The making of “Ram Ke Naam”

In 1984 after her Sikh bodyguards assassinated Indira Gandhi, a revenge pogrom took the lives of over 3000 Sikhs on the streets of Delhi. Many killer mobs were led by Congress Party members, but some were led by the RSS and BJP as well. This is a fact forgotten by history but recorded in newspaper headlines of the day.  It was this massacre that set me on the to road to fight Communalism with my camera. For the next decade I recorded different examples of the rise of the religious right, as seen in diverse movements from the Khalistani upsurge in Punjab to the glorification of Sati in Rajasthan and the movement to replace the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya with a temple to Lord Ram.

The material I filmed was very complex and if I had tried to encompass it all into a single film, it would have been too long and confusing. Eventually three distinct films emerged from the footage shot between 1984 and 1994, all broadly describing the rise of religious fundamentalism and the resistance offered by secular forces in the country. “Una Mitran Di Yaad Pyaari/ In Memory of Friends”, the first film to get completed, spoke of the situation in the Punjab of the 1980’s where Khalistanis as well as the Indian government were claiming Bhagat Singh as their hero, but only people from the Left remembered the Bhagat Singh who from his death cell wrote the booklet, “Why I am an Atheist”.

The second film was “Ram Ke Naam/In the Name of God” on the rise of Hindu fundamentalism as witnessed in the temple-mosque controversy in Ayodhya. The third was “Pitra, Putra aur Dharmayuddha/Father, Son and Holy War” on the connection between religious violence and the male psyche. All three films tackled Communalism, but each used a different prism to analyse what was happening. “In Memory of Friends” highlighted the writings of Bhagat Singh suggesting that class solidarity was the antidote to religious division. “Father, Son and Holy War” looked at the issue from the prism of gender.

For this article, I will concentrate on “Ram Ke Naam”, the middle film of what became a trilogy on Communalism. While the film covers a two year span from 1990 onwards, the back story begins in the mid-1980’s when the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and sister organizations of the Hindutva family (the Sangh Parivar) was searching for a way to capture the imagination of the Hindus of India who at 83%, constitute the real vote bank of this country.  A Dharam Sansad (Parliament of Priests) in 1984 (the year Indira Gandhi was killed and the Congress rode to power on a sympathy wave) identified 3000 sites of potential conflict between Hindus and Muslims that could mobilize the sentiments of Hindus and polarize the nation. The top three sites chosen were at Ayodhya, Kashi and Mathura. The Dharam Sansad decided to start with the Ram temple/Babri Mosque in Ayodhya. Soon a nationwide village to village campaign to collects bricks and money to build a grand Ram temple in place of the Babri mosque began. The campaign went international as NRI’s chipped in from distant lands. By design or by remarkable coincidence, India’s state controlled TV channel, Doordarshan started to run a never-ending serial on the Hindu epic – The Ramayana (The story of Lord Ram). In those days there were few other TV channels and the whole nation was hooked onto mythology. These were the ingredients already at play when BJP stalwart L. K. Advani set out on his chariot of fire.

“Ram Ke Naam” follows the Rath Yatra of L.K. Advani who in 1990 traversed the Indian countryside in an air-conditioned Toyota dressed up by a Bollywood set-designer to look like a mythological war chariot. The stated objective was to gather Hindu volunteers, or “kar sevaks” to demolish a 16^th century mosque built by the Mughal emperor Babar in Ayodhya and build a temple to Lord Ram in its exact location. The rationale for this act of destruction and construction was that Babar had supposedly built this mosque after demolishing a temple to Lord Ram that had marked the exact location of Lord Ram’s birth. This was justified as an act of historic redress for the many wrongs inflicted by Muslim invaders and rulers on their native Hindu subjects, a theme that runs through all Hindutva discourse like a flaming torch.

I started the film instinctively, shooting the Rath Yatra when it arrived in Bombay in 1990 and then following it through various segments of its journey. At many places the Rath passed through, it left a trail of blood as kar sevaks attacked local Muslims either for not showing due respect or just to display their might. By the end of its journey over 60 people had been killed and many more injured in the wake of the Rath.

Most of our shoot was done with a two-person crew consisting of myself with an old 16 mm camera and colleagues who accompanied me on different legs of the shoot. For the leg that eventually reached Ayodhya, Pervez Merwanji recorded sound on our portable Nagra. Pervez was a dear friend and a filmmaker in his own right, having just made his brilliant debut feature “Percy” which went on to win a major award at the Mannhein International Film Festival. Despite this he was not too proud to don the mantle of sound recordist on an unheralded independent documentary project like ours. It turned out to be the last film he would ever work on. Pervez contracted jaundice, probably during our shoot, seemed to recover, but then his liver failed him and he passed away never having seen the final edit of our film.

Our actual filming was staggered over a year and a half, and we were able to research as well as shoot in this period.  We learned that contrary to the theory that votaries of Hindutva were propagating that claimed that there was a temple underneath the mosque, the artefacts that archaeologists had originally found in digs in the vicinity had nothing to do with any temple. According to historians, in the 7^th century at the location of present day Ayodhya, probably stood the Buddhist city of Saket.  We learned that the proliferation of Akhadas (military wings attached to temples) in Ayodhya had nothing to do with the long war to liberate the birthplace of Lord Ram as was being claimed by Hindutva ideologues, but owed their origin to the ongoing rivalry between armed Shaivite and Vaishnavite sects in the middle ages. Most importantly we learned that in the 16^th century, the poet Tulsidas visited Ayodhya many times as he composed his famous Ram Charitra Manas, a text which converted the relatively obscure Sanskrit Ramayana into khadi boli, a form of Hindi, that popularized the story of Lord Ram for the ordinary folk of North India. Not only does Tulsidas never mention that a temple marking the birthplace of Lord Ram was just demolished by Babar, there is another telling fact. Until the 16^th century the Rama legend was largely restricted to the few Brahmins who knew Sanskrit. It is only after Tulsidas’s Hindi version had spread that Ram became a popular god for the masses and Ram temples sprouted across the country. In other words in the middle of the 16^th century when the Babri Mosque was built, it is highly unlikely that there were any Ram temples at all. Today Ayodhya is full of Ram temples and at least twenty of them claim to be built at the birthplace of Ram. The reason is obvious. Any temple that establishes itself as the birthplace of Ram gets huge donations from its devotees.

