Unity In Divinity

IT IS 9.30 IN the morning of January 22, the day of the consecration of the new Ram temple, and the thoroughfare that is known as Dharam Path is packed to the brim on its two sides. The crowd stretches through the side and the road Ram Path that branches off it, all the way to the Ram temple some two kilometres away, even as a vast police force struggles to keep them from spilling onto the main road.

For days now, an assortment of individuals, from sadhus, babas and mendicants to common householders have been coming to Ayodhya from across the country, turning the atmosphere in this city into nothing short of a carnival, and now they appear to have all descended in the narrow sidewalks of these roads, each waiting to catch a glimpse of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is expected to take this route.

There are two ways for the prime minister to make his way to the temple from the Ayodhya airport—either using this stretch of road or taking to the air via a chopper on an alternate route—and which he will eventually take has been a source of speculation for several days. But by morning, a consensus seems to have been built that it will be this road.

An air of anticipation has built around this expected arrival.

TV station crews are parked at different stations. Some people, aware that the arrival of VIPs would impede their entry into this part of the city, have been here since 4 in the morning; many, still wrapped in blankets, walk in a nocturnal stupor, their breaths of vapour streaming into the fog of this cold morning. One in­dividual, a Nepali man in his early 20s called Ajay Sharma who has found accommodation in a large open area filled with tents, each of which can fit about 50 people, has crossed vast swathes of open fields to dodge the many police checkpoints and barricades to stop the entry of individuals into the city. “Everyone told me this was the place to be here this morning,” he says when asked what brought him here. Many individuals here carry posters and flags, a majority of these bearing the image of Ram or Hanuman, but many carry the images of Narendra Modi or Uttar Pradesh’s Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath. One of them, a bedraggled man in his 60s, moves around clutching a large garlanded cutout of Modi. “Modiji has made this happen [the creation of the Ram temple]. Why wouldn’t I want to show my affection for him,” says this man who identifies himself as Ram Singh, from the distant city of Sitapur in Uttar Pradesh. Every few metres on Dharam Path, men and women dressed in colourful attire participate in folk dances from different states on little stages. At some point, doppelgangers of Sachin Tendulkar and Virat Kohli appear, setting off a pande­monium, which is broken only with the arrival of some police­men, but not before some pockets have been picked.

The air of anticipation builds as the clock ticks by. Trucks spraying mists of water to settle the dust pass by constantly, the number of police cars and bikes on recces increase, and an arrival looks imminent. Every time a cavalcade passes, a loud cheer rings through the air, only to be replaced by despondency when they realise it isn’t Modi, but some other VIP.

This goes on for some time until it becomes clear Modi isn’t going to be taking this route. The barricades are done away with and people begin to move to other places. But at some distance, two choppers come, flying low, spilling rose petals on everyone.

A festival has broken out in the streets of Ayodhya. For several days now before the consecration, a vast number of people have been trooping into the city despite appeals to the contrary from different parts of the country. They have done so using all sorts of transport modes, from flights, trains, busses and bikes, to a fairly large number on bicycles and on foot. Trains now pull into the city’s station with bhajan songs, flights take off and land to cries of Jai Shri Ram. In one flight from Mumbai, the bhajan sing­er Anoop Jalota breaks into devotional songs unprompted and gets his co-passengers to join in. These huge numbers swell the streets, their chants of Jai Shri Ram commingling with the songs and prayers emerging from multiple loudspeakers and events, to create an atmosphere unlike any other.

About a couple of kilometres away from the temple, the arrival of an 81-year-old man creates a flutter. He belongs to the Ramnami community, a group of people in Chhattisgarh who tattoo the name of Ram across their bodies and on their shawls and wear a headgear adorned with peacock feathers. Some suggest that the group may have originally belonged to a lower caste, and denied entry into tem­ples, who then decided to make their bodies their site of devotion by tattooing Ram’s name. This individual also claims to have been among the group of people who arrived in the city back in 1992, the year the Babri Masjid was pulled down. A TV journalist, unfamiliar with the Ramnami community and seeing the headgear, takes the individual for a tribal who has converted to Hinduism. An individ­ual accompanying the member of the Ramnami community takes me aside to tell me how the Ramnamis use wooden needles to tattoo almost every inch of the body. “It was his great wish to see the tem­ple’s consecration. So that’s why I have helped bring him,” he says.

