India After Gandhi (109 page)

The language of the mob was only the language of public opinion cleansed of hypocrisy and restraint.

H
ANNAH
A
RENDT

I
N
O
CTOBER
1952
THE
chief of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) wrote a rare signed article in the English-language press. ‘Cut from its moorings, regeneration of a nation is not possible’, insisted M. S. Golwalkar. It was, therefore,

necessary to revive the fundamental values and ideas, and to wipe out all signs that reminded us of our past slavery and humiliation. It is our first necessity to see ourselves in pristine purity. Our present and future has to be well united with our glorious past. The broken chain has got to be re-linked. That alone will fire the youth of free India with a new spirit of service and devotion to our people. There cannot be a higher call of national unity than to be readily prepared to sacrifice our all for the honour and glory of the motherland. That is the highest form of patriotism.

How could one give shape and meaning to this very general ideal? What specific issue would charge the youth to sacrifice their all? ‘Such a point of honour in our national life’, believed the RSS chief,

is none else but MOTHER COW, the living symbol of the Mother Earth – that deserves to be the sole object of devotion and worship. To stop forthwith any onslaught on this particular point of our national honour, and to foster the spirit of devotion to the motherland, [a] ban on cow-slaughter should find topmost priority in our programme of national renaissance in Swaraj.
¹

In the opinion of Guru Golwalkar and his Sangh, India was a ‘Hindu’ nation. But the Hindus themselves were divided – by caste, sect, language and region. From the time it was founded in 1925, the mission of the RSS had been to make the Hindus a strong and cohesive fighting force. For its members, as for the organization as a whole, religious sentiment went hand-in-hand with political ambition. We may not doubt Golwalkar’s own personal devotion to the cow. Yet his call to make cow-slaughter a national priority stemmed from a much greater goal, that of uniting the Hindus.

The cow was found all over India. Hindus too were found all over India. And Hindus worshipped the cow, whereas Muslims and Christians preferred to butcher and eat it. That was the logic on which the RSS sought to build a nationwide campaign. Fourteen years after Golwalkar’s article, a large crowd marched on Parliament to demand a countrywide ban on cow-slaughter. That was the campaign’s high point, and its appeal steadily declined thereafter. Even at its zenith its main attractions were to Hindu holy men and RSS workers – it never quite achieved the popular support its promoters had hoped for.

In the 1980s, however, a single holy spot in a single small town was able to accomplish what a ubiquitous holy animal could not. The campaign to build a temple where a mosque stood in Ayodhya generated a widespread appeal. Many Hindus across India, and of different castes, were beginning to see this as a ‘point of honour in our national life’. To these people, the Babri Masjidin Ayodhya was indeed are minder of ‘our past slavery and humiliation’. To put a temple to Ram in its place had become the ‘sole object of devotion and worship’ for thousands of Hindu youths. This was energy expended in a cause which Golwalkar himself had not anticipated. Were he alive, he might have been surprised, and certainly also pleased.

In 1984 the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), successor to the old Jana Sangh, won a mere two seats in the eighth general election. Five years later its tally was eighty-six. A major reason for this rise was its involvement in the Ayodhya campaign.

Anxious to keep the Congress out of power, the BJP now supported V. P. Singh’s National Front without joining the government. However,
the decision to implement the Mandal Commission’s report, announced in August 1990, threw the party into a tizzy. Some leaders thought this a diabolical plan to break up Hindu society. Others argued that the extension of affirmative action was a necessary bow to the aspirations of the backward castes. Within the party, and within RSS
shakhas
,
the
debate raged furiously – should, or should not, the Mandal recommendations be endorsed?

Rather than take a position, the BJP chose to shift the terms of political debate, away from Mandal and caste and back towards religion and the mandir/mosque question. The party announced a
yatra, or
march, from the ancient temple of Somnath in Gujarat to the town of Ayodhya. The march would be led by L. K. Advani, an austere, unsmiling man reckoned to be more ‘hard line’ than his colleague Atal Behari Vajpayee. He would travel in a Toyota van fitted up to look like a
rath
(chariot), stopping to hold public meetings on the way.

