by Barkha Dutt
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Today, when the dominant feature of our political discourse is religion, it is useful to remember that many of the ideas that are being contested today first originated in the minds of thinkers who were neither Hindu, Muslim, nor even Indian. Writes the great Indian historian Romila Thapar in her latest book, The Public Intellectual in India: ‘The colonial focus on religion as the pillar of Indian identity to the near exclusion of other identities, and the later endorsing of this notion by extremist religious politics, has led to our unquestioning acceptance of the colonial construction of who and what we are.’ She goes on to explain that many of the theories that are used today ‘to explain and justify our definitions of identity…were initially fashioned by colonial writers to suit colonial policy and were the colonial brainchild of the nineteenth century.’ She points out that the two-nation theory, for example, with its ‘insistence on the innate hostility between Hindus and Muslims’ was the work of James Mill, just as it was Colonel H. S. Olcott of the Theosophists who first propagated the theory that ‘Aryans were indigenous to India and took civilization from India to the West’, a theory that is now being used by Hindutva supporters, ‘but with no reference to the colonial view where its origins lie.’ Many of the sectarian and divisive ideas of the colonialists were seized upon by Hindu and Muslim ideologues and politicians to opportunistically pursue their own goals. But fortunately for our country and its ambition to be a plural, inclusive society at the time of Independence, one of the fundamental ideas on which the modern Indian state was founded was of course secularism, an idea that is being fiercely contested and redefined today.
Interestingly, the word ‘secularism’ was not part of the country’s Constitution until the Indira Gandhi-led government enacted the 42nd Amendment in 1977, changing the description of India in the Preamble from a ‘sovereign democratic republic’ to a ‘sovereign, socialist secular democratic republic’. An examination of the constituent assembly debates around the Preamble reveals an early ideological fault line among the men and women who were the architects of the republic. Their feisty, sometimes acrimonious debates reflect an unresolved argument that has persisted in modern times. How does a state establish itself as a reliably secular entity in a multi-religious society? By subsuming religious identity as part of a larger national identity and by placing an equal distance between the state and all religions or by admitting that such a distance was impossible in a republic like India and pushing the state to respect all religions equally? As the founders of independent India argued over whether a reference to God should be included in the opening lines of the Constitution (H. V. Kamath’s amendment was defeated 68-41) and whether the freedom of worship was the same as the freedom to practice, several of them argued in favour of a model that would be uniquely Indian. K. M. Munshi, for instance, underlined that Indian secularism would have to recognize ‘a people with deeply religious moorings. At the same time we have a living tradition of religious tolerance…’
Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, the two most influential leaders of the time, were both fierce advocates of tolerance and pluralism. However, Nehru’s approach was to leave religion entirely out of the political discourse, while Gandhi was comfortable using it as a tool of political mobilization. Unlike Nehru’s essentially atheist humanism, Gandhi—both religious and reformist—pursued the ideal of a syncretic society that borrowed from all faiths. ‘I swear by my religion. I will die for it. But it is my personal affair. The state has nothing to do with it. The state would look after your secular welfare but not your or my religion,’ said the Mahatma who famously dismissed Jinnah’s two-nation theory as an ‘untruth… Hindus and Muslims of India are not two nations.’
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It is indisputable that the campaign by the Hindu right wing to build a temple to Ram in Ayodhya on the site on which a sixteenth-century mosque called the Babri Masjid stood was the single most successful element in the BJP’s first bid for electoral power. Ayodhya has been at the centre of a political and religious dispute for decades. The Babri Masjid was a mosque built in 1528 by a Mughal general called Mir Baqi. Hindu groups have argued that the site is the birthplace of Lord Ram and that before the mosque, there was a temple there. In September 2010, sixty years after the dispute went to court, the Allahabad High Court, in an 8,500-page verdict, said the land should be divided between Hindus and Muslims with two of the three-member bench recognizing the site as the birthplace of Ram ‘as per faith and belief of the Hindus’. In May 2011, the Supreme Court said the High Court judgement was based on a ‘fundamental error’ and put a stay order on the judgement, taking the dispute back to square one. The facts are well known but bear brief recapitulation.
