27 The Ram Janambhoomi Movement

Kumud Ranjan

epgp books

 

Introduction:

 

One of the major shift in Indian Politics and society began with the dispute around The Babri Masjid/ Ram janambhoomi controversy. Since then it has been considered to be a broader significant issue not only in the context of relationship between two communities but also shaped the discourse of society and politics and historicity in India and to a large extent the way people perceived the relationship between majority and minority. This dispute further led politicians to redefine the status and boundaries of two religious communities in India. The issue of Babri Masjid-Ram Janambhoomi is among those issues where myth, faith, belief, history and its legality are brought into questioning.

 

A History of the Event:

 

Let’s start with an overview of socio-historical analysis of the issue through the writings of several historians published as a document titled ‘The Political Abuse of History: Babri Masjid-Rama Janmabhoomi Dispute’. This will give us a chronological kind of understanding along with the analysis of the issue.

 

This document by historians tries to demarcate the boundaries of myth, faith and legitimacy over history and historical evidence. In this context the first question raised by them is ‘Is Ayodhya the birthplace of Rama? Is Present day Ayodhya the Ayodhya of Ramayana?

 

The events of the story of Rama, originally told in the Rama-Katha which is no longer available to us, were rewritten in the form of a long epic poem, the Ramayana, by Valmiki. Since this is a poem and much of it could have been fictional, including characters and places, historians cannot accept the personalities, the events or the locations as historically authentic unless there is other supporting evidence from sources regarded as more reliable by historians. Very often historical evidence contradicts popular beliefs.

 

According to Valmiki Ramayana, Rama, the King of Ayodhya, was born in the Treta Yuga, that is thousands of years before the Kali Yuga which is supposed to begin in 3102 BC. This myth of ‘re-discovery’ of Ayodhya, this claim to an ancient sacred lineage, is an effort to impart to a city a specific religious sanctity which it lacked. But even in the myths the process of identification of the sites appears uncertain and arbitrary.

 

This myth of ‘re-discovery’ of Ayodhya, this claim to an ancient sacred lineage, is an effort to impart to a city a specific religious sanctity which it lacked. But even in the myths the process of identification of the sites appears uncertain and arbitrary.

 

If present day Ayodhya was known as Saketa before the fifth century, then the Ayodhya of Valmiki’s Ramayana was fictional. If so, the identification of Rama janmabhumi in Ayodhya today becomes a matter of faith, not of historical evidence. The historical uncertainty regarding the possible location of the Rama janmabhoomi contrasts with the historical certainty of the birthplace of the Buddha. Two centuries after the death of the Buddha, Asoka Maurya put up an inscription at the village of Lumbini to commemorate it as the Buddha’s birth-place. However, even in this case, the inscription merely refers to the village near which he was born and does not even attempt to indicate the precise birth place. After Independence, some local Hindus thought that the time had come to restore the entire site to its original proposes for the ownership of Ram and it was take over surreptitiously by a group of fifty to sixty persons in the night, who installed Hind idols on the mosque premises. On December 29, 1949, however in response to Muslim demands for the removal of the idols and restoration of the mosque, the district court attached the buildings, locked them, and placed them in the hands of the receiver. A little suit was instituted by Muslims in 1950, which has been pending ever since.

 

After a lapse of thirty-six years, in January, 1986 an agitation was begun by a Hindu Organization, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), with the support of the RSS and the BJP, for the restoration of the site as a place of Hindu worship. The VHP was founded in 1964. Its goals were not confined to Ayodhya. Its leaders prepared a list also of numerous mosques in India allegedly built upon Krishna’s birthplace and Kashi Vishwanath in Banaras. This movement clearly sought to build Hindu Unity by emphasizing, “the antagonism between Hindus and Muslims.

 

Brass writes that  a writ  petition  was  instituted simultaneously  with the beginning of the agitation  at Ayodhya.  In contrast  to  the  delay of thirty-six years in response to the Muslim- instituted title suit, the Hindu petition was heard by a Hindu district judge in Faizabad within a week and the petition to unlock the site for Hindu worship was granted. A writ petition was filed against the order thereafter by Muslims in February, 1986. Again in contrast to the expeditious handling of the Hindu petition, this writ petition has been pending ever since1.