Some of this research is hinted at in the finished film but rarely made explicit as I felt that it would be more powerful for our film to rely on the logic of events unfolding before the camera in 1990-91 rather than become a theoretical and didactic treatise. Ideally I, or someone else should have made an accompanying booklet to point out the many footnotes and annotations that such a film really needs.

30^th October 1990 had been declared by L.K. Advani as the target date for “Kar Seva” at the disputed Ram Janmabhoomi/Babri Mosque site in Ayodhya. Pervez and I headed to Uttar Pradesh. We were trying to catch up with the Rath at some of its scheduled stops. The trains were already jam full. We squeezed into a Third Class compartment where we could barely sit on top of our luggage. We had got on a wrong train and it was impossible to get out! It turned out to be a stroke of luck as the train took us to Patna, Bihar where the Left front along with Bihar Chief Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav were holding a huge anti-Rath rally at the Gandhi Maidan. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7XRvjYQOaI)

A.B. Bardhan of the CPI made a brilliant appeal to preserve India’s syncretic culture and Lalu Prasad Yadav gave a stern warning telling Advani to turn back from the brink. A few days later he kept his promise. Advani was arrested and the Rath Yatra finally came to a halt in Bihar.  Not so the kar sevaks who used all modes of transport to continue to head towards Ayodhya.

We caught a train back to Lucknow. There we spent almost 10 days trying to get permission to enter Ayodhya. Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav had vowed to protect the Babri Mosque and claimed that he had turned Ayodhya into an impenetrable fortress where not just kar sevaks but “parinda par na kar payega” (not a bird could fly cross). As it turned out in the end the only people who had difficulty getting into Ayodhya were journalists and documentarians like us.

We finally reached Ayodhya on the 28^th of October, two days before the planned assault on the mosque. Here we met Shastriji, an old Mahant  (temple priest) who in 1949 had been part of the group that had broken into the Babri Mosque at night and installed a Ram idol in the sanctum sanctorum. From that day on, the site had become disputed territory as District Magistarate K.K. Nair refused to have the idols removed.  As “Ram Ke Naam” points out, K.K. Nair after retiring from government service went on to join the Jan Sangh Party (precursor of the BJP) and became a Member of Parliament.

Shastriji, the Mahant, was proud of installing the idols and a little miffed that everyone had forgotten his role. Hindutva videos, audios and literature had proclaimed that what happened in 1949 was a “miracle” where the god Lord Ram appeared at his birthplace.  Shastri was arrested and released on bail by the District Magistrate, K.K.Nair. Till the day we met him 41 years later, he had remained free.

We went across the Saryu bridge to Ayodhya’s twin city, Faizabad. Here we met the old Imam of the Babri Mosque and his carpenter son who recounted the 1949 story from their perspective. The District Magistrate had told them after the break-in that order would soon be restored, and that by next Friday they could re-enter their mosque for prayers. As the Imam’s son put it “We are still waiting for that Friday”.

As 30^th October dawned and we made our way on foot to the Saryu bridge at Ayodhya, we could see that CM Mulayam Singh’s promise that no one would get through to Ayodhya was proving false. Already several thousands had gathered by the bridge, despite the curfew. There had been a small lathi charge while shoes and footwear were scattered all over the bridge. Busloads of arrested karsevaks were being driven away after arrest. What we did not notice at the time was that many of these buses would stop at a short distance and the kar sevaks would disembark to rejoin the fray. By the side of the bridge thousands were chanting at the police “Hindu, hindu bhai bhai, beech mein vardi kahan se aayee? (All Hindus are brothers. why let a uniform get between us?)”.

As the day progressed it was heartbreaking to those of us who knew that any attack on the mosque would rent apart the delicate communal fabric of the nation.. We had believed Mulayam Singh’s strong rhetoric that he would stop karsevaks long before they reached the mosque. What we saw on the ground was bewildering. Not only were thousands pouring in despite the curfew but at many places there was active connivance from the police and paramilitary forces. There was utter confusion. In the end some karsevaks did break through to attack the mosque but at the very last instance, the police opened fire. Some karsevaks reached the top of the mosque’s dome and tied their orange Hindutva flag. Others broke into the sanctum sanctorum where the idols were kept but police firing prevented the larger crowd from demolishing the mosque. In all 29 people, young and old, lost their lives.  Later BJP and VHP propaganda claimed that over a thousand had been killed and thrown into the Saryu river. The think-tank of Hindutva then initiated another Rath Yatra across the country carrying the ashes of their Ayodhya “martyrs”.

