh, had turned a blind eye to these activities. There had been, in sum, ‘flagrant violation of the law in Ayodhya’.

  Worried that the trouble would escalate, the Home Ministry in New Delhi had prepared a contingency plan, allowing for the imposition of President’s Rule in Uttar Pradesh and a central takeover of the mosque/ temple complex. However, Prime Minister Rao still hoped for the matter to be resolved by dialogue. He had several meetings with VHP leaders and also consulted with the opposing Babri Masjid Action Committee. The possibility of having the matter referred to the Supreme Court was also discussed.7

  Meanwhile, the VHP announced that 6 December had been chosen as the ‘auspicious’ day on which work on the temple would commence. From the middle of November volunteers began streaming into Ayodhya, encouraged by the fact that the state government was now in the hands of the BJP. The chief minister, Kalyan Singh, was summoned to New Delhi. Narasimha Rao urged him to allow the Supreme Court to decide on the case. Singh told the PM that ‘the only comprehensive solution to the Ayodhya dispute was to hand over the disputed structure to the Hindus’.8

  Kalyan Singh had instructed his government to house and feed the thousands of volunteers coming in from out of the state. Reports of this large-scale influx alarmed the Home Ministry. They prepared a fresh contingency plan, under which paramilitary forces would be sent to Ayodhya. By the end of the month some 20,000 troops had been stationed at locations within an hour’s march of the town, ready to move in when required. This, claimed the home secretary at the time, ‘was the largest mobilisation of such forces for such an operation since Independence’.9

  On the other side, more than 100,000 kar sevaks had reached the temple town, ‘complete with trishuls [tridents] and bows and arrows’. On the last day of November, at a press conference in Delhi at which he announced his own departure for Ayodhya, L. K. Advani said that ‘I cannot give any guarantee at the moment on what will happen on 6 December. All I know is that we are going to perform kar seva.’10

  On the morning of the 6th, a journalist at the site found that ‘straddling the security wall [around the mosque] were PAC constables armed with batons and RSS volunteers with armbands’. The central forces stationed around Ayodhya had not been asked to move into the town. The job was left to the UP police and its constabulary. The VHP had planned to begin the prayers at 11.30, on the raised platform constructed beforehand. However, by this time some kar sevaks had begun making menacing moves towards the mosque. RSS workers and police constables tried to stop them, but were met instead by a hail of stones thrown by the crowd, which was becoming more restive by the minute. ‘Mandir yahin banayenge’, they shouted, pointing at the Babri Masjid – We will build our temple at that very spot. An intrepid youngster scaled the railing ringing the mosque and climbed on top of one of its domes. This was the signal for a mass surge towards the monument. The police fled, allowing hundreds of kar sevaks to charge the mosque, waving axes and iron bars.

  By noon, volunteers were crawling all over the Masjid, holding saffron flags and shouting slogans of victory. Grappling hooks were anchored to the domes, while the base was battered with hammers and axes. At 2 p.m. one dome collapsed, bringing a dozen men down with it. ‘Ek dhakka aur do, Babri Masjid tor do!’ screamed the radical preacher Sadhvi Ritambara (Shove some more, and the whole thing will collapse!). At 3.30 a second dome gave way. An hour later the third and final one was demolished. A building that had seen so many rulers and dynasties come and go, that had withstood the furies of 400 and more monsoons, had in a single afternoon been reduced to rubble.11

  Was the demolition of the Babri Masjid planned beforehand? Or was it simply the result of a spontaneous display of popular emotion and anger? To be sure, some BJP leaders were taken aback by the turn of events. Despite his threatening talk the week before, when he saw volunteers rushing the monument, L. K. Advani asked them to return. As the domes came crashing down, he got into an argument with the senior RSS functionaries H. V. Seshadri and K. S. Sudarshan. They thought that now the deed was done, the RSS and the BJP should claim credit for it. ‘The course of history is not pre-determined’, said Sudarshan to Advani. ‘Accept what has happened.’ Advani answered that he would instead ‘publicly express regret for it’.12