1 Paul Brass (1990) The Politics of India Since Independence, Cambridge University Press, pg no. 242.

 

Re-emergence of the issue in 1986: A Socio-Political Turn

 

The dispute got transformed into a national controversy after February 1986. On the Muslim side, a national Babri Masjid Movement coordination committee (BMCC) was established and other Muslim organizations were also mobilized to agitate for a speedy solution of the controversy in favor of the restoration of the site as a mosque. On the Hindu side, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the RSS, the BJP, and leading Hindu religious figures have continued to campaign for the restoration of the entire site to Hindus for the reconstruction of a grand temple to Ram. The Hindu organizations, however far surpassed Muslim groups in mobilizing public action on this issue through a movement to rebuild the temple with consecrated bricks brought to the site by Hindu faithful.

 

While the courts remained supine, the UP government immobile and Hindu-Muslim confrontations on the increase, appeals were made to then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, who at first sought to avoid a decision on the issue. However the situation changed completely with the call for general elections to be held in November 1989. The congress leadership had for a decade been moving away from its longstanding alliance with the Muslim minority leadership in Indian in an attempt to build a stronger support among the Hindu majority voters in areas of the country where the party had either lost power or needed to expand its social base in order to ward off loss of power. Many Muslims blamed the congress for allowing the opening of the site to Hindu worship and for permitting a foundation-laying ceremony to take place in connection with the Shilan march (march to bring bricks to the site for construction of the temple), which contributed to the defeat of the congress in the

 

1989 elections. And the vote of representation in Parliament increased, although the front formed the government under Prime Minister V.P. Singh while the BJP supported it from outside.

 

In this context Ali Asgar writes that from 30 October 1990, the country has witnessed unprecedented communal violence. It can be said without exaggeration that after 1947 such violence has not been witnessed in the country. Most of the riots took place during or after the rath yatra taken by the then BJP President LK Advani and it covered almost 11,000

 

Kms. The rath Yatra was announced after VP Singh, the then Prime Minister, announced partial implementation of Mandal Commission’s award.

 

Politics of the issue

 

The Ayodhya dispute began when approximately 200,000 Hindu fundamentalists gathered at the site in 1992 to claim it as their space, which led to the demolition of the Babri Mosque. The movement was spearheaded by right wing Hindu organizations whose goal was to build a Lord Ram temple on the disputed site, which was transformed into a “symbol for occupying national space.”

 

Ali Asgar writes that it’s significant to understand this situation at least from the perspective of Indian politics. BJP realizes that it cannot come to power except on a Hindu platform and such a Hindu platform can be effectively only if Hindus can be united on some emotional issue. It is precisely for this reason that it had picked on the Ram janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid controversy to bring about at least a temporary unity among Hindus. In the entire Hindi-belt ram is greatly revered by all Hindus whatever their caste, high or low. In the ‘Shila Pujan’ programmes before the 1989 elections, dalits had shown as much enthusiasm as upper caste Hindus in rural areas and small and middle-sized towns. The BJP thought it was coming very close to uniting Hindus for political purposes.

 

The implementation of Mandal commission came as a conflict and especially for BJP as a very unexpected  considering  the  political  scenario    it   was   going   to   create   further   in   future. Backward caste Hindus would now be veering round to the Janata Dal and the BJP’s dream of political unity of the Hindus and its chances of coming to power at the centre as the     champion of  Hindu  Rashtra   were  seen  as  in  danger  of  being shattered.  It  had to  do  something  to retrieve  the   situation.   The  Rath yatra was an ingenious  device to forge unity among  the Hindus in the name of Ram and to incite their raw passions. Riots cannot take place unless planned by some group or party. Advani wanted to avoid any rioting     along   the  route  of  his ‘rath yatra’, but he was not averse to shedding of blood in places away from his route. More riots would mean greater consciousness about Hindutva and Hindu Rashtra.2

 

On October 23, 1990, the chief Minister of Bihar, Laloo Yadav put a stop to the rath Yatra by arresting L.K. Advani in Samastipur. After L.K. Advani’s arrest in Bihar, the BJP withdrew its support from the government and this resulted in loss in majority in parliament. A fourth month interregnum followed under the Prime Ministership of Chandrashekhar while the BJP and all other parties prepared for new elections which were held in May-June, 1991.

