Babri Masjid, Ayodhya, India                             photo: Bill Strong (pre-1992)

Trying to connect the dots in India generally leads to infinity -- or zero. This piece was written on the same day as my earlier one. I have been reluctant to post it, afraid of opening old wounds, except that the wounds still fester, and bearing witness is necessary.

NEW DELHI
December 6, 2008

The sun came up earlier today over the city of Ayodhya , 300 miles to our east. But the sun will never rise again over Babri Masjid pictured above. It was destroyed on this day in 1992.

Ayodhya^[1] had been home to this fine mosque since 1528. Built in honor of Babur, the first Mughal emperor of India, it was not a grand mosque in the high style of the Jama Masjid in Delhi or the Taj Mahal (which is not a mosque), both built by another Mughal emperor Shah Jehan some hundred years later. Note the rather squat, unornamented domes, bespeaking the pre-Mughal architecture of Afghanistan or points west. And the interior held considerable interest: remarkably light-filled and airily spacious, though some of the work might have been a latter day restoration .

                                                                photos: Sunil and Rahul Bajpai (1984)

In the late 1980's, a remarkable claim -- that the precise area of the Babri Masjid and its environs was where Rama had been born -- was advanced by some Hindu fundamentalists, who began what looked at first like a comic opera religious revanchist movement to build a temple where the mosque then stood.

The movement was personally spearheaded by L. K. Advani^[2] of the BJP^[3], seen here with a bow and arrow in a pose supposedly reminiscent of Rama (at least as pictured on a billion Indian calendars). In the right panel, he is leading a Rathayatra -- literally "chariot journey" -- attempting to evoke the image of Krishna, the other great Hindu avatar, Arjun's charioteer in the epic Mahabharata.Traditionally, the chariots were pulled by horses (or as in the great summer festival in Puri, by humans); in the event, it was a Toyota truck decked out like a Rose Bowl float.

The aim of the journey was to gather volunteers -- the so-called kar sevaks -- who would each bring bricks to Ayodhya, and of course, some necessary tools, to embark upon this monumental building project. Thousands poured into Ayodhya and on December 6, 1992, in a horrific coup de théâtre, comic opera turned into Greek tragedy as a mob well-equipped with sledge hammers, chisels, crowbars, tridents (the symbol of Shiva) reduced the five hundred year old mosque to rubble while armed security forces stood idly by.

(The two-minute video below, from the Australian Broadcasting Service, is not for the weak of stomach.)

Predictably, this was followed by nation-wide riots, the primary locus of which was Bombay (as Mumbai was called then), then as now a city governed by the Shiv Sena, an even more radical Hindu extremist group. Some 900 people, mostly Muslims, perished. Some 200,000 slum-dwellers, mostly Muslim, were displaced. Shortly thereafter, Bombay was hit by a series of coordinated bomb blasts, the largest one located at the Bombay Stock Exchange. Another 250 people perished. The bombing is widely believed to have been organized by the local mafia don (a Muslim, now a fugitive reportedly living in Karachi, Pakistan) in retaliation for the Babri Masjid destruction.

Some ten years later, in 2002, a group of kar sevaks returning from Ayodhya after a futile agitation mission (the temple is barred from being built, pending the outcome of "faith vs. fact" litigation) were burnt in a train compartment in Godhra, in the state of Gujarat. 59 people died. Muslims were blamed. Gujarat went up in flames. What followed was the worst pogrom since the Partition in independent India, orchestrated by Chief Minister Narendra Modi^[4] of the self-same BJP, aided and abetted by State Police under his command. Over 2000 Muslims were slaughtered, women and girls systematically raped and killed, over 150,000 displaced from their homes, "communally cleansed". L. K. Advani was Home Minister at the Central Government in Delhi, responsible for law and order and internal security.

And so it goes. It was widely reported in the Indian press that the Mumbai 26/11 murderers yelled "Godhra" and "Babri Masjid" as they killed. Who knows whether this is true. What is true though is that L. K. Advani is now the Leader of the Opposition in Parliament (he would be the next Prime Minister if the BJP were to win in the forthcoming elections early next year). Modi and Advani were two of the first politicians to rush to Mumbai, holding press conferences while the Taj was still burning, fanning the flames.

                                                Farewell gathering at the Taj Hotel, New Delhi

The family in Calcutta

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Postscript: Understandably, the government is even more on edge today, as bad things have tended to happen on this anniversary date. Security forces have been placed on additional high alert. Mercifully, the anniversary, and Bakr-Id, the high Muslim feast day, not only passed without incident, but was notable for the many rallies by Indian Muslims against terrorism.

Footnotes:

[1] Ayodhya had - still has - a profusion of temples and mosques. What was different about the Babri Masjid was (a) Hindus claimed it was built on the site of an older temple of Rama and (b) in a remarkable modus vivendi arrived at in the 19^th century under the auspices of the British Raj, one area of the courtyard was actually used as a Hindu temple with the rest given over to Muslim devotions (somewhat along the lines of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem). This seemed to satisfy all parties for over a hundred years till the BJP agitators deemed it unsatisfactory.

[2] L. K. Advani is the leader in Parliament of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Hindu fundamentalist party whose avowed aim is to subvert the secular Indian Constitution in favor of a Hindu India. The BJP is the main opposition party at the national level but is in power in many states, such as Gujarat.

The BJP is the offshoot and political arm of the organization known as the RSS, one of whose members assassinated Mahatma Gandhi in 1948 for being too accommodating towards Muslims.

[3] BJP: See Note 2.

[4] Narendra Modi: See Note 1 of earlier article.