25 years of Babri demolition: Unleashing of a majoritarian beast

As mobs going on a rampage, killing and lynching in the name of Mother India, Holy Cow or some mythical queen, the ideological agenda behind "unleashing the beast" seems to have taken the centre stage

A quarter of a century later – having witnessed the Iraq war and the events like 9/11 – one has a clearer idea why the demolition of a 500-year-old mosque by kar sevaks continues to haunt India? Such moments signal the unleashing of a beast that lurks underneath all mixed societies and nations. And, it awaits hands to unchain and set it free. What happened in Ayodhya on 6 December 1992 was no freak show. It was a violent, symbolic and well planned demolition of a structure at the hands of political manipulators. It systematically removed all the barriers of law and custom, one by one, and set the beast free.

 
It all began in the late 1960s, when political parties swearing allegiance to Gandhi and/or Marx allowed religion to encroach on politics and went on to form alliances with communal parties – the Congress with the Muslim League in Kerala, followed by the Communist parties; later similar alliances were forged with the Akali Dal in Punjab and the League in Bengal. The leaders of the parties might have remained secular in their personal capacities, but they began visiting places of religious worship, following rituals to inaugurate state projects and arguing in public how short-term minority communalism might be better and more effective in containing a majoritarian communalism in the long run.

 
The unlocking of the Ram Janmabhumi within the Babri mosque was an unmistakable signal for majoritarian appeasement in the name of Lord Ram. As has so often happened in our history, this was interpreted by interested parties as permission tacitly granted for acts of violence, and for plunder in the name of a higher interest.
 

It is true that there had been concealed enmities, jealousies, religious intolerance, coarseness and cruelty among various communities. But there had also been courage, fellowship, and a respect for the law of the land; these had since 1947 restrained the coarser instincts within limits and ultimately calmed the communities down in favour of life lived together, as for centuries. After the unlocking of the mosque, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) began a systematic process of highlighting an imagined Hindu hurt over the pollution of their gods’ birthplaces by Muslim invaders demolishing temples in Ayodhya, Mathura and Kashi, and replacing them with mosques.

 
This simultaneous tinkering with the chains of the beast and the Hindu religious sentiment yielded spectacular electoral gains for the Bharatiya Janata Party in 1989. It increased its seat tally in the Lok Sabha from two to 86. As the beast lurched on the streets of Uttar Pradesh, inciting Hindus and lamenting their loss of izzat over the centuries, and the matter was referred to the courts, the veteran BJP leader L K Advani led a Rath Yatra all over India in 1990, whipping up support for building a grand Ram temple at the (historically disputed) site within the mosque.
 
The Rath Yatra not only resulted in 119 seats in the Lok Sabha for the party that now became the main Opposition, but also helped it form governments in four crucial northern states of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Himachal Pradesh.

 
After the age-old customs and institutions of the secular state were effectively disarmed, times were ripe in 1992 for a rally of 200,000 kar sevaks, organised by the VHP. This saffron-clad mob assembled at the site of the Babri mosque, carrying rods and spades, and demolished the mosque the VHP insisted on calling the disputed structure (vivadit dhancha). In the following Lok Sabha elections (1996), the BJP went on to win 161 seats, and three years later 182.
 
One of the mysteries of the Babri demolition is why so many good members of the judiciary, the executive and its coalition partners from the legislature, just stood by and allowed the beast to gather more and more power till we were faced with a hair-raisingly communal brand of electioneering in 2014 that beat every other political party to a pulp. As mobs go on rampage all across the land now, killing and lynching in the name of Mother India or Mother Cow, or some mythical queen, the ideological agenda behind unleashing the beast seems to have taken centre stage.

 
It’s a cliché to say that the silent majority and foreign potentates hugging and hand-holding India’s leaders are those wishing for peace, stability and an end to corruption, high prices, joblessness, Pakistani intruders, and uncontrolled Pakistan-backed stone pelters who might lead to another partition. Amid an air of global Islamophobia, it is easy for world leaders to praise India’s democracy. But make no mistake – the spectre of Islamic persecution is both a smoke screen against the beast and also a tool to enlarge the borders of their power for politicians all over the globe.
 
Our powerful allies in the west today, above all else, want to contain both Islamic terrorism and China. So, when diplomatic state visits take place, all are reluctant to raise the issues of human rights or express misgivings about victims of mob violence, blocking of foreign funding for suspect NGOs, periodic suspension of net connectivity and rising instances of attacks on whistleblowers and investigative journalists from Chhattisgarh to Croatia.

 
It is a fact universally acknowledged that when a multiethnic democratic state begins to promote majoritarianism, it needs a new own well-coded system of institutions and legal means to support its sovereign authority. So, we see an increasing insistence in states ruled by the BJP that the secular version of Indian history in school texts be sanitised, and that even non-Hindi speaking states accept Hindi as the national language. Also, its fringe groups and also several spokespersons and sitting ministers are allowed to publically justify wreaking bloody revenge against cow traders, meat sellers, filmmakers, creative writers and painters. Rewards of crores of rupees are announced for disfiguring and beheadings the offenders.

 
An unusual death notice inserted in the New York Times in 1994, when the West abandoned Bosnia to Milsevic’s hordes, comes to mind. Bordered in traditional black and signed by many members of the western world’s political and cultural elite, it read:
 
“IN MEMORIAM
Our commitments,
Principles and Moral values
Died: BOSNIA: 1994
On the occasion of the 1,000 day
Of the siege of Sarajevo” Mrinal Pande is a journalist and author. She is the former editor of Hindi daily, Hindustan. She tweets as @mrinalpande1