It is essential to note here that on January 23, a day after the inauguration of the Ram Temple in Uttar Pradesh’s Ayodhya, a mob of at least 25 people had barged into the FTII campus and had angrily raked through the campus despite the presence of the campus security personnel. The mob had burned a banner that has been put up inside the campus stating ‘Remember Babri, Death of Constitution’ and had assaulted many students, including women, too. As per a report of the Arunachal Times, Mankap Nokwoham, an Arunachalee student hailing from Changlang district, who is also the president of the Film & Television Institute of India (Pune) Student Association (FTIISA), had been brutally assaulted by alleged members of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidhyarti Parishad inside the FTII campus.

An FIR had been filed by the institute against the mob. Notably, Indian Penal Code sections pertaining to unlawful assembly, rioting, causing hurt, trespassing, damage to property and criminal intimidation had been invoked by the police against unnamed 10-12 people. And now, as per a report of the Times of India, in a cross lodging of case, the police have registered a case against six students of the institute over displaying a banner and posters with alleged “objectionable” matter.

Pursuant to the filing of the FIR, on January 24 itself, a press note had been released by the FTIISA. The said press note refers to events that took place inside the campus on January 23, stating that “the campus still remains terrorized.” Referring to the FIR filed by the institute against the mob, the note pointedly states how the institute “failed to mention some grievous happenings of the day, including the charge of infringing on women’s modesty.”

The statement also specifies that the assailants in the mob had “not just burnt banners and shouted slogans in the name of Ram, they also pushed slapped, shoved, punched and attacked many students gathered there while hurling abuses”.

The press note also addresses the issue of false portrayal the said incidents on social media platforms. To clarify their stance, the press note states “Hindutva organisations have painted a false picture of the events. Students have not attacked anyone, we were only defending ourselves.” The note also highlights the social media posts that are threatening the FTII students with physical violence and harassment.

Referring to the filing of the FIR against the students, deeming it to be a “serious concern”, the press note stated that there has been a random targeting of five students out of a gathering and the five accused had been exercising their right to defend. As per a report of the Quint, the FIR filed against the students includes sections 153-B (1) (c) and 295 (a) of the IPC, both of which relates to allegation that the acts of the students potentially caused disharmony or enmity and that outrage religious feelings.

Through the note, the FTIISA has then asserted their right to freedom of speech and expression as well as their commitment to protect the secular values of our country. Condemning the said attack they faced as well as the targeting the students are being subjected to, the student association has written that “if upholding the secular values and expressing dissent against their erasure is considered objectionable and worthy of violence to these assailants, we feel strongly that everyone should be alerted of the dire straits we are in, and the kind of terror that surrounds us today.”

The complete press note can be read here:

FIR Copy can be seen here.

Related:

Mob attacks FTII students on campus

Five states report communal incidents following the inauguration of the Ram Temple in UP

Eve of Ram temple inauguration sees “clashes”, planting of saffron flag atop Church

Preamble, banners, slogans of solidarity, inter-faith rallies and protests – symbol of undying secularism on January 22

The post Five FTII Pune students booked by police for “hurting religious sentiments” over displaying ‘Remember Babri’ banner 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.

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

Having cited the excuse of temple desecration, he exhorted the public to take revenge on the Muslim minority: “Revenge, revenge, revenge…if we do not take revenge for the 1000 years, then the Hindu community can clearly say that ours is not Hindu blood”, according to a report in The Indian Express (January 15).

Amid the build-up to the Ayodhya event, Hegde, a Member of Parliament (MP) from Uttara Kannada constituency, listed several mosques, which, according to him, were constructed over the Hindu temples. He went on to locate these mosques in areas across Bhatkal, Uttar Kannada and Mandya.

Note that Hegde’s highly inflammatory speech, aimed at polarising voters on religious grounds, used the symbols of the “subjugated” majority Hindu community at the hands of “foreign” Muslim rulers. Moreover, the invocation of the image of “Hindu blood” is purposefully used to whip up an emotion of hate among the majority community against the minority community. Worse still, during his speech, Hegde raked up the issue of the history of violence inflicted on the native Hindu population by the alien Muslim aggressors.

During the Ayodhya agitation, the justification for the demolition of the sixteenth-century Babri Masjid was based on the same trope of the restitution of the historical wrongs committed by the Muslim rulers. The Hindutva narrative claimed that the commander of Mughal ruler Babar, Mir Baqi, demolished the Ram Temple and built Babri Masjid over it.

Neither does the historical fact uphold the Hindu Right’s claim nor was it proven the Supreme Court (final judgement). Taking the wind out of Hindutva’s sail, the Court condemned the demolition of the Babri Masjid as an act of “an egregious violation of the rule of law”. It is another matter that the decision of the Supreme Court was influenced by the concern to respect the popular faith (Aastha), which hugely disappointed large sections of Indians, democratic-minded people.

While the historical facts point to dynamism during the pre-modern era, Hegde presented a stagnant picture of the one thousand years of medieval India during which only a singular narrative of “Hindu oppression”  under Muslim rulers is/was presented. Even Prime Minister Narendra Modi referred to this, “one thousand years of slavery” in his first/early speech in Parliament and indirectly demonised the medieval period. Ironically, much of the Hindu Right’s understanding of the medieval past is based on colonial historiography.

However, historical facts do not uphold Hindutva’s claims of Hindu oppression by Muslim rulers. Nor do they support the idea of the demolition of the temples in large numbers during the medieval period. Historians largely agree that the long period of the medieval period was complex. The period saw different levels of material advancements across the subcontinent. Therefore, it is also wrong to equate the medieval period with Muslims and then call it a “dark” period, when the so-called “glorious” Hindu civilisation “declined”.

Much beyond communal narratives, the medieval period was an era of the emergence of syncretic Hindu-Muslim culture when literature, music and architecture flourished, reflecting Hindu-Muslim composite styles. During the medieval period, vernacular languages developed under the influence of Persian and Sanskrit. Even the religious and reform movements, questioning the caste system, subjugation of women and the orthodoxy in society, were influenced by both Hinduism and Islam. Moreover, the ideals of equality and fraternity enshrined in Islam appealed to the plebians and their quest for equality and dignity got a new momentum.

The rulers of Delhi and Mughal Sultanates were indeed Muslims in faith, but their rules were more constrained by the ground reality. The canons of Islam as interpreted by the Ulama were largely paid lip service to by the rulers, not rigidly implemented. The BJP and the parent, Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh (RSS) are not willing to accept the truth that the so-called Muslim rule could not have lasted even a day if this had not been assisted by non-Muslim elites.

