#babrimasjiddemolition — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #babrimasjiddemolition, aggregated by home.social.
-
New NCERT textbook removes mention of Babri Masjid, calls it ‘3-domed structure’, says 2019 SC ruling ‘classic example’ of consensus
It has pruned the section on the demolition of the historic mosque by Hindu nationalist mobs from four to two pages and deleted telling details from the earlier version.
#NCERTtextbooks #NCERT #BabriMasjidDemolition #BabriMasjid #HinduMobs #BJP #NDA #education #communalism #hindutva #history #histodon #india
-
NCERT drops some references to Babri demolition, Gujarat riots, Manipur
The change is being made to bring the initial questions in synchronisation with internal latest changes made in the chapter, says the NCERT.
#NCERT #NCERTtextbooks #BabriMasjidDemolition #GujaratPogrom #GujaratRiots #kashmir #manipur #ManipurUnrest #IndianMuslims #education #HumanRights #hindutva #communalism #india
-
NCERT drops 3 Babri demolition references, revises Ayodhya dispute section in Class XII political science book
The official reason for this latest exercise was to reduce the curriculum load further, and to help students recover from learning disruptions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.
#NCERTTextbooks #BabriMasjidDemolition #NCERT #education #hindutva #communalism #india
-
And Then Came Advani
Excerpt from Aakar Patel's 'Our Hindu Rashtra' (Westland, 2020)
The Ayodhya issue had actually been launched by the non-political groups inside the RSS, led by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad. At a meeting in UP in 1983, Rajendra Singh, who would later become RSS chief, demanded that the Babri Masjid be opened to Hindu devotees. In September 1984, the VHP began a campaign against the mosque. This received sufficient public response for the group to claim in 1986 that they would forcibly break the locks open. 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.
But the VHP did not stop with being given access to worship at the site: its target was the destruction of the mosque. In February 1989, at the Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, the VHP said it would lay the foundation stone for the temple in November. This would involve the making of bricks across the country with Ram’s name embossed on them and their being carried in processions through towns and villages to Ayodhya in November.
Till this time, Advani writes in his autobiography, a few members of the BJP like Vijayaraje Scindia and Vinay Katiyar had participated in the Ayodhya movement in their individual capacity. It was not an issue in mainstream politics. In June, at the BJP’s national executive meeting in Himachal Pradesh, 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’. The whole thing was now coloured with religious sentiment.
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 opening articles pledged it would bear true faith and allegiance to the principle of secularism.
A few days before voting, the VHP brought all its processions from across India to Ayodhya and laid the foundation stone next to the mosque.
Powered by its divisive, anti-Muslim demand, Advani’s BJP won 85 seats, four times as many as the Jana Sangh in the last election it contested alone and more than forty times as many as Vajpayee had delivered in his reformed and renamed party. Advani had become the most successful political leader from the RSS and had found the recipe for electoral success. He began to invest more in the issue that had brought the dividend.
The Congress lost its majority in the election, and a coalition led by V.P. Singh took power with support from Advani, though for only a short period. Three months after the election, in February 1990, the VHP resumed its mobilisation against the mosque and said it would continue the process of what it called kar seva from October.
The political escalation, according to Advani, happened by accident. Advani writes in his autobiography that in June he was to visit London, and just before he left he was interviewed by the editor of the RSS journal Panchajanya who asked him what would happen if the government failed to resolve the Ayodhya matter. Advani told him that the BJP supported the decision to begin kar seva on 30 October, and if it was stopped there would be a mass movement led by the BJP.
‘Frankly, I had forgotten about this interview,’ Advani writes, when his wife telephoned him and asked, ‘What have you said? The papers here have reported it with blaring headlines: “On Ayodhya, Advani threatens the biggest mass movement in the history of independent India”.’ Advani adds: ‘The die had been cast.’
After this, 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. He announced he would begin his campaign against the mosque on Deendayal Upadhyaya’s birthday, 25 September, in Gujarat, and ride a ‘chariot’ (actually a truck) to Ayodhya on 30 October 1990. [...]
At each stop along the way 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. The scale of the violence unleashed by Advani’s decision to politicise a communal issue and mobilise on it was staggering in both the numbers killed and the geographical spread.
B. Rajeshwari of the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies in her work, Communal Riots in India: A Chronology 1947-2003, writes: ‘The mobilisation campaign for kar sevaks to construct the proposed Ram Janma Bhoomi Temple at Ayodhya on 30 October 1990 aggravated the communal atmosphere in the country. Communal riots occurred in the wake of L.K. Advani’s Rath Yatra wherever it went. These riots were led by RSS-BJP men to consolidate the “Hindu” vote bank. They were widespread over almost all the states from Assam to West Bengal, Bihar, Orissa, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Gujarat, Maharashtra and Delhi.’