We are at Karsevakpuram, a large locality that houses the Vishva Hindu Parishad’s (VHP) local headquarters and which has served as the Ram Janmabhoomi movement’s nerve centre for all these years. Once a secluded area filled with guava trees and a vast monkey population, it is said, that kar sevaks first sought ref­uge here in 1990, when the then Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav ordered a crackdown on them. Just about two kilometres away from the temple, a VHP-backed trust, Sri Ramjanmabhoomi Nyas, acquired several acres of land in Ayodhya, including this area, and began developing it as a space for kar sevaks. This space has grown, and it houses not just the VHP’s office, but also a cow shel­ter, a guesthouse, a school, and a large dining space. Today, just two days before the temple’s consecration, the mood is vibrant. There is a large lock here, placed in the open, said to be over 400 kilograms that was crafted in Aligarh and brought as a gift by a seer for the temple, that nobody seems to know what to do with. At some point, Nagabhusanam Reddy who runs a catering service in Hyderabad, appears. Seated in the front of a small truck, he carries at the back a large laddoo inside a glass case, claimed to be 1,265 kg in weight. “I will offer this laddoo to the temple. My staff and I have been working on this laddoo for days,” Reddy says while informing that he has brought two more laddoos of similar proportions from Hyderabad, which he will distribute among the devotees.

Won’t it have gone bad, having been prepared days in advance and driven from Hyderabad?

Reddy appears puzzled at this thought.

At one large vacant space in the area, multiple tents have been put up for the many kar sevaks who have landed here. Nearby, Yogesh Kumar, a 31-year-old PhD scholar from Delhi and a VHP activist, is supervising the operations of the kitchen. “We’ve got 2,000 people living here. So, we make meals for them, and everyone else visiting round-the-clock,” Kumar says. “It’s a great blessing for me to be here, to manage the meals of people who have worked so hard for this day. Although it’s hard work too but it’s nothing like another camp nearby where you have to make meals for about 15,000 people living there.”

Not too far from Karsevakpuram, in a compound adjoining the office of the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust, Ramlal Nishad, along with a group of individuals, is working on the carvings made on pillars that will be used in the incomplete sections of the temple. The work is hard on the fingers, and every few minutes, they take short breaks to warm their hands by a little fire they have lit in a vessel. Nishad, a local from Ayodhya, had worked for over 20 years as a cleaner in the space where the make­shift tent containing the earlier Ram idol was placed, before the trust gave him a job here. “Ayodhya was a sacred place, but it was nothing before. Young people here had to go out to find work,” he says. “But now it’s changing so quickly.” Nishad is hopeful that the boom everyone expects Ayodhya will now see will mean better days for its locals, including people like his daughter who travelled to Delhi to become a yoga instructor.

IF THE KAALCHAKRA is indeed turning, the axis upon which this pivot is being accomplished, Ayodhya, is chang­ing too. It is like an entirely new city is coming into being, one that has little resemblance to the town that existed till even a year ago. Roads are being widened and adorned with religious iconography and art; the banks of the Sarayu river have been re­made; old broken structures replaced by new ones; and on the outskirts, large buildings and hotels are emerging on vast swathes of what must have once been just agricultural fields. According to figures released by Ayodhya’s District Industry Centre, the total investment amount pledged so far is Rs 1,42,836 crore, which is estimated to create over one lakh jobs.

