A Hot Day in December
Pravin Togadia is a big name in Indian politics. He is the General Secretary of Viswa Hindu Parishad , World Hindu Council, a lavishly funded and organized body of Hindus which counts among its members university professors, scientists, retired civil servants including a number of affluent Indians who live abroad . It fights , by bringing out mobs on the road , for what it believes to be restoration of Hindu rights. Its latest battle is against an Indian Government plan to dredge out an undersea formation to make navigable the waters that lie between India and Sri Lanka . Mr Togadia has warned the government on behalf of his organization “ this is going to be huge, as big as the Ram Janmabhumi movement…This issue will have major implications on the politics and future of the country just as the Ram Janmabhumi movement had”(Business Standard, New Delhi, Sept 23,2007).
Mr Togadia’s Big Issue concerns the coral formation that can be strenuously imagined to have the look of the remains of a bridge, called Adam’s Bridge. But, then this is India, the ridge-like formation has another momentous identity : folks have always called it Ram Setu, the Ram Bridge, the same one as described in the epic Ramayana as built by the monkey army of Lord Ram , one of the two most venerated and beloved of the millions of Hindu Gods (the other is the elephant-headed rotund Ganesha ),but the only one forced into a starring role in genocidal killings in modern India.
What exactly is Mr Togadia talking about ? This is India of the twenty-first century ,its population largely young, the English-knowing part of which , logged into the net and busy building the back office of the developed world, has ushered in an unprecedented consumerist boom , one of the highest GDP growth rates with global investors crowding in for a share of the pie—with the remaining seventy percent of Indians still subsisting on Rupees twenty ( about 50 US cents) a day . Mr Togadia’s not so strange concerns span the people of both these Indias--- or, rather, another, third, India they both simultaneously inhabit. This is the often-unacknowledged India of the mind in which Hindus and Muslims find embittered refuge each day , a country dark with ancient Hindu hurts and hates and Muslim imprisonment—cruelly forced as well as self-imposed-- in times past and bereft. It is a terribly real country, subterranean, powerful.
For sometime, after the Partition bloodletting had dried up , it lay concealed, unspoken about, like the Partition killings themselves, the unabashed part taken by the people in them. The political language created by Gandhi ,Nehru and the Congress Party they led and the Constitution written in it that they gave the country made raising this issue in public an obscenity. So it became the under-the -table pornography of Indian politics—to be dragged out and savoured in secret among others similarly persuaded; luckily for whom , enmity towards Islamic Pakistan could be, is, part of patriotism and freely ,vociferously spoken, written about, bringing a release to passions secreted. The problems of poverty , Nehru’s socialistic plans to remove it, the failures, the usual cacophony of electoral politics and then the noisy and violent fights to have separate states on the basis of language spoken in each had drawn a film over what lay underneath ,never losing its potency. Its existence not acknowledged except as a perversion that education and affluence would surely cure some day ,its periodic bursts in frenzied killings largely of the poor by the poor re-confirming this clinical diagnosis ,it has neither died nor weakened.
Then the Ramjanmabhumi “movement” happened , bringing what was politically hardcore pornography, on wide screen, in technicolour , for national viewing. It is irrelevant that organized and ambitious Hindus under the banner of Bharatiya Janata Party ,Rashtriya Sevak sangha ,Viswa Hindu Parishad etc had stirred the pot ,finding it rich with stuff to capture leadership of the Hindus. The pot and the stuff were there to be stirred. The brew steams sulphurously, as Mr Togadia and his cohorts now stoke the fire underneath. With election season about to descend , perhaps another genie ,like that released in “Ram Janmabhumi” fifteen years ago, will rise to claim lives and votes.
