Ashok Singhal: A divisive mobiliser

Vishwa Hindu Parishad leader Ashok Singhal's name has become synonymous with the Sangh Parivar agitation for building a Ram temple at the site where the Babri Masjid stood till it was demolished by Hindutva forces on December 6, 1992. 

 

For most of two decades that Singhal was the international working president of the VHP till 2011 and especially before that when he was joint general secretary, and then general secretary of the organisation, his main mission was to see that a grand temple is built at the site where the 16th century Babri mosque once stood. In the years between 1989 and 1992, Singhal attracted more media attention than Atal Behari Vajpayee and he went around the country saying he had a list of some 2,000 mosques that Muslims must give up to make way for temples, the Jama Masjid in Old Delhi included. 

 

When later L.K. Advani jumped onto the Ram temple agitation bandwagon, he promised to use his “good offices” with “Singhalji” to negotiate with the VHP to get it to drop the list of 2,000 sites, provided the Narasimha Government agreed to hand over three major mosques at Ayodhya, Varanasi and Mathura, to the VHP, presumably for demolition. 

 

Singhal, who died at Medanta Medicity Hospital in Gurgaon on November 17 afternoon at the age of 89 will be remembered as one of the leaders of Independent India who did maximum damage to Hindu-Muslims relations in the country. Although there was strong criticism in India and throughout the world of the anti-Muslim pogrom that shook Gujarat for more than a month from February 2002, the Hindutva forces had no qualms in praising the Gujarat “experiment.”  On September 3 that year in Amritsar, Singhal described the Gujarat carnage as a “successful experiment” that he would like to see repeated throughout the country if the “jihadi mentality of Muslims” remained unchecked. He noted that in Gujarat, village after village had been "cleansed of Islam”. 

 

One of the tasks given to the VHP by the parent Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh was to establish a sort of parliament of Hindu sants and sadhus comprising the thousands of different sects under the four major mutts that could coalesce into one supreme body of Hindu priests and exercise some moral authority over the people of that faith. The VHP wanted to set up a Vatican-like institution and Ayodhya was the chosen city for this. 

 

It was towards this that Singhal organised a number of dharam sansads, especially during the big pilgrimage gatherings at Kumbh. After limited success, the whole project unravelled as rivalries between powerful mutts could not be resolved and the repeated delays in project grand temple at Ayodhya eroded the credibility of Singhal and other VHP leaders. 

 

During the years when Vajpayee was Prime Minister, from 1998 to 2004, the Ram Mandir plan came to a halt as the government was acutely conscious of the “compulsions of coalition politics” and preferred to sacrifice the temple rather than the government. Moreover, the issue was in the courts and legally the government's hands were tied. Singhal lost his relevance and his fiery appeal to Hindutva extremists. He was not even on talking terms with Vajpayee and demanded publicly that L.K. Advani, Home Minister and Deputy Prime Minister during that time, should stop wringing his hands and saying December 6, 1992 when the Babri Masjid was pulled down was the  “the saddest day of my life”. Singhal wanted the day to be celebrated as shourya diwas, a day of valour. 

 

As general secretary of the VHP in the late 1980s, Singhal put the entire Muslim community on notice, not-so-discreetly saying they will have hell to pay if they did not agree to hand over to the VHP the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, the Gyan Vapi Mosque in Varanasi that stands next to the Kashi Vishwanath temple and the Idgah complex next to the Krishna temple in Mathura. The message was loud and clear: Hand over those three mosques, allow us to demolish them and build temples at the sites. Besides, he had another list of 2,000 mosques throughout the country mentioned earlier that, he said, must be handed over to “Hindus”. 

 

Singhal was a RSS prachark in Kanpur and prant pracharak in Delhi before he became joint general secretary, then general secretary of the VHP. Born in Agra in 1926, he joined the RSS as a teenager in 1942. He had an engineering degree in metallurgy from Banaras Hindu University. Christophe Jaffrelot in his scholarly study, “The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India,” says the Vishwa Hindu Parishad was the chosen agent of the RSS for its project of a militant Hinduism, and one might add, that Singhal became the face of the VHP in the crucial years when the devastating Ram temple agitation was built up, changing forever (at least upto now) the country's political environment. He was the RSS agent who sought to make RSS  “Guru” MS Golwalkar's views a reality.