On the dark side, the peasantry and workers, both Hindus and Muslims suffered under the burden of taxes in the medieval periods. Both Muslim and Hindu rulers were united in exploiting their labours. When the subalterns revolted against the unjust taxation, they were not waging a religious war but fighting for their rights.

While the Hindu Right is fond of exaggerating the political fights between Hindu and Muslim rulers, they are silent about the wars fought among Muslim rulers for political powers. Similarly, the BJP and the RSS narrative has failed to explain why the Hindu kings sought support from Muslim rulers to defeat their rival Hindu rajas and Sikh Gurus.

Given the complex nature of medieval Indian history, it is wrong to overlook its dynamic nature and complexity. Similarly, one should never try to reduce the events to mere religious conflict. Such a communal approach to history has done much damage to national integration and communal harmony. We, therefore, must counter them with historical facts and logic.

That is why the better way to look at history is to take up social and economic dimensions and even try to find the economic and social expiations of the so-called religious wars. The secular approach to history writing can only hold a secular republic together, a fact often ignored by the BJP and the RSS for their achieving their narrow political agendas.

Instead of taking a social and economic framework, Hedge and his organisations are prone to look at Indian history from a narrow and sectarian religious lance. They do it deliberately to prove the narrative of the “intolerance” practised by the Muslim rulers to justify the Muslim oppression in the present era. Such a divisive mindset influenced Hedge to give an open threat to the minority Muslims, causing a danger to the public order: “In every village of the state, there are small religious places which were violated. Until they are demolished, the Hindu community will not sit idly.”

Records show that BJP MP, Hegde is in the habit of delivering hateful speeches. He is notorious for publicly airing anti-Muslim remarks and attacking the opposition leaders in a distasteful manner. For example, he even attacked Chief Minister Siddaramaiah for appeasing minority voters. In the recent past, he has given highly communal and anti-constitutional remarks but he is yet to be held accountable. Earlier when he was Union Minister for State, he questioned the credibility of Rahul Gandhi being a Hindu as he was, according to him, the son of a “Muslim” father and a “Christian” mother.

Worse still, Hegde went on to outrightly dismiss the national movement led by Mahatma Gandhi as “drama”. Around the same time, he threatened minority Muslim men with dire consequence of chopping off their hands if they tried to touch Hindu women. Attacking the foundation of democracy, he advocated changing the Constitution.

It is a welcome move that the Karnataka Police has taken suo motu cognisance and filed a case against Hegde for giving a public speech promoting mischief and aiming at causing religious enmity between communities. Let’s hope that the police fairly investigate the case and ensure that no one is above the rule of the law.

(The author is a Delhi-based journalist. He has taught political sciences at NCWEB Centres of Delhi University.  )

The post January 2024: Raking up the myth of temple demolition appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The ‘Temples of Modern India’ phrase was the underlying theme for conceptualising the public sectors, educational institutions also promoting the scientific temper, health facilities, and academies for promotion of culture and what have you. 

The nearly four-five decades’ journey with this undercurrent of ‘Modern Temples’ was to be turned upside down from the decades of 1980s when on one side the response to Shah Bano fiasco of dealing with minorities opened the floodgates of divisive politics. (The Indian National Congress under Nehru’s grandson, Rajiv Gandhi led India with an unprecedented majority then)

The communal forces unleashed a massive propaganda war against the religious minorities. At the same time the affirmative action for downtrodden, the Mandal Commission implementation gave the fillip to temple politics which was already in the strategy books of Hindu nationalists.

In contrast to Nehru’s ‘temples of Modern India’, the search for ‘temples underneath the mosque’ brought to the fore the Babri Mosque dispute. The RSS progeny BJP took birth (1980) wearing the garb of ‘Gandhian Socialism’ with moderate posing Atal Bihari Vajpayee was at the helm. He was steeped in the RSS ideology. He wrote Hindu Tan Man-Hindu jeevan (Hindu soul and body-Hindu life), and masked his Hindu nationalist politics with élan. He yielded his place to Lal Krishna Advani, who came up with the slogan of “Mandir Vahin Banayengain’ (We will build the temple where Babri mosque is located).

The RSS’ Combine was thus able to create a perception that Lord Ram was born precisely at the spot where the mosque is located. Ram Rath Yatra, got more muscles after the Mandal Commission implementation. This Yatra left a series of trails of violence. In the wake of L.K. Advani’s Rath Yatra, nearly 1,800 people died in different parts of India around 1990. This Yatra was aborted when Lalu Yadav arrested Advani.

The mosque was demolished on December 6, 1992, by the Kar Sevaks, some selected ones of which had well-rehearsed the demolition. Advani, Joshi and Uma Bharati were sitting on the stage from where the slogan, Ek Dhakka Aur do, Babri Masjid Tod do (Give one more push, break the Babri Mosque) and “ye to kevel Jhanki hai Kashi Mathura baki hai” (this is just the beginning, Kashi Mathra will follow). 

After the demolition violence did follow in Mumbai, Bhopal, Surat and many other places. To cut the long story short, the legal system bent over backwards to give the verdict of the case based on ‘faith’, while naming those who led the demolition, but not giving them any punishment for the crimes committed by the. The judiciary in all its wisdom or lack of it; gave the whole Babri Mosque land to the “Hindu Side”.

Gloating on this ‘success’ by RSS combine; large funds were collected from home and abroad and a huge temple is ready to be inaugurated by the Prime Minister himself with all Hindu rituals. This will be a ceremony undertaken by the head of a ‘formally secular’ state. Babri Masjid was a regular election plank till it was demolished and after that building of ‘grand Ram Temple’ was the part of BJP’s election manifestos and electoral promises. The communal violence shot up on a regular basis along with the ghettoisation of Muslim community, the polarisation and the rise of the electoral might of BJP.

The present plight is well summed up by A M Singh, “Since coming to power, much of the BJP’s political discourse has exacerbated communal tensions between Hindus and Muslims. Their actions have followed suit, with the abrogation of Article 370 in the Indian Constitution and the passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in 2019… By redefining and remanufacturing Indian citizenship on the principles of Hindutva, the BJP government has broken the fate and legacy of India’s secularism enshrined in its constitution.” Now a ghettoised Muslim community has been pushed to the margins as second class citizens.

In 2024, as the temple is set to be inaugurated all round efforts are on to mobilise a large section of Hindus around this. In America and other countries, a large number of NRI’s are preparing for the occasion by organising different programs. Here at home all the progeny of RSS has been activated to mobilise the Hindus for the occasion, either by visiting the new temple or to visit the local temples and perform rituals.

