| Whatever happened to the Ayodhya people? Radhika Ramshesan tracks the footsteps of those who brought the country to a standstill nearly 18 years ago and finds that the era's heroes and villains are now tired old men and women | ||||||||
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On the afternoon of September 24, a three-judge bench sitting in an ancient red building in Lucknow's Kaiserbagh is expected to pronounce its verdict on India's most controversial real estate tussle. The judgement by the Lucknow bench of the Allahabad High Court is expected to rule who — Hindus or Muslims — own the 125x105-foot land in Ayodhya where a temple jostles for space with a demolished mosque. A 92-year-old, wheelchair-bound man will rue his absence from the scene of action when the issue — enshrined in myth and history as the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri mosque vivad (dispute) — is resolved. He is Acharya Giriraj Kishore. In the heyday of the movement for a Ram temple on the site of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya, Kishore and his mentor, Ashok Singhal, were like peas in a pod as they executed the blueprint drawn up by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). They were jokingly called the Ram-Lakshman ki jodi (pair). They looked dissimilar — Singhal was clean shaven, except for a pencil moustache and rarely smiled while Kishore had a flowing beard and a cheerful mien — but they spoke alike. They were hard as nails, and uncompromising on "Hindu rights". "I am too ill. But I would have liked to be in Lucknow on judgment day," says Kishore. Kishore was a sprightly 74 — albeit with a pacemaker — on December 6, 1992, when the RSS, Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and their allies brought the mosque down. Now, he is hardly ever seen. Out of the VHP's management committees, he occasionally addresses the press. "Our biggest error was to have let the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) hijack our andolan (protest)," he says. Like Kishore, many of the "stars" of the movement have dimmed, thanks to age, dwindling health and fortunes. Think Singhal, and the memory that pops up is his reiteration then that Muslims would have to live "under the feet of Hindus". But, at 86, the former metallurgical engineer from Banaras Hindu University has revisited his stand. "Muslims are the most peace loving community and we must co-exist with them," Singhal said at a press conference in Delhi recently. That's not all. If more proof is needed about a change of heart in the Sangh parivar, listen to Mohanrao Bhagwat, the RSS supremo who was a non-entity in 1992. "We do not want a social divide. Our response (to the verdict) will be within a legal and constitutional framework," he told a few journalists last Tuesday. Remember Vinay Katiyar, the eternally edgy chief of the Bajrang Dal that the RSS set up to mobilise young Hindus? In hindsight, Katiyar was a wise investment in the run-up to the demolition. As the member of Parliament (MP) of Faizabad-Ayodhya in the 1990s, he facilitated the clean-up of myriad small temples in the mosque's vicinity as part of the temple-building enterprise with marginal payoffs to the owners and custodians. He had graffiti painted on temple walls of Ram frowning upon a Muslim cleric with a herd of pigs. The efforts succeeded in polarising the Hindus and Muslims of Ayodhya, essentially a sedate temple town. With the mosque gone, Katiyar lost almost every election he contested. "Violence? That word won't slip even mistakenly from my tongue," he claimed earlier this week. Just what's happening? The penny drops at the 30-year-old Sri Ram temple in Delhi's Shalimar Bagh where the VHP is holding its tom-tommed Hanuman Shakti Jagran Abhiyaan, an ongoing campaign to re-galvanise the warriors across the country for a Ram temple. It is strategically scheduled on the days reserved for Hanuman on the Hindu calendar. On Tuesday night, the air is pious and not political. The VHP's presence is registered by a few functionaries who sport its saffron and red bandanas with Jai Shri Ram inscribed on them. For the majority, the mention of Ayodhya evokes no memory. "I know nothing about any fight over a temple or a mosque. Religion is a state of mind. I am here as a Hanuman bhakt," says Amit Kumar Passi, a Bihari migrant working at a medical clinic.
