By Swapan Dasgupta
Those of us who watched the last remaining dome of
the Babri shrine collapse in a haze of red smoke at 4.45 pm on December 6,
1992, amid the exhilaration of a frenzied crowd were fully conscious aware that
we were witnessing something momentous.
To those who had fuelled a movement that had both
galvanised and polarised India as never before, the demolition was akin to the
storming of the Bastille—possibly heralding the collapse of the ancien regime and the dawn of a new age.
That night, sweets were distributed by people celebrating the liberation of Ram
lalla from 364 years of bondage and indignity.
To the liberal intelligentsia that had resolutely
opposed mass mobilisation in the name of faith, the sound of euphoric kar sevaks was akin to the stomping
jackboots from a relatively more recent, but equally troubled, chapter of
European history. When they assembled in Delhi the following morning with
placards proclaiming “sharam se kahon
mein Hindu hoon”, they angrily lamented a perfidious assault on the very
foundations of the Indian Republic.
Both sides of this great Indian rift were united on
one point: life after that fateful December 6 would never be the same again. For
months thereafter as riots and explosions scarred many cities, this seemed a
self-fulfilling prophecy.
Twenty years later, the hastily written obituaries
of the Republic seem rash and premature. Ayodhya was certainly an important landmark
of independent India, perhaps as momentous as the Emergency, the Mandal report
or the liberalisation Budget of 199. But was it more than that? Did the Ayodhya
years lead to a rupture with the past?
The definitive answer must wait a few more decades.
For the moment, Ayodhya remains an almost revolution, a turning point in
history when (to borrow AJP Taylor’s imagery) history refused to turn. History
is not an abstraction that follows pre-determined scientific laws: it is about
human behaviour. In December 1992, the emotional temperature was high enough
for the country to become delirious with both rage and anticipation. Why did
this apparently pre-revolutionary mood recede and why did India limp back to
normalcy?
The answers are at best convoluted. The agitation to
build a grand temple honouring Ram’s exact birthplace at the site of a mosque
built by a Mughal general in 1528, was only partially religious. Had the
movement been driven by blind faith alone, it would have not only have endured
but become even more passionate which it clearly did not. Nor was it shaped by
a frenzied desire to right the wrongs of history. Had that been the case, many
more Ayodhyas would have mushroomed
across India.
In hindsight, the Ayodhya agitation appears strongly
reactive: as an antidote to movements that sought to either dismember India
(Khalistani and Kashmiri separatism) or fracture it into sectional compartments
(Muslim assertiveness over the Shah Bano judgment and V.P. Singh’s Mandal move).
In rallying round a proposed temple, it sought to create a pan-Hindu identity
that would serve as both a vote bank and basis of nationhood. Both these
endeavours have registered patchy success.
There were subsidiary currents as well. The most
notable (and possibly most enduring) of these was the movement’s robust
questioning of the dominant Nehruvian view of secularism. The Ayodhya stir
didn’t receive any significant support from the traditional centres of
intellectual activity. Yet, a galaxy of establishment figures ranging from
retired bureaucrats and generals to writers such as V.S. Naipaul, Nirad
Chaudhuri and Girilal Jain saw the movement as a great ‘awakening’. Ironically,
for a movement that projected a distinctly pre-modern exterior, the
intellectual impulses that guided its politics were more contemporary. Inherent
to the movement was a desire to discard the ‘differentiated nationality’ that governed
India’s official secularism and replace it with an idea of common citizenship
that would do away with ‘minorityism’.
Sunday Times of India, December 2, 2012
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