Between April 1989 and April 1990, Gujarat recorded 262 dead, mostly Muslim. In October 1990, days after Advani’s yatra began, 41 were killed in Ahmedabad. The same month, 52 were killed in Jaipur, 20 in Jodhpur, 33 in Lucknow, over 100 in Delhi, 37 in Assam, 18 in Patna and 165 in Hyderabad. Also in October, a pogrom against Muslims in Bhagalpur, Bihar, saw 960 killed of whom about 900 were Muslim, In November, 31 were killed in Agra, again mostly Muslim and 13 in Indore. In December, 60 were killed in Karnataka and 134 in Hyderabad.
Many parts of India remained tense for long periods of time. Between April and May 1990, three riots in Kanpur killed 30; between May and November 1991 more than 50 were killed in Varanasi. In May 1991, 26 including 24 Muslims were killed in Vadodara.
In October 1992, 44 were killed in Sitamarhi. On 6 December that year, immediately after the Babri Masjid was destroyed, pogroms against Muslims broke out in Surat where 200 died, of whom some 95 per cent were Muslim. In Bhopal in December, 143 were killed. The Bombay riots that broke out at the same time saw the more than 1,000 killed, mostly Muslim.
Advani absolves 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.’ He asks: ‘Was my campaign anti-Muslim?’ and answers himself: ‘Not in the least.’ When the mobs he gathered began to shout, ‘Jo Hindu hit ki baat karega wohi desh pe raj karega’ (only those speaking of Hindu interest will rule India), Advani says he requested them to replace the phrase Hindu hit with rashtra hit. He adds: ‘I was, therefore, pained to see a section of the media carry reports that had sensational titles like “Advani’s blood yatra”.’ Other than this sympathy for himself, Advani has no comment on the killings in his book written fifteen years later.
Many of the riots broke out after calculated provocation. Rath Yatras and associated processions were deliberately taken through Muslim neighbourhoods. Violence was good because it led to polarisation and that made voter choice easy. 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.
Over 3,400 Indians were killed in the violence triggered by Advani’s anti-Babri Masjid campaign and it brought the BJP to the doorstep of power. Advani’s success was built on the corpses of Indians and cemented with their blood.
He writes the day the mosque was demolished was ‘the saddest day of my life’. Having assembled a mob and fired it up against the mosque, he says he was surprised that they immediately tore it down. As a mark of sacrifice, he says that when celebrations broke out on the dais he was sitting in he refused refreshment saying: ‘No, I will not have sweets today.’
The blood profits were not limited to the general elections. 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 majorities on the back of 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.
Advani made the BJP India’s dominant political force. The Babri demolition and the communal violence in its wake also gave the party the template to further expansion. It would abandon or disregard everything that its manifestos claimed, from mechanisation in the economy to limiting private property to prohibition to Swadeshi to throwing English out to Integral Humanism and the other mumbo-jumbo. The BJP would concentrate its politics on India’s Muslims and focus on those issues alone on which Indian society could be divided and kept on the boil.
#BookExcerpt #LKAdvani #AakarPatel #hindutva #RamTempleMovement #BabriMasjidDemolition #BJP #RSS #VHP #HinduMobs #CommunalRiots #AntiMuslimRiots #IndianMuslims #india #books #bookstodon #BharatRatna
-
And Then Came Advani
Excerpt from Aakar Patel's 'Our Hindu Rashtra' (Westland, 2020)
The Ayodhya issue had actually been launched by the non-political groups inside the RSS, led by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad. At a meeting in UP in 1983, Rajendra Singh, who would later become RSS chief, demanded that the Babri Masjid be opened to Hindu devotees. In September 1984, the VHP began a campaign against the mosque. This received sufficient public response for the group to claim in 1986 that they would forcibly break the locks open. 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.
But the VHP did not stop with being given access to worship at the site: its target was the destruction of the mosque. In February 1989, at the Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, the VHP said it would lay the foundation stone for the temple in November. This would involve the making of bricks across the country with Ram’s name embossed on them and their being carried in processions through towns and villages to Ayodhya in November.
Till this time, Advani writes in his autobiography, a few members of the BJP like Vijayaraje Scindia and Vinay Katiyar had participated in the Ayodhya movement in their individual capacity. It was not an issue in mainstream politics. In June, at the BJP’s national executive meeting in Himachal Pradesh, 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’. The whole thing was now coloured with religious sentiment.
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 opening articles pledged it would bear true faith and allegiance to the principle of secularism.
A few days before voting, the VHP brought all its processions from across India to Ayodhya and laid the foundation stone next to the mosque.
Powered by its divisive, anti-Muslim demand, Advani’s BJP won 85 seats, four times as many as the Jana Sangh in the last election it contested alone and more than forty times as many as Vajpayee had delivered in his reformed and renamed party. Advani had become the most successful political leader from the RSS and had found the recipe for electoral success. He began to invest more in the issue that had brought the dividend.
