Babri demolition, 25 yrs on: When a border was carved on a nation's psyche

The demolition created two zones of sensibilities, a Hindu one and a Muslim one; it ensured that after that there would be little they would share

There are very few dates that evoke contradictory emotions in different communities living side by side in a nation. In Indian history, 6 December is a date Hindus and Muslims remember differently. It is a day that may even be called a border. A border which has created two distinct zones of sensibilities — one Hindu and the other Muslim. It ensured that from now on there would be little they would share. They don’t intersect, they don’t meet. They look at each other, not with interest but with suspicion.
 
On behalf of Hindus, 6 December is celebrated as the day of valour; Muslims remember it as a day of humiliation. The date 6 December assures Hindus that despite the proclamations of secularism India remains a Hindu state. They have and can exercise an extra-constitutional agency.
 
Twenty five years ago, on this day, thundreds of thousands of Hindus gathered in Ayodhya, immortalised by Tulsidas as the abode of Ram. They were persuaded by the leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party that their revered Lord Ram was born here and at the very same spot where a mosque, known popularly as Babri Masjid, stood. It was claimed the mosque was built by destroying a magnificient temple on the Janmabhumi of Ram by a Muslim invader called Babar.
 
Time had come, the leaders of the BJP said, to reclaim the land of the Lord and also the long lost dignity of Hindus. It was a surreal scene. Thousands of Hindus descending on Ayodhya like the army of Lord Ram. Marching into an imagined past to fight a battle in which there was no army to answer them but only a memory and a symbol called the Babri Mosque. It stood between them and their long lost glorious past, to regain which this poor structure had to go.
 
It was more than that. Hindus, they said, had been emasculated by a ‘fraud’ called Gandhi, and had to get back their virility. He had feminised them and made them accept the dismemberment of their mother, Bharat Mata, into two countries – India and Pakistan. Had he not been there — he who masqueraded as a Hindu — India would have been a Hindu nation. He didn’t allow Hindus to have their way in their own land.
 
Was it not Gandhi who emphatically denounced the idea of using public exchequer for the restoration of the Somnath temple? Didn’t he say that the state funds could not be touched for what was a Hindu cause? Hindus should pay for it and not the state of India or what remains of the secular claims of the state.
 
And was it not Gandhi who sat on a fast, which was to be his last, to ask the Hindus and Sikhs to remove Hindu idols and the Tricolour from the mosque at Connaught Place and also facilitate the return of Khadims to the shrine of Mehrauli which was lying deserted?
 
And, who else it was if not Gandhi who very clearly told Babu Rajendra Prasad that there was no question of an anti-cow slaughter law in a secular India?
 
Hindus were made to endure this secular nonsense by this man and his disciples. He was long gone. The generation of Hindus who felt bounded by the commitment they had made to him to keep India a secular state was also not there.
 
What remained alive was an organisation which had dreamt of capturing and ruling a Hindu India. It had taken care not to squander its energies fighting the British. It didn’t even fight the Muslim league. Patiently, it involved itself in creating a Hindu mind, which would be activated at an opportune time.
 
Not that it had not tried to win the sympathies of Gandhi. But the man who could smell violence in the discipline and order which the organisation wanted to inculcate in the Hindus could not be hoodwinked. He was too big to even oppose them but he told them that he was not impressed.
 
Wounded, the organisation waited, biding for its time. The pre-condition was to disabuse Hindus of the ‘pseudo-Hinduism’ which Gandhi had preached to them. For this patient education and regular rituals were necessary to convince Hindus that they were capable of violence. That they still had that martial element in them. Small  and big acts of violence against Muslims were such ritualistic exercises.
 
Those with slightly longer memory remember the assault on the Indian Parliament in 1966. Independent India was not even twenty. Apparently, sadhus were leading this attack to force Parliament to outlaw cow slaughter. They were met with the force of the state. But, eventually a committee was formed to look into the demand. The demand which the great Hindu Gandhi had summarily dismissed became a matter of consideration.
 
The milk man Verghese Kurien recalls his discussion with Golwalkar, the chief of the RSS who found a place in the committee. He confessed that agitation for a law against cow slaughter was essentially political, there was no religiosity in it. The idea was to force the secular state to adopt the idea of the Hindu statecraft.
 
Nearly two-and-a-half decades after this discussion, the descendant and disciple of Golwalkar, Lal Krishna Advani, rode a Toyota ‘rath’ and asked Hindus to accept it as Ram's chariot and converge in Ayodhya to reclaim what was legitimately theirs — the land where Ram was born and on which stood an illegitimate structure called Babri Masjid.
 
The defenceless mosque was demolished by the army of this modern Ram. And he innocently claimed that he had asked them to build and not destroy. Tears fell from his eyes when the domes of the mosque fell, he said.
 
Later, like his guru Golwalkar, he confessed that the so-called Ram Janmabhumi Andolan was a political movement and not religious as many Hindus were given to believe.
 
It was the biggest mass ritual to forge a ‘political Hindu’ mind. We know who the priests and the kartas of this yajna.
 
Without the creation of this Hindu mind, the genocidal violence against Muslims in Gujarat would not have been condoned. Not only by the Hindus of Gujarat but by the Hindus of India. Without this ritual, 2014 would not have been possible.
 
The message of demolition of the Babri Masjid was that Hindus didn’t care for the Muslim sentiment, let alone share it. The polity, too, was cold to them. They did not matter. Even for the courts there was no urgency to it.
 
Another quarter century had to pass to stitch a mandate that told Indian Muslims that it did not care for their concerns in the matters of statecraft. So, the border that was drawn by 6 December 1992 came alive again in 2014. There are definitely two Indias now. The Hindu India seems to be relishing this moment. A time will come, and it has to, when the Hindus would realise that instead of being freed they were enslaved by a wily gang which always knew that Hindutva was not a religious idea but a mere lever to propel it to power. Till then brace, brace....

Apoorvanand teaches in Delhi University