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The Guardian, Friday, March 01, 2002
Violence flares on a nation's
holy ground
The novelist Pankaj Mishra reports on
the town which is at the heart of India's sectarian violence
Pankaj Mishra
A few weeks ago I was in Ayodhya, the north
Indian pilgrim town where in 1992 an uncontrollable crowd of
Hindus demolished a 16th century mosque that they claimed had
been built by the Moghul emperor Babur over the birthplace of one
the most revered Hindu gods, Lord Rama.
I had travelled there to see Ramchandra Paramhans, an elderly
Hindu abbot who has dedicated his life to the struggle over the
disputed mosque territory, since initiating a legal battle in
1949 to wrest control of the mosque back from local Muslims to
return it to the Hindu community.
Mr Paramhans, who heads a militant sadhu sect, looks every bit
the irascible ascetic of Hindu legend, with his dense white beard
and matted locks.
He had not done too badly for himself when, in the mid-1980s, he
was enlisted by Hindu nationalist politicians as they attempted
to capitalise on an old and once-minor dispute as a way of
boosting their popularity, after being on the margins of Indian
politics for much of the last half century.
Mr Paramhans is now more than 90 years old, and full of rage. In
the decade since the demolition, the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya
Janata party finally came to power in Delhi, if only with a small
percentage of the national vote.
The idols of Rama stand on the site of the demolished mosque and
are regularly worshipped. Much of the grand temple - a garish
fantasy of marble and gold - that Hindu nationalist politicians
promised to build on the site of the mosque has been steadily
prefabricated in construction sites across India. But Mr
Paramhans still feels that the BJP government has to act faster
to fulfil its commitment to restoring the temple.
That morning, he told me, he had upbraided L K Advani,
the home minister, on the phone. Mr Advani was one of the senior
BJP leaders who had witnessed the demolition in 1992, if less
ecstatically than Mr Paramhans. "I asked Advani", Mr
Paramhans said, "'Have you forgotten the time when you came
here begging for my support on the temple issue?"'
When I mentioned the two key constraints stopping the Indian
government from rebuilding - a supreme court ban on construction
and the strong Muslim opposition - Mr Paramhans exploded:
"There are only two places Muslims can go: Pakistan or
Kabristan [graveyard]."
I had almost forgotten this popular slogan of the 1980s and early
90s that Hindu nationalist processions chanted as they passed
through Muslim ghettos. One did not hear it any longer; but this
may be because, as a Muslim scholar I met in Benares last month
pointed out, "the people who used it to incite anti-Muslim
violence and gain Hindu votes are now the rulers of India. They
have to be more careful now."
Not much more careful, perhaps: the extremist Hindu group Shiv
Sena that a judicial commission indicted for organising the
killings of hundreds of Muslims in Bombay in January 1993 remains
a close ally of the BJP, its anti-Muslim rhetoric as strident as
ever. According to a report in the Indian Express yesterday on
the killings in Gujarat, railway officials had arranged for Hindu
activists to travel free to Ayodhya, and changed regular
schedules in order to accommodate them.
In the last decade, the Indian media has been so dominated by the
concerns of the Hindu middle class which has been created by the
newly globalised economy that one gets hardly any sense of what
Muslims feel about their fate in a nation whose official ideology
is now Hindu majoritarianism.
To speak as a Hindu to Muslims is to get stock responses.
At one of the village Madrasas, or places of study, currently
accused of being staging-posts for Pakistani spies near the
Indo-Nepal border, Muslim teachers spoke frankly and movingly of
being harassed by the local Hindu-dominated police force, until
they realised that I only looked like a Muslim; they then tried
to assure me that they felt perfectly safe and happy in India.
Much more such nervousness and fear lies behind the latest
manifestation of "Muslim rage". It is certainly no
accident that it should occur in Gujarat. The Hindu middle class
there was the first in India to make the BJP its party of choice,
and stays loyal. The BJP's campaign for the temple caused
horrific riots in the cities of Surat and Ahmedabad, where the
police joined and sometimes led (as they appear to have done
yesterday), the mobs of unemployed Hindus in anti-Muslim pogroms.
The violence in Gujarat has finally broken what now seems a long,
sullen peace. The responsibilities of power will force the BJP to
keep a certain distance from such volatile old fellow-travellers
as Mr Paramhans. But it would be optimistic to expect
that the hardline members of the BJP would give up the fascistic
vision of their ideological father, Guru Golwalkar: an India
cleansed of the corrupting influences of Arabia, Persia, and the
perfidious Pakistanis.