The Congress lost its majority in the election, and a coalition led by V.P. Singh took power with support from Advani, though for only a short period. Three months after the election, in February 1990, the VHP resumed its mobilisation against the mosque and said it would continue the process of what it called kar seva from October.
The political escalation, according to Advani, happened by accident. Advani writes in his autobiography that in June he was to visit London, and just before he left he was interviewed by the editor of the RSS journal Panchajanya who asked him what would happen if the government failed to resolve the Ayodhya matter. Advani told him that the BJP supported the decision to begin kar seva on 30 October, and if it was stopped there would be a mass movement led by the BJP.
‘Frankly, I had forgotten about this interview,’ Advani writes, when his wife telephoned him and asked, ‘What have you said? The papers here have reported it with blaring headlines: “On Ayodhya, Advani threatens the biggest mass movement in the history of independent India”.’ Advani adds: ‘The die had been cast.’
After this, 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. He announced he would begin his campaign against the mosque on Deendayal Upadhyaya’s birthday, 25 September, in Gujarat, and ride a ‘chariot’ (actually a truck) to Ayodhya on 30 October 1990. [...]
At each stop along the way 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. The scale of the violence unleashed by Advani’s decision to politicise a communal issue and mobilise on it was staggering in both the numbers killed and the geographical spread.
B. Rajeshwari of the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies in her work, Communal Riots in India: A Chronology 1947-2003, writes: ‘The mobilisation campaign for kar sevaks to construct the proposed Ram Janma Bhoomi Temple at Ayodhya on 30 October 1990 aggravated the communal atmosphere in the country. Communal riots occurred in the wake of L.K. Advani’s Rath Yatra wherever it went. These riots were led by RSS-BJP men to consolidate the “Hindu” vote bank. They were widespread over almost all the states from Assam to West Bengal, Bihar, Orissa, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Gujarat, Maharashtra and Delhi.’
Between April 1989 and April 1990, Gujarat recorded 262 dead, mostly Muslim. In October 1990, days after Advani’s yatra began, 41 were killed in Ahmedabad. The same month, 52 were killed in Jaipur, 20 in Jodhpur, 33 in Lucknow, over 100 in Delhi, 37 in Assam, 18 in Patna and 165 in Hyderabad. Also in October, a pogrom against Muslims in Bhagalpur, Bihar, saw 960 killed of whom about 900 were Muslim, In November, 31 were killed in Agra, again mostly Muslim and 13 in Indore. In December, 60 were killed in Karnataka and 134 in Hyderabad.
Many parts of India remained tense for long periods of time. Between April and May 1990, three riots in Kanpur killed 30; between May and November 1991 more than 50 were killed in Varanasi. In May 1991, 26 including 24 Muslims were killed in Vadodara.
In October 1992, 44 were killed in Sitamarhi. On 6 December that year, immediately after the Babri Masjid was destroyed, pogroms against Muslims broke out in Surat where 200 died, of whom some 95 per cent were Muslim. In Bhopal in December, 143 were killed. The Bombay riots that broke out at the same time saw the more than 1,000 killed, mostly Muslim.
Advani absolves 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.’ He asks: ‘Was my campaign anti-Muslim?’ and answers himself: ‘Not in the least.’ When the mobs he gathered began to shout, ‘Jo Hindu hit ki baat karega wohi desh pe raj karega’ (only those speaking of Hindu interest will rule India), Advani says he requested them to replace the phrase Hindu hit with rashtra hit. He adds: ‘I was, therefore, pained to see a section of the media carry reports that had sensational titles like “Advani’s blood yatra”.’ Other than this sympathy for himself, Advani has no comment on the killings in his book written fifteen years later.
Many of the riots broke out after calculated provocation. Rath Yatras and associated processions were deliberately taken through Muslim neighbourhoods. Violence was good because it led to polarisation and that made voter choice easy. 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.
Over 3,400 Indians were killed in the violence triggered by Advani’s anti-Babri Masjid campaign and it brought the BJP to the doorstep of power. Advani’s success was built on the corpses of Indians and cemented with their blood.
He writes the day the mosque was demolished was ‘the saddest day of my life’. Having assembled a mob and fired it up against the mosque, he says he was surprised that they immediately tore it down. As a mark of sacrifice, he says that when celebrations broke out on the dais he was sitting in he refused refreshment saying: ‘No, I will not have sweets today.’
The blood profits were not limited to the general elections. 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 majorities on the back of 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.
Advani made the BJP India’s dominant political force. The Babri demolition and the communal violence in its wake also gave the party the template to further expansion. It would abandon or disregard everything that its manifestos claimed, from mechanisation in the economy to limiting private property to prohibition to Swadeshi to throwing English out to Integral Humanism and the other mumbo-jumbo. The BJP would concentrate its politics on India’s Muslims and focus on those issues alone on which Indian society could be divided and kept on the boil.
