The Theme Is Power
The Theme Is Power
A pair of articles explaining the background to Monday's inauguration of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh.
On this forthcoming Monday, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will inaugurate the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya, in the state of Uttar Pradesh. The inauguration of the temple will be the culmination of a four decades-long political project by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to transform the Indian state. The temple has been constructed on the grounds of a former mosque, which was destroyed by extremists inspired by the BJP in 1992.
As some background to this event, I thought I’d share a pair of articles that I wrote for the Australian Institute of International Affairs in 2020. The first was after the foundation stone of the Ram Mandir was laid by Modi, and the second on the acquittal of those political leaders charged with the destruction of the mosque.
Monday in Ayodhya will undoubtedly be an extraordinary spectacle of political-religious theatre. With the event being used by the BJP as central to their campaign for the federal election to be held between April and May.
On 5 August, in the town of Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid the foundation stone for a new temple to be built in honour of the Hindu deity Ram. The event symbolised the completion of a three and a half decades-long project of the Sangh Parivar – a collection of Hindu organisations of which Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is the political wing – to fundamentally alter the character of the Indian state. With this event, India’s existence as a secular, pluralistic society has now passed. In its place, a Hindu-chauvinist state has been born with Modi as its midwife.
In the early 1980s, the religious arm of the Sangh Parivar, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), translated as World Hindu Council, began campaigning for the “liberation” of a site in Ayodhya that housed a 16th century mosque built by the Mughal emperor Babur. With little evidence to back up their claim, the VHP had declared that the mosque was built on the very spot where the deity Ram, the central figure of the Hindu epic Ramayana, had been born (Ram Janmabhoomi). The mosque’s presence on this land was touted as a glaring affront to Hinduism.
At the time, the BJP was a fringe political party that had won just two of the 543 seats in Lok Sabha (the lower house of India’s parliament) at the 1984 federal election. The party was seemingly no threat to the incumbency of the Congress Party, which was the primary vehicle of India’s independence movement and the party that had constructed the modern Indian state as a multi-religious entity. India’s secularism was built on eschewing religious favouritism rather than a strict separation of religion and state. However, in adopting the VHP’s agitation as a central component of its Hindutva ideology, the BJP’s political fortunes were transformed.
Being a religious political party, the BJP were aware of two things that assisted in their rise. From religion, they knew that faith was more powerful than facts, and from politics, they understood that emotive narratives were more compelling than evidence-based arguments. So the Ram Janmabhoomi myth became central to the BJP’s platform. Having this as a cause to advocate would set the party against the ideals of the Indian state, and therefore gain it the attention it needed to become a major political player.
While the BJP has an instinctive suspicion of the liberal democratic state developed by the Anglocentric elites of the Congress Party, the primary source of its grievance is actually the Mughal Empire (1526-1857), whose ruling elites were something much worse than Western in education and outlook: they were Muslims. The Babri Mosque became a symbol of this Mughal rule, an Islamic structure that, by its physical presence in Ayodhya, was literally suppressing the religion of the soil. It’s destruction – and replacement with a Ram Mandir – would make India great again.
With this narrative, the BJP had an instrument to polarise the electorate along religious lines to cut through issues of caste and to establish a more unified Hindu identity. This identity would be one based on historical grievance – India’s Centuries of Humiliation. The goal was to create a bloc of voters which would focus its attention solely on these issues of negative identity – the politics of who you are against – rather than policies that could make practical improvements to people’s lives.
Serendipitously, in the late-1980s, India’s public broadcaster Doordarshan began airing an epic 78-week television production of the Ramayana. This was a period when many Indians were first gaining access to household or village television sets, and the production became a collective cultural event. This provided added fuel for the BJP’s co-optation of religion for political purposes, and its romanticism of a glorious former Hindu civilisation that had been crushed by foreign forces.
