Ashok Singhal: Moving Spirit

WHEN ASHOK SINGHAL broached his plans to mobilise support for the Ram Mandir, then Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) chief Madhukar Dattatraya Deoras told him that if he took up the struggle there should be no turning back. For Singhal, it was a single-minded mission—making Ram the force to galvanise a pan-Hindu oneness—and there was no looking back.

Singhal was then with the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), the socio-religious arm of RSS, where he mobilised the support of sants of various sects, winning them over in his struggle to make the Ram temple a mass cultural movement, surpassing caste di­visions within the Hindu community. It found support, beyond perhaps even his expectations, particularly in northern India. It is his face, with vermilion and sandalwood paste on his forehead, metal rimmed spectacles and angavastram around the neck, that came to mind whenever the Ram Janmabhoomi agitation was mentioned, seen by some as a messiah restoring Hindu pride and by others as a diabolical divider.

Singhal did not mince his words. Those who worked closely with him say he was unperturbed by what people said about him, determined, confident, and focused on his task. His was a quest that began even before he plunged into the Ram Janmabhoomi agitation. It cut across party lines, as was evident from the Virat Hindu Samaj, of which he was general secretary and senior Con­gress leader Karan Singh president, set up to bring all Hindus, from upper castes to Other Backward Classes (OBCs) and Dalits on a common platform. When the Samaj, formed in 1981 after the Meenakshipuram conversion in Tamil Nadu of 300 Dalit families to Islam, called for a meeting in Delhi, where Singhal was RSS prant pracharak, about five lakh people turned up for it. One of the grievances of the Dalits, who converted to other faiths, was their entry being barred to several temples. Later, at an RSS meet in Bangalore, it was Singhal who is believed to have been the most vocal about the conversions. For him, the conversions under­scored the immediate need to break caste barriers among Hindus, so the disadvantaged sections would not be vulnerable and lured into converting. Singhal, along with RSS’ low-profile pracharak Moropant Pingley, organised the Ekatmata Yatra (journey of one soul), meticulously selecting various routes in the country, mo­bilising Hindus from all castes to participate in it.

After he was sent to VHP, Singhal breathed new life into the out­fit which was founded in 1964 to bring together Hindus in India and abroad. For Singhal, the struggle to reclaim Ram’s ‘birthplace’ from the site of the Babri Masjid was another platform to spark off a mass movement, bringing all Hindus together. Back in 1959, it was not the Ram temple, but the Kashi Vishwanath temple that was specifically named in the Sangh’s Akhil Bharatiya Pratinidhi Sabha (ABPS) resolution, asking the government to take steps “for the return of all such desecrated temples”. But, sensing Hindu senti­ment on Ram, Kashi Vishwanath went on the back burner. It was the Ram temple that became the focus of the Sangh, with VHP as its key crusader for the cause. In 1984, led by Singhal, VHP planned the Sri Ram Janki Yatra, revolving around ‘liberating’ Ram, showing the god to be behind bars, on seven chariots, travelling from Bihar’s Sitamarhi, where Sita was believed to have been born, to Ayod­hya. The unapologetic display of Hindu nationalism on the yatra pushed Singhal into the spotlight as a firebrand Hindutva figure.

Singhal led more yatras. He launched the shila pujan, getting bricks for the temple construction from various parts of the country. It struck a chord among Hindus. “In the late 1980s, nobody could see any sign of the mandir being built at the site of the Babri structure. At that time he invested very substantial amounts in the purchase of land and equipment for carving pillars for the temple. Only either a crazy person or a very confident one could have done that. He was the later,” says VHP’s Alok Kumar. In October 1990, despite the state government’s diktats and Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav’s warning that without his permission even a bird could not fly (koi parinda bhi par nahi mar sakta), Singhal reached Ayodhya around 10:30AM on a bike, along with several kar sevaks. He shouted, “Mandir wahin banayenge (the temple will be built right there),” when someone threw a stone hitting him on the head. It hit the headlines, with newspapers carrying the image of a bleed­ing Singhal, leading kar sevaks. The Mulayam Singh government, which ordered a police crackdown on the kar sevaks, lost the next election. Singhal became the protagonist of the Ram Janmabhoomi agitation till the Sangh’s political wing, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), came into the picture with its leader LK Advani riding into it on his rath.