 

BJP made the greatest electoral effort in its history during this election. The party fully exploited the Ayodhya issue, anti-Muslim hostilities which its leaders and workers had themselves done so much to inculcate in the

 

2  Engineer Ali (1991) The Bloody Trail-Ramjanmabhoomi and Communal Violence in UP, EPW, Vol – XXVI No. 4, pg no.-155.

 

upper caste Hindu population of the country, particularly in north India, and the riots which occurred before and during the election campaign. Although the BJP failed to achieve its goals of winning 140 to 150 seats in parliament and lost ground in the three states in which it held power (Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh), it emerged as the second largest party in Parliament with 119 seats and as the ruling party in the state of U.P. The Congress, for its part, came to power with a weak minority government at the centre and was reduced to third position in the state of U.P. Important Points mentioned by AG Noorani in context of History: AG Noorani writes:

  • The Archaeological Survey of India embarked on a project “Archaeology of the Ramayana sites” in 1975. Its former director B B Lai initiated it. Experts worked in five cities mentioned in Valmiki’s Ramayana. Ayodhya was one of them. An Ip Metre trench was dug right behind the Babri Masjid. The first volume is ready for publication. The second and concluding volume is being written. The reports of two well informed ‘correspondents, Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay (Sunday Mail, November 20, 1988) and Pankaj Pachauri (India Today, January 15, 1989) tally—The ASI’s findings knock the bottom out of the VHP case that the site in Question is the birthplace of Shri Ram.
  • The VHP says that Babar’s governor’ at Avadh, Mir Baqi, built the mosque in 1528 by demolishing  a temple  ‘renovated’  by Vikramaditya   of  the  Guptas   in  the  fourth century AD. The ASI found that there was no habitation in the area during the Gupta period. The first human settlement there took place as late as in the seventh century BC while there were no human settlements in and around Ayodhya between the 3rd and 11th centuries AD. This debunks the Gupta construction as also the theory of Ayodhya being the seat of Shri Ram. Mukhopadhyay reported, “a senior former ASI officer said that there was no question of deviating from the original findings which underline that modern Ayodhya was not a seat of Rama (if he existed) and that a temple to mark his birthplace was not built on the site of the Babri Masjid”.Pachauri reported that in the 14 sites excavated Ayodhya no figurines of Ram were found. The result of the excavation at the site is already available in the ASI’s Journal of Indian Archaeology, 1976-77.
  • There are problems in placing Ram in a precise period. Some hold he lived nearly a million years ago in treta yug. Others like A K Majumdar and Genovesio place him in the 15-14 centuries BC. According to R.S. Sharma if the present Ayodhya is considered to be the capital of Ram, there is very grave doubt as to whether he really lived there” (The Times of India, April 12, 1987). The eminent archaeologist H D Sankalia was asked, “Can you pinpoint the place in Ayodhya where Ram was born?” He replied, “No, I don’t think it is possible” (Sunday, March 27, 1988), As Mulk Raj Anand wrote to Atal Behari Vajpayee, “there is not a shred of evidence about where this hero was born!’
  • The Ramcharitmanas of Sant Tulsidas does not mention either the destruc- tion of a temple or the construction of a mosque on its site. He was over 30 in 1528 when the mosque was built. He lived and wrote his great work in Ayodhya. It is simply unthinkable that this devotees of Shri Ram would have ignored the outrage, if it had been committed.
  • Some eminent historians in a letter published The Times of India (New Delhi, October 21, 1986; Bombay, October 28,1986) a propos its publication of the mischievous report on ‘Krishna’s birthplace after Aurangzeb’, said:

 

It creates the kind of confusion such as has been created, probably deliberately, over the question of the birthplace of Rama in the matter of Rama Janmabhoomi. A Persian text of the mid-nineteenth century states that the Babri mosque was adjacent to the Sita- ka-rasoi-ghar and was known as the Rasoi Sita mosque and adjoined the area associated with the birthplace of Rama. It would be worth enquiring whether there is reliable historical evidence of a period prior to the nineteenth century for this association of a precise location for the birthplace of Rama. Furthermore, such disputes as there were between Hindus and Muslims in this area up to the nineteenth century were not over the Babri mosque but the totally different site at Hanuman- baithak.It cannot be denied that acts of intolerance have been committed in India by followers of all religions. But these acts have to be understood in their context, it is a debasement of history to distort these events for present day communal propaganda.