On the night of the 30^th, in the sombre mood that the attack had spawned, we met Pujari Laldas, the court-appointed head priest of the disputed Ram Janmabhoomi/Babri Mosque site. Laldas was an outspoken critic of Hindutva despite being a Hindu priest and had received death threats. The UP government had provided him with two bodyguards. It is this wonderful interview of one of independent India’s unsung heroes that gives “Ram Ke Naam” its real poignancy. Laldas spoke out against the VHP pointing out that they had never even prayed at the site but were using it for political and financial gain. He spoke of the syncretic past of Ayodhya and expressed anguish that Hindu-Muslim unity in the country was being sacrificed by people who were cynically using religion. He predicted a storm of mayhem that would follow but expressed confidence that
this storm too would pass and sanity would return.

For “In Memory of Friends”, I had used a prism of class as seen through the writings of Bhagat Singh to speak of the Punjab of today. In reality, by the late 1980’s classical Marxist analysis and class solidarity were no longer exclusively effective tools in an India and a world where the ideas of the Left were losing out to consumer capitalism. The Soviet Union was collapsing and China was embracing state capitalism. The USA was the only super power left in the world, which itself was fragmenting into its religious and ethnic sub-parts. Yugoslavia disintegrated into internecine warfare. The USA with its ally, Saudi Arabia, stoked Islamic fundamentalism in Afghanistan and Pakistan to fight Communism which in turn helped Kashmiri militants take up the gun. In Punjab, Sikh militants were rising and in Northern India, Hindu militants came into their own. For “Ram Ke Naam” the sane voice of the Hindu priest Pujari Laldas played the role that Bhagat Singh’s writings had done in my previous film. The Left antidote to Communalism was still present through the Patna speech of CPI’s AB Bardhan. But it was now joined by a liberation theologist in the form of Pujari Laldas. The violent reaction of upper caste Hindus to the attempt by Prime Minister V.P. Singh to implement a Mandal Commision report granting reservations to ‘backward’ castes, had led to upper caste Hindus embracing Hindutva and the Mandir (Ram temple) movement. This had not yet trickled down the Caste order. Wherever we went in UP, Dalits and “Backward Castes” spoke out against the Ram temple movement. This became the third spoke in the anti-Communal wheel.

The film was complete by late 1991. We had some hiccoughs and delays from the censors but finally cleared this hurdle without cuts. The film went on to win a national award for Best Investigative Documentary as well as a Filmfare Award for Best documentary. At the 1992 Bombay International Documentary Film Festival, Jaya Bacchan was head of the jury. “Ram Ke Naam” did not get a mention. Several critics commented that the film was raking up a dead issue as the Babri Mosque was intact and the film would unnecessarily give the country a bad name abroad. Later that month I attended the Berlin Film Festival with “Ram Ke Naam”. I learned to my horror that Amitabh and Jaya Bacchan, who were also guests at this festival, had told the Festival authorities that should not have selected such an “anti-India” film.

On the strength of our national award I submitted it for telecast on Doordarshan. Any government that actually believed in a secular India, would have shown such a film many times over so that our public could realize how religious hatred is manufactured for narrow political and financial gains. Widespread exposure may have undermined the movement to demolish the mosque. The BJP was not yet in power. Yet Doordarshan refused to telecast the film and I took them to court. 5 years later we won our case and the film was telecast, but the damage had long been done.

After the October 30 attack in 1990 and the death of 29 karsevaks, the BJP, which had been in coalition with VP Singh’s Janata Dal Party government at the centre, pulled out its support. Chandra Shekhar briefly came to power at the centre but quickly lost to Narsimha Rao’s Congress in the wake of Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination. In UP Mulayam Singh’s government gave way to a BJP government. One of its first steps was to have Pujari Laldas removed as head priest of the Ram Janmaboomi/Babri Masjid, and then to remove his bodyguards. Conditions were now ripe for the major assault.

On December 6, 1992 with the BJP in power in UP, and a strangely acquiescent Narsimha Rao led Congress government at the centre, the Hindutva brigade finally succeeded in demolishing the Babri Mosque. Pujari Laldas’s predictions of large scale violence in the region came true. The old Imam and his son from Faizabad I had interviewed were put to death on 7^th December 1992. While Muslims were slaughtered across India, in neighbouring Pakistan and Bangladesh, the Hindu minority was targeted and temples destroyed. In March 1993, bomb blasts in Mumbai organized by Muslim members of the mafia killed over 300 people. The chain reaction set into motion since those days has still to abate.

Back in 1991 our première had been held in Lucknow, capital of UP. Pujari Laldas came for the screening and asked for several cassettes of the film. When I asked about his own safety, he laughed and said he was happy that now his views would circulate more widely. As he put it, if he had been afraid, he would not have spoken out in the first place.

A year later, a tiny item on the inside pages of the Times of India noted-“Controversial priest found murdered.” Pujari Laldas had been killed with a country-made revolver. The newspaper article never told us that the real “controversy” was the fact that this brave priest believed in a Hinduism that is the mirror opposite of Hindutva.

The post The making of “Ram Ke Naam”: a Hinduism that is the mirror opposite of Hindutva appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The making of “Ram Ke Naam”

In 1984 after her Sikh bodyguards assassinated Indira Gandhi, a revenge pogrom took the lives of over 3000 Sikhs on the streets of Delhi. Many killer mobs were led by Congress Party members, but some were led by the RSS and BJP as well. This is a fact forgotten by history but recorded in newspaper headlines of the day.  It was this massacre that set me on the to road to fight Communalism with my camera. For the next decade I recorded different examples of the rise of the religious right, as seen in diverse movements from the Khalistani upsurge in Punjab to the glorification of Sati in Rajasthan and the movement to replace the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya with a temple to Lord Ram.