There are minor controversies about who has been invited and who is left out. Lal Krishna Advani, the Chief architect of demolition movement and his close aide Murali Manohar Joshi were initially advised by the temple trust, not to visit the inauguration due to their old age and biting cold in Ajodhya. On second thoughts (and after some public outcry), the VHP, the overarching organization has invited them.

Just as the Babri demolition helped this sectarian politics to come to power, the inauguration of the temple seems to be yet another mechanism to consolidate the polarisation and to reap electoral dividends. Large number of special trains and buses are being planned for the occasion. Temple politics has reached its acme.

It is time to recall Nehru’s concept of “temples of Modern India’ with promotion of scientific temper! Currently religiosity and faith blind faith are being heightened. 

As India emerged out of colonial darkness it also ensured a direction where the ‘last person in the line’ was to be the primary focus. 

With the politics revolving around Ram Temple, to be followed by temples in Kashi and Mathura, the deprivations of ‘last person’ and Nehru’s ‘Tryst with Destiny’ promises have been dumped along with holding him responsible for all the ills of the country!

Related:

Babri Masjid demolition case: The long road to justice

Court begins recording statements of Babri demolition accused

No one conspired to demolish Babri Masjid?

This judgment is far from justice: AIMPL Board

We always planned to demolish Babri Masjid: Jai Bhagwan Goyal

The post Babri demolition to Ram Temple: A trajectory of Indian politics appeared first on SabrangIndia.

[https://indianexpress.com/article/india/ram-mandir-bhumi-pujan-full-text-of-pm-narendra-modis-speech-in-ayodhya/]

Goswami Tulsidas put in bad light

As generally happens with our PM, he resorted to lies regarding the destruction of Ram birth-place temple for building Babri Mosque too. According to his narrative, borrowed from the RSS shakhas, Ayodhya represented a continuous war between Hindus and Muslims over the Ram Temple for almost last five centuries.

While boasting of victory over the adversary (Muslims) he did not bother to look at the epic work of poetry in Avadhi language penned by Goswami Tulsidas, namely, Ramcharitmanas. This was the work which mesmerized India with the story of Lord Ram and the latter became a house-hold deity of every Hindu home, specially, in North India. He penned his above-mentioned work during 1575-76. According to the Hindutva version Ram birth-place temple was destroyed during 1538-1539. The Ramcharitmanas written almost 37 years after the so-called destruction of Ram’s birth-place temple should have mentioned this destruction. But it did not.

Are Hindutva zealots trying to say that the greatest story-teller and worshipper of Ram and his Court (Darbar), Tulsidas did not speak truth in his historic work? Is this an attempt to question the credibility of Goswami Tulsidas? Are the Hindutva zealots trying to say that Goswami Tulsidas kept mum on the issue of the destruction of a temple at Ram’s birth-place due to some ulterior motives?

Contempt of the Supreme Court Judgement

The Prime Minister, by claiming that the Ram Janmabhoomi [birth-place] “has become free from the centuries-old chain of destruction and resurrection” was openly contradicting the Supreme Court judgment on Ayodhya delivered on November 9, 2019 that Babri Mosque was not built after demolishing any temple, the appearance of idol of Ram Lalla on the intervening night of 22/23 December 1949 was illegal and the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya on December 6, 1992 was an “egregious violation of the rule of law”. The same judgment underlined the fact that “Muslims have been wrongly deprived of a mosque which had been constructed well over 450 years ago”. In fact, PM should have been tried for contempt of the Court for his Ayodhya speech.

It is a different matter that despite all these findings the highest court of justice of India allowed construction of Ram Temple at the site of Babri Mosque. The more shameless was allowing Vishwa Hindu Parishad, a pocket organization of RSS which demolished the Mosque on December 6, 1992 to build the Temple!

[https://scroll.in/article/943337/no-the-supreme-court-did-not-uphold-the-claim-that-babri-masjid-was-built-by-demolishing-a-temple]

Selective Redressal of wrongs of History

The demolition of the Babri Mosque and building of a grand Ram Temple at Ayodhya has been justified by the Hindutva flag-bearers claiming that justice was being done to the wrongs of history. However, the Indian past looked through the Hindu Muslim binary has its serious limitations. One major problem is that despite India being a five-thousand-year-old civilization but it is only the period 0f approximately 700-800 years in which people with the Muslim names ruled/attacked India is under scrutiny.

Let us get acquainted what the most important ideologue of the RSS-Hindutva and the second chief of it, MS Golwalkar wrote about destruction of Somnath Temple in 1025-26 by Mahmud Ghazni.

According to him: “One thousand years back our people invited foreigners to invade us. A similar danger threatens us even today. How the glorious temple of Somnath was desecrated and devastated is a page of history. Mahmud Ghazi had heard of the wealth and splendour of Somnath. He crossed the Khyber Pass and set foot in Bharat to plunder the wealth of Somnath. He had to cross the great desert of Rajasthan. There was a time when he had no food and no water for his army, and even for himself left to his fate, he would have perished, and the burning sands of Rajasthan would have consumed his bones. But no, Mahmud Ghazi made the local chieftains to believe that Saurashtra had expansionist designs against them. In their folly and pettiness, they believed him. And they joined him. When Mahmud Ghazi launched his assault on the great temple, it was the Hindu, blood of our blood, flesh of our flesh, soul of our soul-who stood in the vanguard of his army. Somnath was desecrated with the active help of the Hindus. These are facts of history.” (MS Golwalkar’s speech in Madurai cited in ‘Organiser’ dated January 4, 1950, pp. 12, 15.)

If the RSS-BJP government is really serious about executing its core issue of undoing religious injustice in India’s past then they should start working to hand over Jagannath Temple at Puri to Buddhists immediately. Swami Vivekananda who is regarded as an icon of the Hindutva politics and resurgent Hindu India by RSS who was also the greatest narrator of ancient India’s past, unambiguously, declared that Jagannath Temple was originally a Buddhist Temple. According to his admission, “To any man who knows anything about Indian history…the temple of Jaganath [sic] is an old Buddhistic temple. We took this and others over and re-Hinduised them. We shall have to do many things like that yet. ” (Swami Vivekananda, ‘The Sages of India’ in The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, Vol. 3, Advaita Ashram, Calcutta, p. 264.)

It has been corroborated by another darling of the Hindutva camp, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee. According to him Rath Yatra, an integral part of Jagganath Temple was a Buddhist ritual too.

