DESTRUCTION OF THE BABRI MASJID: A NATIONAL DISHONOUR
A G Noorani
Tulika Books
505 pages; Rs 995
The dress rehearsal took place almost two years before. In October, 1990, nearly 200,000 kar sevaks (volunteers) descended on Ayodhya, offering their services for the proposed construction of a Ram temple there. More than two-thirds of them were detained by security forces. But a number of them still sneaked in, dodging 20,000-odd security personnel stationed in the town that was home to the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid controversy for years. Some of them moved past the Border Security Force contingent and reached the Babri Masjid. One volunteer is reported to have planted a saffron flag on the structure.
And dress rehearsal it turned out to be. The alert Uttar Pradesh (UP) administration headed by the then chief minister Mulayam Singh Yadav ensured that no further damage was done to the Babri mosque. But the battle between volunteers and security forces continued for nearly three days and at least 20 kar sevaks are reported to have lost their lives.
It was a different situation altogether in December 1992. There was a change of guard in UP with Kalyan Singh, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader, at the helm. P V Narasimha Rao was the prime minister of the country, who continued to believe, despite several warnings about the volatile situation in Ayodhya, that dialogue and more dialogue was the only way out. A sympathetic UP administration and an indifferent central government may have emboldened the kar sevaks, assembled in the hundreds of thousands on December 6, to go for the kill. The centuries-old Babri Masjid was demolished in six hours flat. The communal riots that followed the demolition in various parts of the country claimed more than 2,000 lives.
The demolition of December 6, 1992, will certainly rank as one of the most tragic events of independent India. It was perhaps the first serious internal challenge to the idea of India. And the author of the present volume describes in detail how subsequent events failed miserably to restore even parts of what was lost that day. Written by a lawyer of eminence and a constitutional expert, the book critically examines the judgments delivered by the courts prior to and after the event. And he concludes that "Muslims have lost in every judicial forum as a mosque was converted into a temple: in 1949-50 and in 1986, when K M Pandey, District Judge of Faizabad, ordered that locks on the gates of the mosque be opened on 1 February, 1986… . In 1992, the mosque was demolished. In 1994, the Supreme Court pronounced against the Muslims and in 2010 the Allahabad High Court dismissed their suit."
The book follows two compiled volumes of documents and primary source materials on various aspects of the Ayodhya dispute published in 2003 by the same author. The present volume has included documents and disclosures that have come to light after that.
One gets the sense after going through sections of the book that if various arms of the government had acted sensibly and with some foresight, the mosque would have been standing now. The Intelligence Bureau had definitive information about what was to happen and that was shared with the prime minister and the Union home ministry. A large contingent of central forces was stationed around Ayodhya even on that day. But they were not allowed to move into the town.
In addition to a series of valuable legal documents, the present volume contains book reviews, scholarly essays and some newspaper reports. One such review of a book written by P V R K Prasad, media advisor to P V Narasimha Rao, has details about how Rao wanted to hijack the Hindu agenda from the BJP. The central thesis of Mr Prasad's book was that Rao wanted to build a Ram temple at Ayodhya with the help of a representative and apolitical committee consisting of all Hindu heads of mutts and peethams.
Yet another report included in the present volume reveals how a group of Hindus forcibly put an idol of Ram inside the Babri mosque on the night of December 22-23, 1949. That was a watershed event in the sense that just a week after the incident the Babri Masjid was declared a disputed property, locks were put on the main gate and Muslims were forbidden from entering the mosque.
The "disputed property" stands demolished now and the present volume reminds us yet again, in all its dimensions, of the serious bruises suffered by the idea of India that day. The tone may seem alarmist, the language somewhat bitter. But then, the evocation of memories of that day cannot be done any differently.
