#hindumobs — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #hindumobs, aggregated by home.social.
-
In Telangana’s Medak, BJP’s growing clout emboldens ‘Gau Rakshaks’
While the Muslim residents maintain that the latest communal conflagration was unexpected, the tall Chatrapathi Shivaji statue in Medak town stands as evidence of growing clout of Hindutva forces.
#telangana #medak #HinduMobs #CowVigilantes #BJP #BajrangDal #VHP #RSS #GaurakshakSamithi #BJYM #TelanganaPolice #eid #hindutva #IndianMuslims #india
-
In Telangana’s Medak, BJP’s growing clout emboldens ‘Gau Rakshaks’
While the Muslim residents maintain that the latest communal conflagration was unexpected, the tall Chatrapathi Shivaji statue in Medak town stands as evidence of growing clout of Hindutva forces.
#telangana #medak #HinduMobs #CowVigilantes #BJP #BajrangDal #VHP #RSS #GaurakshakSamithi #BJYM #TelanganaPolice #eid #hindutva #IndianMuslims #india
-
In Telangana’s Medak, BJP’s growing clout emboldens ‘Gau Rakshaks’
While the Muslim residents maintain that the latest communal conflagration was unexpected, the tall Chatrapathi Shivaji statue in Medak town stands as evidence of growing clout of Hindutva forces.
#telangana #medak #HinduMobs #CowVigilantes #BJP #BajrangDal #VHP #RSS #GaurakshakSamithi #BJYM #TelanganaPolice #eid #hindutva #IndianMuslims #india
-
In Telangana’s Medak, BJP’s growing clout emboldens ‘Gau Rakshaks’
While the Muslim residents maintain that the latest communal conflagration was unexpected, the tall Chatrapathi Shivaji statue in Medak town stands as evidence of growing clout of Hindutva forces.
#telangana #medak #HinduMobs #CowVigilantes #BJP #BajrangDal #VHP #RSS #GaurakshakSamithi #BJYM #TelanganaPolice #eid #hindutva #IndianMuslims #india
-
In Telangana’s Medak, BJP’s growing clout emboldens ‘Gau Rakshaks’
While the Muslim residents maintain that the latest communal conflagration was unexpected, the tall Chatrapathi Shivaji statue in Medak town stands as evidence of growing clout of Hindutva forces.
#telangana #medak #HinduMobs #CowVigilantes #BJP #BajrangDal #VHP #RSS #GaurakshakSamithi #BJYM #TelanganaPolice #eid #hindutva #IndianMuslims #india
-
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
-
Four years after facing an attack, Caravan staffers made the accused in FIR at Bhajanpura police station
On 11 August 2020, a mob assaulted three journalists working with The Caravan—Shahid Tantray, Prabhjit Singh and a woman journalist—in northeast Delhi’s Subhash Mohalla neighbourhood. The journalists were subjected to communal slurs and threatened with murder; the woman reporter was sexually harassed.
#delhi #bhajanpura #TheCaravan #DelhiPolice #BJP #SexualAssault #HinduMobs #hindutva #DelhiRiots #IndianMuslims #PressFreedom #media #india
-
Scars of disharmony keep pot boiling: Hindu-Muslim wedge festers in North East Delhi
Kanhaiya Kumar is contesting from North East Delhi. His opponent is the BJP’s sitting MP Manoj Tiwari, who traces his roots to Kaimur district in Bihar.
#delhi #NorthEastDelhi #KanhaiyaKumar #ManijTiwari #congress #BJP #DelhiRiots #DelhiPogrom #hindutva #HinduMobs #IndianMuslims #india
-
Malgaon stands up to polarisation
Hindu mobs are attacking shrines at which people of many faiths have worshipped for centuries. A determined village shows how syncretic ways of living can still be revived.
#maharashtra #malgaon #ReligiousHarmony #syncretism #BJP #hindutva #HinduMobs #IndianMuslims #india
https://ruralindiaonline.org/en/articles/malgaon-stands-up-to-polarisation/
-
Telangana: Saffron-Clad Men Vandalise Catholic School in Mancherial, 2 FIRs Lodged
According to the police, the mob launched its attack after accusing the school management of refusing to allow some students to sit for exams after they had turned up in saffron clothes instead of school uniform.
#telangana #mancherial #HinduMobs #CatholicSchools #hindutva #CommunalViolence #IndianChristians #india
-
Telangana: Saffron-Clad Men Vandalise Catholic School in Mancherial, 2 FIRs Lodged
According to the police, the mob launched its attack after accusing the school management of refusing to allow some students to sit for exams after they had turned up in saffron clothes instead of school uniform.
#telangana #mancherial #HinduMobs #CatholicSchools #hindutva #CommunalViolence #IndianChristians #india
-
Telangana: Saffron-Clad Men Vandalise Catholic School in Mancherial, 2 FIRs Lodged
According to the police, the mob launched its attack after accusing the school management of refusing to allow some students to sit for exams after they had turned up in saffron clothes instead of school uniform.
