A Chariot in History

This story begins in an age and time when journalists in India used typewriters and communicated either over telephone (the black bakelite ones, vastly different from today’s smartphones) or via telex, the efficacy of both dependent on how up and about the Government’s Post and Telegraph Department, better known as P&T, felt on any given day and hour. It so happened that on a particular day when a brief news story tucked away in the inside pages of a Delhi daily caught my attention. It was about the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) taking out small yatras in and around Faizabad in Uttar Pradesh, seeking the liberation of Sri Ram from ‘captivity’ in Ayodhya. Some months ago, a similar yatra, on a slightly larger scale and whose organisers called it Ram Janaki Yatra, had begun from Sitamarhi in Bihar. Its launch had found passing mention in the papers, but the story had subsequently dropped off the news radar. My curiosity whetted, I tried calling our representative in Lucknow for details. The call did not go through despite several attempts. So I sent him a telex message. After a couple hours his cryptic reply came: ‘Not important. Please ignore.’
Fortunately, I did not take his reply seriously. Equally fortunately, my editor at The Statesman did not think it was too trivial a story to chase. And so it was that I found myself in a rickety Ambassador car, hired in Lucknow, making my way to Ayodhya. That was also a journey of learning and discovery—of a disputed place of worship Hindus called Ram Janmabhoomi and Muslims insisted was Babri Masjid. The place had just been unlocked for worshippers and a local journalist, who worked for a Hindi paper, took me around. My first sight and memory was of granite pillars carved with Hindu figurines, their faces disfigured. Whoever had used the hammer or the sword clearly did not like noses and lips. Beneath the central dome sat Ram Lalla, made of brass.

This was in 1987. As the media began picking up the story, popular curiosity in the Ayodhya dispute also increased. The VHP became prominent through headlines; it was a different avatar from that of the VHP which had organised the Ganga Yatra some years ago. Slowly, Ayodhya began seeping into political discourse, first in Uttar Pradesh and then in Delhi.

The Congress was the first entrant, not the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). A petition was moved in the Faizabad district court to unlock the gates of the disputed structure. The locks had been placed after Ram Lalla’s idol ‘miraculously’ appeared under the central dome. Clearly it had been placed there to assert claim and rights; it was a dare to those denying the antiquity of the land on which Mir Baqi’s Babri Masjid, a monument to Babur the Invader, stood. The court had ordered status quo to be maintained—in effect, it meant freezing the dispute like the granite pillars that stood frozen in time, mute witness to history through centuries, with Mir Baqi’s pillage carved in stone.

If the appearance of Ram Lalla under the central dome was a ‘miracle’, the unlocking of the gates of the disputed structure was no less miraculous. Delhi those days was awash with apocryphal stories of how Arun Nehru, a Rajiv Gandhi groupie and Minister for Internal Security, had come up with this brilliant counter-strike to balance the damage done by undoing the Supreme Court’s judgment in the Shah Bano case by using the Congress’ brute majority in Parliament.

BJP leader LK Advani’s strident criticism of the haste with which Rajiv Gandhi had banned Salman Rushdie’s book, The Satanic Verses, and the primacy accorded to Shari’ah above the Constitution and India’s highest court, had begun to resonate with both urban classes and rural masses. Hindus were in a fervent mood across castes and Advani the master strategist-tactician sensed it before anybody else. It was at this point that Arun Nehru convinced Rajiv Gandhi to play the Ayodhya card. Lo and behold, the gates of the disputed structure were thrown open and the masses embarked upon a new pilgrimage. The VHP openly thanked the Congress.

It took three years between 1986 and 1989 for the BJP to get its act together. Partly because there was resistance to Advani’s attempt to steer the party towards a Hindu platform and largely because, apart from Advani, nobody could really foresee how the Ayodhya story would unfold. Finally Advani decided to force the party’s hand. At the Palampur national executive meeting in 1989, he moved a resolution, a rare exercise of presidential power, adopting Ayodhya as a core political cause of the BJP. Since a resolution moved by the president is passed without debate or vote, the naysayers had to bite their tongue and keep quiet. Thus was Ram Mandir added to what was till then a single-issue (abrogation of Article 370) core agenda; the demand for a Uniform Civil Code followed.

Rajiv Gandhi may have been the first mover, in a manner of speaking, on Ayodhya. But that did not work to his advantage. The Congress launched its 1989 election campaign from Ram ki Nagri and lost it to a ragtag group of party rebels led by VP Singh. The BJP’s exponential leap from two seats in 1984 to 85 in 1989, and the Congress’ decline to less than half the seats it held, showed which way the Ayodhya wind was blowing. In the heartland, a new social coalition was taking form and shape with ‘backward’ castes rallying behind BJP’s Kalyan Singh.

VP Singh knew that unless he disrupted this emerging social coalition themed around Ram Janmabhoomi and Ayodhya, he would be the loser in the states that sustained his politics. He audaciously tried to play three games simultaneously: to the BJP he gave the assurance that the Ayodhya riddle would be solved; to the Left he offered his promise to restrain the BJP; and to Muslims he gave his word that Babri Masjid would remain standing. As history shows, being audacious and being adroit are not quite one and the same thing.