According to Bankim: “I am aware that another, and a very reasonable, account of the origin of the festival of Rath [at the Jagganath Temple] has been given by General Cunningham in his work on the Bhilsa Topes. He there traces it to a similar festival of the Buddhists, in which the three symbols of the Buddhist faith, Buddha, Dharmma, and Sangha, were drawn in a car in the same fashion, and I believe about the same season as the Rath. It is a fact greatly in support of the theory, that the images of Jagannath, Balaram, and Subhadra, which now figure in the Rath, are near copies of the representations of Buddha, Dharmma, and Sangha, and appear to have been modelled upon them.” (Chatterjee, Bankim Chandra, ‘On the origin of Hindu festivals’ in Essays & Letters, Rupa, Delhi, 2010, pp. 8-9.)

In fact, Puri Temple was not the only one Hinduised. Founder of Arya Samaj, Swami Dayanand Saraswati while describing the heroics of Shankaracharya in Satyarth Prakash: “For ten years he toured all over the country, refuted Jainism and advocated the Vedic religion. All the broken images that are now-a-days dug out of the earth were broken in the time of Shankar, whilst those that are found whole here and there under the ground had been buried by the Jainis for fear of their being broken (by those who had renounced Jainism).” (SATYARTH PRAKSH BY Swami Dayanand Sarswati, chapter xi, p. 347.)

The Hindutva rulers who declare their love for indigenous religions like Buddhism and Jainism should begin to handover their usurped temples and Vihars at the earliest to them.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed here are the authors own.

Related:

Several ‘secular’ people applauded the Babri demolition: Ravi Gupta

Babri demolition accused to head Ram Temple Trust

1992 – BOMBAY, After the Babri Demolition ,The People’s Verdict

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New Delhi: Nearly three years after the Supreme Court (SC) ordered the Uttar Pradesh (UP) government to allot 5 acres for the construction of a mosque in Ayodhya and cleared the way for the construction of a Ram Temple at the disputed site, the project is in limbo due to the lack of approval for building maps and no-objection certificates (NOCs) from civic authorities, UP Pollution Control Board and fire services.

On the other hand, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi laying the foundation stone on August 5, 2020, after the SC ordered that the disputed land be handed over to a Trust for building a Ram temple, construction at the site is in full swing.

Following the long-fought Babri Masjid-Ram Janmabhoomi title suit, the apex court in its 1,045-page judgment had ordered the state government in November 2019 to allot 5 acres to the UP Sunni Central Waqf Board for the construction of the proposed mosque Masjid-e-Ayodhya.

The alternate piece of land, located at Dhannipur village, is 24 km away from the disputed 2.77 acres, where the historic Babri Masjid once stood before being demolished on December 6, 1992.

Apart from a mosque that can accommodate 2,000 people at a time, a 300-bed superspeciality hospital, a research centre dedicated to freedom fighter Maulvi Ahmadullah Shah (1857 anti-British war hero) and a community kitchen that will feed about 1,000 people daily were proposed to come up at the alternative land under the supervision of Indo Islamic Cultural Foundation (IICF)—a trust set up by the Waqf Board.  

Allegedly keeping it pending for more than a year, the Ayodhya Development Authority (ADA) has expedited clearance to the project only after a joint delegation of the Board and the Trust met ADA vice-chairman Vishal Singh on June 30.

“The IICF (also known as the Ayodhya Masjid Trust) had submitted the drawings of the maps in 11 sets to the ADA on May 25 last year along with Rs 5 lakh as the processing fees for approval.

“We received an official communication only after we met Vishal Singh on June 30 this year. We were asked to apply online on the ADA website for approval. We complied but it needed several NOCs. We reverted to the ADA urging it to secure all the NOCs,” IICF trustee Arshad Afzaal Khan told Newsclick.

“At this juncture, Ayodhya district magistrate Nitish Kumar intervened and deputed an additional district magistrate for the same. On October 18, ADA secretary Satyendra Singh informed us that the plot is agricultural land, according to revenue records. Therefore, no construction can be done on it without changing its use. We were provided with a proforma for an application seeking a change in the land’s use. We did it as well,” Khan further said adding that the application is “still pending with the authorities”.

Nearly two months ago, Khan said, the fire services department refused to ‘issue us an NOC for the mosque and other facilities by objecting to the narrow approach road being less than 12 metres. The Trust has urged the government to resolve the issue as it possesses the vacant land on both sides of the approach road. “We have also not been provided the additional land for widening of the approach road so far,” Khan alleged.

Asked if he sees a contrast between the promptness of authorities in facilitating the construction of two equally religious sites, Khan said it is a “pertinent” question but the government should answer that.

When queried about the same, Singh denied any discrimination and clarified that “technical issues” are being resolved to approve the project.

“The land use of the allotted site has to be changed and an application in this regard is being processed. There are other technical glitches which are also being worked upon. Soon, everything will be resolved,” he said.

Asked about declining the NOC to the project by his department, Ayodhya’s chief fire officer RK Rai said, “The approach road should be 12 metres wide; however, the main approach road is not more than four metres wide. The width of other approach roads is not more than six metres. Therefore, clearance has been withheld and the Trust has been informed about it.”

NO RESEMBLANCE TO BABRI MASJID 

According to Khan, who is also in charge of designing, the mosque will not bear any resemblance to the Babri Masjid—built by Mughal emperor Babur’s General Mir Baqi in 1528–29 and a replica of the mosques in the Delhi Sultanate.

Picture credit: Praveen Jain

“Babur is not our ideal. Our ideals are our Sufi saints, freedom fighters and scholars. Therefore, the proposed Masjid-e-Ayodhya will not in any way look like the Babri Masjid. Therefore, the new mosque wouldn’t have any reference to the Mughal-era mosque and its demolition,” he said.

Khan said that the museum on the premises of the proposed mosque will have a memorial dedicated to freedom fighters like Shah. “As per the Islamic teachings of Khidmat-e-Khalq (philanthropy), the proposed complex will have a community kitchen and a hospital to feed the poor and serve the humanity at large,” he added.  

Courtesy: Newsclick

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The first attack through bullets hit and killed Mahatma Gandhi on January 30, 1948. This attack was a declaration of intent[1] against India’s proud defiance of communal mobilisation and violence, and its adherence, despite the blood and pain of Partition to fashion itself into a secular, socialist, constitutional republic. Another body blow was dealt on December 6, 1992. Three decades down and counting, India has seen a steady downfall into an electorally driven majoritarian abyss.