The Ram temple increased BJP’s Lok Sabha tally but the fallout of the political conquest left Singhal disturbed. Senior journalist Ram Bahadur Rai recalls a day in 2010-11 when he spent several hours with him at the VHP office. It happened to be Singhal’s birth­day and some people came to wish him, but after that he spoke to Rai alone about a meeting he, along with some sants, had had with former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee a few months after the 2002 Godhra train fire in which 59 kar sevaks and pilgrims return­ing from Ayodhya were killed. Arun Jaitley, who was a minister in the Vajpayee government, was also present at the meeting. When Vajpayee asked Jaitley to see them out, Singhal asked the minister, who was also a senior lawyer, if there was any legal hurdle in the Ram Janmabhoomi issue. Singhal pointed out that there were 64 acres outside the disputed land which could be given to start temple construction. Jaitley told him there was no constitutional hurdle. When Rai asked Singhal why that land was not transferred, he spoke of the Vajpayee-Advani power tussle. “Ashokji was worried that the temple would not be made in his lifetime. At the same time, he was sure it would be constructed,” says Rai.

He was also upset that Advani expressed regret over the Babri Masjid demolition which took place on December 6, 1992 when the senior BJP leader—along with others, including Murli Manohar Joshi, Pramod Mahajan, Uma Bharti, Ramchandra Paramhans, and Sadhvi Ritambhara—was on a dais opposite the structure. According to Singhal, it would go down in history as a day of valour for Indians.

With only one agenda in mind—building the Ram temple at the Babri site—Singhal’s pursuit was apolitical. Sheetla Singh’s book Ayodhya—Ramjanmabhoomi-Babri Masjid Ka Sach recounts a story published in 1987 in RSS mouthpieces Panchjanya and Or­ganiser, saying Ram bhakts have won as the Congress government has succumbed to pressure to make a temple and instituted a trust for the purpose. It also said foreign technology was being explored to relocate the Babri Masjid. Alongside was Singhal’s photograph. Singh quotes Lakshmikant Jhunjhunwala of KM Sugar Mills on how Deoras was livid with Singhal at a meeting at Keshav Sadan, the Jhandewalan headquarters. He called Singhal and asked him how he had agreed to the plan. Singhal said the movement was for the Ram Mandir and it had to be welcome. Deoras said there were 800 Ram temples in this country and if one more were constructed it would be 801, but the movement was gaining momentum and would have led to forming the government in Delhi. Rejecting the proposal, Deoras said it would impede the fulfilment of their goals.

According to Arun Anand, author of The Saffron Surge and Know about RSS, for Singhal it was not a religious but civilisational move­ment that could resolve faultlines within the Hindu community: “He was from the lot which worked with Guruji (MS Golwalkar, the second RSS chief). He had complete ideological clarity, was soft-spoken but firm, a man of few words, an assertive Hindu but not an aggressive one.” In what was held as the first World Hindu Conference, organised by VHP at the Prayag Kumbh Mela in 1966, Golwalkar had got the meet to pass a resolution against the caste system, particularly untouchability.

Panchjanya, in one of its editions on reformist Hindu resurgence, mentioned Singhal visiting Varanasi’s Dom Raja, the head of the clan helping cremate bodies at the city’s cremation grounds, and eating with him. The Dom caste is considered one among Dalits. Leaving his life as a metallurgical engineer after graduating from the Banaras Hindu University (BHU) and the comforts of his well-to-do home in Allahabad, Singhal lived the life of an RSS pracharak—generally in one room with a table, a chair and a bed. It was in his college days that he came across RSS. He took his love of music with him to the Sangh. The first cassette of the Sangh’s songs was made under his guidance and several of the songs were sung by Singhal himself, recalls Alok Kumar. “He had always lived in one room and only later when VHP’s activities expanded, he allowed himself two rooms. All those working for Ram received his affection.”

Singhal was confident that the court order would go in fa­vour of the temple and it would be built at the site of the Babri Masjid. When Narendra Modi came to power in 2014, he praised him by saying it had ended 800 years of slavery. The admiration was mutual. When Singhal died in 2015, the prime minister said on Twitter (now X): “Ashok Singhalji was the force behind several noble deeds & social work, which benefitted the poor. He is an inspiration for generations.”

“Ashokji used to ponder what would bring all Hindus to­gether. He felt it was Ram who could unite,” says Om Prakash Singhal, an RSS pracharak who had worked with Singhal since 1983. In Ayodhya, where he was busy with the preparations for the temple consecration on January 22, he said a “mansik niman­tran” (symbolic invitation) was sent to Ashok Singhal and that he was sure he would be there when the chants reverberated from the Ram temple.

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