Come the 1989 federal election, the BJP had increased its presence in the Lok Sabha to 88 seats, enough to be kingmaker in a hung parliament. The following year, BJP president L.K Advani organised a pilgrimage procession (Rath Yatra) to Ayodhya in order to generate publicity for the Ram Janmabhoomi movement. In many cities that his procession travelled through there were riots between local Hindus and Muslims, which prompted the government of Bihar to arrest Advani. Yet many BJP supporters proceeded onwards to Ayodhya and attempted to attack the mosque, resulting in several being killed by Uttar Pradesh police. The movement now had its martyrs.
These events also led to the BJP withdrawing its support for the government of V.P. Singh. A new coalition was only able to last six more months before an election was required. With the BJP’s controversies in hand, the issue of Ayodhya would become a central theme of the 1991 election. The party had been able to successfully shift India’s political culture to place themselves at its heart. From this time forward, whether the BJP won or not, elections would be contested on the issues that they drove.
Yet for such a radical party, the patience and processes of democracy were unsatisfying, and the party instead desired a physical demonstration of its burgeoning power. In December 1992, the BJP, along with the VHP, and the Sangh Parivar’s paramilitary wing the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) organised a rally in Ayodhya. During speeches by Advani and other BJP politicians, the crowd of Hindutva devotees stormed the mosque and within several hours had reduced it to rubble.
A commission of inquiry, known as the Liberhan Commission, was launched directly after the mosque’s demolition. It took 17 years for the commission to complete its determination, but in its final report it concluded that the BJP and its affiliate organisations in the Sangh Parivar had intentionally orchestrated the destruction of the mosque, and singled out a number of BJP politicians as either directly or ideologically responsible. The report noted bluntly that “the theme was power.”
Power not only provides you the ability to control circumstances, but it also allows you to avoid any consequences for your actions. In the period between the destruction of the Babri Mosque and the BJP winning a majority government in 2014, the party didn’t have enough power to implement its revolutionary vision for the Indian state, but it did have enough power to avoid any consequences for its attempts. Yet, the rise of Narendra Modi has changed the first part of that equation. With the Congress Party now an ineffectual rump, there are only pockets of regional resistance to the BJP’s authority. Further submission to the party’s vision seems inevitable.
In November 2019, the Supreme Court of India made a decision that waved goodbye to the India of the Congress Party, and ushered in the new India of the BJP. It ruled that the destruction of the Babri Mosque was against the rule of law, but the land should be given to a trust in order to construct a temple to Ram anyway. With Modi laying the foundation stone of this temple in early August the construction of a new Indian state has also symbolically begun. It will be a state built on the animosity of an “injured majority,” who will use their power to cower the country’s religious minorities, and reorganise the state’s structures away from constitutionalism towards majoritarian domination.
Originally published by Australian Outlook on 21 August 2020 under the title: Does the Ram Mandir of Ayodhya Mark the Decline of Secularism in India?
In early August, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid the foundation stone for a temple to the Hindu deity Ram in the town of Ayodhya, situated in the populous northern state of Uttar Pradesh. This ceremony was the symbolic culmination of an almost four-decade long political project by Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its affiliate organisations, collectively known as the Sangh Parivar, to fundamentally alter the character of the Indian state, replacing India’s previous multi-religious doctrine with a state that instead places a muscular Hindu identity at its core.
The site where this temple will be built previously housed a 16th century mosque, known as the Babri Masjid, named after the Mughal emperor, Babur. In the early 1980s the Sangh Parivar constructed a myth that this mosque was built on the very spot where Ram – the central figure of the Hindu epic Ramayana – had been born. This myth became the organising political narrative of the BJP, and as I wrote previously for Australian Outlook, it has projected the party from obscurity to its current status as India’s dominant political force.
As a party that is instinctively suspicious of India’s constitution, the BJP’s political ascension has come via actively placing itself in conflict with the country’s norms and laws, and riding the controversy this has generated for its electoral gain. The defining event of the party’s tactic was a rally in 1992 that BJP and the Sangh Parivar’s paramilitary wing, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), held in Ayodhya outside the Babri Masjid. Around 150,000 people had gathered in the town, listening to speeches by senior BJP leaders, before a mob stormed the mosque and reduced it to rubble. An ensuing riot killed around 2000 people.