#BookExcerpt #LKAdvani #AakarPatel #hindutva #RamTempleMovement #BabriMasjidDemolition #BJP #RSS #VHP #HinduMobs #CommunalRiots #AntiMuslimRiots #IndianMuslims #india #books #bookstodon #BharatRatna
-
And Then Came Advani
Excerpt from Aakar Patel's 'Our Hindu Rashtra' (Westland, 2020)
The Ayodhya issue had actually been launched by the non-political groups inside the RSS, led by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad. At a meeting in UP in 1983, Rajendra Singh, who would later become RSS chief, demanded that the Babri Masjid be opened to Hindu devotees. In September 1984, the VHP began a campaign against the mosque. This received sufficient public response for the group to claim in 1986 that they would forcibly break the locks open. 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.
But the VHP did not stop with being given access to worship at the site: its target was the destruction of the mosque. In February 1989, at the Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, the VHP said it would lay the foundation stone for the temple in November. This would involve the making of bricks across the country with Ram’s name embossed on them and their being carried in processions through towns and villages to Ayodhya in November.
Till this time, Advani writes in his autobiography, a few members of the BJP like Vijayaraje Scindia and Vinay Katiyar had participated in the Ayodhya movement in their individual capacity. It was not an issue in mainstream politics. In June, at the BJP’s national executive meeting in Himachal Pradesh, 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’. The whole thing was now coloured with religious sentiment.
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 opening articles pledged it would bear true faith and allegiance to the principle of secularism.
A few days before voting, the VHP brought all its processions from across India to Ayodhya and laid the foundation stone next to the mosque.
Powered by its divisive, anti-Muslim demand, Advani’s BJP won 85 seats, four times as many as the Jana Sangh in the last election it contested alone and more than forty times as many as Vajpayee had delivered in his reformed and renamed party. Advani had become the most successful political leader from the RSS and had found the recipe for electoral success. He began to invest more in the issue that had brought the dividend.
The Congress lost its majority in the election, and a coalition led by V.P. Singh took power with support from Advani, though for only a short period. Three months after the election, in February 1990, the VHP resumed its mobilisation against the mosque and said it would continue the process of what it called kar seva from October.
The political escalation, according to Advani, happened by accident. Advani writes in his autobiography that in June he was to visit London, and just before he left he was interviewed by the editor of the RSS journal Panchajanya who asked him what would happen if the government failed to resolve the Ayodhya matter. Advani told him that the BJP supported the decision to begin kar seva on 30 October, and if it was stopped there would be a mass movement led by the BJP.
‘Frankly, I had forgotten about this interview,’ Advani writes, when his wife telephoned him and asked, ‘What have you said? The papers here have reported it with blaring headlines: “On Ayodhya, Advani threatens the biggest mass movement in the history of independent India”.’ Advani adds: ‘The die had been cast.’
After this, 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. He announced he would begin his campaign against the mosque on Deendayal Upadhyaya’s birthday, 25 September, in Gujarat, and ride a ‘chariot’ (actually a truck) to Ayodhya on 30 October 1990. [...]
At each stop along the way 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. The scale of the violence unleashed by Advani’s decision to politicise a communal issue and mobilise on it was staggering in both the numbers killed and the geographical spread.
B. Rajeshwari of the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies in her work, Communal Riots in India: A Chronology 1947-2003, writes: ‘The mobilisation campaign for kar sevaks to construct the proposed Ram Janma Bhoomi Temple at Ayodhya on 30 October 1990 aggravated the communal atmosphere in the country. Communal riots occurred in the wake of L.K. Advani’s Rath Yatra wherever it went. These riots were led by RSS-BJP men to consolidate the “Hindu” vote bank. They were widespread over almost all the states from Assam to West Bengal, Bihar, Orissa, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Gujarat, Maharashtra and Delhi.’
Between April 1989 and April 1990, Gujarat recorded 262 dead, mostly Muslim. In October 1990, days after Advani’s yatra began, 41 were killed in Ahmedabad. The same month, 52 were killed in Jaipur, 20 in Jodhpur, 33 in Lucknow, over 100 in Delhi, 37 in Assam, 18 in Patna and 165 in Hyderabad. Also in October, a pogrom against Muslims in Bhagalpur, Bihar, saw 960 killed of whom about 900 were Muslim, In November, 31 were killed in Agra, again mostly Muslim and 13 in Indore. In December, 60 were killed in Karnataka and 134 in Hyderabad.
Many parts of India remained tense for long periods of time. Between April and May 1990, three riots in Kanpur killed 30; between May and November 1991 more than 50 were killed in Varanasi. In May 1991, 26 including 24 Muslims were killed in Vadodara.
In October 1992, 44 were killed in Sitamarhi. On 6 December that year, immediately after the Babri Masjid was destroyed, pogroms against Muslims broke out in Surat where 200 died, of whom some 95 per cent were Muslim. In Bhopal in December, 143 were killed. The Bombay riots that broke out at the same time saw the more than 1,000 killed, mostly Muslim.
