VIII
In the parliamentary elections of 1991, the BJP won 120 seats, up thirty-five from the last time. Meanwhile, 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 also 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 in clear contravention of court orders asking for the status quo to 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 was, in sum, ‘the 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, the prime minister, Narasimha 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.37
Meanwhile, the VHP announced that the 6th of 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. The prime minister urged him to allow the Supreme Court to decide on the case. Singh answered that ‘the only comprehensive solution to the Ayodhya dispute was to hand over the disputed structure to the Hindus’.38
Kalyan Singh had instructed his government to house and feed the thousands of volunteers coming in from outside 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’.39
On the other side, more than a hundred thousand 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 where 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’.40
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 a 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 getting more charged by the minute. ‘Mandir yahin banayenge’, they shouted, pointing at the Babri Masjid – we will build our temple at this 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 rods.
By noon, volunteers were crawling all over the Masjid, holding saffron flags and shouting slogans of victory. Hooks attached to ropes 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!’ (Shove some more, and the whole thing will collapse) screamed the radical preacher Sadhvi Ritambara. At 3.30, a second dome also gave way. An hour later, the third and final one was also demolished. A building that had seen so many rulers and dynasties come and go, that had withstood the furies of four hundred and more monsoons, had in a single afternoon been reduced to rubble.41
Was the demolition of the Babri Masjid planned aforehand? 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’.42
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.43
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 spot, 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 told a reporter: ‘Do you think a group of frenzied kar sevaks could have gone about it so systematically?’44 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 state.45
One cannot be certain that all Hindus shared these sentiments – as Shourie presumed they did. But those Hindus who brought down the mosque on 6th December had certainly bent the Indian state to their will. The forces to stop them were at hand, yet the order asking 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.46
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 two thousand 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-shot 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’.47
The city worst hit was India’s commercial capital, Bombay. On the morning of 7th 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 60 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.48
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’.49
The Shiv Sainiks were encouraged by their leader and mentor, Balasaheb Thackeray. In an editorial in the party newspaper, Saamna, published on 10th 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!50
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 a fresh 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, this when they constituted a mere 15 per cent of the city’s population.
Once more the city 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 set outside the Stock Exchange, others in front of or inside luxury hotels and corporate offices. The intention was to cause the maximum damage, for the explosions occurred in the early afternoon; the busiest time in the richest part of the city. More than three hundred 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, both Muslims, 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 multi-cultural of 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’.51
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’.52
The rise of the Hindu right in general, and the events at Ayodhya in particular, prompted a fresh wave of gloomy forebodings about the future of India. ‘The secular fabric of the country has been seriously damaged’, wrote the Madras fortnightly Frontline, adding: ‘India will never be the same again’. For the ‘events of December 6 and 7 gave India a taste of what things would be [like] if and when the Hindutva combine’s Hindu Rashtra [Hindu State] comes into existence. It became clear . . . [that] the minority communities would have no right to live, not to speak of social interaction; that freedom of expression would be non-existent; and that truth would be only what the rulers perceive’. ‘In the week that followed [6 December 1992], India changed, perhaps forever’, commented the Calcutta weekly Sunday. With the breakdown of authority and the rule of law, ‘in the eyes of the world, India moved one step closer to being perceived as a tinpot African “republic”’. The ‘forces let loose by the vandalism at Ayodhya’, lamented the New Delhi magazine India Today, ‘have begun not just to take a ghastly toll of human lives, but also to reduce to rubble the edifice of our hopes and aspirations as a people and as a nation.’53
These worries were shared by the Western press. ‘Like the three domes that crowned the 464-year-old Babri mosque’, wrote Time magazine, ‘the three pillars of the Indian state – democracy, secularism and the rule of law – are now at risk from the fury of religious nationalism’.54 The day after the mosque came down, The Times of London carried a story with the headline: ‘Militants Bury Hope of Harmony in Rubble of Indian Mosque’. The next day’s paper quoted the views of the Labour politician, Jack Straw, then on a visit to Bombay. Straw thought that there was a real danger that India would slide ‘into the abyss of sectarianism’. The same issue carried a leading article by the Irish intellectual Conor Cruise O’Brien, which confidently proclaimed that ‘India’s history as a secular state appears to be coming to an end’. O’Brien now anticipated a mass flight of Muslims into Pakistan, and the emigration of educated Hindus into Europe and North America.55
These were the immediate, so to say knee-jerk, responses of excitable
journalists and professional cynics (O’Brien had previously predicted that the fall of the Berlin Wall would lead to the revival of a cult of Hitler in Germany and of a party based on Nazi ideals). But writers trained to take the long view also echoed these fears. A British author who had written many affectionate books about the subcontinent remarked that ‘all who care about that country must tremble for the future of its secular democracy’.56 And an American scholar who had spent a lifetime studying India went so far as to compare the Sangh Parivar to the Nazis. ‘It is past time to note’, wrote Paul Brass, ‘that Indian politics and society display many of the symptoms of a murderous pre-fascist stage which has already produced a multiplicity of localized Kristallnachts in numerous urban sites’. The ‘spread of violence, lawlessness and disorder at the local level’, thought Brass, might prompt the central government (then controlled by the Congress) into ‘another venture into authoritarian practices’. And so the ‘Indian state may yet disintegrate in this clash between secular opportunists and chauvinist nationalists equally tied to the pursuit of illusions and chimeras, “symbols and shadows” of national unity and greatness pursued by all the tyrannical regimes of the twentieth century’.57
These forecasts were dire, alarmist, as Western predictions had tended to be ever since India became independent in 1947. Once, it was thought that India would balkanize into many parts or experience mass famine. Now, it was said that India might become a tinpot dictatorship of the African kind or a fascist dictatorship modelled on European examples. These predictions also did not come to pass. That said, the destruction of the Babri Masjid and the riots that followed left deep scars, these felt by individuals, communities, and perhaps the nation itself.
India After Gandhi Revised and Updated Edition Page 79