In the days after the mosque’s destruction, a commission of inquiry known as the Liberhan Commission was established to investigate the incident. The commission took 17 years to gather all the relevant evidence, and the findings it reached were damning. Its 1029-page report stated that the leadership of the BJP and its affiliates were both ideologically and practically responsible for the mosque’s destruction. The report highlighted the financial involvement of the Sangh Parivar which, the report asserted, categorically pointed to the planning of the mosque’s destruction, stating that the event was “neither spontaneous nor voluntary.” It concluded that, “These leaders saw the ‘Ayodhya Issue’ as their road to success and sped down this highway, mindless of the casualties they scattered about.”
After years of legal wrangling, in 2017, a special court set up by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) charged a number of senior BJP figures, as well as other members of the wider Sangh Parivar, with criminal conspiracy over the mosque’s destruction. With the overwhelming evidence gathered by the Liberhan Commission, the case against these actors should have been straightforward. However, the political climate in the country has been significantly altered since the BJP was reelected in 2019. This was an election that confirmed their political dominance and loosened their self-restraint. Institutions like the CBI that should have been independent from the government of the day have instead found themselves under pressures that have compromised this independence – if not by direct interference, then by the threat of it, or threat of something even worse.
So instead, the special court decided in late September to acquit the 32 defendants who were still alive (49 were originally charged), stating that the mosque’s destruction was not premeditated and directed by party officials. The decision was less based on the compelling evidence of the event, and more on the CBI’s understanding of which way the wind now blows in India. The BJP, with both its political and paramilitary muscle, would be unwilling to accept any other verdict, and therefore in the CBI’s eyes, there was no point in delivering one.
This verdict of the CBI can be seen as a companion to the 2019 decision by the Supreme Court regarding the plot of land where the mosque once stood. The court made a farcical ruling that attempted to honour the existing constitutional order while simultaneously submitting itself to the political pressure it was under from the BJP. It ruled that the destruction of the mosque was “an egregious violation of the rule of law,” but the plot of land should be awarded to a Hindu trust in order to construct a temple to Ram anyway. The Supreme Court had placed one foot in the old India, one foot in the new.
However, the CBI’s ruling on criminal culpability for the mosque’s destruction went further. It didn’t just acquit the Sangh Paviar’s early-90s leadership of any wrongdoing, but it sought to rewrite history to construct a new narrative that would try to remove the event’s taint on the party. Instead of the Liberhan Commission’s assertion that the Sangh Paviar’s leadership had deliberately organised the destruction of the mosque, Judge Surendra Kumar Yadav disingenuously stated that these actors “actually tried to control and pacify the mob.” Yadav further obfuscated the event by claiming that the video and audio of the mosque’s destruction could not be authenticated, and therefore events could not be verified.
Officially, the issue of the destruction of the Babri mosque has now been settled. The BJP and its affiliates have been politically rewarded by riding the issue to successive majority governments with no effective national opposition force to temper them, and any legal repercussions for their behaviour have been successfully avoided. The Indian courts have consolidated this triumph by not just ignoring the behaviour of the BJP, but by converting themselves into instruments of its power.
This has always been the goal of the party. Rather than simply seeking to obtain political power democratically – that is, the opportunity to govern within a constitutional framework – the party has instead sought to demonstrate raw power – the ability to exercise their will without restraints or consequences. Independent institutions like courts are of no intrinsic value to parties like the BJP as binding themselves to such principles would limit their ability to act freely to achieve their ideological aims. Now emboldened by having avoided any consequences for their most serious crime, the path is cleared for the BJP to further do as it pleases.
Originally published by Australian Outlook on 15 October 2020 under the title: Is the Indian Judiciary Independent Anymore?