The material I filmed was very complex and if I had tried to encompass it all into a single film, it would have been too long and confusing. Eventually three distinct films emerged from the footage shot between 1984 and 1994, all broadly describing the rise of religious fundamentalism and the resistance offered by secular forces in the country. “Una Mitran Di Yaad Pyaari/ In Memory of Friends”, the first film to get completed, spoke of the situation in the Punjab of the 1980’s where Khalistanis as well as the Indian government were claiming Bhagat Singh as their hero, but only people from the Left remembered the Bhagat Singh who from his death cell wrote the booklet, “Why I am an Atheist”.

The second film was “Ram Ke Naam/In the Name of God” on the rise of Hindu fundamentalism as witnessed in the temple-mosque controversy in Ayodhya. The third was “Pitra, Putra aur Dharmayuddha/Father, Son and Holy War” on the connection between religious violence and the male psyche. All three films tackled Communalism, but each used a different prism to analyse what was happening. “In Memory of Friends” highlighted the writings of Bhagat Singh suggesting that class solidarity was the antidote to religious division. “Father, Son and Holy War” looked at the issue from the prism of gender.

For this article, I will concentrate on “Ram Ke Naam”, the middle film of what became a trilogy on Communalism. While the film covers a two year span from 1990 onwards, the back story begins in the mid-1980’s when the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and sister organizations of the Hindutva family (the Sangh Parivar) was searching for a way to capture the imagination of the Hindus of India who at 83%, constitute the real vote bank of this country.  A Dharam Sansad (Parliament of Priests) in 1984 (the year Indira Gandhi was killed and the Congress rode to power on a sympathy wave) identified 3000 sites of potential conflict between Hindus and Muslims that could mobilize the sentiments of Hindus and polarize the nation. The top three sites chosen were at Ayodhya, Kashi and Mathura. The Dharam Sansad decided to start with the Ram temple/Babri Mosque in Ayodhya. Soon a nationwide village to village campaign to collects bricks and money to build a grand Ram temple in place of the Babri mosque began. The campaign went international as NRI’s chipped in from distant lands. By design or by remarkable coincidence, India’s state controlled TV channel, Doordarshan started to run a never-ending serial on the Hindu epic – The Ramayana (The story of Lord Ram). In those days there were few other TV channels and the whole nation was hooked onto mythology. These were the ingredients already at play when BJP stalwart L. K. Advani set out on his chariot of fire.

“Ram Ke Naam” follows the Rath Yatra of L.K. Advani who in 1990 traversed the Indian countryside in an air-conditioned Toyota dressed up by a Bollywood set-designer to look like a mythological war chariot. The stated objective was to gather Hindu volunteers, or “kar sevaks” to demolish a 16^th century mosque built by the Mughal emperor Babar in Ayodhya and build a temple to Lord Ram in its exact location. The rationale for this act of destruction and construction was that Babar had supposedly built this mosque after demolishing a temple to Lord Ram that had marked the exact location of Lord Ram’s birth. This was justified as an act of historic redress for the many wrongs inflicted by Muslim invaders and rulers on their native Hindu subjects, a theme that runs through all Hindutva discourse like a flaming torch.

I started the film instinctively, shooting the Rath Yatra when it arrived in Bombay in 1990 and then following it through various segments of its journey. At many places the Rath passed through, it left a trail of blood as kar sevaks attacked local Muslims either for not showing due respect or just to display their might. By the end of its journey over 60 people had been killed and many more injured in the wake of the Rath.

Most of our shoot was done with a two-person crew consisting of myself with an old 16 mm camera and colleagues who accompanied me on different legs of the shoot. For the leg that eventually reached Ayodhya, Pervez Merwanji recorded sound on our portable Nagra. Pervez was a dear friend and a filmmaker in his own right, having just made his brilliant debut feature “Percy” which went on to win a major award at the Mannhein International Film Festival. Despite this he was not too proud to don the mantle of sound recordist on an unheralded independent documentary project like ours. It turned out to be the last film he would ever work on. Pervez contracted jaundice, probably during our shoot, seemed to recover, but then his liver failed him and he passed away never having seen the final edit of our film.

Our actual filming was staggered over a year and a half, and we were able to research as well as shoot in this period.  We learned that contrary to the theory that votaries of Hindutva were propagating that claimed that there was a temple underneath the mosque, the artefacts that archaeologists had originally found in digs in the vicinity had nothing to do with any temple. According to historians, in the 7^th century at the location of present day Ayodhya, probably stood the Buddhist city of Saket.  We learned that the proliferation of Akhadas (military wings attached to temples) in Ayodhya had nothing to do with the long war to liberate the birthplace of Lord Ram as was being claimed by Hindutva ideologues, but owed their origin to the ongoing rivalry between armed Shaivite and Vaishnavite sects in the middle ages. Most importantly we learned that in the 16^th century, the poet Tulsidas visited Ayodhya many times as he composed his famous Ram Charitra Manas, a text which converted the relatively obscure Sanskrit Ramayana into khadi boli, a form of Hindi, that popularized the story of Lord Ram for the ordinary folk of North India. Not only does Tulsidas never mention that a temple marking the birthplace of Lord Ram was just demolished by Babar, there is another telling fact. Until the 16^th century the Rama legend was largely restricted to the few Brahmins who knew Sanskrit. It is only after Tulsidas’s Hindi version had spread that Ram became a popular god for the masses and Ram temples sprouted across the country. In other words in the middle of the 16^th century when the Babri Mosque was built, it is highly unlikely that there were any Ram temples at all. Today Ayodhya is full of Ram temples and at least twenty of them claim to be built at the birthplace of Ram. The reason is obvious. Any temple that establishes itself as the birthplace of Ram gets huge donations from its devotees.