Let us look back look back on the day fifteen years ago to date, when a genie climbed out of a pit a in the name of a god , to a small Indian town on a cold winter day. But it was not cold at all, even though it was four in the morning. The heat came from houses on fire, some with people inside, burning. The fires had started almost twelve hours back , late in the afternoon the previous day, just as the sun mellowed by the fierce North Indian winter was to set. They would burn unchecked , joined by new ones, for a further twenty-four hours. The crowd had been pouring in for almost a week , by train , buses and on foot, chanting in unison, quickly swelling to about two hundred thousand, many carrying sticks. They had not come secretly. Their leaders, who would eventually sweep the elections and form a government in Delhi, had been announcing in public meetings, to the Press and in the Parliament their resolve to carry out a mass kar seva, a labour of love for the gods, for rebuilding the temple that was supposed to have been destroyed. Unease and fear lay like a pall over the local residents. Many had fled the town .To those remaining ,perhaps with no place to go to, there was still no indication that an inferno was about to descend on this dingy town of temples and mosques, occupying just about ten square kilometres on the banks of river Saryu, home to less than fifty thousand people.
The small town was not new to mobs or their lethal mischiefs . One hundred and thirty years ago, the British had erected walls at the source of trouble, to divide the place, the inner court which housed a mosque to the Muslims and the outer , which had Hindu temple structures, to the Hindus. A suit fifty years later for permission to erect a regular temple in the outer court was dismissed repeatedly. There had been periodic fights, every few years, between the people of the two faiths , deaths resulting, one attack damaging the domes of the structure in the inner court , they then repaired and restored by the colonial rulers.
Then came Independence , Partition and the bitter migration of populations fleeing the terrible killings which perhaps explain what happened two years later: a few people stealing into the inner court at night to install idols in it , thousands gathering in the morning hailing spontaneous appearance of the image of Lord Ram, the state administration pleading uncontrollable mob violence in case of forcible removal of the idols as ordered by Prime Minister Nehru , an injunction by the Judge of the District Court forbidding removal ,the injunction confirmed by the province’s High Court , the inner courtyard then locked, entries to it barred by court order, the issue settling thereafter in the shape of suits and counter-suits working their way through the vast entrails of Indian legal system. In the town, peace simmered. Till thirty-seven years later, the locks were broken open , with a court’s permission and order to allow Hindus to enter daily the inner court to do worship of Lord Ram. Muslims , outraged, formed an association to protect the Mosque . The first link in an infernal chain of mass-murders that visit India every few years , like the famines and pestilence that did in another age , has been forged.
First a look at the prize. It was a mosque, erected in the town, according to inscription on a stone in it, in 1528 by a provincial governor of Babur of Afghanistan ( invader and conqueror of India and the founder of Mughal rule , great-great-grandfather of the builder of Taj Mahal ) , therefore commonly known in the town and elsewhere as the Babri Masjid (i.e. Babur’s Mosque). No great piece of architecture and rather curiously without minarets ,an invariable feature of mosques elsewhere, it commanded an area of about hundred thousand square feet with Muslim graveyards on all sides of it, spanning about forty thousand square feet, except the north. The three-domed mosque stood in the fenced inner courtyard ; outside it, in front, there was a raised platform of stone, twenty-five feet long and seventeen feet wide , six feet in height ,called by locals the Ram Chabutra ( Ram’s Birthplace) and on its right , another small structure called Sita Rasoi ( Sita’s kitchen. Sita was Lord Ram’s wife, equally venerated), both of indeterminate age and since destroyed by thugs to whom we will have to return .
This is India where everyday things are entwined with the immemorial. Many Hindus believe that the Ram Chabutra was where since pre-history a temple had stood marking the actual birthplace of Ram , the God-King ( whose reign is described in the Hindu epic Ramayana) , and that the temple was destroyed at Babur’s orders and a mosque erected in its place. Now there is no evidence that Lord Ram was a real person and there is every evidence that the small town with a name identical with that of Ram’s kingdom in the epic, could not be the same place. There is no proof whatsoever that a temple ever existed at, or near, the place where the mosque stood (archaeological excavations had proved nothing) or that Babar’s men destroyed this or any other temple in India. There are three kernels of fact : the site was referred to as yanmasthan ( the Birthplace) for at least the last two centuries, temples elsewhere in India had been sacked and destroyed by other Islamic invaders and British civil servants working in India early nineteenth century onwards had repeated and endorsed the belief, without offering proof, that there was a Ram temple here and it was sacked by Babur’s governor who then built the mosque on its remains.