Advani absolves 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.’ He asks: ‘Was my campaign anti-Muslim?’ and answers himself: ‘Not in the least.’ When the mobs he gathered began to shout, ‘Jo Hindu hit ki baat karega wohi desh pe raj karega’ (only those speaking of Hindu interest will rule India), Advani says he requested them to replace the phrase Hindu hit with rashtra hit. He adds: ‘I was, therefore, pained to see a section of the media carry reports that had sensational titles like “Advani’s blood yatra”.’ Other than this sympathy for himself, Advani has no comment on the killings in his book written fifteen years later.
Many of the riots broke out after calculated provocation. Rath Yatras and associated processions were deliberately taken through Muslim neighbourhoods. Violence was good because it led to polarisation and that made voter choice easy. 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.
Over 3,400 Indians were killed in the violence triggered by Advani’s anti-Babri Masjid campaign and it brought the BJP to the doorstep of power. Advani’s success was built on the corpses of Indians and cemented with their blood.
He writes the day the mosque was demolished was ‘the saddest day of my life’. Having assembled a mob and fired it up against the mosque, he says he was surprised that they immediately tore it down. As a mark of sacrifice, he says that when celebrations broke out on the dais he was sitting in he refused refreshment saying: ‘No, I will not have sweets today.’
The blood profits were not limited to the general elections. 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 majorities on the back of 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.
Advani made the BJP India’s dominant political force. The Babri demolition and the communal violence in its wake also gave the party the template to further expansion. It would abandon or disregard everything that its manifestos claimed, from mechanisation in the economy to limiting private property to prohibition to Swadeshi to throwing English out to Integral Humanism and the other mumbo-jumbo. The BJP would concentrate its politics on India’s Muslims and focus on those issues alone on which Indian society could be divided and kept on the boil.
#BookExcerpt #LKAdvani #AakarPatel #hindutva #RamTempleMovement #BabriMasjidDemolition #BJP #RSS #VHP #HinduMobs #CommunalRiots #AntiMuslimRiots #IndianMuslims #india #books #bookstodon #BharatRatna
-
And Then Came Advani
Excerpt from Aakar Patel's 'Our Hindu Rashtra' (Westland, 2020)
The Ayodhya issue had actually been launched by the non-political groups inside the RSS, led by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad. At a meeting in UP in 1983, Rajendra Singh, who would later become RSS chief, demanded that the Babri Masjid be opened to Hindu devotees. In September 1984, the VHP began a campaign against the mosque. This received sufficient public response for the group to claim in 1986 that they would forcibly break the locks open. 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.
But the VHP did not stop with being given access to worship at the site: its target was the destruction of the mosque. In February 1989, at the Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, the VHP said it would lay the foundation stone for the temple in November. This would involve the making of bricks across the country with Ram’s name embossed on them and their being carried in processions through towns and villages to Ayodhya in November.
Till this time, Advani writes in his autobiography, a few members of the BJP like Vijayaraje Scindia and Vinay Katiyar had participated in the Ayodhya movement in their individual capacity. It was not an issue in mainstream politics. In June, at the BJP’s national executive meeting in Himachal Pradesh, 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’. The whole thing was now coloured with religious sentiment.
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 opening articles pledged it would bear true faith and allegiance to the principle of secularism.
A few days before voting, the VHP brought all its processions from across India to Ayodhya and laid the foundation stone next to the mosque.
Powered by its divisive, anti-Muslim demand, Advani’s BJP won 85 seats, four times as many as the Jana Sangh in the last election it contested alone and more than forty times as many as Vajpayee had delivered in his reformed and renamed party. Advani had become the most successful political leader from the RSS and had found the recipe for electoral success. He began to invest more in the issue that had brought the dividend.
The Congress lost its majority in the election, and a coalition led by V.P. Singh took power with support from Advani, though for only a short period. Three months after the election, in February 1990, the VHP resumed its mobilisation against the mosque and said it would continue the process of what it called kar seva from October.
The political escalation, according to Advani, happened by accident. Advani writes in his autobiography that in June he was to visit London, and just before he left he was interviewed by the editor of the RSS journal Panchajanya who asked him what would happen if the government failed to resolve the Ayodhya matter. Advani told him that the BJP supported the decision to begin kar seva on 30 October, and if it was stopped there would be a mass movement led by the BJP.
‘Frankly, I had forgotten about this interview,’ Advani writes, when his wife telephoned him and asked, ‘What have you said? The papers here have reported it with blaring headlines: “On Ayodhya, Advani threatens the biggest mass movement in the history of independent India”.’ Advani adds: ‘The die had been cast.’
After this, 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. He announced he would begin his campaign against the mosque on Deendayal Upadhyaya’s birthday, 25 September, in Gujarat, and ride a ‘chariot’ (actually a truck) to Ayodhya on 30 October 1990. [...]
