Ayodhya: End of India's Secular Dream?

By M. M. Ali

The further resurgence of Hindu extremism will likely dominate Indian politics in this last decade of the 20th century, although it may cost the country dearly in the long run. The present carnage is not a mere dispute over a mosque versus a temple. It represents something much more significant and goes deeper into the ethos of the Hindu nation.

Tactics and targets adopted by Hindu religious party politicians were plain and simple. The training and preparations undertaken by their followers at camps around the country during the past two years provided clear evidence of the intentions of the hundreds of thousands of Hindu extremists who thronged to Faizabad, also called Ayodhya, on Dec. 6, 1992. What is amazing is the complaint of Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao that he was taken in, duped and misled by the Bharatiya Janata Party leadership. It is either a case of total ineptitude or a sad example of a government that is operating from inside an ivory tower, afraid and paralyzed.

An even less charitable explanation is that New Delhi had the information and read the developments correctly but chose to look the other way under the cover of constitutional constraints, while letting the 463-year-old Babri Masjid fall with the hope of making the BJP pay a political price for it. That more than 1,500 people, mostly Muslims, died in the process was perhaps little more than what was expected—a fair move in a political game in which you sacrifice a pawn to save the castle. The question is: how many more such moves before the game is won or lost?

A World Reacts and Watches

Widespread killings in several parts of India, including the otherwise peaceful commercial capital of Bombay, sparked violent reactions in neighboring Pakistan and Bangladesh. The aftermath of the destruction of the Babri Masjid recalled the post-independence bloodbath that took place in the subcontinent in 1947 and reminded the world of the vulnerability of minorities living in the midst of unfriendly majorities everywhere. The human hatreds unleashed recall the advent of the Nazis in Germany in the 1930s and the current Serbian atrocities in Bosnia.

Under the headline "Mob on the Rampage as Police Look On,'' Mohan Sahay and Ishan Joshi wrote in the Statesman of Delhi: "A mob of Kar Sewaks [literal translation: social workers] pulled down the . . . Babri Mosque . . . as police and paramilitary forces watched, some helplessly and others hopefully."

Dilip Ashwati, in a blow-by-blow account of the attack on the mosque, wrote in the leading bimonthly magazine India Today: "The scenes will return, like deranged ghosts, to haunt those of us who were at the graveside to witness the burial of the secular dream. . .If there were no implements, the frenzied hordes would have used their bare hands to the same effect, so powerful was the poison that coursed through their veins."

In a separate India Today article, Inderjit Badhwar wrote: "Like a million twisting, spiralling tornadoes the forces let loose by the vandalism at Ayodhya have begun not just to take a ghastly toll of human lives, but also to reduce to rubble the edifice of our hopes and aspirations as a people and as a nation. . . Ayodhya is a microcosm of this country's tenacious inability to tackle its problems head on. . . Ayodhya is Punjab. Ayodhya is Kashmir."

Like Indian and foreign reporters, former Indian Prime Minister V.P. Singh placed primary responsibility for most of the deaths on the police and other law enforcement officials. "Eighty to 90 percent of the killings...have been of Muslims with police bullets," he told Reuters.

At the urging of Cabinet Minister Arjun Singh, Prime Minister Rao banned the three major Hindu organizations, Vishwa Hindu Parishad, Rashtriya Sewak Sangh and the Bajrangdal. To balance that action, he also banned two Muslim bodies, the Jamiat-e-Islami and the Islam Sewak Sangh, and dismissed the BJP provincial government in Uttar Pradesh. A week later, he dissolved governments in Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan.

BJP leaders L. K. Advani, M. M. Joshi, V. H. Dalmia and Uma Bharati were arrested, along with several hundred others charged with responsibility for the demolition of the mosque. President's Rule was imposed in the four states whose BJP governments were dismissed. It was obvious that New Delhi had no strategy and was only reacting as things developed.

It was clear that the Bharatiya Janata Party, umbrella organization of most of the right-wing Hindu bodies, was carrying out a long-range plan. Noting the decline of the Congress Party after the deaths of all of its larger-than-life leaders, M. K. Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Indira and Rajiv Gandhi, the BJP relied on the religiosity of the majority of Hindu voters. Within a span of five years, BJP progressed from 5 to 85 to 118 members in the Lokh Sabha (lower house of the Indian parliament) to become the major opposition group.

The BJP did not rely solely on recitations of the ancient Hindu epic poems Rarnayana and Mahabharata, and their dramatic portrayals on television. It rallied its supporters to oppose such physical symbols of diversity as the Islamic mosques spread all over the country. Babri Masjid was the first target and, in the words of Robert Hayden of Pittsburgh University, "carried to its logical conclusion, this process would require the demolition of the Taj Mahal, which has in fact been closed temporarily for fear of just such extremism."

The 1990 Rath Yatra (Chariot March) launched under the leadership of Advani was thwarted by the Congress government in Uttar Pradesh. By 1992, however, the BJP had captured UP. A second Yatra was destined to be successful, especially with New Delhi fiddling with the judicial system. Retired Indian army officers spent the time between the Rath Yatra and Kar Sewak Yatra training demolition squads. Because the Dec. 6 gathering of thousands of militants in Ayodhya was publicized for months in advance, the outcome was obvious. Only Narasimha Rao's surprise is surprising.

Indian history seems to be repeating itself. Every time a Gandhi or a Nehru courted arrest under the British rule, the Indian freedom movement gained further momentum. No wonder BJP leaders walked into the jails smilingly. They know the Rao government cannot keep them locked up for too long, nor can the President's Rule in the four Hindu belt provinces last forever. Second-rank BJP leaders now have launched a national movement for the "liberation" of BJP leaders. It is said that 3,000 Muslim mosques and shrines already have been identified for future action. "The Big One" is yet to come in Indian politics, it appears.

In India, as in so many other parts of the globe, people are going to have to devise better means, nationally and internationally, to secure and protect minorities from the assaults of majorities. Just as mechanisms must be devised to deter demagogic national leaders from launching their armies against weaker nations, institutions must be installed to secure the wretched of this earth from the depredations of self-appointed leaders who would divide and rule them in the name of clan, tribe, nation or sect.