Ayodhya: A Personal Account

In 1992, my father had planned a visit to Mumbai, then Bombay, in the first week of December. We were supposed to depart on the day of my birthday, December 7. A few days before the journey, I would see my father being on the phone more than usual, talking at times excitedly, and at times, with a worrying countenance on his face. The snippets of conversation that I could latch onto, told me that he was expecting some kind of trouble. My eight-year-old self was more concerned with the worst of his fears coming true. I had told all my friends that I was on my way to Bombay, and now the prospect of a cancellation of the trip would surely be the most embarrassing thing for the child in his less than a decade lifetime. As with human life, the worst fear had come true. On December 6, just a day before the journey, my father was glued to the television and listening to the radio, while my mother was intermittently packing the suitcases and being on the phone with relatives. The general consensus was to abort the journey and very late at night, maybe less than 12 hours before we were supposed to depart, the trip was called off. I have never managed or got a chance to visit Bombay since then.

But a greater damage had been done. Irrevocably so. The secular fabric of India, sometimes a matter of faith, most times a matter of pride and seldom (until then) a matter of scrutiny, was under the microscope. Ayodhya had now become the buzzword in every household and every major city was on the edge. A storm was coming. Some leaders, like the charismatic Lalu Prasad Yadav, had famously commented that if a government doesn’t want, there will be no riots. His exact words were, “Agar sarkar na chaahi, toh dangaa na hoye.” The then Chief Minister of West Bengal, the stoic Jyoti Basu, had appeared on the State-sponsored television in Calcutta and declared that he had ordered the police to shoot any troublemaker or miscreant, irrespective of the religion he belonged to. But the other heads of State were probably less forceful and confident in exercising their authority.

Little did we know that the country had reached a moment of reckoning and it had failed to live up to the test. The horrors of the Partition were still less than 50 years old, but another event of seismic proportions had shaken the foundations of the claim of unity through diversity of the largest democracy in the world. As I look back now—almost three decades after the event of the destruction of the Babri Masjid—I ask myself whether the event set off a chain reaction or whether it was the culmination of years of latent communal distrust and suspicion that had always been there and which finally found an outlet for justification and expression in the public domain.

The Partition was a watershed event in the history of the Indian subcontinent. The horrors, the cost of human lives and the displacement of millions on both sides of the border have been well documented. From Manto to Khushwant Singh to the maverick Bengali filmmaker, Ritwik Ghatak, an entire generation had been scarred by the senseless maiming and mayhem of human lives, familial trust and neighbourly betrayals.

When India stepped into the 1960s and 70s, the onus was unfairly on both communities to uphold the spirit of fraternity. In film after film, it was almost a socio-cinematic demand to have a Muslim character befriending the hero and ending up saving his life or losing his own or worse, proving his loyalty to the system and the country. On the other side, the predominantly Hindu majority took it upon itself to portray a “good” Muslim character almost as if to prove a point to the other Hindus (read Right Wing) of the indispensability of the “other”. And yet, almost negligible mainstream Bollywood films would have a Muslim character in the titular role. The Khans (Aamir, Salman, Saif and Shah Rukh) throughout the 1990s were always playing the Rahul Malhotras, the Khannas and the Kapoors—very Hindu, very privileged and very upper caste. It was living on a sword, where no one knew where the right edge was. Legend has it that the then chief of selectors, Raj Singh Dungarpur, had proposed the captaincy of the Indian National Cricket team to Mohammad Azharuddin, with the words, “Kya Miyaan, captain banoge?” Despite being a prolific run-getter, Azhar always carried the burden of raised eyebrows from different sections of the Indian populace who staunchly believed that his being awarded the captaincy was nothing but a part of the appeasement politics employed to keep the Muslim community content. When his involvement with the match-fixing scandal was uncovered, the more than general consensus was that it was only natural. To think that one associated dabbling in a sort of criminal activity with one라이브 바카라 religious affiliation was only symptomatic of how deep the malaise was.

Looking back now, one wonders, maybe naively that there was still hope—that the hardliners, the “angry Hanuman” car sticker wielders, were the minority. A film with a not-so-subtle political message criticising the men in power like Fiza or Rang De Basanti could still be released without serious threats against the directors. India could still go to Pakistan to play a bilateral series with the words of the then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee—“Jeet Lo Dil바카라 웹사이트”. Shah Rukh Khan could still appear in a music video for a song sung by Jagjit Singh, penned by Vajpayee again. A R Rahman could dare to work on a highly controversial and historical song like Vande Mataram and almost make it his own. There were no trolls, no cancel culture, no trending hashtags on the print media or on television and public platforms calling for his head. Rather, when Shiv Sena activists dug up the cricket pitch in Delhi, where Pakistan was supposed to play a test match in 1999, the entire country was up in arms condemning the act.

But times go out of fashion. There are no winds of change, and to blame the BJP government for granting impunity to the blatant show of communal hatred, post their coming to power in 2014, is, I think, shirking the knowledge of our collusion in this fragmentation and polarisation of social harmony. I believe, and maybe it is a bleak thought, but India had always been inherently distrustful of the “other” minorities. Time to time, some event or the other appeals to our “Heart of Darkness” and we become what Joseph Conrad라이브 바카라 main character in the novella had become, reminding ourselves to “Exterminate the Brutes”. Be it the Sikh riots of 1984, the Muzzaffarnagar riots in 2013, the violence in Bombay in the early 1990s—all are testimony to the fact that the belief and ideology of a secular and tolerant republic was a convenient lie we told ourselves, a mirror we held up because it was the feel-good thing, we thought we were doing to keep the country together. The wheels have come off now, and considering the ideological base that the BJP commands with their version of Hindutva, it seems unlikely that this organised, systematic and almost machine-like precision of vilifying a community will come to an end anytime soon.

The homogenisation of Indian culture and the seizure and erasure of history will only get stronger. Githa Hariharan had predicted this in her almost prophetic novel, In Times of Siege, about the increasing interference of the government in the education sector and the universities. Unless we, who still believe that the myth is worth living and fighting for, should stand up and ask the right questions and not rest till we are answered—questions like when will Umar Khalid get a fair hearing and trial? Questions like where is Najeeb Ahmed?

(Views expressed are personal)

Sayan Aich Bhowmik is Assistant Professor, Department of English, Shirakole College, Kolkata