From The Economist print edition
Nov 26th 2009 | DELHI
A Hindu mob’s demolition in 1992 of a mosque at Ayodhya still arouses passions
AFTER 17 years, several hundred testimonies, and many missed deadlines, an inquiry into one of modern India’s darkest episodes, the destruction of a mosque by Hindu fanatics, this week at last published its findings. It prompted riotous scenes in parliament and a media whirl. The report, on the demolition in December 1992 of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, concluded that senior leaders of the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), including the party’s present leader, Lal Krishna Advani, were complicit in the vandalism.
The demolition sparked violence across India, in which some 2,000 people died. It has stained Indian politics ever since. For Hindu activists, the destruction was merely the first act, and less important than the still unwritten sequel, in which a glorious temple would be built to Ram, a Hindu god-king. Invading Muslims in the 16th century had allegedly plonked the mosque on Ram’s birthplace. A more recent communal disaster, a pogrom in the state of Gujarat in 2002, in which more than 2,000 people, mostly Muslims, are believed to have been killed, could also be traced back to Ayodhya. It started with a fire, contentiously blamed on Muslim arsonists, on a train carrying Hindu activists back from agitating there.
That the BJP was involved in the demolition of the Babri Masjid was never in doubt. It followed a noisy and divisive campaign by Mr Advani for a Ram temple on the site. After whipping up his followers, he and several other senior BJP leaders looked on as the mosque was razed with pickaxes and bare hands.
This was a watershed in modern Indian history, exacerbating tensions between the Hindu majority and Muslim minority. It propelled the BJP, which until Mr Advani’s campaign had been on the fringe of Indian politics, into a mainstream party. In 1998 a BJP-led coalition won a general election, thanks in part to the party’s continued promotion of an ideology known as Hindutva, literally “Hinduness”, that asserts Hindu rights.
Nearly two decades on, that ideology appears to have lost much of its vote-winning power. In a general election this spring, the BJP took a drubbing. It now controls only 116 seats in the 543-member parliament. Political scientists ascribed the victory of the Congress party partly to its wresting of votes from the BJP’s core supporters: upper-caste and middle-class Indians once drawn to political Hinduism.
The report by M.S. Liberhan, a judge, debunks the BJP’s long-held claim that the mosque was spontaneously torn down by Hindu zealots. Especially damaging is its description of Atal Behari Vajpayee, a former prime minister long admired across party lines for his moderate views and gentle wit, as a “pseudo-moderate”. Mr Vajpayee, like Mr Advani, was found to have been aware of the impending demolition and to have done little to stop it.
For the BJP, grappling with an ideological crisis compounded by in-fighting, the report comes at a bad time. This has fuelled allegations that prepublication leaks of parts of it were politically motivated. The government has denied this.
Muslim leaders have called on the government to punish those castigated in the report. But neither the report itself nor the government statement that followed its publication hint at this. Some reckon the government is unlikely to prosecute any politicians over the Babri Masjid incident, lest the Hindu right make martyrs of them.
Impunity has also been enjoyed by the perpetrators of both the Gujarat pogrom and of the massacre of more than 3,000 Sikhs in 1984. The government has, however, said it will follow Mr Liberhan’s suggestion of drafting a law to punish those who manipulate religion for political ends. Frictions between Hindus and religious minorities have often rallied more extreme Hindu groups aligned with the BJP. Last year, after the party came to power in Karnataka, in the south, the state suffered a rash of anti-Christian violence.
In Ayodhya itself the priest of the makeshift Hindu temple built where the mosque once stood rues the day it was ever destroyed. Ever since the Babri Masjid’s three majestic domes fell, Ram’s birthplace has been exposed to the sun and the rain, complains the softly spoken, saffron-robed Satyendra Das as he sits near his temple reading the “Bhagavad Gita”, a Hindu text. “In the mosque Ram was safe”, he adds. “Those Hindu activists did all this for political gains. We had no hassles with our Muslim brothers.”
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