Ayodhya’s dazzling diyas hide a political amnesia

For those who witnessed the dark days of the Ayodhya campaign, this year's Diwali celebration with its pomp and ceremony, its dazzling diyas, seemed surreal.

In the early days of the Babri masjid-Ram temple campaign, as award-winning film maker Anand Patwardhan began work on his documentary on the Ayodhya dispute (Ram Ke Naam won a National Award in 1993), he found a number of temples in Ayodhya that claimed to be the birthplace of the popular deity. Now we are being told that this year's Diwali in Ayodhya was the first such celebration after “Ram Lalla had come home after 500 years”.

So, had the birthplace of Ram Lalla been bereft of Diwali all these centuries? Did the celebrations by the other Ram mandirs in Ayodhya not count?

It appears Ayodhya has been bestowed with a new identity. From being the city associated with Ram, it has become the city associated with just one temple. This new temple, which has put into shade all the other temples that together made Ayodhya one of our great pilgrimage centres, is indeed unique: the only one in independent India built after demolishing another's place of worship.

For those of us who witnessed the dark days of the Ayodhya campaign, this year's Diwali celebration with its pomp and ceremony, its dazzling diyas (which made it to the Guinness Book of records), seemed surreal. What would those who lost loved ones in the violent campaign have felt about it? In his speech inaugurating the celebrations, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath mentioned one category of victims: those Hindus — numbers vary from 28 to 56 — who fell to police firing during the first attack on the Babri masjid in 1990. What of the thousands of others who were killed during the campaign? They were Indians too.

The all-round amnesia of the political class regarding these victims, coupled with the triumphant Diwali statements of both Adityanath and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, signal a new turn to the Ayodhya discourse. From the start of the campaign in 1986 to the demolition of the masjid in December 1992, and after that too, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) stood isolated in its intention to build a temple on the very spot where stood a 400-year-old mosque. Not only the political spectrum, but also the media and the judiciary, ie, all the institutions of our democracy, disapproved of the campaign. The weight of this disapproval forced the leaders to negotiate, however half-heartedly, with the other side, and to assure the Supreme Court that the masjid would not be damaged. Kalyan Singh, then UP CM, was even sentenced by the Supreme Court to a day's symbolic imprisonment in Tihar Jail for having violated that assurance.

For the BJP, nothing's changed. The Ram mandir remains as always, a political project. There couldn't have been a more explicit message timed for UP's impending by-polls than Adityanath's Diwali speech. While this cynical exploitation of religion is only to be expected of the BJP, why did no party think it fit to counter its one-sided recall of Hindu ‘martyrs’, and point out that both Hindus and Muslims had been killed, the latter in much larger numbers, so that this ‘historic Diwali’ could be celebrated? Do these parties want the BJP's version of this gory history to prevail?

While this silence is disturbing, the real change in the Ayodhya discourse has come from where it was least expected: the judiciary. The Supreme Court's final judgment on the Ayodhya dispute in 2019 was already problematic. It described the Babri masjid demolition as a crime, yet went on to reward those who'd committed this crime with possession of the disputed site. But the CJI's recent remarks that this judgment, which none of its authors were willing to sign, was the outcome of divine guidance, placed this unjust ‘settlement’ of the most divisive movement since Partition, beyond rational evaluation.

Two other judges dealt extensively with the Babri masjid-Ram Janmabhoomi issue. Justice B N Srikrishna's tilak and frequent citing of Sanskrit shlokas during the hearings of his inquiry into the Mumbai riots, made many Muslim victims fear they wouldn't get a fair hearing. But this obviously devout Hindu unequivocally blamed the Babri masjid demolition, and Bal Thackeray's incitement of Hindus, for the riots. (Srikrishna Report, Volume 1, Chapter III).

Justice Srikrishna's findings were echoed by Justice Liberhan, whose inquiry into the demolition of the Babri masjid, indicted the ‘malevolent leaders’ of the Ayodhya campaign, who, ‘lured by the prospect of power...turned peaceful communities into intolerant hordes...’

These were not pliable retired judges; both were sitting high court judges when they presided over these commissions. Their reports came not so long back, in 1998 and 2009, respectively. Yet, they seem to belong to another era, a country we've left behind.

Jyoti Punwani is a senior journalist.

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.