There are other places in India, belonging in part to fact and to legend in part , and life goes on, fact and myth both its integral parts. No doubt such was the life in Ayodhya ,our small town, its people shivering that Sunday morning in the December cold made painful by the high wind coming down from the great mountains further north. The crowd was pouring in by bus, trains, trucks and on foot, from all parts of India, and soon outnumbered the locals, almost ten to one. They had not come secretly. Their leaders, who would eventually sweep the elections and form a government in Delhi, had been announcing in public meetings, to the Press and in the Parliament their resolve to carry out a mass kar seva, a labour of love for the gods, for rebuilding the temple that was supposed to have been destroyed by Muslim invaders. Their leaders had named them karsevaks, servants in the service of a mission and they were there to do karseva , a labour of faith, for the symbolic laying of the foundation stone of a temple-to-be-built at a place away from the inner court of the mosque and the zone where all forms of construction had been prohibited by India’s highest court. Later , incidents witnessed by thousands, caught on video and other cameras by Indian government , journalists both Indian and foreign, would be grown over by a thicket of wild rumours, reports of happenings almost certainly true but un-provable in court, passionate accusations and blustery denials. The truth is still being unpicked by a judge presiding since 1993 over a government-appointed Enquiry Commission.
Reports of incidents , happenings , unproven :
It is the previous Tuesday. The karsevaks housed, fed and kept warm in government-owned rest houses begin amusing themselves by vandalising Muslim graves around the Mosque. The police reporting to the provincial government owing allegiance to the Hindu Party do not stop them. Throughout the week, new groups of karsevaks keep arriving. The police watch.
Saturday, morning. The karsevaks’ leaders have arrived. They are no lunatics foraging in the fringe but respected politicians with huge followings that include retired senior civil servants, academicians, archaeologists, professors of universities and leaders of the organizational wing (known as the Rastriya Sevak Sangh , the RSS, meaning national volunteers’ association, once banned for years following assassination of Mahatma Gandhi by one of its members) of the Hindu fundamentalist party. They address gatherings of karsevaks. The crowd is excited, enraged. Shouts rise from it , the leaders watching , that Ram’s birthplace being called a mosque is intolerable insult. Roars of approval meet calls for demolition of the mosque. Ochre -robed monks , each well-known with large and rich followings , recite from Gita, the Hindu sacred text , call for obedience to their orders and not the court’s.
Saturday, afternoon. One of the seniormost leaders of the Hindu Party , later a senior minister in the cabinet of the Hindu Party-led government in Delhi makes an unscheduled appearance at Faizabad, nearest big town, attends a secret meeting of the leaders of his party and faith. It is not known what they discuss. Journalists watch a group of karsevaks atop a huge boulder at a place close to the Mosque complex practising mock-demolition with pickaxes and shovels and guy ropes .A photograph is taken and printed the next day in The Indian Express, a respected Indian daily.
The town , by now a cauldron on boil, is in the crosshairs of international news. Journalists, TV camera-men from BBC, CNN, New York Times, Time, The Times and the Guardian of UK, Voice of America, Australian Broadcasting Corporation , many others are all over the town. The Indian press is present in full force. Officers of Indian secret service, with video cameras ,have installed themselves in the town as has a representative of India’s Supreme Court. The members of the Province’s police force are everywhere. The Central Government in New Delhi , run by the Congress Party, has stationed a large para-military force which is protested by the state’s Chief Minister as “ unnecessary, unconstitutional and unilateral.”
Badges have been issued by the Hindu organizing body to those cleared to enter the 120,000 sqft Mosque complex. Journalists , identified by pink-colored badges issued to them, are not allowed to come anywhere near it. An Indian journalist sneaking into the prohibited area is caught and forcibly detained for several hours and released only after promise not to file any report is extracted. The police stand by, watching.