At each stop along the way 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. The scale of the violence unleashed by Advani’s decision to politicise a communal issue and mobilise on it was staggering in both the numbers killed and the geographical spread.
B. Rajeshwari of the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies in her work, Communal Riots in India: A Chronology 1947-2003, writes: ‘The mobilisation campaign for kar sevaks to construct the proposed Ram Janma Bhoomi Temple at Ayodhya on 30 October 1990 aggravated the communal atmosphere in the country. Communal riots occurred in the wake of L.K. Advani’s Rath Yatra wherever it went. These riots were led by RSS-BJP men to consolidate the “Hindu” vote bank. They were widespread over almost all the states from Assam to West Bengal, Bihar, Orissa, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Gujarat, Maharashtra and Delhi.’
Between April 1989 and April 1990, Gujarat recorded 262 dead, mostly Muslim. In October 1990, days after Advani’s yatra began, 41 were killed in Ahmedabad. The same month, 52 were killed in Jaipur, 20 in Jodhpur, 33 in Lucknow, over 100 in Delhi, 37 in Assam, 18 in Patna and 165 in Hyderabad. Also in October, a pogrom against Muslims in Bhagalpur, Bihar, saw 960 killed of whom about 900 were Muslim, In November, 31 were killed in Agra, again mostly Muslim and 13 in Indore. In December, 60 were killed in Karnataka and 134 in Hyderabad.
Many parts of India remained tense for long periods of time. Between April and May 1990, three riots in Kanpur killed 30; between May and November 1991 more than 50 were killed in Varanasi. In May 1991, 26 including 24 Muslims were killed in Vadodara.
In October 1992, 44 were killed in Sitamarhi. On 6 December that year, immediately after the Babri Masjid was destroyed, pogroms against Muslims broke out in Surat where 200 died, of whom some 95 per cent were Muslim. In Bhopal in December, 143 were killed. The Bombay riots that broke out at the same time saw the more than 1,000 killed, mostly Muslim.
Advani absolves 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.’ He asks: ‘Was my campaign anti-Muslim?’ and answers himself: ‘Not in the least.’ When the mobs he gathered began to shout, ‘Jo Hindu hit ki baat karega wohi desh pe raj karega’ (only those speaking of Hindu interest will rule India), Advani says he requested them to replace the phrase Hindu hit with rashtra hit. He adds: ‘I was, therefore, pained to see a section of the media carry reports that had sensational titles like “Advani’s blood yatra”.’ Other than this sympathy for himself, Advani has no comment on the killings in his book written fifteen years later.
Many of the riots broke out after calculated provocation. Rath Yatras and associated processions were deliberately taken through Muslim neighbourhoods. Violence was good because it led to polarisation and that made voter choice easy. 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.
Over 3,400 Indians were killed in the violence triggered by Advani’s anti-Babri Masjid campaign and it brought the BJP to the doorstep of power. Advani’s success was built on the corpses of Indians and cemented with their blood.
He writes the day the mosque was demolished was ‘the saddest day of my life’. Having assembled a mob and fired it up against the mosque, he says he was surprised that they immediately tore it down. As a mark of sacrifice, he says that when celebrations broke out on the dais he was sitting in he refused refreshment saying: ‘No, I will not have sweets today.’
The blood profits were not limited to the general elections. 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 majorities on the back of 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.
Advani made the BJP India’s dominant political force. The Babri demolition and the communal violence in its wake also gave the party the template to further expansion. It would abandon or disregard everything that its manifestos claimed, from mechanisation in the economy to limiting private property to prohibition to Swadeshi to throwing English out to Integral Humanism and the other mumbo-jumbo. The BJP would concentrate its politics on India’s Muslims and focus on those issues alone on which Indian society could be divided and kept on the boil.
#BookExcerpt #LKAdvani #AakarPatel #hindutva #RamTempleMovement #BabriMasjidDemolition #BJP #RSS #VHP #HinduMobs #CommunalRiots #AntiMuslimRiots #IndianMuslims #india #books #bookstodon #BharatRatna
-
Places of Worship Act – a crucible for the idea of India
The next few months and years will determine which vision of India will triumph – the one which (as the Act does) recognises fault lines that were imaginarily wiped out by the lawmakers to bolster the dream of a unified vision of a shared India, or the one which is premised on cultural supremacy and reclamation of a glorious religious past. Soutik Banerjee writes.
#PlacesOfWorshipAct #BabriMasjidDemolition #IndianMosques #minorities #IndianMuslims #UnionGovt #hindutva #ReligiousFreedom #rights #india
-
Advani’s bitter legacy 25 years after the demolition of the Babri Masjid
Advani’s yatra of 1990 was aimed explicitly at pitting one group of Indians against another. He has been, without question, the most divisive politician in the history of independent India. Ramachandra Guha writes. (Article from December 2017)
#LKAdvani #RathYathra #BabriMasjidDemolition #BharatRatna #CommunalViolence #BJP #communalism #india
-
An Advani Honoured, the Republic Diminished
There is a stench of shabby calculations in L.K. Advani being awarded the Bharat Ratna.