Commencing on 25 September 1990, Mr Advani’s
rath yatra
planned to reach Ayodhya five weeks later, after travelling more than 6,000 miles through eight states. Militants of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) flanked the van, flagging it off from one town and welcoming it at the next. At public meetings they were complemented by saffron-robed
sadhus
, whose ‘necklaces of prayer beads, long beards and ash-marked foreheads provided a strong visual counterpoint’ to these armed young men. The march’s imagery was religious, allusive, militant, masculine, and anti-Muslim’. This was reinforced by the speeches made by Advani, which accused the government of ‘appeasing’ the Muslim minority and of practising a ‘pseudo-secularism’ which denied the legitimate interests and aspirations of the Hindu majority. The building of a Ram temple in Ayodhya was presented as the symbolic fulfilment of these interests and aspirations.
²

Advani’s march through north-western India was a major headache to V. P. Singh’s government. For the procession ‘posed a provocation that could not be ignored. Growing disorder, riots, and a final destruction of the mosque loomed ahead. Yet there would be serious consequences to stopping it. Not only would Singh have to act against [the revered god] Rama, but he would also bring down his own ruling coalition and risk serious disorder.’
³
The
yatra
reached Delhi, where Advani camped for several days, daring the government to arrest him. The challenge was ducked, and the procession started up again. However, a week before it was to reach its final destination, the van was stopped and
Advani placed under preventive detention. The arrest had been ordered by the Bihar chief minister Lalu Prasad Yadav, through whose state the march was then passing.

While L. K. Advani cooled his heels in a Bihar government guest house, his followers were making their way to Ayodhya. Thousands of
kar sevaks
(volunteers) were converging from all parts of the country. The Uttar Pradesh chief minister, Mulayam Singh Yadav, was, like his Bihari namesake, a bitter political opponent of the BJP. He ordered the mass arrest of the visitors from out of state. Apparently as many as 150,000
kar sevaks
were detained, but almost half as many still found their way to Ayodhya. Twenty thousand security personnel were already in the temple town, some regular police, others from the paramilitary Border Security Force (BSF).

On the morning of 30 October a large crowd of
kar sevaks
was intercepted at abridge on the river Sarayu, which divided Ayodhya’s old town from the new. The volunteers pushed their way past the police and surged towards the Babri Masjid. There they were met by BSF contingents. Some
kar sevaks
managed to dodge them, too, and reach the mosque. One planted a saffron flag on the structure; others attacked it with axes and hammers. To stop a mass invasion the BSF
jawans
used tear gas and, later, live bullets. The
kar sevaks
were chased through narrow streets and into temple courtyards. Some of them resisted, with sticks and stones – they were supported by angry residents, who rained down improvised missiles on the police.
⁴

The battle between the security forces and the volunteers raged for three whole days. At least twenty
kar sevaks
died in the fighting. Their bodies were later picked up by VHP activists, cremated, and the ashes stored in urns. These were then taken around the towns of northern India, inflaming passions wherever they went. Hindus were urged to take revenge for the blood of these ‘martyrs’. The state of Uttar Pradesh was rocked by a series of religious riots. Hindu mobs attacked Muslim localities, and – in a manner reminiscent of the grisly Partition massacres – stopped trains to pull out and kill those who were recognizably Muslim. In some places the victims retaliated, whereupon they were set upon by the Provincial Armed Constabulary, long notorious for its hostility towards the minority community.
⁵

As one commentator put it, L. K. Advani’s
rath yatra
had, in effect, become a
raktyatra
, a journey of blood.
⁶

Among the casualties of the
rath yatra
was Prime Minister V. P. Singh. In November 1990 he resigned, unable to sustain his minority government in the absence of BJP support. As in 1979 – when Morarji Desai demitted office – the Congress allowed a lame-duck prime minister (in this case Chandra Shekhar) to hold charge while they prepared for midterm elections to be held in the summer of 1991. In the middle of the campaign Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated while speaking in a town in Tamil Nadu. The assassin, who was also blown up by the bomb she was carrying, was later revealed to be a representative of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. The killing was an act of vengeance, for the LTTE had not forgiven Rajiv Gandhi for sending troops against them in 1987.