The media is treated to a parade before them of men and women in saffron ,the colour denoting piety and sacrifice. Leaders explain to the media-men that at the appointed hour this is all that they will do, chant hymns ,circle the spot chosen for symbolic laying of the first stone of the temple. The mosque will not be touched , they tell the media. Five hundred meters away, media-men meet another leader, surrounded by muscle-bound karsevaks sporting saffron headbands with the legend Jai Shri Ram (Hail Lord Ram) printed on them .He says, pointing to the Mosque looming in the dusk : this is symbol of injustice, Hindus will set right the wrong. In the corner of the room where he sits talking to the media , lies a pile of pickaxes, ropes and shovels. He seems enraged that the symbolic thing is taking place in the foreground of the Mosque. That’s not where we planned the mandir, it should be on that hill, he says, pointing to the Mosque. What are the pickaxes and shovels for ? I really don’t know, he says. They have been brought here by my followers, there is more in the room next to this, he adds.
Saturday, evening : Two high priests of the neigbouring Hindu temples meeting the karsevaks where they have been parked for the few nights , to counsel them on the course of action are abused and man-handled . The sevaks shout that they have come all this distance not for any symbolic nonsense but to demolish the Mosque. The high priests now have the unpleasant knowledge that the sevaks are not in their control.
Saturday, midnight : Minutes before midnight, a leading light of the Hindu organisation is seen near the Mosque, deep in discussion with leader of the Ayodhya chapter of the RSS .The two men closely survey the area that lay between the makeshift gate that barred the way to the Mosque and a pit. It seems that they are deciding on the spot , out of the prohibited zone , for karseva the next day.
Sunday, morning: It is 7 a.m., not early even for a cold December day for devout Hindus rise early and brace themselves with a dip in the icy waters of a river, a pond. The entire area surrounding the Babri Mosque is now cleared of ordinary karsevaks and is under the control of small teams of RSS men. They form a cordon along with a handful of policemen present.
8 a.m. : A closed-door meeting is on , attended by the leaders of the Hindu Party and its organizational wing. Two hours later, a leader from Bombay , known for his lavish lifestyle and fund-raising abilities joins it.
10 a.m. Leaders start arriving at the site, some distance from where they say they will do symbolic stone-laying. The cordon of police and RSS volunteers keep the karsevaks from the court-protected area. Half-hearted attempts by the karsevaks to break through the cordon are waved away, but some sneak in. The crowd has now swelled to about two hundred thousand men, some women. Some of the leaders address the crowd. The speeches are incendiary. A Hindu nun in her speech refers to Muslims as the circumcised ones.
11.45 a.m. A group of about twenty young men with bright-yellow headbands rush to the cordon. It appears that they are pitching in to help the volunteers to catch and throw out karsevaks who have entered the prohibited zone. Immediately an order is barked out on the public address system to the orange –yellow headbands : get out. They file out, followed by the volunteers manning the cordon. By another account, they lead the demolition team.
12 noon : A rush of karsevaks immediately pour over, across and through the fence ,now broken, to the Mosque. They are armed with pickaxes, shovels, bamboo-sticks and crowbars. They climb the top of the outer wall of the mosque from the sides and back and pelt the police with stones and bricks. The police start running away. A senior police official shouts at them , ordering them to return. They do not obey but stop to watch.
The karsevaks start to tear apart the four-hundred and sixty-five year old Mosque with bare hands. The first group attacks the pillars of the Mosque. The base pillars on which the structure rests are brought down, one by one. Another group climbs on top of the domes, prying loose the mortar with axe. They use makeshift pulleys made out of ropes to bring down the bricks. An RSS leg-man stands on the watchtower in front of the mosque, directs them, blowing a whistle and waving a flag. Women climb and collect on the rooftops of adjoining buildings, and throw gulal, celebratory coloured powder , at the karsevaks. They sing and clap. A few others begin to uproot telephone wires.
The seniormost civilian authority , the District Magistrate accompanied by the Superintendent of Police, arrive. They have orders from the provincial government not to use force, nor allow the Central policemen to use any, under any circumstances. They watch the demolition in progress for a few minutes silently , leave. More police officers come , stare at the goings-on, leave. The route to the Mosque is now blocked for police cars with burning tyres, rubble, people.
The Mosque is about to fall. The karsevaks are delirious with joy : frenzied, they demolish Ram Chabutra and Sita Rasoi where Hindus have been worshipping for decades, some say centuries.
Outside the crumbling Mosque , saffron-bands keep the people, thousands of them, away. They have started beating up journalists and photographers, men and women, Indian and foreign, easily identified by the pink badges they wear on the orders of the organizers, smashing, snatching cameras, other equipment.