One hotel owner, whose family owned vast swathes of agricul­tural land, has begun to make hotels upon them. He built one with over 30 rooms a year ago, following his brother who had made an­other large property some years back to seize upon the potential the development of Ayodhya would throw upon locals. He is currently in talks with a large corporate hotel chain which is interested in building a hotel. “But I’m looking to see if I can convince them to take the land on lease instead,” he says. “It’s our land. It’s been with us for generations. And we now know its value.” For days before the consecration, his mood has remained upbeat. The actress Jahnvi Kapoor and her father Boney Kapoor had apparently booked some rooms. But this changes when it gets cancelled. Many big chains are moving in too. The Indian Hotels Company Limited, which runs the Taj group of hotels, for instance, is looking to open two large properties. Prices of land are also shooting up.

Locals like Iqbal Ansari believe this boom will benefit the city’s residents. Ansari, who lives near the temple, is the son of Hashim Ansari who was one of the litigants in the land dispute case around the Ram Janmabhoomi and Babri Masjid issue. After his father died in 2016, Ansari continued with the case. Seated today in a tent out­side his house with a policeman who provides him security, Ansari is reluctant to talk about the past. To him, the Muslims of Ayodhya have moved on from the demolition of the mosque. “The case ended with the judgment by the Supreme Court. Whatever is happening in Ayodhya now, all this development and prosperity, it will be good for all of us, Hindus or Muslims,” he says. Ansari was living in Mum­bai, working as a car mechanic in a workshop, when the masjid was pulled down, and continued to stay there, till he moved back to Ay­odhya after his father died. There were constant threats, both on him and his father to withdraw the case. And at one point in 2019, a gunman tried to kill him, Ansari says, but his guard managed to overpower the individual. “Anyway, it is all in the past now,” he says.

As you take one of the many lanes that jut off from Hanuman­garhi—another sacred site close to the Ram temple where some people believe Hanuman lived, guarding Ram’s birthplace—a dif­ferent city comes into view. The lanes become narrower and the houses older. The songs playing on loudspeakers in Ram Path can still be heard, but their sounds have reduced. People are going about their day. A woman is chasing an unruly buffalo, kids are flying kites on terraces, and old men are sitting on charpoys chatting the day away. In the small compound of a house in one of these lanes, Azam Qadri is seated on a chair, saying things very similar to Ansari. “There are just some 6,000 or 7,000 Muslims in the city. We are all peace-loving and nobody bears any grudges,” he says. One part of the compound bears the remnants of an old house. All that you see of it today are some partially demolished walls overrun with weeds. Ansari was a young child living in that house when a large crowd gathered outside on the lane looking for Muslim inhabitants. Ansari and his family escaped that day to the nearby city of Faizabad. They gathered the courage to return a month later.

What hurts Qadri today, he says, is the encroachment on Waqf properties in the city. “There is a lot of encroachment happening on mosques, idgahs and cemeteries,” says Qadri, who heads the Sunni Central Waqf Board sub-committee in the city. This is con­nected to the boom in the city’s real estate value and although he has approached the government, so far little has been done. “In some 10 spots, these encroachments have happened. There are some mafia-type people and some sadhus involved,” he says.

Not far from this location, just the evening before the consecra­tion, I find a huge crowd assembled in the area just below the steps of Hanumangarhi. One near-naked sadhu from Uttarakhand, along with a female companion, is being driven inside a glass box on a small truck. A young man stands atop this truck, waving a large saffron flag, dancing to the thumping beats of songs that have been described by some as a new type of Hindu pop. The song has a charged quality, and coupled with the consecration of the temple just a day away, it drives the crowd into a kind of delirious frenzy. The boy continues to wave this massive flag even when his arm hurts, and the men gathered around the truck dance, even as they sweat and pant in this cold evening air. The sadhu watches on from his glass box, leaning back on his elbows like a raja in a palanquin, with an amused expression.

For days and nights, men, women and children, have been moving through the city’s cold streets, shouting Jai Shri Ram or whispering sacred syllables. It feels now like the birth of something big and something new is imminent.

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