Notwithstanding the murder of Rajiv Gandhi, the elections went ahead on schedule. Pollsters had predicted a hung Parliament, with no party anywhere near a majority. However, the sympathy generated by the killing allowed the Congress to win 244 seats. With support from independents they were in a position to form a government. P. V. Narasimha Rao, a veteran of the Congress Party from Andhra Pradesh who had held important positions in Rajiv Gandhi’s Cabinet, was sworn in as prime minister.

In these Parliamentary elections of 1991 the BJP won 120 seats, up thirty-five from the last time. It also won the assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh. It was now in power in four states in northern India (Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Himachal Pradesh being the others). Clearly, the Ram campaign was paying political dividends. Riots were being effectively translated into votes. At the same time, these successes at the polls had led to a crisis of identity. Was the BJP a political party, or was it a social movement? Some leaders thought the party should now put the mosque-versus-temple controversy on the back burner. It should instead raise broader questions of economic and foreign policy and work to expand its influence in south India. On the other side, the VHP and the RSS were determined to keep the spotlight on that disputed territory in Ayodhya. In October 1991 they acquired the land around the mosque and began levelling the ground, preparing for temple construction.

In July 1992 a team from the central government was sent to study the situation. They found that there had been ‘large-scale demolition’ on
the disputed site, and the building of a ‘large concrete platform’, both developments in clear contravention of court orders demanding that the status quo be maintained. To their dismay, the Uttar Pradesh government, headed by the old RSS hand Kalyan Singh, had turned a blind eye to these activities. There had been, in sum, ‘flagrant violation of the law in Ayodhya’.

Worried that the trouble would escalate, the Home Ministry in New Delhi had prepared a contingency plan, allowing for the imposition of President’s Rule in Uttar Pradesh and a central takeover of the mosque/ temple complex. However, Prime Minister Rao still hoped for the matter to be resolved by dialogue. He had several meetings with VHP leaders and also consulted with the opposing Babri Masjid Action Committee. The possibility of having the matter referred to the Supreme Court was also discussed.
⁷

Meanwhile, the VHP announced that 6 December had been chosen as the ‘auspicious’ day on which work on the temple would commence. From the middle of November volunteers began streaming into Ayodhya, encouraged by the fact that the state government was now in the hands of the BJP. The chief minister, Kalyan Singh, was summoned to New Delhi. Narasimha Rao urged him to allow the Supreme Court to decide on the case. Singh told the PM that ‘the only comprehensive solution to the Ayodhya dispute was to hand over the disputed structure to the Hindus’.
⁸

Kalyan Singh had instructed his government to house and feed the thousands of volunteers coming in from out of the state. Reports of this large-scale influx alarmed the Home Ministry. They prepared a fresh contingency plan, under which paramilitary forces would be sent to Ayodhya. By the end of the month some 20,000 troops had been stationed at locations within an hour’s march of the town, ready to move in when required. This, claimed the home secretary at the time, ‘was the largest mobilisation of such forces for such an operation since Independence’.
⁹

On the other side, more than 100,000
kar sevaks
had reached the temple town, ‘complete with
trishuls
[tridents] and bows and arrows’. On the last day of November, at a press conference in Delhi at which he announced his own departure for Ayodhya, L. K. Advani said that ‘I cannot give any guarantee at the moment on what will happen on 6 December. All I know is that we are going to perform
kar seva
.’
¹⁰