Between the years, 1946-1950, the 299-day long debates of the Constituent Assembly –including the utter consensus on the Preamble and Fundamental Rights –were and are testimony to the grounded values outlined in India’s Constitution. The chapter III (Fundamental Rights) and Chapter IV (Directive Principles of State Policy) were brought in not just by the 1931 Karachi Resolution passed by the Indian National Congress (INC) but by a centuries long dialectic between the Brahman-Shraman exemplified in the birth and spread of Buddhism, the powerful Sufi-Bhakti poets and sants, the figures of Eknath, Namdeo, Basavannah, Tukaram, Guru Nanak, Kabir, Narayan Guru, Periyar, Phule –Savitribai and Jyotiba –and Ambedkar. Each and all of these, had from times immemorial challenged the hierarchies and exclusion of caste, gender and community insisting on a lived politics of emancipation. This rich tradition, marshalled by modern day –Indian and international –articulations and struggles like those of Bhagat Singh and Ambdekar, Adivasis, Forest Dwellers, Workers, further powered by international struggles and victories made up the Indian national movement that commanded a people’s document, the Constitution.

All that and more was frontally attacked on December 6, 1992 when, in full public view, while 3,000 police and paramilitary men watched, a place of worship –yes, a 400 year old Mosque– was demolished by a large, organised mob mobilised and trained to reach their destination by senior political leaders and provoked to undertake the illegal and unconstitutional act. Not only has this crime gone unpunished, but the public hate-letting, stigmatising and demonising of a section of our own people, Muslims has grown, unchecked. Since 2014 especially this hate-letting is, powerfully, if not officially sanctioned discourse.

Accounting for this time-frame of three decades needs appreciation of the manner and fashion in which both society and state have transformed into such a deeply driven discriminatory framework.

In the 1980s we saw how target blood-letting against minority populations be it Assam, Delhi, Aligarh, Muradabad, Maliana-Hashimpura, Bhagalpur, Ahmedabad, Bombay, Bhiwandi was eased and made possible by two factors, a brazen complicity of men and women in uniform and the sinister role played by hate speech and hate writing. The former phenomenon allowed crimes to erupt mostly unchecked, and the latter facilitated a climate that easily made possible a section among us to be made scapegoat and victim while the majority of us remained silent.

The assault on the Babri Masjid, exactly 30 years ago, was preceded by a politically driven astute campaign of firing up large sections of the Indian population. As LK Advani’s infamous rath yatra wound its way across India, violence broke out in its wake. The messaging was to build a temple to a beloved God, the actions were starkly contradictory: violent and crude, an othering of those meant to be confined to the margins of the citizenry. The lives and properties of thousands of Indian Muslims and Sikhs even (1984) fell to this onslaught of electorally driven majoritarianism.

If, until the 1980s a syncretic civility and some inclusion graced Indian public life and discourse, the build up to 1992 and its three decade long fall out has ushered in an aggressive alternative: a weaponised and militaristic faith-driven political language that has necessitated consistent use of threat, intimidation, rigidity and exclusion. Along with brutalisation of Indian minority populations, the past decades have also seen debasing levels of violence against Indian women and children. It is this version of a majoritarian faith that is now mired and legitimised within the echelons of state power as proponents of an ideology that found the Mahatma’s notions of syncretic and composite nationhood a threat –and assassinated him — now occupy seats of governance. Their books and their icons proudly state that the aim is to overthrown the Indian Constitution, to bring back a 2022 version of the Manu Smriti and to ensure that within this newly born Hindu-tva nation, the enemies are loudly proclaimed: the Muslim, the Christian, the communist (dissenter, journalist, independent thinker). It is on this precipice that India stands today.

Society, or a shrilly vocal side of Indian society, sits comfortably with this discriminatory hatred. Media driven by commercial-corporate-ideological considerations has bowed to dance to the master’s voice. India in the streets and in villages and neighbourhoods exists still as it once and always did, calm and inclusive, but how long will this be allowed to rest? The imminence of an all India NPR-NRC on the back of the application of a discriminatory CAA 2019 threatens social harmony and will bring uncontrollable turmoil. Are opposition spaces, political and social geared to the task of facing such an all-out onslaught and challenge?

How do we, will we, crawl back out of this abyss?

Hate is today a State Project in India where the political formation in power, its vigilante organisations & brown shirts are mentally and physically armed through hate propaganda to violently harm religious minorities, women, Dalits as targets.  Prejudiced Ideas, Acts of Prejudice, Discrimination, Violence –4 stages prior to Genocide—have been breached.  To act against this systemic hate is of course one step, given how persistent hate-spreading, like a virus weakens the wider community into a complicit silence.

Should actions be driven from the bottom or at the visible top? A multi-pronged strategy may be in order. Committed, gritty peace workers on the ground, armed with the Constitution –and an unshakeable conviction that its ideals are home bred, home grown and non-negotiable can and will strengthen efforts to reclaim lost ground from the top.

Our jurisprudence on hate letting has evolved too slowly. In the 1980s and 1990s courts a slew of election petitions filed in the Bombay High Court drew out path-breaking verdicts in three four cases. [2] Candidates and campaigners were de-barred from voting. The Supreme Court of India however overturned most or all these verdicts and the trend to hate-let, to discriminate, to stigmatise and demonise continued, unabated. Political leaders continued with this dangerous and heady mix of lacing public discourse with the pernicious poison of hate. Only of late has the Supreme Court of India made some sharper interventions.

The problem is not that there is a shortage of laws, alone. The problem is the complete absence of political will in these being effectively executed or effectively implemented. [3]

How does 2022 India effectively then implement constitutional principles, laws against hate speech? When you have in power adherents to a politics not of constitutionalism but of authoritarian majoritarianism? Are verdicts from the courts the only method out of an all-consuming hysteria? Or are sustained social and political campaigns against hate speech necessary? Where we make the viable and necessary distinction between the right to Free Speech (Article 19) and the right to live in equality and without discrimination (Articles 14, 15, 16 and 21) and underscrore –as a non-negotiable –that these are congruous rights, each with their own weight and footing. That one man (or woman’s) free speech cannot snatch away another’s right to a life with dignity and equality before the law.

In 2004, the Supreme Court upheld the verdict of the district administration in Tamil Nadu disallowing the entry of Praveen Togadia, then international general secretary of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, not an outfit known for any sobriety. In 2018, in the Tehseen Poonawala case[4], the Supreme Court quoting from the 2017 Law Commission report recommended that the Indian parliament amend the IPC and insert these sections: new section 153C (Prohibiting incitement to hatred) and section 505A (Causing fear, alarm, or provocation of violence in certain cases). Before this, in 2014, was the seminal judgement that made a breakthrough in jurisprudence –understanding the phenomenon of hate speech was/is the Pravasi Bhalai Sanghatana[5] case in which a three member bench of justices B.S. Chauhan, M.Y. Eqbal, A.K. Sikri made a seminal breakthrough when they observed,

“Hate speech is an effort to marginalise individuals based on their membership in a group. Using expression that exposes the group to hatred, hate speech seeks to delegitimise group members in the eyes of the majority, reducing their social standing and acceptance within society. Hate speech, therefore, rises beyond causing distress to individual group members. It can have a societal impact. Hate speech lays the groundwork for later, broad attacks on vulnerable that can range from discrimination, to ostracism, segregation, deportation, violence and, in the most extreme cases, to genocide. Hate speech also impacts a protected group’s ability to respond to the substantive ideas under debate, thereby placing a serious barrier to their full participation in our democracy.”