  In press conferences after the event, the term most often used by BJP spokesmen to describe the happenings at Ayodhya was ‘unfortunate’. They knew that in a democracy ostensibly bound by the rule of law, an act of vandalism by the main opposition party could scarcely be condoned. When he met the press at the party’s Delhi headquarters on the evening of the 6th, the ideologue K. R. Malkani ‘made it clear that we did want the old structure to go, but that we wanted it gone through due process of law. The regret was that it had been demolished in an irregular manner.’ Seeking to distance the BJP from the act, he claimed that the kar sevaks who attacked the mosque were most likely from the Shiv Sena, since they had been heard speaking in Marathi.13

  The radicals within the movement were less coy. One VHP leader boasted that, in September itself, engineers had been asked to identify the structure’s weak spots and volunteers trained on how best to bring it down. ‘Without this planning how do you think we razed the masjid in six hours?’ he asked a reporter. ‘Do you think a group of frenzied kar sevaks could have gone about it so systematically?’14 And in a speech in Madras soon after the demolition, the polemicist Arun Shourie noted that, ‘while the BJP leaders tried to disown and distance themselves from what had happened, the Hindus of India appropriated the destruction; they owned it up’ . The Ayodhya events, said Shourie, demonstrated ‘that the Hindus have now realised that they are in very large numbers, that their sentiment is shared by those who man the apparatus of the state, and that they can bend the state to their will’. His own hope was that ‘the Ayodhya movement has to be seen as the starting point of a cultural awareness and understanding that would ultimately result in a complete restructuring of the Indian public life in ways that would be in consonance with Indian civilisational heritage’ – a somewhat roundabout way of saying that the demolition of the Babri Masjid should, and perhaps would, be a prelude to the reshaping of India as a Hindu nation.15

  One cannot be certain that all Hindus shared these sentiments – as Shourie presumed they did. But those Hindus who brought down the mosque on 6 December had certainly bent the Indian state to their will. The forces to stop them were at hand, yet the order telling them to act never came. Worried that it would be charged with being anti-Hindu, the government of Prime Minister Narasimha Rao ‘came to perceive the lesser evil in the demolition of the mosque’. Only after the deed was done was action taken – in the shape of the dismissal of the Uttar Pradesh government and the imposition of President’s Rule.16

/>   IV

  When the domes of the Babri Masjid fell, they brought those atop them down too. More than fifty kar sevaks were injured, some very seriously. At least six deaths were reported. The aftermath of the event was, however, more deadly still. The main leaders of the BJP, such as L. K. Advani, were taken into protective custody, yet riots broke out in town after town, in an orgy of violence that lasted two months and claimed more than 2,000 lives.

  The troubles began in the vicinity itself. An influential local priest had expressed the desire that Ayodhya should become the ‘Vatican of the Hindus’. To cleanse the town of the minorities was one step towards that larger goal. Kar sevaks celebrated the felling of the mosque by setting fire to Muslim homes and localities. In other towns, riots were a consequence of processions organized by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad. Elsewhere it was Muslims who came out into the streets to protest the demolition, by attacking police posts and attempting to burn government buildings.

  Sometimes sparked by triumphant Hindus, at other times by defiant Muslims, the riots covered large parts of northern and western India: 246 died in Gujarat, 120 in Madhya Pradesh, 100 in Assam, 201 in Uttar Pradesh, 60 in Karnataka. The weapons used by the mobs ranged from acid and sling-shots to swords and guns. Children were burnt alive, women shot dead by the police. In this epidemic of violence, ‘every possible refinement in human unkindness [was] on display’.17

  The city worst hit was India’s commercial capital, Bombay. On the morning of 7 December the Muslim locality of Muhammad Ali Road witnessed an outpouring of collective anger in which Hindu shops were raided and effigies of BJP leaders set aflame. A temple was also razed to the ground. When a posse of constables arrived on the scene, the crowd were undaunted. ‘Police in Ayodhya just stood by and let the mosque be demolished,’ they shouted. ‘We’re going to get you now.’ Through that day and the next mobs battled police in the area. At least sixty people died in the violence.

