[Daily Times - 9 December 2004
URL: http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_9-12-2004_pg3_6 ]
HUM HINDUSTANI: December 6 and the demolition squad
J Sri Raman
In the case of Bofors, a series of non-Congress governments, including those of Singh and Vajpayee, failed to find evidence to fulfil their election promises to punish the culprits. In the case of Ayodhya, justice has been delayed for twelve long years despite the evidence. The demolition was after all widely reported and televised
December 6, 2004, marked the twelfth, far from tumultuous, anniversary of an epochal event in India’s post-independence history — the demolition of the Babri Masjid. The day passed off peacefully — prompting some media observers to conclude that the demolition had become a dead issue. It has not.
It has been argued that Ayodhya, the agitprop that found its ugly culmination in the demolition, was just a one-election issue. The vandalism of a place of worship shocked the world and led to a political victory for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). For the first time the party won a prominent place on the country’s parliamentary map. True, the issue never again proved so profitable for the BJP again. Ayodhya, still, cannot be equated with other one-election issues.
It cannot be equated, for one example, with Bofors. Allegations of kickbacks in the big-gun deal sufficed to oust Rajiv Gandhi and bring VP Singh to power in 1989. The issue, however, died almost immediately after that. It failed to win another election for the parties that continued to flog it. More importantly, it ceased to figure in the street politics that is the soul of electoral democracy. The memory of the Bofors campaign today is an embarrassment to those who espoused it then, especially after Singh’s own statement some months ago that he never really related the scam to Rajiv.
Ayodhya, on the contrary, has been kept alive. The issue, which served to increase BJP’s strength in the Lok Sabha from a pathetic two to a three-digit number, has never again proved a similar shot in the party’s trident-wielding arm. The BJP and the parivar (the far-right ‘family’ of which it is the political front), however, never abandoned Ayodhya. The BJP may have put the issue “on the back burner” while in power, but only to associate itself with it again and again.
Communal fascism, in other words, cannot be equated with corruption as a political issue. Corruption may be common to contending parties just as communalism may taint them all. Communal fascism as an ideology, however, is the unique feature and selling point of the country’s far right. The Congress party may only pretend to be secular; the BJP and the parivar actually pride themselves in their communalism.
Even while in power, the BJP made no bones about its Ayodhya agenda. As prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee praised Ayodhya as “a nationalist movement”. Ayodhya also figured in the grim run-up to the gristly Gujarat riots.
The first response of the BJP to its electoral rout and loss of power was a resolve to return to its “roots”. One of the first results of this decision was an attempt to revive Ayodhya. Under pressure from its non-parivar allies, the party has been unable to espouse the cause of an enactment to erect a temple over the ruins of a mosque. This alone can meet the demand of the parivar: follow up the demolition of Babri Masjid with that of the “discredited structure of secularism”. It may only be a matter of time before the BJP meets the demand.
The Bofors and Ayodhya have a striking similarity. In neither case has the law taken its course to what may be considered a logical conclusion. The failure has been for entirely different reasons, however. In the case of Bofors, a series of non-Congress governments, including those of Singh and Vajpayee, failed to find enough evidence to fulfil their election promises to punish the culprits. In the case of Ayodhya, justice has been delayed for twelve long years despite the available evidence. The demolition was after all widely reported and televised.
December 6 may have passed off uneventfully this time but the media was fed some meat four days earlier when BJP leader Kalyan Singh, chief minister of Uttar Pradesh appeared before the Justice MS Liberhan Commission, still inquiring into the demolition. He had fallen out with the party for sometime and talked of a “conspiracy” by BJP leaders including Lal Kishna Advani on the eve of demolition.
Contradicting himself blatantly on Decmber 2, Kalyan Singh told the commission that the demolition was “an act of God” and that he had no sorrow or regret about it. He added that the crime was a result of “self-generated resentment” against a “symbol of slavery and disgrace” but denied his own role in it.
Striking, again, is the similarity between this and the position taken all along by Advani, the architect of the Ayodhya movement, and his party. They have always tried to deny their own role in the demolition, but describe it as a historic achievement. At one point, with the revanchist fascists’ ridiculous sense of history, they even compared it to the “storming of Bastille”!
We must expect the pattern to continue. A safe-playing BJP and its leadership will keep Ayodhya alive — and despite their ‘family’ feuds may even create more Ayodhyas in coordination with the rest of the parivar.
The writer is a journalist and peace activist based in Chennai, India
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