Meaning that, the Supreme Court has clearly said, and this is important, that hate speech can lead to discrimination, it can lead to ostracism, it can lead to segregation, it can lead to deportation, it can lead to violence. And then the Supreme Court even went on to say that in extreme cases, it can lead to genocide. Yet the phenomenon continues unabated, as the battle between constitutional democracy and an electoral mob-ocracy continues, every day, unabated.

It is this war that is being waged between a governance structures – of state and society—premised on principles of equality, justice and non-discrimination and one –that has captured state power presently –that has no use for such niceties. There is no knowing how this battle will end, or when. This much is certain, however. The human cost has already been too heavy and is being paid, tragically, with every passing day.

The post 1992-2022 How Indian State & Society have both been targeted and transformed appeared first on SabrangIndia.

As the 2019 general election approaches, the ghosts of 1992 are back on India’s streets. There seems to be a well organized clamor for the construction of Ram Temple in Ayodhya, in clear defiance of the Supreme Court. And so, for the many who do not know what the original Ram Temple movement is and the many who may have forgotten the mayhem, eminent activist and journalist Teesta Setalvad presents a ready reckoner on what the Ram Temple movement really is about and why has it been so conveniently resurrected, twenty six years later in 2018.

First published on December 6, 2018

Courtesy: https://cjp.org.in/

The post What is the Ram Temple Really about? appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The post Babri Masjid demolition 30 years on with Teesta Setalvad appeared first on SabrangIndia.

First published on: 01 Feb 2011

I am a journalist and given the timing of this meeting, I should probably first mention a disclaimer. Though I am from the English mainstream media, I don’t figure  in the Radia tapes. You may therefore hear me with a degree of indulgence. I don’t take dictation from any corporate lobbyists. I don’t toe any government line. If I travel with anybody, it is more with activists like Teesta Setalvad and I’m very proud to say so because I see no contradiction in this. I don’t feel compromised when I speak or when I espouse public causes. And Ayodhya is one such. And if I may extend the Radia tapes metaphor, Ayodhya has been a bit like the Radia tapes of our claim to be secular. From 1949 onwards, Ayodhya has been a major challenge which showed how hollow our pretensions are, right from the way in which the establishment responded to the 1949 episode.

I am very conscious of the fact that I am the third speaker here and that I come after Anupam Gupta who gave us such a comprehensive account of the systemic response to the 1949 and 1992 episodes concerning Ayodhya. So I will try not to tread over the same ground. I will try to deal with the few gaps that have been left in an otherwise very comprehensive exposition. One that comes to mind offhand is the reference made to the 1994 judgement of the Supreme Court, given during the follow-up to the demolition, on the law (the Acquisition of Certain Area at Ayodhya Act 1993) that the Narasimha Rao government came up with. What the Supreme Court gave to the nation smacked of a Hindu bias and this was underlined by the fact that it was a split verdict. The three judges who gave the majority judgement, and this is probably no coincidence, were all Hindus and the two who gave the dissenting opinion were non-Hindus, one was a Parsi and the other a Muslim.

The reason I make reference to this is because the Allahabad high court in 2010 likewise delivered a split verdict in the Ayodhya case. Much of the truth about the 1949 episode is reflected essentially in Justice Khan’s judgement even though it was absolutely central to determining who this disputed site should be given to. The whole basis for the claim arose from the illegal act that took place on December 23, 1949 and yet it was given short shrift in the two judgements delivered by the Hindu judges. And this should be a matter of great concern to us. There is a need for our judiciary to appear more assertive in displaying our secular commitment.

Another issue that has not been dealt with in great detail and which I will therefore take up concerns the criminal proceedings that followed after the 1992 episode. The manner in which the state responded to this crime was as strange as the manner in which it responded to the crime of 1949. The crime of 1949 was a turning point in the history of modern India; yet though a first information report (FIR) was formally lodged, it has never been investigated. This was an episode unlike any other in our history, an episode that has led to so many subsequent crimes; it has polarised the nation and continues to dog us even today. There has been no judicial finding on the illegality of what happened that night in 1949 or on culpability, on who was responsible for it.

Similarly, with regard to the 1992 episode, there have been FIRs – not one but as many as 49 FIRs – and the proceedings are still going on, there has still been no judicial finding on what happened on that fateful day, December 6. Of these 49 FIRs, only two really matter in the immediate context because the other 47 relate to attacks on journalists so I will dwell a little longer on these two. The first one, FIR No. 197/92, deals with the demolition per se, the run-up to it, the conspiracy that led to the demolition, the people who were involved in that demolition. The other FIR, No. 198/92, deals with the inflammatory speeches that were delivered by eight main leaders of the sangh parivar from a makeshift dais, Ram Katha Kunj Manch, erected not very far from the Babri Masjid as it stood that morning. The FIR dealing with the demolition did not name any accused persons at all. The police were probably justified in doing so because their focus was on the kar sevaks (who had been actively engaged in the demolition) and so this FIR, which was registered on the evening of December 6, names no names at all. FIR No. 198 names eight sangh parivar leaders. This is not the strange part. The strange sequence of events begins thereafter.

Much of the truth about the 1949 episode is reflected essentially in Justice Khan’s judgement of 2010 even though it was absolutely central to determining who this disputed site should be given to. The whole basis for the claim arose from the illegal act that took place on December 23, 1949 and yet it was given short shrift in the two judgements delivered by the Hindu judges

For some reason the centre, which had taken over the administration of Uttar Pradesh through president’s rule soon afterwards, chose to refer the demolition FIR, No. 197, to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) while the FIR dealing with the inflammatory speeches delivered by sangh parivar leaders, which is probably a more sensitive issue, more politically sensitive at least, was referred to the Crime Branch, Criminal Investigation Department (CB-CID), of the Uttar Pradesh police. There was really no reason for the two to be separated. Both pertained to the same crime; there was a link, an organic link, between them. These inflammatory speeches were made not very far from the scene of the crime, where the demolition was going on, and they were addressed to kar sevaks who were gathered there while the crime was taking place simultaneously. And there were witnesses to all of this. It is very logical to infer that inflamed as they were by these speeches, those kar sevaks were encouraged to indulge in that crime. The two cases were linked yet for some reason the Congress government of Narasimha Rao – I mention this because there’s this rhetoric about the Congress being a secular party and so on and so forth – did this very strange thing, of separating the two cases. They were given to two different agencies. (While FIR No. 197 was handed over to the CBI, FIR No. 198 was to be prosecuted by the state CID in a special court in Lalitpur, later moved to Rae Bareli.)