Some of this research is hinted at in the finished film but rarely made explicit as I felt that it would be more powerful for our film to rely on the logic of events unfolding before the camera in 1990-91 rather than become a theoretical and didactic treatise. Ideally I, or someone else should have made an accompanying booklet to point out the many footnotes and annotations that such a film really needs.

30^th October 1990 had been declared by L.K. Advani as the target date for “Kar Seva” at the disputed Ram Janmabhoomi/Babri Mosque site in Ayodhya. Pervez and I headed to Uttar Pradesh. We were trying to catch up with the Rath at some of its scheduled stops. The trains were already jam full. We squeezed into a Third Class compartment where we could barely sit on top of our luggage. We had got on a wrong train and it was impossible to get out! It turned out to be a stroke of luck as the train took us to Patna, Bihar where the Left front along with Bihar Chief Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav were holding a huge anti-Rath rally at the Gandhi Maidan. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7XRvjYQOaI)

A.B. Bardhan of the CPI made a brilliant appeal to preserve India’s syncretic culture and Lalu Prasad Yadav gave a stern warning telling Advani to turn back from the brink. A few days later he kept his promise. Advani was arrested and the Rath Yatra finally came to a halt in Bihar.  Not so the kar sevaks who used all modes of transport to continue to head towards Ayodhya.

We caught a train back to Lucknow. There we spent almost 10 days trying to get permission to enter Ayodhya. Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav had vowed to protect the Babri Mosque and claimed that he had turned Ayodhya into an impenetrable fortress where not just kar sevaks but “parinda par na kar payega” (not a bird could fly cross). As it turned out in the end the only people who had difficulty getting into Ayodhya were journalists and documentarians like us.

We finally reached Ayodhya on the 28^th of October, two days before the planned assault on the mosque. Here we met Shastriji, an old Mahant  (temple priest) who in 1949 had been part of the group that had broken into the Babri Mosque at night and installed a Ram idol in the sanctum sanctorum. From that day on, the site had become disputed territory as District Magistarate K.K. Nair refused to have the idols removed.  As “Ram Ke Naam” points out, K.K. Nair after retiring from government service went on to join the Jan Sangh Party (precursor of the BJP) and became a Member of Parliament.

Shastriji, the Mahant, was proud of installing the idols and a little miffed that everyone had forgotten his role. Hindutva videos, audios and literature had proclaimed that what happened in 1949 was a “miracle” where the god Lord Ram appeared at his birthplace.  Shastri was arrested and released on bail by the District Magistrate, K.K.Nair. Till the day we met him 41 years later, he had remained free.

We went across the Saryu bridge to Ayodhya’s twin city, Faizabad. Here we met the old Imam of the Babri Mosque and his carpenter son who recounted the 1949 story from their perspective. The District Magistrate had told them after the break-in that order would soon be restored, and that by next Friday they could re-enter their mosque for prayers. As the Imam’s son put it “We are still waiting for that Friday”.

As 30^th October dawned and we made our way on foot to the Saryu bridge at Ayodhya, we could see that CM Mulayam Singh’s promise that no one would get through to Ayodhya was proving false. Already several thousands had gathered by the bridge, despite the curfew. There had been a small lathi charge while shoes and footwear were scattered all over the bridge. Busloads of arrested karsevaks were being driven away after arrest. What we did not notice at the time was that many of these buses would stop at a short distance and the kar sevaks would disembark to rejoin the fray. By the side of the bridge thousands were chanting at the police “Hindu, hindu bhai bhai, beech mein vardi kahan se aayee? (All Hindus are brothers. why let a uniform get between us?)”.

As the day progressed it was heartbreaking to those of us who knew that any attack on the mosque would rent apart the delicate communal fabric of the nation.. We had believed Mulayam Singh’s strong rhetoric that he would stop karsevaks long before they reached the mosque. What we saw on the ground was bewildering. Not only were thousands pouring in despite the curfew but at many places there was active connivance from the police and paramilitary forces. There was utter confusion. In the end some karsevaks did break through to attack the mosque but at the very last instance, the police opened fire. Some karsevaks reached the top of the mosque’s dome and tied their orange Hindutva flag. Others broke into the sanctum sanctorum where the idols were kept but police firing prevented the larger crowd from demolishing the mosque. In all 29 people, young and old, lost their lives.  Later BJP and VHP propaganda claimed that over a thousand had been killed and thrown into the Saryu river. The think-tank of Hindutva then initiated another Rath Yatra across the country carrying the ashes of their Ayodhya “martyrs”.

On the night of the 30^th, in the sombre mood that the attack had spawned, we met Pujari Laldas, the court-appointed head priest of the disputed Ram Janmabhoomi/Babri Mosque site. Laldas was an outspoken critic of Hindutva despite being a Hindu priest and had received death threats. The UP government had provided him with two bodyguards. It is this wonderful interview of one of independent India’s unsung heroes that gives “Ram Ke Naam” its real poignancy. Laldas spoke out against the VHP pointing out that they had never even prayed at the site but were using it for political and financial gain. He spoke of the syncretic past of Ayodhya and expressed anguish that Hindu-Muslim unity in the country was being sacrificed by people who were cynically using religion. He predicted a storm of mayhem that would follow but expressed confidence that
this storm too would pass and sanity would return.