12.30 p.m. Water is pumped into a small, crude, tank-like, brick-and-mud structure a little distance away from the mosque. This is to mix the cement that is used to build , on the rubble of the Mosque, the platform and wall of the temple.
1.45 P.M. Central forces inform the Government in Delhi that the Mosque is under attack with the local police standing by.
1.50 P.M. Commander of Central forces inform Delhi that the forces, unable to reach the site due to roadblocks set up by the mobs ,have returned to camp.
2.00 P.M. The state’s seniormost police officer repeats the Chief Minister’s orders prohibiting firing by the forces under any circumstances.
2.30 P.M BBC starts broadcasting to the world news and pictures of the demolition.
3.30—4.30 P.M. Delhi receives information that Muslim houses in the town are being attacked.
5.45 p.m. The last dome of the Mosque comes down. The Mosque is rubble. Kar sevaks begin clearing the debris and cart it away in tractors. Pieces are collected by some as souvenirs. Some senior leaders of the Hindu organization hug each other , exultant.
5.45 p.m. : Spirals of smoke are seen at a distance : Muslim houses set on fire by rampaging karsevaks. A Hindu leader tells reporters that Muslims are setting their houses on fire to spite the karsevaks and people like her. Some karevaks have been injured in the demolition melee. The Hindu organisation’s ambulances take them away to the government hospital in the near-by town of Faizabad.
6.45 P.M. Idols are placed where the central dome of the Mosque had stood. The area and the entire town are overrun by rampaging mobs. Reports that firearm has been used by a Muslim in self-defence makes the mobs go berserk.
7.30 P.M. Work begins on construction of a makeshift temple, with bamboos and tarpaulin sheets , in the form of a five hundred square foot platform surrounded by walls and a set of stairs, where the idols have been placed. Indefinite curfew is ordered on Ayodhya and Faizabad as Muslim houses in the town are attacked and torched.
9.10 P.M. The Central Government issues orders dismissing the provincial government. Curfew is clamped on several cities in the state. The news of the happenings has spread. The country is coming to a boil. The Indian Army is put on alert in seven states. In many cities across the country, assaults on Muslims assembling to mourn and condemn the demolition begin.
Monday, 4 A.M. It is bitterly cold. Kar sevaks setting fire to Muslim shops are seen throwing out furniture for the local policemen to light small fires on the road to keep warm. Attacks on Muslims in our town have reached a crescendo that will not abate for the next twelve hours. Central forces now in charge do not intervene, fearful , it is claimed later , of the carnage a forceful intervention may cause. Mobs roam unchecked, chanting the name of Lord Ram and abuses at Muslims and Mahatma Gandhi.
By the time the mobs start dispersing in the evening in specially arranged no-fare trains, at least fourteen Muslims have been killed, about two hundred sixty-seven Muslim homes and twenty-three mosques gutted by fire and nineteen grave-yards vandalized. The town has now , of the hundreds of mosques and idghas, sacred sites, earlier in it, only two left.
24 hours later : Central forces take charge of the Mosque complex, where a makeshift temple with idols inside now stands at the centre. Indian media report revenge attacks on temples and Hindus in Pakistan and Bangladesh.
The next two weeks : Hindus start attacking Muslims in several cities, murderously. What can be called India’s Ram Curse, were it not too hurtful a thing to say for hundreds of millions of Hindus who not only worship Ram but love Him, now began to take its country-wide toll. Within four weeks of the ancient Mosque being reduced to debris on which a makeshift temple was then erected, accompanied by strident demands for a permanent temple , a massacre , almost exclusively of Muslims, took place. Four hundred seventy-seven were killed in the western Indian states of Gujarat and Maharashtra , the two most industrially advanced states , fifty-five in Karnataka ( of which nineteen in Bangalore, India’s Silicon Valley) , fourteen in Kerala, forty-two in Delhi, one hundred eighty-five in Uttar Pradesh, one hundred in Assam, forty-three in Bihar, one hundred in Madhya Pradesh, and twenty-three in Andhra Pradesh. Enquiries ordered by the Government and those undertaken by unofficial bodies invariably spoke of inaction and complicity of the police in the attacks and incitement by politicians, named in the reports.