In the nineteenth century, following communal unrest, the British authorities designated a separate area near the mosque for the Hindus to conduct religious ceremonies. Soon after Independence, in 1949, an idol of Ram was smuggled into the mosque; following Muslim protests the Babri Masjid was then locked up. The dispute over the mosque simmered on until the 1980s, when the VHP began an agitation, backed by the BJP, to build a Ram temple in Ayodhya. L. K. Advani, the BJP leader with prime ministerial ambitions (he got as far as deputy prime minister in Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s 2002 NDA government) became the face of the movement in 1990 when he launched a rath yatra to raise support for the construction of the temple. The Babri Masjid was eventually demolished on 6 December 1992, in the presence of Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi and a host of other senior BJP leaders.
The breaking of the mosque had terrible consequences, and it unleashed a swathe of destruction throughout the country. Over 2,000 people died in the riots that were directly sparked off by the demolition in December 1992 and January 1993—in Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Kanpur and elsewhere. Then came the 1993 serial blasts in Mumbai which killed hundreds more. The Liberhan Commission, which investigated the razing of the Babri Masjid and called it ‘one of the most abhorrent acts in the history of India’, held Advani and Joshi, among others, as being responsible for the demolition.
But the Congress also played an insidious role in creating the circumstances that led to the demolition of the mosque. Though Rahul Gandhi once grandly claimed that the mosque would never have been brought down had a member of the Nehru-Gandhi family been at the helm of government, it was his father, Rajiv Gandhi, who on the request of the VHP first ordered the locks on the Ram Janmabhoomi–Babri Masjid complex to be opened in 1985. And in 1989, with one eye on the elections, it was Rajiv who sent his home minister, Buta Singh, to participate in the ‘shilanyas’, or the symbolic temple foundation laying ceremony, at a site near the Babri Masjid but outside of what he understood to be the disputed site. After his assassination in 1991 it became the responsibility of Narasimha Rao to safeguard the mosque from demolition. The Liberhan Report said Prime Minister Rao and his government were ‘day-dreaming’; his own party colleagues and those who met him in the days leading up to 6 December say his inaction was deliberate. Veteran journalist Kuldip Nayar even went so far as to suggest in his memoirs that Rao ‘sat at a puja when the kar sevaks began pulling down the mosque and rose only when the last stone had been removed’.
This impression that Rao didn’t just display naiveté but that he was consciously indecisive is reinforced by journalist and politician Shahid Siddiqui. He had been in a meeting with Rao and Congress leaders where he had angrily urged them to do something about the situation. ‘I was so angry with the inaction of Rao in preventing the demolition,’ Siddiqui told me. Hours later, after the dome of the mosque had been destroyed, he and Rajesh Pilot proposed to the prime minister that another dome could be airlifted to the site and placed on whatever walls of the structure remained standing. ‘We thought at least that we could be making a powerful symbolic statement that we intended to preserve the structure as a mosque.’ Although Siddiqui and Pilot waited patiently for the helicopter which was supposed to fly in the dome, it never came. ‘We were told it had developed a technical fault.’
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On the back of its Ayodhya movement, the BJP—from being a party of little consequence (it won only two seats in the 1984 general elections, although its showing might have been somewhat better if Rajiv Gandhi hadn’t been the beneficiary of a massive wave of sympathy following his mother’s assassination)—became the third largest party in Parliament in the elections in 1989 (after the Congress and Janata Dal) winning eighty-five seats. It could be argued that Advani’s Ayodhya campaign would not have delivered the electoral dividends that it did if some other factors had not been in play. The first, of course, was that the Ram temple movement became as successful as it did in the 1980s because of widespread dissatisfaction among the middle class, in particular those belonging to the upper castes after the announcement that the recommendations of the Mandal Commission would be implemented. Prime Minister V. P. Singh accepted the 27 per cent job quota in government institutions for Other Backward Classes (OBCs) in addition to the affirmative action that was already in place for the Dalits and Scheduled Tribes. Singh’s actions triggered a widespread anti-reservation stir in many of India’s cities. The BJP capitalized on the unrest by presenting itself as the party best placed to serve the interests of the Hindu middle class. Advani managed to successfully portray the Hindu middle class as the unfortunate victims of vote bank politics. From Mandal to Mandir was but a short step.