  Meanwhile, to the north of the city, the shanty town of Dharavi was suffering from an excess of Hindu triumphalism. A ‘victory rally’ organized by the BJP and Shiv Sena ended in attacks on Muslim homes and shops. In retaliation, Muslims stabbed a priest and set his temple on fire. In other places anger was vented not on the rival community but on the state. Dozens of government buses were trashed or burnt, as were at least 130 bus shelters.18

  On 9 December the Shiv Sena and the BJP announced a city wide strike to protest against the arrest of their leaders in Ayodhya. This, recalled a Bombay journalist, ‘was a signal for their followers to go on the rampage. They attacked mosques and Muslim establishments. In one locality, the Shiv Sena put up a notice announcing an award of Rs50,000 to anyone pointing out a Muslim house.’19

  The Shiv Sainiks were encouraged by their leader and mentor, Balasaheb Thackeray. In an editorial in the party newspaper, Saamna, published on 10 December, Thackeray insisted that the violence of the past few days was merely

  the beginning of an era of retaliatory war. In this era, the history and geography of not only this country but the entire world is going to change. The dream of the Akhand Hindu Rashtra [United Hindu State] is going to come true. Even the shadow of fanatical sinners [i.e. Muslims] will disappear from our soil. We will now live happily and die happily . . . No revolution is possible by shedding tears. Revolution needs only one offering, and that is the blood of devotees!20

  Curfew was imposed, and the army called in. It still took ten days for the city to get back to normal, for the commuter trains to be up and running, for offices and factories to be working as before. For three weeks the peace held, but then in the beginning of January afresh riot broke out. On the morning of the 5th two Hindu dock workers were stabbed to death in a Muslim locality. The cause was not clear – it might have been a product of union rivalry – but the story that Hindus were killed in a Muslim area spread through the city, catalysing more violence. In Dharavi, angry Hindus looted shops and warehouses owned by Muslims. In another slum area, Jogeshwari, a Hindu family was burnt to death. For a week the fires raged, till Bal Thackeray announced in a Saamna editorial that the attacks could stop ‘since the fanatics had been taught a lesson’ It was, indeed, the minorities who had borne the brunt of the violence. Of the nearly 800 people who died in the riots, at least two-thirds were Muslim, though they constituted a mere 15 per cent of the city’s population.

  Once more Bombay limped back to normal. This time the peace held for two whole months. On 12 March 1993 a series of bombs went off in south Bombay, one outside the Stock Exchange, others in front of or inside luxury hotels and corporate offices. The intention was to inflict the maximum casualties, for the explosions occurred in the early afternoon, the busiest time in the richest part of the city. More than 300 people died in the blasts. The material used to blow them up was the powerful explosive RDX. The operations had been directed by two Dubai-based mafia dons, in apparent revenge for the killings of their co-religionists earlier in the season.

  The rise of the Shiv Sena had, over the years, somewhat dented Bombay’s reputation as the most cosmopolitan and multicultural of India’s cities.That image was dealt a body blow by the riots and bomb blasts of 1992-3. This was now a ‘permanently altered city’, a ‘deeply divided city’ , even a ‘city at war with itself’.21

  The Babri Masjid demolition was depressing enough, but, as the columnist Behram Contractor wrote, ‘the bigger tragedy, perhaps, is not that India is no longer a secular country, but that Bombay is no longer a cosmopolitan city. Whatever happens henceforth, whether the Ram Janmabhoomi issue is resolved, whether Hindus and Muslims relearn to live together, Bombay’s reputation as a free-living and high-swinging city, absorbing people from all communities and all parts of India, is gone for ever’.22

