December 6, 2024 marks 32 years of the tearing down of the Babri Masjid by a Hindutva mob cheered on by top BJP leaders, becoming that one defining moment of communal fascism in the country. This demolition took place despite the assurance to the National Integration Council by Kalyan Singh, the then chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, that his government will “hold itself fully responsible for the protection of the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid structures”. What makes the demolition even more egregious is that this undertaking was incorporated into an order of the Supreme Court on 15th November 1991, in the matters challenging two notifications dated 7th October and 10th October, 1991 under which certain property in Faizabad close to Ram janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid Complex had been notified for acquisition for the purpose of development of pilgrimage and providing amenities to them at Ayodhya.
While Kalyan Singh and the BJP government in UP was held in contempt by the Supreme Court in October 1994 for failing to keep its promise and handed a token punishment of one day imprisonment and a fine of ₹2000, the others including LK Advani, Uma Bharti, Murli Manohar Joshi and scores of others who mobilised the mob to demolish Babri Masjid and were caught on camera gleefully celebrating the demolition, were acquitted by the CBI Court in September 2020. This verdict, came after the Supreme Court Constitution Bench verdict, effectively validated the post-demolition circumstances by awarding the ownership of the ‘disputed land’ to the very people who had demolished the mosque even after terming the act of demolition as an egregious violation of law. While the demolishers got what they wanted, the seekers of justice got a ‘compensatory’ offer of a separate plot of five acres for the construction of a mosque.
The Constitution Bench while passing its judgment specifically referred to the Places of Worship Act, 1991, which has been enacted by Parliament to serve two purposes. First, it prohibits the conversion of any place of worship. Second, it imposes a positive obligation to maintain the religious character of every place of worship as it existed on 15th August 1947. The Constitution Bench held that in providing a guarantee for the preservation of the religious character of places of public worship, “Parliament determined that independence from colonial rule furnishes a constitutional basis for healing the injustices of the past by providing the confidence to every religious community that their places of worship will be preserved and that their character will not be altered”. The only exception carved out by this statute, as per the Constitution Bench, is a suit, appeal or proceeding instituted on the ground that the conversion of the religious character of a place of worship had taken place after 15th August 1947 and such an action was pending at the commencement of the Places of Worship Act.
It was said then that with the Ayodhya dispute and the Places of Worship Act, 1991 coming into force communal harmony and reconciliation would be the way forward. This ignored the oft repeated slogan of the Sangh brigade that, 'Ayodhya sirf ek jhanki hai, Kashi Mathura baki hai' (Ayodhya is only a glimpse of what will happen in Kashi and Mathura). Going beyond, the Sangh brigade has deployed their two-pronged strategy combining litigations with aggressive communal mobilisation on the ground to target scores of mosques including Gyanvapi mosque, Sambhal Mosque and even Ajmer Sharif Dargah. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad has a list of around 3000 Mosques that they eventually want to convert and one can only expect a plethora of civil suits and targeted communal violence as the Sangh brigade seeks to rewrite history and paint the whole of India with a saffron brush.
This only confirms that there can be no reconciliation with the Sangh brigade's cultural aggression, decimation of India's historical and cultural diversity and its long-cherished dream of converting India into a saffron monolith. From the renaming of cities of roads to the rewriting of history books, the Sangh seeks to erase all signs of Muslimness in public life.
One expects the judiciary to apply the 1991 Act, which is a legislative device designed to protect the secular features of the Indian polity. However, its response is unsurprising given the judiciary has become amenable to capture by theocratic judges espousing Hindutva ideology and seeking the source of law in religious texts rather than the Constitution. Jst Chandrachud, former Chief Justice of India, who was part of the bench which wrote the Babri Masjid-Ram Janmabhoomi judgment, confessed, to the thrill of Hindutva politicians, that he prayed to god for a solution of the case! In an order that has surprised most, revealing the depths to which expectations from the judiciary has dropped, the Supreme Court, while orally expressing its reservations on the Trial Court ordering survey, asked the Sambhal Trial Court not to proceed with the case till the petition of the Masjid Committee was listed before the Allahabad High Court.
The events around Sambhal Mosque repeat the same modus operandi of the Sangh Brigade to target an old Mosque with the claim that it was built over a demolished temple, and a Trial Court judge ignores the 1991 Act, and orders a survey, which is carried out within hours amidst chants of Jai Shri Ram. Muslims, bitter at such injustice, respond through protests, which is met with disproportionate force in the form of lathi charge and firing, at the end of which 5 young Muslim men are dead. The killings are sought to be justified as a consequence of police force to bring under control protesting Muslims; however that such killings are reserved for Muslims becomes apparent when contrasted with the police response to repeated violence and lawlessness of Hindutva mobs or even Kanwriyas who went to the extent of pelting stones on a school bus with school-going children inside.
Meanwhile Hindutva forces have developed another front against Muslim religious structures. In Uttarakhand, the bogey of “land jihad” has been raised to attack Mosques claiming that these have been built illegally. Earlier this year, in October, the Sanyukt Hindu Sangathan protest for the demolition of a Mosque on private land in Uttarkashi owned by a Muslim, turned violent resulting in injuries to several policemen. Not a shot was fired.
December 6, 2022 also marks the 68th death anniversary of Babasaheb Ambedkar, who had warned: “If Hindu Raj does become a fact, it will, no doubt, be the greatest calamity for this country”. The disaster Babasaheb Ambedkar warned about is staring us in the face; the challenge is to rescue India from its ravages and to harness our collective determination and strength against this communal fascist onslaught.