Even VHP activist Devendra Dhingra admits that the times have changed. "The word Babri mosque is not uttered. Our slogans have changed. We don't say inta, golli khayenge, mandir wahin baneyenge (we'll face bricks and bullets but we will go ahead and build the temple). Now it's santon ka adesh, mandir wahin banega (The order from the saints is build the temple there)." The only active leader of the VHP is Praveen Togadia, who came into his own after the Gujarat riots and had nothing to do with the temple chapter. So what does the Hindu clergy say? Mahant Avaidyanath, who chaired the Ram Janmabhoomi Nyas — the apex trust to oversee temple construction — is a shadow of his former self. The mahant, who is the presiding head of the powerful Gorakhnath temple in Gorakhpur, is ailing. "We passed up a chance to make the temple (when the National Democratic Alliance government was in power). Everybody was competing to be secular, including the BJP. Even the RSS didn't openly pitch for it. I felt let down," he says. Not all the blasts from the past are that dispirited. "Let us find a leader like Veer Savarkar and we can rebuild the edifice. Let the likes of Bal Thackeray vanish. He gives a clean chit to Salman Khan and still expects to be revered as the monarch of Hindu hearts," says Acharya Dharmendra, another of the Ayodhya stars. "The BJP is useless," says the sari-clad preacher from Jaipur who always wore several strings of pearls, had long, curly locks and used to freeze onlookers with his cold stare. Indeed, the BJP's actors have made themselves scarce. L.K. Advani, steadily pushed to the margins of his party, was the movement's most credible face. But his flip-flops on the secular-communal debate have robbed him of considerable credibility. "Don't mention his name," says Ram Vilas Vedanti, a member of the temple trust who took advantage of the BJP's ascendancy to twice become an MP. Uma Bharti's exhortation as the mosque came crumbling down rang loud and clear in the ears of those who witnessed the demolition. "Ek dhakka aur do, Babri masjid ko tod do (one more push and break the mosque)," she urged, clambering on to BJP leader Murli Manohar Joshi's shoulders. She is out of the BJP and there's no sign of her anticipated return. As for Joshi, he is so out of sync that he first heard about the BJP forming a government in Jharkhand when a television reporter told him about the development last week. But the biggest casualty of the vagaries of power politics is Kalyan Singh, who ruled UP when the mosque was felled. Singh perhaps had a sixth sense of the impending loss of his government and the unpredictability of the voters. Two days before the demolition, he told this correspondent in an interview that he was ready to strike a truce with the Centre and Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao. The RSS-VHP rejected his proposal out of hand. Singh has since left the BJP and is struggling to find his feet in his own party. The stellar actors of the "secular" brigade have not exactly shone either. Two former Prime Ministers, V.P. Singh and Chandra Shekhar — who muddied the waters in their own cynical ways — have died. Mulayam Singh Yadav, who was the Uttar Pradesh chief minister in 1990, when the mosque was first attacked, reaped huge electoral dividends for staving off the attackers with the police force. But he fell between two stools when he tied up with Kalyan Singh — the mosque destroyer in popular perception — for the UP polls. The ideological fuzziness of the political class has defeated two Muslim leaders — who tried to save the mosque and failed. Javed Habib, a founder-member of the Delhi Babri Masjid Action Committee, says, "It's a matter of betrayal, the demolition. Muslims have been let down by the system and not by the Hindus." Habib, who was wooed by successive Prime Ministers, has no means of support today. His home is run with his wife's income. The Urdu weekly he brought out, Hujan, has closed for lack of funds. Syed Shahabuddin, former convenor of the All India Babri Masjid Action Committee, stays afloat as head of the Muslim Majlis-e-Mushawarat but is as broken as Habib. "Can I build a religious place on the debris of falsehood and force," he asks. From his perch in the nether world, how would Rao look at the ruins of an act many believed he did little to prevent? In his lifetime, Rao said nothing about the event. In death, too, he spoke little. For his memoir, Ayodhya: 6 December 1992, published in 2006, two years after he died, was silent on his role. |
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Palash Biswas
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