 

The statement in your news report that the site at Mathura is to be ‘liberated* and handed over to the ‘rightful owners as the birthplace of Krishna raises the question of the limits to the logic of restoration of religious sites (and this includes the demand for the restoration to worshippers of disused mosques now under the care of the Archaeological Survey of India). How far back do we go? Can we push this to the restora- tion of Buddhist and Jaina monuments destroyed by Hindus? Or of pre-Hindu animist shrines?

 

The letter was signed by eminent historians and then academics; Romila Thapar, Muzaffar Alam, Bipan Chandra, R Champaka Lakshmi, S Bhattacharya, H Mukhia, Suvira Jaiswal, S Ratnagar,M K Palat, Satish Saberwal, S Gopal and Mridula Mukherjee.

 

They were   absolutely   right.  The   myth is  a  nineteenth   century creation by the British.In a letter to The Statesman (October 22,1989) Indrajit Dutta and nine others wrote:

 

The belief that the disputed place of worship in Ayodhya is a mosque built after destroying a temple consecrating Rama’s birthplace originates in the first half of the I9th century. In 1813

 

John Leyden, a British historian, published his “Memoirs of Zehir- ed-din, Muhammed Babar, Emperor of Hindustan” (A translation of Babar’s memoirs in Persian). In it

 

Leyden had contended that Babar had passed through Ayodhya in March 1528 during his campaign against the Pathans. This “historical evidence” of Babar’s presence in the area was distorted by later British authorities to propagate the belief that (he “anti-

 

Hindu” Babar had destroyed the Ram Janmabhoomi Temple and got a mosque built on the spot- though liydcn’s work makes no mention of it. Sushil Srivastava of the Department of Medieval and Modern History, University of Allahabad, has worked extensively on the history of Awadh. He substantiates his findings to show how the British authorities, specifically Colonel Sleeman, then Resident of Luck now, anxious to justify the annexation of Avadh, exploited this controversy superbly at a time when rumblings of the 1857 mutiny were ominous.

 

In fact, going by the “Babar Nama” memoirs of Babar, a brilliantly detailed treatise translated by Lady Annette Susnah Beveridge in

 

1922, there is good reason to believe that Babar, though himself a devout Muslim, was extremely tolerant towards all religions. It states quite clearly that the Mughal emperor visited several temples during his campaign and was full of praise for their architectural beauty. There is no mention of his being driven by any desire to destroy Hindu temples.

 

Srivastava writes that “the belief that the Ram Janmabhoomi Temple was located at the site of the Babri Masjid appears to be based largely on local myth and folklore. In fact there is no concrete historical evidence to show that a temple associated with Rama existed at the spot. Nor is there any mention of any such temple in the Hindu scriptures. The main basis for the belief appears to be the Ramayana of Valmiki, which mentions Ayodhya as the city where Rama was born!’ He also holds that there is no evidence that Babar “destroyed any temple in Ayodhya”.

 

In Ayodhya itself to this day opinion differs as to the actual birth site, as the famous historian R S Sharma found. In a recent interview to Janashakti of Patna he said, “there is no proof that there was any mandir which was demolished by Babar”. Also “it is very difficult to say Ramji was born where. I have been there [Ayodhya]. There are at least15-16 mandirs, the pujaris of which claim that their temple is the real birthplace of Rama” (New Age, October 8, 1989).

