Twenty-three years after the vandals of the Sangh Parivar had demolished the Babri Masjid in brazen defiance of India’s history of composite culture and every tenet of the rule of law, the Sangh brigade seems desperate to rake up the Ram Mandir issue all over again. On the eve of the twenty-third anniversary of the demolition, Mohan Bhagwat renewed the Mandir call first at the funeral of Ashok Singhal in Delhi and then again in another meeting in Kolkata. The VHP wants the Modi government to legislate in favour of the temple. The Shiv Sena, the closest ideological ally of the BJP, is of the same opinion. Even Nitish Kumar, the estranged BJP ally who has retained power for the third successive term in Bihar riding on a powerful anti-Modi vote, misses no opportunity to teasingly ask the BJP to fix a time-frame for the construction of the temple.
Is the Sangh contemplating a return to the Ayodhya agenda after the humiliating electoral debacles of Delhi and Bihar and to prepare for the crucial UP elections of 2017? The aggressive and hugely emotive mobilisation around the Ram Mandir issue had yielded massive electoral dividends for the BJP in the late 1980s and early 1990s, catapulting it to power for the first time in UP. The rise of ‘Hindutva’ helped the BJP broaden its base beyond its traditional ‘forward’ caste core and contend with the empowerment appeal of the Mandal Commission among the backward caste population. Since then the BJP has tried hard to expand and consolidate its ‘Hindutva’ constituency through its sustained campaign of aggressive communalism and Islamophobia, punctuated periodically by riots, massacres and other forms of targeted violence. Recent reverses however indicate diminishing returns for this strategy of ‘low-intensity warfare’, prompting perhaps a rethink and a possible return to the ‘proven blessings’ of Ram.
For the ideologues and political managers of the Sangh parivar, the ‘Ram Mandir’ campaign was a multi-dimensional exercise aimed simultaneously at reinventing Hinduism, reinterpreting Indian nationalism and redesigning governance on a majoritarian plank. Defying Brahminical regimentation, Hinduism has evolved as a non-regimented religion with an amazing diversity of beliefs and practices. By projecting Ram as the ultimate warrior and the foremost Hindu symbol, the Ram Mandir campaign sought to impart a decisive military muscle to the otherwise diverse and rather amorphous Hindu religious persona. The territorial and historical evolution of Indian nationalism as a modern cementing force against British colonial rule was sought to be redefined as something traditional and even eternal, revolving primarily around this aggressive Hindu identity and invoking the pride and glory of a mythical past and the injured sense of a perceived Hindu victimhood through the medieval period.
The mob vandalism that demolished the mosque in broad daylight was no ‘uncontrollable momentary excess’ but very much part of the script and the celebratory smiles on the faces of the leaders present on the spot revealed it all. Had the demolition been carried out on an unscheduled date and in the absence of these leaders, the BJP could have even tried to pass it off as an ‘accident’ on the lines of the recent incident of Dadri mob lynching. Apart from achieving the immediate and direct objective of demolishing the mosque, the Ayodhya expedition of the Sangh brigade was also intended to challenge and test the institutional fabric of the constitutional Indian republic. While the BJP had to pay an immediate price in the form of dismissal of its governments in UP and three other states and a temporary ban on the RSS, VHP and Bajrang Dal, it gained enormous confidence in terms of impunity for the criminal act of demolition and a clear shift in the post-demolition legal-juridical discourse and framework that privileged Ayodhya as a special case and exempted it from the ambit of the subsequent legislation that guarantees the character of places of worship as on 15 August 1947. The BJP used these ‘gains’ from Ayodhya to the hilt in Gujarat to consolidate its rule through a genocide followed by serial staged encounter killings and a corporate-cheered quasi-privatised mode of governance driven by the NaMo-bhakti cult. By 2014, the BJP had managed to create a veritable mythology of a ‘Gujarat model’ and win its first ever majority at the Centre with the promise of replicating the ‘Gujarat model’ on a countrywide scale!
The renewed Sanghi call for ‘Ram Mandir’ must be seen in this larger perspective and not just as another twist or turn in the protracted Ayodhya dispute. The Ram Janambhoomi campaign has always been a pivotal rallying point for the Sangh’s vision of Hindu Rashtra and from the vantage position of central power, the Sangh brigade has now launched an all-out assault on India’s pluralistic heritage and ethos and the constitutional values, ideas and institutions of modern India. But the developments of 2015 – powered by the resistance of India’s peasants to land acquisition and agrarian crisis, the opposition of trade unions and the working class to the attack on labour rights, the spirited protests of students against the ongoing sale of higher education to the dictates of global capital, the unprecedented collective assertion of the democratic conscience of India’s writers, artists and scientists, and most tellingly, by the verdicts of Delhi and Bihar Assembly elections and now the Gujarat local polls – have made it quite clear that the Indian people have begun to see through this Sanghi game-plan and are determined to foil it with all their might.