For “In Memory of Friends”, I had used a prism of class as seen through the writings of Bhagat Singh to speak of the Punjab of today. In reality, by the late 1980’s classical Marxist analysis and class solidarity were no longer exclusively effective tools in an India and a world where the ideas of the Left were losing out to consumer capitalism. The Soviet Union was collapsing and China was embracing state capitalism. The USA was the only super power left in the world, which itself was fragmenting into its religious and ethnic sub-parts. Yugoslavia disintegrated into internecine warfare. The USA with its ally, Saudi Arabia, stoked Islamic fundamentalism in Afghanistan and Pakistan to fight Communism which in turn helped Kashmiri militants take up the gun. In Punjab, Sikh militants were rising and in Northern India, Hindu militants came into their own. For “Ram Ke Naam” the sane voice of the Hindu priest Pujari Laldas played the role that Bhagat Singh’s writings had done in my previous film. The Left antidote to Communalism was still present through the Patna speech of CPI’s AB Bardhan. But it was now joined by a liberation theologist in the form of Pujari Laldas. The violent reaction of upper caste Hindus to the attempt by Prime Minister V.P. Singh to implement a Mandal Commision report granting reservations to ‘backward’ castes, had led to upper caste Hindus embracing Hindutva and the Mandir (Ram temple) movement. This had not yet trickled down the Caste order. Wherever we went in UP, Dalits and “Backward Castes” spoke out against the Ram temple movement. This became the third spoke in the anti-Communal wheel.

The film was complete by late 1991. We had some hiccoughs and delays from the censors but finally cleared this hurdle without cuts. The film went on to win a national award for Best Investigative Documentary as well as a Filmfare Award for Best documentary. At the 1992 Bombay International Documentary Film Festival, Jaya Bacchan was head of the jury. “Ram Ke Naam” did not get a mention. Several critics commented that the film was raking up a dead issue as the Babri Mosque was intact and the film would unnecessarily give the country a bad name abroad. Later that month I attended the Berlin Film Festival with “Ram Ke Naam”. I learned to my horror that Amitabh and Jaya Bacchan, who were also guests at this festival, had told the Festival authorities that should not have selected such an “anti-India” film.

On the strength of our national award I submitted it for telecast on Doordarshan. Any government that actually believed in a secular India, would have shown such a film many times over so that our public could realize how religious hatred is manufactured for narrow political and financial gains. Widespread exposure may have undermined the movement to demolish the mosque. The BJP was not yet in power. Yet Doordarshan refused to telecast the film and I took them to court. 5 years later we won our case and the film was telecast, but the damage had long been done.

After the October 30 attack in 1990 and the death of 29 karsevaks, the BJP, which had been in coalition with VP Singh’s Janata Dal Party government at the centre, pulled out its support. Chandra Shekhar briefly came to power at the centre but quickly lost to Narsimha Rao’s Congress in the wake of Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination. In UP Mulayam Singh’s government gave way to a BJP government. One of its first steps was to have Pujari Laldas removed as head priest of the Ram Janmaboomi/Babri Masjid, and then to remove his bodyguards. Conditions were now ripe for the major assault.

On December 6, 1992 with the BJP in power in UP, and a strangely acquiescent Narsimha Rao led Congress government at the centre, the Hindutva brigade finally succeeded in demolishing the Babri Mosque. Pujari Laldas’s predictions of large scale violence in the region came true. The old Imam and his son from Faizabad I had interviewed were put to death on 7^th December 1992. While Muslims were slaughtered across India, in neighbouring Pakistan and Bangladesh, the Hindu minority was targeted and temples destroyed. In March 1993, bomb blasts in Mumbai organized by Muslim members of the mafia killed over 300 people. The chain reaction set into motion since those days has still to abate.

Back in 1991 our première had been held in Lucknow, capital of UP. Pujari Laldas came for the screening and asked for several cassettes of the film. When I asked about his own safety, he laughed and said he was happy that now his views would circulate more widely. As he put it, if he had been afraid, he would not have spoken out in the first place.

A year later, a tiny item on the inside pages of the Times of India noted-“Controversial priest found murdered.” Pujari Laldas had been killed with a country-made revolver. The newspaper article never told us that the real “controversy” was the fact that this brave priest believed in a Hinduism that is the mirror opposite of Hindutva.

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The merging of four distinct public bodies under one single umbrella, controlled by one single ministry under one single minister whose most infamous utterance just before the outbreak of deadly violence in Delhi in 2019 was “Shoot the Bastards” (a loose translation of “Goli Maaro Salon Ko”) would have been alarming in of itself.  What is more alarming is that these developments are not about one individual. They are the fruit of an ideology that has been at work for over a hundred years, producing hatred based on fake news and the demonisation of fellow citizens of India. Their most famous victim was Mahatma Gandhi. But the killings and the hatred have never stopped, they just lie below the surface till the haters gather enough power to deliver.

Today they bask in the glory of election victories won by sheer money power and the ruthless control over every democratic institution originally set in place by the power of India’s secular and democratic Constitution. But this Constitution means nothing to those who sincerely and truly believe in dictatorship and majoritarian rule.

The assault on the National Film Archives and Films Division (which also has a vast collection of post-Independence news and documentary films) should be seen as nothing short of an assault on our Constitution. Once our archived history falls into the hands of those who never fought for Independence from British rule, it will just disappear or be re-cut and rewritten.  As for the Children’s Film Society and the Directorate of Film Festivals, these were both bodies created to expand our cultural heritage. One can only shudder at what the future holds if these institutions come under the control of a single poisonous agency.

And what indeed is this new agency? On the surface it is actually an old agency called NFDC (National Film Development Corporation) that was meant to promote good independent cinema as opposed to the commercial cinema that came out of Bollywood. Initially some good films were indeed produced or distributed by NFDC. But their role soon turned into a clerk’s office where filmmakers could not be discovered even under a microscope.