Advani’s calculated move was aided by the cynical politics of the Congress after its electoral victory in 1984. For example, it is unlikely that his Ayodhya movement would have got the sort of traction it did had the Rajiv Gandhi government not reversed the Supreme Court judgement in the seminal Shah Bano case. In 1985, Shah Bano, a sixty-two-year-old destitute Muslim woman and mother of five, filed a case in the Supreme Court seeking maintenance from her ex-husband. The court, citing provisions of criminal law, ruled in her favour. The provisions were seen to be an interference with Muslim Personal Law by sections of the Muslim clergy. By 1986, the Congress, worried about an electoral backlash, used its majority in Parliament to overturn the ruling, leading to the resignation of Arif Mohammed Khan, a Muslim minister in the government who had passionately supported the verdict. In the next few years, the Congress would take a series of decisions that would discredit its claims to secularism. By the summer of 1989, the BJP’s national executive endorsed the demand for a mandir in Ayodhya and charged the Congress with ‘callous unconcern’ towards what it called ‘majority sentiment’ in the country. In October 1988, a decision by the Rajiv Gandhi government that would forever polarize the free speech debate made India the first country in the world to ban Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. Author and political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot has pointed out that Rajiv’s keenness to appease both Hindu and Muslim extremists was lethal. ‘From the Shah Bano case to the opening up of the Masjid on VHP’s request to launching his election campaign from Faizabad calling it Ram’s land, he was playing Hindus against Muslims and vice-versa,’ he said. It played right into the hands of the BJP.
From that point onwards, despite a few electoral reverses, the BJP continued its inexorable rise to absolute power at the centre, culminating with Modi’s massive electoral victory in the 2014 general elections.
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Even more damaging to the Congress’s attempt to portray itself as secular is the fact that some of the worst communal conflagrations in India’s history have taken place when the Congress has been in power. The Nellie massacre of 1983 where 5,000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed; the 1987 Hashimpura massacre in which 40 Muslims were killed in cold blood; the Bhagalpur riots of 1989 (in which the victims were predominantly Muslim); the Hyderabad riots of 1990 (where both the Hindu and Muslim communities suffered a large number of fatalities); and the Surat riots of 1992 (where again the victims were largely Muslim) all took place with Congress chief ministers in charge.
The absolute failure of Congress governments to uphold the principles of natural justice in all of these massacres has forever sullied the conversations around secularism in India. Most worryingly, it has made Indians cynical; is any party in our country genuinely secular? Or are the differences only of degree, circumstance and opportunity? When violence takes places in states governed by so-called ‘secular parties’—take the most recent riots in Muzaffarnagar in 2013 (that resulted in the death of forty-six Muslims and sixteen Hindus) in which the socialist Samajwadi Party was seen to have played a key role—it permanently dents their credibility to then oppose Hindutva politics.
In March 2015, sixteen accused policemen were acquitted of their involvement in the Hashimpura massacre, making minorities even more cynical about the promises of justice from secular parties. The case dated back to 1987 when riots had erupted in Meerut. Men from UP’s Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC) dragged out young Muslim men, most of them poor daily wagers and weavers, drove them to the Upper Ganga Canal in Ghaziabad instead of to the police station, and threw them in one by one. V. N. Rai, who was superintendent of police in Ghaziabad, wrote a chilling account of how the police—who described Meerut as a ‘mini Pakistan’ and held the Muslims solely responsible for the violence—had behaved.
‘Every survivor who hit the ground after being shot at tried hard to pretend he is dead and most hanged on the canal’s embankments with their heads in water and the body clutched by weeds to show to their killers that they were dead and no more gunshots fired at them. Even after the PAC personnel had left, they lay still between water, blood and slush. They were too scared and numbed even to help those who were still alive or half dead.’
When the perpetrators of such a massacre walk free—or when both Samajwadi Party and BJP leaders are held responsible for fomenting riots (as they were by a judicial panel investigating the Muzaffarnagar violence)—claims to secularism become no more than a fierce battle of contestations.
