Repeating the mistakes of 1992
The situation in Varanasi and the actions of the local administration portend a replay of the past
When L K Advani took charge of the Bharatiya Janata Party in 1986, he had never been a participant in electoral politics. His entry into politics came after time spent as a journalist in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh magazine, where he wrote film reviews.
As a politician, Mr Advani had always been a nominated member, whether in the Delhi Council or in the Rajya Sabha. He had no experience of political mass mobilisation and, going by his autobiography (My Country, My Life, published in 2008) does not appear to know how it worked.
The Ayodhya issue had actually been launched by the non-political groups inside the RSS, led by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad or VHP. In September 1984, the VHP began a campaign against the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, demanding to be allowed to pray inside the mosque. Rajiv Gandhi succumbed to the pressure and the government told the courts there would be no law and order problem if this happened. The locks were thus opened and Hindus allowed into the mosque.
After this, the VHP demand changed. It now wanted the mosque handed over to “Hindus”. In February 1989, at the Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, the VHP said it would lay the foundation stone for the temple in November. Till this time, Mr Advani writes in his autobiography, it had not been an issue in mainstream politics. In June, at the BJP’S national executive meeting in Himachal Pradesh, Mr Advani threw the party behind the issue. The BJP resolution demanded that the site “should be handed over to the Hindus” and “the mosque built at some other suitable place”. Elections came a few months later, in November 1989. The BJP’S manifesto now made its first reference to Ayodhya: “By not allowing the rebuilding of the Ram Janma Mandir in Ayodhya, on the lines of Somnath Mandir built by the government of India in 1948, it has allowed tensions to rise, and gravely strained social harmony”. It was a violation of the BJP’S own constitution, which on its first page and in the opening article pledged it would bear true faith and allegiance to the principle of secularism. But it helped Mr Advani take the BJP to 85 seats in 1989, four times as many as the Jana Sangh in the previous election it contested alone and more than forty times as many as Atal Bihari Vajpayee had delivered with his reformed and renamed party. Mr Advani had become the most successful political leader from the RSS and had found the recipe for electoral success.
He now began to invest more in the issue that had brought the dividend. Mr Advani says he offered the Muslims a deal. If they would hand over the Babri Masjid, he would “personally request” the VHP to not campaign against two other mosques in Mathura and Varanasi. He writes that he was “deeply disappointed” and “annoyed” that this was not considered to be satisfactory by the Muslims. Thus began his Rath Yatra on October 30, 1990.
Mr Advani writes that he was astonished by the frenzied response his campaign received. “I had never realised that religiosity was so deep-rooted in the lives of the Indian people,” he said, adding that it was the “first time he understood the truth of Swami Vivekananda’s statement that ‘religion is the soul of India and if you want to teach any subject to Indians, they understand it better in the language of religion’.”
At each stop along the way, Mr Advani went about talking about why the Babri Masjid had to be taken down, using the vocabulary and metaphors of religion, in basic speeches that he says were no more than five minutes long. The reduction can only be imagined; the consequence was predictable.
Communal riots occurred in the wake of the Rath Yatra in Assam, West Bengal, Bihar, Odisha, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Gujarat, Maharashtra and Delhi and continued for a long time. Over 3,400 Indians were killed in violence between April 1989 and March 1993.
Mr Advani absolved himself of any responsibility here. He accepts there was violence around India but acquits himself by saying, “There were indeed riots in several parts of the country, but none at all along the yatra trail.” The Rath Yatra and associated processions were deliberately taken through Muslim neighbourhoods. Violence was good because it led to polarisation and that made voter choice easy. Mr Advani successfully polarised India from north to south and east to west, pitting Indians against their fellow countrymen and women and children.
The reward was a doubling of the BJP’S vote share. In the general elections held in mid-1991, the BJP got 20 per cent of the total vote and won 120 seats. In the first election held after the demolition, in 1996, the BJP won 161 seats.
Northern states going to Assembly elections after the beginning of the anti-babri Masjid campaign fell to the BJP for the first time in the party’s history as it won full majorities on the back of the anti-muslim mobilisation.
There were BJP chief ministers in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh in 1990, Uttar Pradesh in 1991, Gujarat in 1995 and Maharashtra in coalition with the Shiv Sena the same year.
Mr Advani’s image as a “hawk” made him less acceptable to coalition partners and he had to look on as Vajpayee became prime minister. However, under Vajpayee the BJP was unable to express the confident majoritarianism that had actually brought it success. The BJP’S national vote share fell from over 25 per cent in 1998 to 23 per cent in 1999 and then to 22 per cent in 2004, when it ran out of steam and Vajpayee was defeated in the general election. Instead of an angry and hostile campaign against Indian Muslims, Vajpayee chose an economyfocussed message captioned “India Shining” that was firmly rejected.
This confident Hindutva has of course returned with the arrival of Narendra Modi. The events in Kashi portend an action replay. The alacrity of the local administration in moving forward, the helplessness of the Muslims, the reluctance of the Supreme Court— all of these are familiar, as is the lesson that the most effective tool for mass mobilisation in India is to march against the minorities. We stand on the edge with no capacity to resist what is to come.