Ayodhya no more a glue for Hindutva ‘parivar’?

Radhika Ramaseshan
Senior journalist

When Maharashtra was in the throes of forming a government, when parties thrashed about for numbers and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Shiv Sena were on the brink of a break-up, arrived the news that the Supreme Court would pronounce a judgment on the title suit of the disputed 2.77 acres in Ayodhya that housed the Babri mosque before December 1992. The received wisdom was, because the BJP and Sena were ideologically bound by their commitment to a political Hindutva, a verdict that favoured the Hindu litigants and paved the way for a Ram temple, the glue to bind the estranged allies again. The argument was that the BJP would appropriate the credit for closing a long-drawn litigation that was underpinned on faith and myths rather than facts and the Sena would have no choice but to embrace its ally and uphold Hindutva. 

Recall that when the mosque was brought down and the BJP brass that was present in Ayodhya sent mixed signals — LK Advani cried while Murli Manohar Joshi and Uma Bharti beamed — it was the Sena that claimed responsibility for the act. The Sena contingent of ‘kar sevaks’ was small, but the party, then helmed by the feisty Bal Thackeray, was extraordinarily voluble. The attacks on Muslims that followed in Mumbai were instigated, led and abetted by the Sena. 

Ayodhya and its aftermath is a useful context to refer to when discussing Maharashtra because the upshot of the apex court’s ruling was that ideology,  stoked by faith, had ceased to be a unifying element among the parties. The Sena jettisoned the BJP and was ready to embrace the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and the Congress to secure its own chief minister, while the NCP and, for a while, even the Congress had apparently no qualms in doing business with an adversary that was poles apart, ideologically. 

The Maharashtra fallout had a lesson for the BJP. The party had hoped to resurrect the temple that was below people’s radar, even in Uttar Pradesh, the epicentre, and vest it with the emotional overload it carried in the late eighties and nineties. Back then, there was no question. Ashok Singhal, the patriarch of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and architect of the temple blueprint, was like an avatar of Rama whose word was supreme until LK Advani of the BJP usurped the project. 

The UP election of 1993 was the first speed bump on the road of the VHP-BJP’s Ayodhya juggernaut. Their carefully crafted concept of Hindutva, that sought to create an identity based on faith and not caste, class or region, was contested by an alliance of the parties that represented the rights and interests of the backward castes, Dalits and Muslims, namely, the Samajwadi Party (SP) and Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). In that election, the BJP’s contestant had a hard time saving even the Ayodhya Assembly seat because of a coalition of the less-empowered and the vulnerable. He won, but it was not an election that Lalu Singh would care to remember.  Clearly, the temple issue was going belly up. 

Did the diminishing returns have to do with the fact that the ‘deed’ over, it did not materially matter where Rama’s idol was placed? Inside the sanctum sanctorum of a bhavya (magnificient) temple or a makeshift one that sprung up on the night after the demolition? Indeed, a VHP office-bearer once told me that it was easier to mobilise an assembly of ‘kar sevaks’ for ‘destruction’ rather than ‘construction’. The Sangh ‘parivar's’ incessant propaganda, that culled fanciful anecdotes and quoted history, pertaining to the Sultanate and Mughal rule selectively, turned the Babri mosque into an object of unqualified hatred. On Babur’s diktat, his lieutenant Mir Baqi had razed a temple that existed on Rama’s birthplace and raised a mosque. Therefore, a structure, whose raison d’ etre was to ‘humiliate’ Hindus and ‘immortalise the abasement’, had to be wiped out. The propagation worked as long as it coalesced with other subjects that projected Muslims as the ‘oppressors’ and Hindus as the ‘victims’. 

In 2002, when Atal Bihari Vajpayee was the Prime Minister, a sortie of ‘kar sevaks’, mustered largely from Gujarat, tried to break into the security-fortified complex of the makeshift temple, carrying bricks and stones, and start the construction of a ‘permanent’ temple. Their efforts were foiled. The episode had an unfortunate finish in Gujarat. The Godhra train carnage and the subsequent communal violence happened soon thereafter.  The Ram temple figured in the BJP’s election manifestos as a matter of form, and there were periodic but half-hearted attempts at negotiation between the Hindu and Muslim litigants and noises from the VHP. 

With the legal closure, what now? The ‘dispute’ has existed long enough for people, especially those who keenly followed it in the Hindi heartland, to discern the extent to which it was politicised. The BJP might be tempted to re-position it in its central discourse, but its leaders are perspicacious enough to know what works at a point in history and, more importantly, how it will be contextualised. Ayodhya and the temple have gone through the wringer for long. Even Hindutva votaries might begin to sift facts from rhetoric. The Jharkhand election will be the first test case to assess how the BJP recycles the old beliefs and if it owns credit for the closure.

It’s not without reason that the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), BJP and VHP have hammered home the line that the other ‘contentious’ places of worship in Varanasi (the Gyan Vapi mosque) and Mathura (the Shahi Eidgah masjid) will not be touched, although these structures have for long been on the ‘hit list’. The Ram temple agitation took off after the government, headed by VP Singh, adopted the recommendations of the Mandal Commission that earmarked quota in education and jobs for the Other Backward Classes. The move provoked a virulent backlash from the upper castes of north India, but the RSS’s Hindutva ideology was challenged by the schisms in the social order, after Mandal triggered the hope that the less-empowered and disempowered backward castes might find their place under the sun, after all.  Ram and a temple for him were instruments for the Sangh to weld a divided society. The tactic worked for the BJP, but it took years of identifying and nurturing its own backward caste leaders — culminating in the anointment of Narendra Modi as PM — to knit together a Hindutva order, after the RSS’s imagination. Today, the BJP commands the votes of most OBCs. A conducive ambience for an Ayodhya redux does not exist.