Then a few months later it wakes up to the incongruity of this duality and it clubs the two cases together and gives them to the CBI. And then it also refers the two cases to one special court (a special CBI court set up in Lucknow). The reason I mention this is because it was in this special court that the CBI in 1993 first filed a joint charge sheet related to both FIRs, wherein these leaders, Advani and company, were named, in the context of the demolition, as conspirators. They were very much a part of the conspiracy and there was ample evidence of this. After all, in the run-up to the demolition there were the two rath yatras that converged in Ayodhya, one led by Advani, the other led by Murli Manohar Joshi, inviting people to come to Ayodhya in large numbers for the alleged kar seva; and on the eve of the demolition there was a secret meeting at the residence of Vinay Katiyar, the then MP from that area – which the CBI charge sheet refers to – where the finer details of this conspiracy were probably discussed. This charge sheet was filed in October 1993, nearly a year later.

In 1997 Judge Jagdish Prasad Srivastava of the additional (special) sessions court, Lucknow, frames charges. He passes an order prima facie accepting, taking cognisance, of all the charges made by the CBI so now there is a judicial stamp on these charges. A lot of the CBI’s findings were endorsed by this judge and he was poised to call each of the accused persons before court to read them the charges. It was at this stage that this legal process was interrupted. Some of the persons named in that charge sheet (a total of 49 persons were named in the charge sheet – somehow the figure 49 keeps recurring in this context!) went to court, the Allahabad high court, and got a stay order on proceedings.

This stay order was finally lifted in 2001 by which time the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) was in power at the centre, by which time Advani was sitting in North Block as home minister and, if I am not mistaken, was probably even deputy prime minister of India. Whether he was, whether he had acquired that designation by then or not, he was very much a powerful leader. The Allahabad high court, speaking through Justice Jagdish Bhalla, said, look, there was a flaw, a procedural flaw, in referring the political leaders’ case, the inflammatory speeches case, to the special court at Lucknow but the saving grace is that it is a defect that can be cured. Now all that the then BJP government in Uttar Pradesh, led by Rajnath Singh, had to do in terms of the high court order was to issue a fresh notification so that the reference of that case, No. 198, was made in a proper manner.

After that, for weeks on end Rajnath Singh would keep saying, he would mystify it: “Oh, we are looking into it, we have referred this to our legal experts, they will do the needful.” And sure enough, they did nothing of the sort. That vacuum allowed the special sessions court in Lucknow, a sessions judge called Srikant Shukla, to separate the two cases completely. He said that the leaders, Advani and company, would no longer be tried for the demolition in this special court. They would be tried separately, if at all, for the lesser offence of inflammatory speeches.

The term ‘legal fiction’, so often used, has acquired a very perverse meaning in the context of Ayodhya. The legal fiction here is that we are today confronted with a situation where, even as we speak, proceedings are going on in the Lucknow special court dealing with the Ayodhya demolition while the special court in Rae Bareli deals exclusively, wearing blinkers, with the issue of inflammatory speeches. The fact that the two are linked is totally overlooked. The fact that you can’t talk about conspiracy without bringing leaders into it is overlooked. Look at the joke that is being played on us. I am not talking about the September 30, 2010 judgement of the Allahabad high court. I am talking about the related issue of criminal proceedings and the farce that is being perpetrated on us even today. There is so much hype about our being a rising power in the world and so forth but look at the manner in which more and more people are able to mock at all notions of the rule of law, of secularism.

The continuing joke is that in the Lucknow special court, accused persons whose names you have never heard of, whose faces you would not recognise, some anonymous kar sevaks, are being tried for the crime of conspiring to demolish the Babri Masjid all on their own, without the knowledge or involvement or instigation of any of these sangh parivar leaders, of the VHP, the BJP, the RSS, etc. That is the implication of their being tried in isolation, of only these unknown persons being tried for the demolition. And in Rae Bareli, you have the sangh parivar leaders being tried and being tried for what? Only for delivering inflammatory speeches which, as far as the courts are concerned, have nothing to do with the demolition because they will look at the issue of inflammatory speeches in isolation. And if that were not farcical enough, we must also bear in mind that we witnessed during the NDA’s reign a glaring instance of how the judiciary often does the bidding of the executive (just as, in the context of the Radia tapes, you have heard that journalists do the bidding of corporate lobbyists). So much for the independence of the judiciary.

We have seen how in 1986, in the context of the Shah Bano case and all the flak Rajiv Gandhi was getting for what he was doing to allegedly appease Muslim fundamentalists, he came up with this brainwave of doing a balancing act and got his administration to take the necessary steps to get the locks of the Ayodhya shrine opened. The Babri Masjid, which was kept under lock and key from 1950 onwards to keep the dispute under control, was suddenly opened. We have heard about the manner in which the then district judge, KM Pandey, referred to some divine inspiration that he got from a monkey, which he even mentions in his memoirs. This was an instance of courts doing the bidding of the government.

 
Similarly, in the NDA’s time when the inflammatory speeches issue was taken up and charges were to be framed, what does the court do? The Rae Bareli court? It discharges the person who for all practical purposes was the face of the Ayodhya movement, the so-called Ayodhya movement. The 1986 incident, of the locks being broken open and Hindu devotees being allowed to have darshan of Ram Lalla inside the Babri Masjid, gave momentum to this movement. And the face of this movement – especially after the BJP’s Palampur resolution in 1989 (openly supporting the VHP’s demand for building the Ramjanmabhoomi temple in Ayodhya) – was LK Advani. Minus Advani, minus his genius, his political skills, it would probably not have acquired these proportions. This leader was discharged. He was there on the dais but he was discharged while other leaders were still going to be prosecuted.

We have little evidence, documentary evidence, of the demolition. The 47 other cases that were registered by the police along with the two cases I have been talking about involved attacks on journalists. Why were these cases registered? Many of these journalists were there to do independent work and they were inconvenient to the kar sevaks, to the sangh parivar types. So while part of the telltale evidence of a conspiracy was the manner in which they stealthily removed the Ram Lalla idols before the demolition, further, very clear, evidence of it was the orchestration of events. It was not as if some people got carried away by their emotions and started attacking the Babri Masjid. On the contrary, while one section of kar sevaks was engaged in the demolition, there was another section that very systematically attacked journalists. As soon as they saw a camera, they would smash it, they would scare the journalists away, they would intimidate them, they would beat them up – there were actual instances of this nature. That is how those 47 cases of attacks on journalists arose. In spite of all the demolition, you only have little bits of evidence here and there, like the photograph of Uma Bharti hugging Murli Manohar Joshi, which have survived those attacks. This is because of the kind of crime it was, the mass crime that took place in Ayodhya, when even journalists were not spared.