#LKAdvani #BharatRatna #AntiMuslimRiots #RathYatra #BabriMasjidDemolition #BJP #communalism #hindutva #india
https://thewire.in/politics/an-advani-honoured-the-republic-diminished
-
Ex-service chiefs have no place at Ram Temple inauguration. They must guard military values
Officials of senior ranks should not wear military heritage on their sleeves while navigating the rough and tumble of politics, writes Lt General Prakash Menon. (Article from December 2023)
#ayodhya #RamTempleInauguration #BabriMasjidDemolition #IndianArmy #hindutva #majoritarianism #india
-
Ayodhya: Once There Was A Mosque
A timeline of events from the construction of the Babri Masjid in 1528 upon the instructions of Mughal emperor Babur, till the consecration ceremony of the Ram temple on January 22, 2024.
#ayodhya #BabriMasjidDemolition #RamTempleInauguration #BJP #HinduMahasabha #ASI #india #history #histodon
-
Hyderabad cops halt screening of Ram Ke Naam, arrest three movie club members
The screening was halted after a complaint by a VHP activist. The complainant also stated that he found a few “men with beards” at the screening, which made him suspicious.
#telangana #hyderabad #BabriMasjidDemolition #VHP #documentary #AnandPatwardhan #CommunalViolence #BJP #congress #india
-
What about Ayodhya’s mosque?
As the Ram Mandir is consecrated, the proposed Muhammed bin Abdullah mosque stares at red tape and cash crunch. It exists only as a blueprint. Ismat Ara writes.
#UttarPradesh #communalism #ayodhya #BJP #RamTempleInauguration #BabriMasjidDemolition #AyodhyaVerdict #hindutva #IndianMuslims #india
-
Archeologist Who Observed Dig Says No Evidence of Temple Under Babri Masjid
"Underneath the Babri Masjid, there are actually older mosques." (Article from December 2022)
#BabriMasjidDemolition #RamTempleInauguration #ASI #archaeology #hindutva #ConspiracyTheories #BJP #india
https://thewire.in/history/babri-masjid-asi-excavation-ayodhya-ram-temple
-
Ayodhya Judgment and the Legalisation of Hindutva Sovereignty
By rejecting the possibility of partitioning the land, the court has displaced justice and accorded primacy to sovereignty which is by its nature absolute. (Article from November 2019)
#BabriMasjidDemolition #AyodhyaVerdict #SupremeCourtb#AllahabadHC #IndianMuslims #hindutva #BJP #communalism #india
https://thewire.in/law/supreme-court-ayodhya-judgement-hindutva-sovereignty
-
India Is Unveiling Its Controversial Temple of Ram. Here’s What to Know
A decades-long flashpoint in India’s sectarian politics is poised to reach a climax next week. The Ram Mandir, a Hindu temple, will be consecrated Jan 22 on a contested holy site once home to a mosque in India’s northern city of Ayodhya.
#UttarPradesh #ayodhya #RamTempleInauguration #RamTemple #BabriMasjidDemolition #hindutva #CommunalViolence #NarendraModi #BJP #IndianMuslims #india
-
‘There Is Nothing More Unconstitutional, Nothing More Cruel:’ Muslims Before Ram Temple Consecration
Lay low, stay indoors and avoid travel. These are some of the things Indian Muslims we spoke to said they would do, as the BJP and its supporters organise a nationwide celebration on 22 January, with widespread media coverage and State backing. But for most of India’s 200 million Muslims, the temple is still a site of loss and grief.
#BabriMasjidDemolition #RamTempleInauguration #IndianMuslims #AntiMuslimViolence #BJP #hindutva #ayodhya #UttarPradesh #BJPStates #india
-
Ram Ke Naam (In the name of God) - a documentary by Anand Patwardhan (1991)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMT18TMNQbY
#AnandPatwardhan #BabriMasjidDemolition #RamTempleInauguration #hindutva #india
-
'Disappointed That 'Ram Ke Naam' is Still Relevant': Anand Patwardhan on Janmabhoomi Politics
In his 1992 film 'Ram Ke Naam', Patwardhan meticulously traces the Ram Janmabhoomi movement of the 1990s and its culmination in the demolition of the Babri Masjid.
#AnandPatwardhan #BabriMasjidDemolition #RamTempleInauguration #hindutva #india
https://thewire.in/video/ram-ke-naam-movie-anand-patwardhan-on-janmabhoomi-politics
-
1951 to 2019: How the Indian judiciary turned the Babri Masjid into the Ram Mandir
While Ayodhya has been the site of hectic politics, it is the judiciary that delivered on the demands for a temple.