Two months later , on March twelve ,1993 , on a weekday morning, a series of bombs burst at several points of Bombay, crowded , the death toll two hundred fifty-seven, injured seven hundred thirteen. The killers are identified as several Muslim men and women, led and funded by Muslim members of Bombay’s super-rich crime lords, vowing to avenge the Mosque demolition and the subsequent killings (fourteen years later, their trials have just concluded and sentences are being announced). The deadly calendar of armed Hindu-Muslim conflict in the heartlands of India ---far from Kashmir, a different can of killer worms--- has just begun.
February 14, 1998 – four weeks before the Hindu Party, triumphant in the just-concluded General Election , assumed power in Delhi--saw a series of bombings in Coimbatore killing forty six and injuring two hundred, December 13, 2001 an attempt to launch an armed attack on the Parliament in session, killing seven, including five attackers. On February, 2002, a coach in a train carrying a crowd of karsevaks from Ayodhya was set on fire in Gujarat by persons still not known. An orgy of killing, arson, and destruction of property took hold of the state for days, the number of persons killed estimated ( including by the US Congressional Services) at about two thousand, again almost exclusively Muslims. Seven months later, on September 24, a temple complex in Gujarat was attacked and hostages taken , casualties: twenty-nine killed, seventy-nine injured. A bomb attack in Bombay within a few weeks, on December 6--the tenth anniversary of the Mosque demolition-- was mercifully frugal in its toll, killing only two. Similarly restrained was the attack that followed in Bombay seven week later : bombs killed one ,on January twenty-seven, 2003, injured twenty-eight. Bombay seemed particularly marked out ; on the twenty-eighth of July the same year, a bomb burst in a bus ,killing four, injuring thirty-two. On August twenty-five, the mercies ended . Blood flowed in gushes : fifty-two people dead in Bombay of bomb attacks, one hundred fifty injured.
A lull then, broken about two years later on July 5, 2005 ( a coalition led by the Congress Party had replaced the Hindu Party a year before) by an attack on the Mosque-temple complex ,in Ayodhya. All five attackers were killed. Within four weeks, on July 28 , a bomb blew up the coach in a train in north India, killing thirteen, injuring fifty. On October twenty-nine , carnage in Delhi : a series of bomb blasts, killing fifty-nine, injuring two hundred. A year’s respite was ended by a series of blasts on a suburban train in Bombay , on the eleventh of July , 2006 , two hundred killed, about seven hundred injured. Four weeks later, on September 8, a repeat : bombs killed in Bombay thirty-seven, injuring upwards of one hundred twenty-five. A five-month pause before the terrible metronome re-started : several coaches of the train, only recently inaugurated making surface travel to Pakistan possible, were blown up, on February 19 this year, killing 68,injuring dozens more. The bloodlust is unabated : on May 18, in Hyderabad, sixteen killed (including five in police firing ) ,about a hundred injured; on August twenty-five , bombs burst in Hyderabad again , killing forty-two people.
talk of and demand for building the Ram temple where the Mosque stood remain, all through these fifteen years, the Hindu Party’s main electoral platform . It is no fringe party. With its allies, it rules in half the states of India. But for the communist members of the Parliament aligning with Sonia Gandhi’s Congress Party (and exacting as its price the almost certain scuttling of India’s nuclear pact with the US), it could ensure fall of Mrs Gandhi’s Government any day. And now along with the scents of winter the election season has come to India. In Gujarat –which saw a pogrom-like killing of Muslims five years ago --the state’s Chief Minister Mr Narendra Modi and his party have won another landslide victory for the Hindu Party repeating their performance in the election that followed the killings in 2002. Many consider the incredible Mr Modi as a Prime Minister in the making. Meanwhile, Lord Ram is back in play : the ‘setu’ now threatened by a Government-funded project to dredge the seas has brought mobs crying blasphemy ! out on the roads forcing the government to appoint a Committee of Eminent Persons –comprising historians, retired archeologists and sundry civil servants – to ponder on the issue.
Democracy, made famous as preventer of famines in India, has another test to pass : how to make Indians live in peace.
