Remembering Babri Mosque

The month of December brings back memories of the gory incident of demolition of Babri Mosque in India. As it is, on December 6, 1992, a large gathering of extremist Hindus completely demolished the Mughal era 464-year-old Babri Masjid erected by the emperor Babar in Ayodhya. The demolition reportedly occurred after a rally supporting the movement turned violent after a guarantee from the state government to the Indian Supreme Court that the mosque would not be demolished. But there are other versions of the episode as well.

The demolition, in a historical and political context, was originally manipulated by the British who constructed a fence around the mosque and gave the order that Muslims and Hindus would use separate gates for entrance. This led to petitions that led to claims of Babri Mosque being a Hindu temple. The demolition ultimately led to several months of inter-communal rioting between Hindus and minority Muslim communities, causing the death of around 2,000 people, mostly Muslims.

Senior BJP leader Yashwant Sinha admitted to The Sunday Observer of December 14, 1992, after the demolition of Babri mosque: “India is being pushed back into the dark ages by obscurantist, fundamentalist and fascist forces. Their appeasement… has today given them the strength and the audacity to seek to destroy the very basis of our nation state…. [T]he secular forces will have to unitedly and determinedly meet this challenge if India is to survive as a democratic, secular, progressive, liberal and modern nation.”

According to Indian media, the Communist Party of India (Maoists) has joined the Indian Muslims in observing the anniversary of the destruction of Babri Mosque as a black day. In a signed press release issued by the central committee of CPI (Maoists), its spokesperson Abhay said that the Maoists had all along maintained that the land on which the Babri Masque stood belonged to Muslims and it should be given back to them. The statement underscored the injustice done to Muslims in the controversial verdict in the title case regarding possession of the Babri Mosque site. “On 30th September, giving its verdict on the ownership rights of the controversial site , pending for 61 years , the Lucknow bench of the Allahabad High Court with its Brahmanical Hindu religious ideology, did injustice to the Muslims. Without any historical evidence and archaeological proof, it stated the controversial place to be the birth place of Lord Rama,” it said.

It has also been reported through a sting operation, conducted on 23 key people of the Ram Janambhoomi movement, that "the demolition of the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992, was elaborately planned by the various wings of the Sangh Parivar and executed with precision by trained volunteers. It wasn't, as it is claimed, a case of mob frenzy going out of control, leading to the fall of the disputed 16th Century structure."

Posing as a would-be-author researching his book on the Ayodhya movement, "Cobrapost associate editor K Ashish travelled to Ayodhya, Faizabad, Tanda, Lucknow, Gorakhpur, Mathura, Moradabad in UP, Jaipur, Aurangabad, Mumbai and Gwalior interviewing 23 of those who participated in the operation. He clandestinely recorded conversations with them. If what they claim is true, the Ram Janambhoomi leaders and activists toiled secretly for months on a plan codenamed 'Operation Janmabhoomi' and executed it with military precision. Volunteers were trained, logistics painstakingly put in place and the assault on the disputed shrine launched using large surging crowds with volunteers skilled in demolishing structures embedded in it. Not only do those interviewed spell out details of the planning, they also allegedly reveal how enthusiastic young participants were deliberately used as cannon fodder by provoking a police firing on kar sevaks in 1990 because of the belief of some leaders that the movement would not gather steam unless 'some Hindus die'."

Babri Masjid has emerged as a symbol of militant Hindu revivalism or a central theme of Hindutva ideology. The BJP whips up the Hindu support for an electoral strategy that aims to sideline India’s minorities. Savarkar, the man who coined the ugly term of Hindutva, implies that only Hindus and those following Sikhism, Jainism and Buddhism can be true citizens of the country while Zoroastrian, Christianity, Islam and Judaism originated outside the Subcontinent and thus their followers have no rights. They are aliens and will remain so. A senior leader of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council) Praveen Togadia has gone to the extent of declaring that the percentage of Hindus in India should be raised from 82 percent to 100 percent. He talks about forcibly converting or eliminating the minorities altogether. It can be stated with confidence that the dome that was demolished in Ayodhya on December 6, 1992 was not that of a mosque alone; what transpired was that the fragile edifice of secular India or secular credentials of India were demolished by BJP.