At least the Films Division had existing staff, infrastructure, equipment and a large body of competent work. The NFDC is a clean slate. Their only raison d’etre is to make money and even this they have failed to do. However once four bodies are merged into one and that body has the mandate to make a profit, it is not hard to predict what will happen next. Privatization and the selling off of public assets. Films Division sits on highly lucrative land in Mumbai. It is a bonanza awaiting looters.

If those who believe in freedom of expression and the right to information stand idly by at this juncture, not only will our archives and valuable properties be destroyed or sold, we should not complain if a Kangana Ranaut or a Vivek Agnihotri become the ilk that decide what message is force-fed to the public at large.

Anand Patwardhan is a film-maker

This article was first published on https://countercurrents.org/

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Modi is getting ready to celebrate his birthday at the Sardar Sarovar Dam site in Gujarat on September 17. But how can a birthday be auspicious if no one is sacrificed?

To ensure human and animal sacrifice, water is being released from dams like Indira Sagar upstream on the Narmada river. Water has already started rising.

By the 17th of September the Narmada water at Sardar Saovar will be at an impressive height. You wont be able to spot the drowned bodies of humans and cattle but they will add to the auspicious event and the prayers of the priests will reach heaven so very much faster.

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Politically I do not know where he stands today.'

Image:  Pierre Guillaud/AFP

I’m not really sure how I feel about Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize for literature. Firstly, there is nothing sacred about Nobel, whose fortune was made by inventing, manufacturing and selling military explosives. We can go past that one as it’s an old story and even war profits may theoretically be used for peace. Were they? Here again we get into uncomfortable territory. Henry Kissinger won a Nobel Peace Prize when a less deserving candidate must have been hard to find. More recently, Barack Obama did. Charming as he may be, his peace record is abysmal.

Wait. We are not talking of the Nobel Peace Prize here. That, the Bob Dylan of the 1960s may well have deserved for songs like Blowing in the Wind, Masters of War, With God on Our Side, The Times They Are A'Changing or civil rights songs like Oxford Town and Only a Pawn in their Game”. I grew up with these songs. We sang them at protest rallies when I was a student in America fighting against the Viet Nam war. Best of all, you didn’t need to be a great guitarist to learn the few chords that most early Dylan songs required.

To be truthful, at the very beginning of my introduction to his work, almost anybody sounded better than Dylan when they sang his songs. There were so very many who did, from Joan Baez to the Byrds and Peter, Paul and Mary. At least when they sang, you could understand the words. Not so at first for me with Dylan. But soon, the Dylan delivery, the nasal twang and the long, free verse mouthed without breaking for breath, interspersed with short bursts of a harmonica that seemed to care nothing for its audience’s pre-conceived ideas of music, grew on me. And obviously I wasn’t the only one. Millions around the globe were hooked. The poetry and the music were a package, inseparable. When you got a better voice, or a more technically accomplished musician, you didn’t feel the words in the same way.
 

The man and his art

So much for Dylan the musician and poet. What of the man? The politically charged Dylan gave way to the lover who either perennially walked out of relationships or made a brave face as others walked out on him. Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right is a classic of that genre. His fierce independence politically and personally meant that no one could take him for granted, including fans like me. So we suffered as he went from being the Lefty pacifist, to becoming a born-again Christian, to asserting his Jewish roots as Robert Zimmerman. Frankly I never enjoyed these later avatars though recognising his right to explore himself in every way that he wanted to.

Musically, of course, he was able to reinvent himself from acoustic folk to electric rock and for a long while that created a delicious amalgam best exemplified by the album Blonde on Blonde. Politically I do not know where he stands today. Is he a critic of the American war machine that created Bin Laden to fight communists, that first armed Saddam Hussain and then invaded Iraq to capture natural resources, that allies with Israel and Saudi Arabia to create Islamic jihad and recolonise the world? There is no evidence of this in his music today. This is not the Dylan of the '60s and '70s.

Luckily he has not won a Nobel Peace Prize. That I would gladly have seen on musicians like Paul Robeson and Pete Seeger or even Joan Baez.

This is a prize for literature. For his unique blend of poetry and music and his precocious ability to capture the pulse of his times. That I can celebrate. 40 saal der, par durust. (40 years late, but nevertheless right). To say it in Dylan’s words:

May your hands always be busy
May your feet always be swift
May you have a strong foundation
When the winds of changes shift
May your heart always be joyful
And may your song always be sung
May you stay forever young.

Courtesy: Scroll.in

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Image: The Hindu

I won’t occupy this space for very long as I think we should be primarily listening to some of the amazing student leaders who have collectively come to the rescue of this despondent country by giving us something to hope and cheer for.
 
We are all aware of where the internal danger to our secular, democratic fabric lies, so I will not repeat all this except to point out that it no longer lies in any single party or organization. Today an ideology based on hate but disguised as “love for Mother India” has penetrated the deepest sections of every traditional pillar of democracy – the executive, legislature, judiciary and media.
 
After the ghastly trauma of Partition and then, the murder of Mahatma Gandhi in 1948, we were lulled into believing that the worst was over, that communal fascist forces had been named and shamed and they would not rise again. But they did, working quietly for decades until they mustered enough force to show their face in public again. These forces can be called Brahminists as long as we remember Dr. Ambedkar’s distinction between the insidious ideology of Brahminism and individuals that happen to be born into the Brahmin caste. The corollary is that even non-Brahmins can perpetrate Brahminism. If we do not understand that the biology of caste is less important than the ideology of caste we will not be able to distinguish between friends and foes.
 