#telangana #mancherial #HinduMobs #CatholicSchools #hindutva #CommunalViolence #IndianChristians #india
-
Telangana: Saffron-Clad Men Vandalise Catholic School in Mancherial, 2 FIRs Lodged
According to the police, the mob launched its attack after accusing the school management of refusing to allow some students to sit for exams after they had turned up in saffron clothes instead of school uniform.
#telangana #mancherial #HinduMobs #CatholicSchools #hindutva #CommunalViolence #IndianChristians #india
-
Telangana: Saffron-Clad Men Vandalise Catholic School in Mancherial, 2 FIRs Lodged
According to the police, the mob launched its attack after accusing the school management of refusing to allow some students to sit for exams after they had turned up in saffron clothes instead of school uniform.
#telangana #mancherial #HinduMobs #CatholicSchools #hindutva #CommunalViolence #IndianChristians #india
-
‘Leave college or be killed’: Muslim student beaten on Pune campus for walking with Hindu classmates
Accused of ‘love jihad’, Junaid Jamadar said four men told him to pack his bags immediately.
#maharashtra #pune #SavitribaiPhulePuneUniversity #HinduMobs #VHP #IndianMuslims #hindutva #india
-
‘Leave college or be killed’: Muslim student beaten on Pune campus for walking with Hindu classmates
Accused of ‘love jihad’, Junaid Jamadar said four men told him to pack his bags immediately.
#maharashtra #pune #SavitribaiPhulePuneUniversity #HinduMobs #VHP #IndianMuslims #hindutva #india
-
‘Leave college or be killed’: Muslim student beaten on Pune campus for walking with Hindu classmates
Accused of ‘love jihad’, Junaid Jamadar said four men told him to pack his bags immediately.
#maharashtra #pune #SavitribaiPhulePuneUniversity #HinduMobs #VHP #IndianMuslims #hindutva #india
-
‘Leave college or be killed’: Muslim student beaten on Pune campus for walking with Hindu classmates
Accused of ‘love jihad’, Junaid Jamadar said four men told him to pack his bags immediately.
#maharashtra #pune #SavitribaiPhulePuneUniversity #HinduMobs #VHP #IndianMuslims #hindutva #india
-
‘Leave college or be killed’: Muslim student beaten on Pune campus for walking with Hindu classmates
Accused of ‘love jihad’, Junaid Jamadar said four men told him to pack his bags immediately.
#maharashtra #pune #SavitribaiPhulePuneUniversity #HinduMobs #VHP #IndianMuslims #hindutva #india
-
Under Attack from Hindutva Forces, 'Convent' Schools Fight for Survival
Under the cumulative strain of last 10 years of the BJP rule, Catholic Bishops Conference of India recently issued guidelines to church-run schools that could well change the nature of their operations, and could affect their standing.
#education #ChristianSchools #ConventSchools #CatholicSchools #CBCI #hindutva #BJP #RSS #NEP #HinduMobs #IndianChristians #christianity #india
https://thewire.in/rights/under-attack-from-hindutva-forces-convent-schools-fight-for-survival
-
Under Attack from Hindutva Forces, 'Convent' Schools Fight for Survival
Under the cumulative strain of last 10 years of the BJP rule, Catholic Bishops Conference of India recently issued guidelines to church-run schools that could well change the nature of their operations, and could affect their standing.
#education #ChristianSchools #ConventSchools #CatholicSchools #CBCI #hindutva #BJP #RSS #NEP #HinduMobs #IndianChristians #christianity #india
https://thewire.in/rights/under-attack-from-hindutva-forces-convent-schools-fight-for-survival
-
Under Attack from Hindutva Forces, 'Convent' Schools Fight for Survival
Under the cumulative strain of last 10 years of the BJP rule, Catholic Bishops Conference of India recently issued guidelines to church-run schools that could well change the nature of their operations, and could affect their standing.
#education #ChristianSchools #ConventSchools #CatholicSchools #CBCI #hindutva #BJP #RSS #NEP #HinduMobs #IndianChristians #christianity #india
https://thewire.in/rights/under-attack-from-hindutva-forces-convent-schools-fight-for-survival
-
Under Attack from Hindutva Forces, 'Convent' Schools Fight for Survival
Under the cumulative strain of last 10 years of the BJP rule, Catholic Bishops Conference of India recently issued guidelines to church-run schools that could well change the nature of their operations, and could affect their standing.
#education #ChristianSchools #ConventSchools #CatholicSchools #CBCI #hindutva #BJP #RSS #NEP #HinduMobs #IndianChristians #christianity #india
https://thewire.in/rights/under-attack-from-hindutva-forces-convent-schools-fight-for-survival
-
Under Attack from Hindutva Forces, 'Convent' Schools Fight for Survival
Under the cumulative strain of last 10 years of the BJP rule, Catholic Bishops Conference of India recently issued guidelines to church-run schools that could well change the nature of their operations, and could affect their standing.