#IndianJudiciary #BabriMasjidDemolition #RamTempleInauguration #SupremeCourt #hindutva #RSS #BJP #india
-
Controversial BJP MP Says 'Hindus Won't Rest Till More Mosques Reclaimed'
Anantkumar Hedge is not new to controversy. Earlier, he had claimed that he would change the country’s constitution.
#karnataka #BJP #RamTempleInauguration #BabriMasjidDemolition #mosques #IndianMuslims #AnantkumarHegde #HinduMobs #hindutva #india
https://thewire.in/communalism/anantkumar-hegde-karnataka-mosques-reclaimed-hindu
-
Indian Jurisprudence Seems to Be Bending to the Will of Hindutva Forces
A closer analysis of key Supreme Court judgements indicates the dangerous emergence of a majoritarian jurisprudence in direct proportion with the majoritarian polity ruling the country. Shivasundar writes.
#SupremeCourt #IndianJudiciary #BJP #hindutva #article370abrogation #AyodhyaCase #BabriMasjidDemolition #kashmir #india
https://thewire.in/law/indian-jurisprudence-seems-to-be-bending-to-the-will-of-hindutva-forces
-
We support Ram temple construction, says Karnataka CM Siddaramaiah
Karnataka Minister D Sudhakar had said the BJP government was projecting Lord Ram to get votes in the last Lok Sabha elections.
#karnataka #siddaramaiah #RamTemple #BabriMasjidDemolition #hindutva #congress #SoftHindutva #INDIAAlliance #elections2024 #INC #india
-
Congress says it will decide at appropriate time on Sonia Gandhi attending Ram Mandir consecration
The issue of handling the invitation for the consecration of Ram Temple has become politically sensitive and has been discussed at the highest level in the party.
#UttarPradesh #ayodhya #RamTempleInauguration #RamTemple #SoniaGandhi #congress #INDIAAlliance #SoftHindutva #hindutva #BabriMasjidDemolition #INC #india
-
The Ayodhya Ram Temple and LK Advani's (Sour) Grapes of Rath
It is difficult to feel sympathy for the man whose yatra has led to what is happening in India today, writes Sidharth Bhatia.
#LKAdvani #BabriMasjidDemolition #RamTemple #RathYatra #MMJoshi #ayodhya #BJP #VHP #HinduMobs #NarendraModi #GujaratRiots #GujaratPogrom #AntiMuslimRiots #hindutva #india
https://thewire.in/politics/the-ayodhya-ram-temple-and-lk-advanis-sour-grapes-of-rath
-
How SC’s evasion on Places of Worship Act challenge is powering new Hindutva claims on mosques
The Supreme Court’s dithering on reaffirming the act might be acting like a signal to lower courts to ignore it, writes Vineet Bhalla.
#SupremeCourt #RamTemple #PlacesOfWorshipAct #law #BabriMasjidDemolition #hindutva #BJP #IndianJudiciary #HinduMobs #india
-
Construction of mosque in Ayodhya may start in May next year, says top UP Waqf Board official
The official, Zufar Farooqui, said a committee has been constituted in Mumbai to oversee the collection of funds to construct the mosque.
#UttarPradesh #ayodhya #UPWaqfBoard #BabriMasjidDemolition #RamTemple #AyodhyaMosque #hindutva #BJP #BJPStates #muslims #india
-
‘The Memoirs of Valmiki Rao’: A clever reimagination of the Ramayana that terrifies and evokes pity
The novel refreshes our memories of 1992 Mumbai riots using the medium we understand best – the stories of our gods and goddesses.
#BookReview #LindsayPereira #novel #MumbaiRiots #CommunalViolence #BabriMasjidDemolition #hindutva #HinduMobs #books #bookstodon #fiction #india
-
Why Muslims feel let down by Supreme Court
The deeply disappointing verdict in the Ayodhya title suit, go-ahead for the survey of Varanasi’s Gyanvapi mosque and constant talk of uniform civil code are just some of the reasons. Ajaz Ashraf writes.
#SupremeCourt #muslims #ayodhya #BabriMasjidDemolition #UCC #hijab #TripleTalaq #GyanvapiMosque #UAPA #DelhiPogrom #DelhiRiots #UttarPradesh #gujarat #delhi #hindutva #HinduMobs #india
https://www.mid-day.com/news/opinion/article/why-muslims-feel-let-down-by-supreme-court-23303489
-
Ayodhya Residents Struggle to Reconcile Rampant Demolitions With City's Age-Old Culture
Amidst rampant construction and demolition efforts, at risk are people’s houses, businesses and a 275-year-old mosque.
#UttarPradesh #ayodhya #faizabad #RamTemple #KhajurKiMasjid #demolitions #mosques #UPGovt #BJP #RSS #secularism #AjayBisht #YogiAdityanath #hindutva #muslims #BabriMasjidDemolition #india
https://thewire.in/urban/ayodhya-rampath-demolition-construction