In the end, VP Singh, pushed to the wall by other aspirants to power in the Janata Dal, pulled out the Mandal Commission’s recommendations that had been put on the back burner by his predecessors. In one stroke, he gave 27 per cent reservation in jobs to Other Backward Classes or OBCs. For Advani, this was both a challenge and an opportunity: faced with post-Mandal dissent among upper castes which were traditional BJP voters and the potential desertion by OBCs which had begun to flock to the party, he decided to strike an aggressive posture on Ayodhya.

Many years later, during a casual conversation he told me how he decided to bet on Ram Janmabhoomi as a great unifier of Hindus, upping the Mandal game of VP Singh. India was still high on Ramanand Sagar’s Ramayan on Doordarshan. Hindu revivalism was in the air, waiting for a catalyst to convert that to Hindu resurgence. Ayodhya was the catalyst and Advani, in an uncanny way, knew so. ‘Jai Shri Ram’ was a salutation turned into slogan; ‘Garv se kaho hum Hindu hain (Say it with pride we are Hindus)’, forged as a slogan during the intervening years of 1987-1989, became the new salutation. The turmoil and uncertainties of the 1980s, from the rise of Khalistani separatism in Punjab to the ethnic cleansing of Kashmir Valley from where Hindus were made to flee their ancestral home and hearth to the riots that would erupt every few weeks, Hindus had begun to feel they were under siege. Ayodhya became a tonic of rejuvenation and strength, bestowing upon Hindus a sense of pride in their identity which had been made into a badge of shame by, to use Advani’s description, a pseudosecular state and its cohort of fellow travellers. The fake cosmopolitanism of urban India was no longer representative of the nation or its mood.

Popular politics is now guided by digital wonders and virtual reality shows. Those days it had to be political theatre on the ground. Mass mobilisation in India, as Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi had demonstrated in his lifetime, had to have elements of drama revolving around a cause that was emotive and anchored in faith: religion and politics were never segregated in this land. The fact that Ganga Yatra had witnessed huge support among the masses and minor yatras had served to awaken consciousness about Ayodhya would have been lurking in Advani’s mind. At a brainstorming session, Pramod Mahajan came up with the idea of a nationwide grand yatra, Narendra Modi concurred and that was the beginning of the Ram Rath Yatra, catapulting the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid dispute on the national scene with Advani emerging as the face of Hindu aspirations. Hindutva became the new buzzword, resurrected from the archives of Veer Savarkar’s writings. Advani called it cultural nationalism—giving a new ideological edge to the BJP and, possibly unknowingly, sowing the seeds of the aggressive nationalist politics of today’s BJP.

A Toyota truck was converted into a rath, or chariot, and fitted with loudspeakers. The amenities were minimal but the visuals were strikingly redolent of Ramanand Sagar’s televised Ramayan. Lata Mangeshkar recorded a bhajan and Manoj Kumar recorded messages. Both were played on the loudspeakers as the the rath trundled through districts and villages of India’s hinterland, entering cities and towns after sunset to thunderous applause by ecstatic crowds. The yatra began from the Somnath temple and was to conclude at Ayodhya. Its journey was halted by Lalu Prasad, then Chief Minister of Bihar, at Samastipur and Advani was arrested. That triggered events which changed India’s politics forever. The BJP withdrew support to VP Singh’s moth-eaten Government, paving the path to the 1991 midterm election and setting the trajectory of the BJP’s rise.

In a sense, the demolition of the disputed structure on December 6th, 1992, was a foregone conclusion. The Ram Rath Yatra had unleashed the biggest mass movement in independent India and made Ayodhya, indeed Hindu aspirations, a non-negotiable issue. It happened not because of Advani (or the others charged with conspiracy) but despite his restraining hand. Ever the constitutionalist, that is not how he would have wanted the denouement; he described December 6th as the “saddest day” of his life not because the domes collapsed under the weight of mass fury but because the crowds triumphed over the law. But, as we all know, the law or rather its custodians, the courts, failed too: the Ayodhya case was allowed to fester for close to seven decades and the dispute close to five centuries.

Ram Janmabhoomi is about faith and belief, Advani would repeat at every place the Ram Rath stopped. The courts cannot decide on the validity of this faith and belief, he would add. Ayodhya belongs to Sri Ram and not a monument to an invader who usurped this land of ours and plundered its wealth. Some 30 years later, while restoring the disputed site to Hindus and upholding Sri Ram’s ownership of the land where he was born, the Supreme Court echoed those words: It is not for the courts to wade into matters of faith and belief.

History is essentially about ‘what ifs’. It would be in order to look back and ask, what if Arun Nehru had not tried to make the Congress the first mover on Ayodhya to erase the Shah Bano blot? What if Advani had deferred to colleagues and steered clear of the Ram Janmabhoomi dispute? What if VP Singh had not implemented the Mandal quota? What if Advani had not galvanised the masses with his Ram Rath Yatra? What if PV Narasimha Rao had allowed kar seva in 1992 and prevented precipitate action leading to the structure’s demolition? What if the courts had ruled in favour of Hindus ages ago and undone a glaring crime committed against them and their faith?

AyodhyaBabri MasjidLK AdvaniRajiv GandhiRam TempleRath YatraSupreme Court