Advani was discharged on the testimony of his security officer, one very upright young Indian Police Service officer called Anju Gupta. And what does her testimony say? In her testimony, and this is something that anybody who reads it will know, she is nailing his claims, his much touted claim that December 6, 1992 was the saddest day of his life. The author of this movement, the man who did whatever he could to bring things to that stage on December 6, had the gumption to say that that was the saddest day of his life. But she gave us a ringside view of what was happening on the dais, what the conversation was, how he was very much a part of the jubilation.

This lady goes on to give further evidence about how Advani was very much a part of all the jubilation and how there was a time when he was concerned about the kar sevaks who were on top of the structure, engaged in the demolition. His concern was not to stop them, his concern was not to bring them down and save the mosque. His concern, and this comes through very clearly in Anju Gupta’s testimony, was that because there were a lot of kar sevaks at the ground level who were simultaneously demolishing the structure, there was a great probability of those who were on top of the structure being hurt, of their falling down and getting hurt. That was his concern and that is why he sent Uma Bharti there to dissuade them, to tell them to come down. Those were his concerns; there was no anxiety being displayed by him to stop anything. This is what came through in her testimony.

Yet the special court in Rae Bareli, when it discharged Advani during the NDA’s reign, actually cited Anju Gupta’s testimony – the judgement was in Hindi, the judge used the expression “ati mahatvapurna (exceedingly important)” – as the crucial basis on which he was letting off Advani. So much for this rule of law that we all keep buying into.

When there was a change of regime in 2004, this farce was corrected. Advani was brought back into the case. And given the background circumstances, I dare say that this judicial correction would not have taken place but for the fortuitous circumstance of the government having changed at the centre.

In the Lucknow special court, some anonymous kar sevaks are being tried for the crime of conspiring to demolish the Babri Masjid without the knowledge, involvement or instigation of any of the sangh parivar leaders. And in Rae Bareli, the sangh parivar leaders are being tried only for delivering inflammatory speeches

These events are all interconnected. The fact that the 1949 FIR has never been followed up, that there have been no convictions, is no coincidence. And it doesn’t end there.

To come back to the Supreme Court and the judgement of 1994, there is more to it than the split verdict on the then government’s proposed new law. There was another very farcical aspect that pertains to contempt of court. During the run-up to the demolition this matter was also before the Supreme Court.

As we are now aware, the intelligence reports issued prior to the demolition were very precise and any administration would have known from those reports that there was imminent danger to the structure. So there was wilful negligence on the part of the centre, on the part of the Narasimha Rao government, in this regard. Simultaneously, there was a public interest petitioner, Mohammad Aslam Bhure, and his counsel, OP Sharma, who were very valiantly fighting a battle before the Supreme Court. Their applications were based on newspaper reports that said the same thing: that what was going to happen on December 6 was very serious, that the threats cannot be taken lightly – these were issues that were brought before the court. And more importantly, the Supreme Court bench headed by Justice MN Venkatachaliah had one very compelling reason to take these warnings seriously.

In July 1992 proceedings were underway before the Supreme Court, also at the instance of Bhure, on the construction of a platform near the Babri Masjid that was going on at the time. The court kept on ordering the Kalyan Singh government to stop this, to respect the status quo order, and yet the construction took place. The first contempt notice to Kalyan Singh was issued in July 1992 in this context and then, on December 6, this great crime takes place. These warnings should have been taken seriously. The undertakings given by the same Kalyan Singh who so wilfully violated and disobeyed the Supreme Court orders in July 1992 should therefore not have been taken seriously. Yet the Supreme Court in its wisdom decided to allow symbolic kar seva to take place.

How much of this was based on their commitment to the rule of law, how much of it was because they were Hindus, I don’t know. Despite the background, the Supreme Court trusted these fellows to perform a symbolic kar seva. And when this belief of theirs was belied, was completely shattered, sure enough, the Supreme Court, for national consumption, to the delight of our newspapers and TV channels, came up with some very strong observations: This is the greatest ever perfidy, there can be no greater instance of contempt of the Supreme Court, an otherwise mild judge really thundered in the courtroom, making someone like KK Venugopal, who was representing the Kalyan Singh government, say: I’m ashamed my lord, I was not privy to this conspiracy. When my clients said that they were going to observe the rule of law, that they were going to ensure that no damage would take place to the structure, I took their word for it. That was the kind of drama that took place in the court soon after the demolition. This was part of the same response.

And then, along with the 1994 judgement wherein the post-demolition measures taken by the government were examined by the Supreme Court, the court also dealt with the issue of contempt. The media and most people thought that the one-day sentence awarded to Kalyan Singh in that context was for the demolition but it was actually for the July 1992 instance of contempt, the first contempt notice. The judges wilfully kept clear of the act of contempt that was committed on December 6, 1992. To date, just as the 1949 FIR has still not resulted in a charge sheet and prosecution, this greatest ever contempt, as we were told it was subsequent to the December 6 incident, has still not been disposed of. No action has so far been taken. It is as if the judges don’t want to take chances with Lord Ram’s wrath.

Their inaction is not very different from the actions of Judge Pandey of the Uttar Pradesh judiciary who saw the hand of Hanuman, Hanuman’s benediction, in his decision to open the gates of the Babri Masjid. One cannot help seeing such significance in their eloquent silence on taking action against the December 6 act of contempt. And such silence is not an isolated instance.

We saw a similar silence in the context of the Supreme Court’s judgement on Hindutva in 1995. To make a brief reference to the Hindutva judgement… How do you talk about whether Hindutva is really liberal and in consonance with the Constitution without talking about what exactly Veer Savarkar, the man who coined that expression, had in mind: What was his definition of Hindutva, how did he propound this very pernicious theory that India belongs more to those whose birthplace and sacred land is India? This was an aspect that was totally glossed over by the Supreme Court in its Hindutva judgement as it merrily went along with the view that Hindutva is no different from Hinduism, the catholic, liberal interpretation of Hinduism.

I look at all of this as an outsider, as a representative of the media; I’m sure those of you who are from within the system can see this farce even more clearly than I do.

Archived from Communalism Combat, February 2011 Year 17    No.154, Section 1-Silence is Eloquent

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