  V

  In 1994 the VHP leader Ashok Singhal remarked that the destruction of the Babri Masjid was ‘a catalyst for the ideological polarization which is nearly complete’.23 Two years later the Bharatiya Janata Party reaped the rewards in the eleventh general election. It won 161 seats, emerging as the largest single party in Parliament. The Congress was relegated to second place, twenty-one seats behind. The veteran BJP leader Atal Behari Vajpayee was invited to form the government, but after two weeks he resigned, failing to cobble a majority. For the next two years the BJP sat in the opposition, while the country was governed by a motley coalition of regional parties calling itself the National Front. When a mid-term poll was held in 1998, the BJP improved its position further, winning 182 seats. This time, the support of smaller parties and independents gave it the numbers to govern. However, within a year it called a fresh election, hoping to do better still. As it happened, it won the same number of seats (182), but the Congress hit an all-time low of 114. A strong performance by its allies allowed the BJP to govern for a further five years. Thus, the BJP’s Atal Behari Vajpayee became the country’s longest-serving non-Congress prime minister, occupying that office for six years altogether.

  In the first years of Independence the wounds of Partition had provided the excuse for a vigorous assertion by the Hindu right. The RSS was particularly active. But when the Jana Sangh won a mere three seats in the 1952 elections, commentators were ready to write an epitaph for a party that, in a modern, secular, democratic state, dared to base its politics on religion. The socialist politician Asoka Mehta wrote that Hindu communalism ‘has proved to be weak twice, once in [the elections of ] 1946 and again in 1951–2’. He was confident that ‘its ghost is now laid for good’.24 ‘The Hindu is too tolerant’, remarked the writer-couple Taya and Maurice Zinkin, themselves long resident in India. The election results had shown that ‘Hindu communalism has been utterly defeated’, indeed, that ‘communalism has thus failed, probably finally’.25

  Other observers, the Kashmiri leader Sheikh Abdullah among them, thought that it was mostly Jawaharlal Nehru who kept the Indian state and Indian politics on the secular path. They worried about what would happen after he was gone. After Nehru’s death the Jana Sangh
slowly gained in influence. It won twenty-five seats to the Lok Sabha in 1967 and twenty-two in 1971, more or less holding its own despite the ‘Indira wave’ of that year. Later, its participation in the JP movement, its leaders’ incarceration during the emergency and its role in the Janata government substantially increased the party’s profile and presence. Then it fell away again. As the freshly named Bharatiya Janata Party it won two seats in the elections of 1984. Even Atal Behari Vajpayee, who had been a member of parliament since 1957, failed to win re-election. Once more obituaries were written for a politics based on religion. Once more it was claimed that the Hindu would not tolerate bigotry among his kind. ‘The most striking feature of Indian politics is its persistent centrism’, wrote two American political scientists. Apart from the natural Indian tendency towards moderation, the BJP had also to contend with the fragmentation of the electorate on lines of caste and region. Hence the conclusion that ‘the support base for a national confessional party, [representing] the Hindu majority, is illusionary’.26

  The events of the 1990s confounded these predictions. For the big story of this decade was in fact the rise of Hindu communalism, as manifested most significantly in the number of seats won by the BJP in successive general elections. Beyond the formal theatre of party politics, there was also a transformation occurring on the ground. In towns and villages across northern India, relations between Hindus and Muslims were being redefined. Once, members of the two communities had lived next to one another, traded with one another, even befriended and played with one another. True, there was also competition and conflict. Each community thought itself theologically superior, each had memories – real or imagined – of being scorned or victimized by the other. However, the compulsions of living together meant that these divisions were deflected or subsumed by activities conducted in common. But with the riots sparked by the Ayodhya movement, the ambivalences had been replaced by an unambiguous animosity. Hostility and suspicion were now the governing – some would say only – idioms of Hindu-Muslim relations.27