 

The Ayodhya Verdict 2010:

 

The fate of a nationally contested religious space, the Babri Masjid (Mosque) in Ayodhya, culminated in 2010 with a court ruling, now known as the Ayodhya verdict. The legal case involved a contest of title rights between an existing fifteenth-century mosque and a historical temple that may have existed on the same site before the time of the Mughals. The verdict provided a consolatory solution, with a three-way division of land – two-thirds to Hindus and one-third to Muslims. However, for the first time in Indian history, the court ruled that, based on the epic narrative the Ramayana, the space of the Babri Mosque was also the birthplace of Lord Ram. As a result, the space under the mosque’s central dome will be allotted to Hindus. The verdict creates precedence for using mythology as evidence to contest spatial issues through legal channels.

 

Conclusion:

 

JV Deshpande Writes “With economy stagnant and the corruption rampant, a weak government and dishonest leadership of most parties, the conditions would very much seem to be ripe for the rise of fascism. Persons conversant with the European history of this century do find parallels between the Indian conditions of today and the con- ditions in Italy and Germany in the 20s. Actually, if one wishes to look for a foreign parallel, a more apt and recent one would be that of Iran under the Shah: A classic case of a ruling class which had set out to modernise a country by coercion and brutality while keeping intact its own corrupt and opulent way of life The ruling class in Iran had lost all contact with the masses in the process. The rulers in today’s India are not much different.

 

A disturbing offshoot of this is already evident. The heads and chiefs of a few mutts and sects among the Hindus, a few Acharyas have been increasingly vocal, claiming to speak for the entire Hindu community or to interpret the religion for them. Preposterous as these claims are, after countenancing similar claims from a few Imams and Kazis vis-a-vis the Muslims, the government finds that it cannot dismiss them offhand. If accepting the legitimacy of Imams and Kazis in the affairs of the state was a folly, similar course with respect to Mahants and Sadhus will be nothing short of disastrous. But to prevent such a drift towards disaster, the secular forces have to resolve the bane contradiction in their position mentioned above.

 

This issue today is one of the most controversial which challenges the social, historical and political fabric of Indian society. On one hand the confrontation is with the Hindu Nationalists and other the other hand those who at times who claim to represent Islam in India. The case we are facing today is over the political abuse of history as pointed out by many historians. The appropriation and co-option of history is a continuous and ongoing process in any society. These historians have took a position that As a sacred centre the character of Ayodhya has been changing over the centuries. It has been linked to the history of many religions. Different communities have vested it with their own sacred meaning. The city cannot be claimed by any one community as its exclusive sacred preserve.

you can view video on The Ram Janambhoomi Movement

Reference bibliography

 

Books:

  • Brass, Paul (1994) The Politics of India Since Independence, Cambridge University Press.
  • Brass, Paul (1997) Theft of an Idol: Text and Context in the Representation of Collective Violence, Princeton University Press.
  • Brass, Paul (2005) The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India , University of Washington Press.
  • Brass, Paul (2006) Forms of Collective Violence: Riots, Pogroms and Genocide in Modern India, Three Essays collectives.
  • Jaffrelot, Christophe (2007) Hindu Nationalism: A Reader, Princeton University Press, USA.
  • Jaffrelot, Christophe (1998) The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India, Columbia University Press, USA. (first Published 1995)
  • Jaffrelot, Christophe (Ed.) (2005) The Sangh Parivar: A Reader, Oxford University Press, New Delhi.
  • Jaffrelot, Christophe (1993) The Hindu nationalist Movement and Indian Politics 1925 to 1990s: Strategies of Identity-Building, Implantation and Mobilisation (With special reference to Central India) Penguin Books India, New Delhi.
  • Noorani, A.G. (2014) Destruction of the Babri Masjid: A National Dishonour, Tulika Books
  • Pandey, Gyanendra (2002) Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India, Cambridge University Press,
  • Pandey, Gyanendra (2012) The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India, Third Edition, Oxford University press.
  • .Sarkar, Sumit (1989) Modern India: 1885-1947, St. Martin’s Press
  • Sarkar, Sumit (1999) Writing Social History, Oxford University Press. Sarkar, Sumit (2001)Beyond Nationalist Frames: Postmodernism, HinduFundamentalism, History, Indiana University Press.

 

Articles:

 

Audio-Visual:

  • Pradhanmantri – Episode 16: Babri Mosque Demolition
  • URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQaV2cWL1D4