Today the mother body that nurtures the Brahminist ideology has begun to expand its caste base. The RSS,  the largestand fastest growing NGO in the world, has spawned other groups, connected and unconnected, that pose an even greater threat to humanity than the mother body itself.
 
How was this achieved? Internationally in the last two decades, aided by the collapse, or capitulation, of the Soviet Union and China, a war has been waged on the world by an axis comprising of the USA, Israel, UK and Saudi Arabia, backed at times by various other powerful nations that collectively serve an international arms lobby whose sole aim is to perpetuate war, or the threat of war,external and internal. They have all made the simplistic but tautological calculation that as vital natural resources like oil, water and assorted minerals on this planet rapidly deplete, the only way to corner the remaining stock is by military might. I say tautological because the act of building up and deploying military power further erodes the planet’s depleting resources, apart from pre-occupying scientists whose knowledge and creativity could have otherwise served the cause of just and sustainable technologies.
 
This international axis and the arms lobby that runs it,is directly responsible for most of the wars being fought in the world at present, internal and external.
 
In the early 1990’s when the Berlin wall came down and Gorbachev was willing to sign all manner of peace pacts, it is Reagan’s America, controlled by the military industrial complex that refused the peace agenda and began to militarize outer space.  It had earlier imported Islamic Jihad and Saudi Arabia’s Bin Laden into Afghanistan and Pakistan in order to defeat godless communists. The fallout in our region was that armed jihadis entered the Kashmir valley, which until the late 1980’s had only seen non-violent protests for better governance and greater autonomy.
 
In Iraq in 2003 this axis overthrew the dictator Saddam Hussain whom they had earlier armed to the teeth, by pretending that Saddam had “weapons of mass destruction”. It is this act that gave birth to ISIS and it is ISIS or the fear of ISIS that has been used to run ever more wars, from Libya to Syria.
 
On the economic front the “liberalization” process that began in the 1980’s consolidated in the next decades as WTO GAT cast its net wider. India, then led by Congress, capitulated and what has happened to its Jal, Jungle, Zameen (water, forest, land) is history.
 
The arms industry and its relatives have many needs. Apart from minerals, fossil fuels and water, they also need to control education and popular culture in order to spread vulgar commodification. World business is a highly integrated, coordinated mechanism with unimaginable economic power.To quote a statistic from 2007, the total volume of trade by private corporations world over was over $1171 trillion; 20 times greater than the combined earnings of all the countries in the world !
 
 Any strong, secular democracy has always been anathema to imperialists and neo-colonialists out to destroy sovereignty. Having destroyed the fabric of democracy in Pakistan via Islamization, is it too far fetched that the axis of evil is now supporting the same destruction in India, via Hindutva?
 
What is fully home grown and what is externally fertilized and nurtured is not always easy to separate.In the year 2000,a BJP led NDA government in a shocking surrender of sovereignty, gave permission to the FBI to open its office in India. This was before 9/11. What followed after 9/11 was a worldwide surrender of civil liberties in the name of “fighting terror”.
 
Let us take the infamous Intelligence Bureau and the rapidly-getting- more-infamous National Intelligence Agency.  Their top leadership acts as if it is fully commandeered by hard core Hindutva. These seem to work undercover when a non-BJP government is in power but become openly pro-active when the BJP comes to power. When an honest officer like Maharashtra’s ATS chief, Hemant Karkare finds incontrovertible proof that many, if not most of the bomb blasts and terror attacks attributed to Islam-inspired terrorists were actually the handiwork of Hindutva, we see what happens to Karkarein November 2008 in the very midst of his revelations.Karkare had solved the Malegaon case and was on the brink of further major breakthroughs. On the heels of this came the confession before a magistrate of Swami Aseemanand who provided information on this and  other terror cases involving Hindutva. Today after Karkare’s murder and BJP’s return to power, many of these cases are blatantly unraveling before our very eyes. In Gujarat “clean chits” fall like manna from the sky.  In Mumbai a public prosecutor who was following Karkare’s cases is unceremoniously replaced and reveals that she was asked to “go slow” after his death.Confessional statements by Hindutvaleadersmade before a magistrate go “missing” and over 40 witnesses against Brahminists like Col. Purohit turn hostile.
 
We face a dangerous enemy that is capable of murder and has demonstrated time and again that it gets away with murder. Even today murder threats have been issued and procuring a venue for this assembly was made painfully difficult.
 
The only choice before us is to unite all forces that can possibly be united against hatred and corporate and communal fascism.
 
In doing this we have to be generous with those whose particular understanding and emphasis may differ from ours. History beckons us to shelveego problems that are endemic to all alliances and joint actions.
 
Our alliance must include not just Marxists and Ambedkarites but all those who know why Gandhi, Dabholkar, Pansare, Kalburgi, Rohith Vemula and so many others lost their lives and who killed them. Apart from organized parties it must draw into its fold living symbols of resistance like Medha Patkar, Soni Sori, Irom Sharmila, Binayak Sen, Sandeep Pande, Teesta Setalvad and SP Uday kumar,to name just a few who tirelessly work for a just and secular democracy.It must also include those who have no fixed ideology but desire the freedom to think freely.
 
In my personal opinion,in the face of an international arms trade- driven communal fascism, only an unshakable, unbreakable,and expressly non-violent (both in word and in deed) movement can win back the hearts and minds of our people. We must become the Khudai Khidmatgars of today !
 
Jai Bhim, Laal Salaam, Jai Jagat !
 

Mumbai 23.4.16
 
 
 

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