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InMumbai, I met Girish and Tahir—both fathers of dead sons, one Muslim, one Hindu, one a victim of the 1993 Mumbai blasts, another of the 1992–1993 Mumbai riots. I met them both just a few days after underworld don Yakub Memon was executed in 2015 for his role in the 1993 serial blasts. They quietly listened to each other’s anguish, strangers bonded in instant intimacy by the essential sameness of what they had experienced.
Hanging Memon may have brought symbolic closure to the 257 people killed in the 1993 blasts, but the memory of those violent years lingered on in the collective consciousness of the country—especially because the events of 1992 and 1993 had a significant effect on how secularism would thereafter come to be perceived. For me, Tahir and Girish illustrated how and why secularism had come to be regarded as a two-faced entity, deployed selectively as a political weapon and, just as easily, sheathed and put away when convenient.
Bundled up in the pocket of Girish Mehta’s trousers was a young boy’s school tie. It’s the last memory he has of his son and he carries it with him wherever he goes. On the morning of 12 March 1993, thirteen-year-old Tejas told him that he wanted to go outside and play cricket. School had let out early and all his friends were planning to meet at Mumbai’s Shivaji Park. It was just another day and the family went about its normal business. A few hours later, Girish heard that a bomb had gone off in Zaveri Bazaar. ‘The building where I worked shook violently, I thought it was an earthquake. Then I heard that there had been a blast.’ Soon, he realized the enormity of what had happened—a series of coordinated bomb blasts had hit the city in multiple locations from Century Bazaar to the Bombay Stock Exchange. Worried about his boy, Girish rushed home. His brother and he spent the rest of the day looking for Tejas, walking from parks to train stations, from building to building, through the ravages of the explosions. Tejas was nowhere to be found. The next morning at Mumbai’s Poddar Hospital, Girish’s friend saw a corpse that looked somewhat like Tejas. It was hard to tell because the body was so severely burnt that the bones were exposed. All that had been left untouched by the explosives was his young innocent face. And the tie around his ne
ck. ‘I washed what remained of him with Dettol. I told the doctors, this is my son, my Tejas,’ Girish told me when we met, his voice still trembling, twenty-two years after his son was killed. Now all he had to remember him by was a maroon tie.
Tahir Wagle’s son, Shahnawaz, was seventeen when he was killed in the aftermath of the Mumbai riots that preceded the serial blasts of 1993. Shahnawaz tried to display his student identity card to the cops who had come to round up the young boys in the neighbourhood, kicking and pushing them around with their rifle butts. His mother was watching helplessly from the balcony. Suddenly, one of the constables grabbed Shahnawaz and turned him around, held his .303 rifle to his head and shot him dead. The police never accepted the Wagle family’s version of events and refused to register a formal complaint. The ageing husband and wife devoted the rest of their lives running from court to court in the hope of elusive justice for their dead son. The Justice Srikrishna Commission—set up to investigate the riots in which more than 900 people were killed—had described the Shahnawaz shooting as ‘cold blooded murder’. Even now, years later, the recommendations of the Srikrishna Commission have never been officially accepted let alone acted upon by the Maharashtra government.
Justice B. N. Srikrishna, a man who lived away from the public glare, but never pulled his punches, told me that the ‘state did not prosecute those accused in the Mumbai riots with the same zeal as they did Yakub Memon’. A hundred people had been convicted for their role in the blasts; by contrast, only three people were found guilty for inciting violence during the riots. Justice Srikrishna did not disagree with the death sentence for Memon, who he felt was ‘given the fullest opportunity of defence’; he was only dismayed at the partial and selective application of justice. In his report, Srikrishna had likened Bal Thackeray, the chief of the ultra right-wing Shiv Sena, to a ‘virtual General’ during the riots, but he was just as scathing about the Congress–NCP government on whose watch the violence had taken place. ‘I do not buy the theory that the riots were inspired or that they occurred spontaneously. The response of the state was remiss. There was hardly any serious investigation, even in cases where there was enough prima facie evidence,’ he told me, resigned to the fact that no party, neither the BJP, nor the Congress, was ever going to take action on the findings of his report.
