One of the big changes in Ayodhya since the Ram temple verdict was announced by the Supreme Court on November 9, 2019, is the presence of young men on motorbikes, who stop visitors and offer to act as guides to the Ram temple. They are different from traditional Pandas in temple towns as they move around in groups of two, drive fast on their motorcycles and demand to know who visitors are in a threatening tone. As a frequent visitor to Ayodhya over three decades, as my journalism had begun in the shadow of the demolition of the Babri masjid, this was a phenomenon that I flagged.
In rural parts, things are different. Dharmendra Passi is hesitant to reveal his voting choices to a journalist who steps off a vehicle and starts interviewing him. He lives in the village of Tatpura, which is part of the Ayodhya city seat that is of great significance to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and votes in the fifth phase of the ongoing Uttar Pradesh elections. There are five assembly segments in the Ayodhya Lok Sabha seat, all won by the BJP in 2017, now witnessing a contest. Whatever the end result, there are issues other than Ram mandir that engage many voters in the rural segments.
After some coaxing, Dharmendra says that he is upset over saand (bulls) and cows ravaging his crop, and that is his primary complaint with the government whose ration he is happy to receive. He is still evasive about his voting choices as he says there are just a few Passi families where he lives, and they will decide closer to polling day on February 27. He smiles as he says the vote is "gupt" (secret). Across Uttar Pradesh, when Dalits are interviewed in villages where they share spaces with OBCs and forward castes, they can be evasive and, on occasion, even misleading, but they are frank in villages and hamlets that they dominate.
Also Read | Preventing future Ambedkars from being born
A section of the Passi Dalits, significant in several seats in the Awadh region, have shifted to the Samajwadi Party (SP), depending on the local arithmetic and candidate. In 2017, they were strong BJP supporters. Jatav Dalits, who make up 54 per cent of the SC population that in turn constitutes 21 per cent of the state's population, are always more inclined towards the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). Some of them, too, are shifting to the SP but in smaller numbers than Passis.
The significant trend of this election is the desertion of specific groups from the impressive social engineering feat that the BJP managed when it got 40 per cent of the vote in the 2017 assembly election and 50 per cent in the 2019 national poll from Uttar Pradesh. The great social engineering bridge is now missing some nuts and bolts as caste groups across Uttar Pradesh abandon the national party, wholly or partially. The scale of the desertion will determine the result of this election.
In Ayodhya itself, Ashok Verma, a Kurmi, who works in a grocery store, categorically says that the era of the BJP is over, and he is voting for the SP in this election. But when the owner of the store in a rural part of the Ayodhya seat, also a Kurmi, arrives, Ashok goes quiet, and the owner says he will support the BJP because he does not want Yadavs to rule the roost. What about the Ram mandir? It's got nothing to do with our voting choices, he says.
The Ayodhya seat was won by a huge margin of 50,000 votes by the BJP in 2017, while in 2012, the SP had won the seat by a narrow margin of 5,400 votes. The same two candidates, BJP's Ved Prakash Gupta and SP's Tej Narayan Pandey, face off in what is a good contest. Yet the edge presumably would be with the BJP as storm-troopers from the Vishva Hindu Parishad/Bajrang Dal have arrived, and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) cadre outreach is phenomenal and done on a house-to-house basis. They will be trying to ensure that voting is brisk in the urban segments as opposed to the rural segments in which voters do express alienation. It's a seat where, at one time, even the communist party had a presence, and the CPI does indeed have a candidate in the field. He is seated in a chai shop along with cadres of the CPI (ML) and a trade union worker of the CPI (M). They say that the fight is on between the SP and BJP, and they are there to keep up the tradition of marking a presence in Ayodhya.
My final visit is to see if Mohammad Naeemul Haq's home and wood chipping business still stands on the edge of a boundary that had a view of the site of the Ram Janmabhoomi temple. He was eight on December 6, 1992, when the Babri mosque was demolished, and his father sent him out of Ayodhya the night before while he stayed to guard the home and business. The mob did indeed come, and Naeemul's father hid. The rioters took the shards of wood from Haq's own business, stuffed it into a room that functioned as an office and set it on fire. The room apparently exploded like a bomb.
The family never repaired the room nor painted the walls. They have kept it as a testament to the brutal past, and I saw that Naeemul is still there doing his business with the burnt, blackened room standing in 2022. I had last visited Naeemul the day before the Supreme Court verdict came in 2019. Not much has changed since then: his view of the Ram Janmabhoomi site where the temple is coming up has been blocked by high fencing, but once the under-construction temple reaches a certain height, he should in all probability be able to see it on the skyline.
(Saba Naqvi is a journalist and an author)
Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.