#education #ChristianSchools #ConventSchools #CatholicSchools #CBCI #hindutva #BJP #RSS #NEP #HinduMobs #IndianChristians #christianity #india
https://thewire.in/rights/under-attack-from-hindutva-forces-convent-schools-fight-for-survival
-
Hapur Mob Lynching Conviction: Court Finds UP Police Guilty of Negligence in Investigation
Victim Qasim’s brother Saleem said he hopes that the conviction in the case would serve as “an example” in preventing “acts of mob lynching” in the country, especially in the name of the cow.
#UttarPradesh #hapur #HapurLynching #UPPolice #CowVigilantism #CowLynchings #HinduMobs #hindutva #communalism #india
-
‘After Muslims, It’s The Turn Of Christians:’ With Little Evidence, UP Govt Prosecutes 4 Christian Institutions, Arrests Employees
Four Christian-run institutions in the Uttar Pradesh town of Fatehpur face criminal cases for alleged forcible conversion of Hindus, with over 200 accused, many arrested and imprisoned, under UP’s three-year-old anti-conversion law. Article 14 investigation reveals similar statements in four FIRs over nine months, police cases or raids on Christian institutions, based on illegal third-party or anonymous complaints. Simultaneously, the union government acted against the finances of one of these four institutions.
#UttarPradesh #prayagraj #AntiConversionLaw #conversions #VHP #IndianChristians #HinduMobs #UnionGovt #EvangelicalChurch #ReligiousFreedom #ConspiracyTheories #india
-
‘After Muslims, It’s The Turn Of Christians:’ With Little Evidence, UP Govt Prosecutes 4 Christian Institutions, Arrests Employees
Four Christian-run institutions in the Uttar Pradesh town of Fatehpur face criminal cases for alleged forcible conversion of Hindus, with over 200 accused, many arrested and imprisoned, under UP’s three-year-old anti-conversion law. Article 14 investigation reveals similar statements in four FIRs over nine months, police cases or raids on Christian institutions, based on illegal third-party or anonymous complaints. Simultaneously, the union government acted against the finances of one of these four institutions.
#UttarPradesh #prayagraj #AntiConversionLaw #conversions #VHP #IndianChristians #HinduMobs #UnionGovt #EvangelicalChurch #ReligiousFreedom #ConspiracyTheories #india
-
‘After Muslims, It’s The Turn Of Christians:’ With Little Evidence, UP Govt Prosecutes 4 Christian Institutions, Arrests Employees
Four Christian-run institutions in the Uttar Pradesh town of Fatehpur face criminal cases for alleged forcible conversion of Hindus, with over 200 accused, many arrested and imprisoned, under UP’s three-year-old anti-conversion law. Article 14 investigation reveals similar statements in four FIRs over nine months, police cases or raids on Christian institutions, based on illegal third-party or anonymous complaints. Simultaneously, the union government acted against the finances of one of these four institutions.
#UttarPradesh #prayagraj #AntiConversionLaw #conversions #VHP #IndianChristians #HinduMobs #UnionGovt #EvangelicalChurch #ReligiousFreedom #ConspiracyTheories #india
-
‘After Muslims, It’s The Turn Of Christians:’ With Little Evidence, UP Govt Prosecutes 4 Christian Institutions, Arrests Employees
Four Christian-run institutions in the Uttar Pradesh town of Fatehpur face criminal cases for alleged forcible conversion of Hindus, with over 200 accused, many arrested and imprisoned, under UP’s three-year-old anti-conversion law. Article 14 investigation reveals similar statements in four FIRs over nine months, police cases or raids on Christian institutions, based on illegal third-party or anonymous complaints. Simultaneously, the union government acted against the finances of one of these four institutions.
#UttarPradesh #prayagraj #AntiConversionLaw #conversions #VHP #IndianChristians #HinduMobs #UnionGovt #EvangelicalChurch #ReligiousFreedom #ConspiracyTheories #india
-
‘After Muslims, It’s The Turn Of Christians:’ With Little Evidence, UP Govt Prosecutes 4 Christian Institutions, Arrests Employees
Four Christian-run institutions in the Uttar Pradesh town of Fatehpur face criminal cases for alleged forcible conversion of Hindus, with over 200 accused, many arrested and imprisoned, under UP’s three-year-old anti-conversion law. Article 14 investigation reveals similar statements in four FIRs over nine months, police cases or raids on Christian institutions, based on illegal third-party or anonymous complaints. Simultaneously, the union government acted against the finances of one of these four institutions.
#UttarPradesh #prayagraj #AntiConversionLaw #conversions #VHP #IndianChristians #HinduMobs #UnionGovt #EvangelicalChurch #ReligiousFreedom #ConspiracyTheories #india
-
Hyderabad: HMDA official seeks action against Bajrang Dal members for attack on church
The Hyderabad Metropolitan Development Authority official filed a complaint on February 14, a day after the Dalit Christian church was attacked by a mob of 200 Bajrang Dal members from various dominant castes.
#telangana #hyderabad #CommunalViolence #BajrangDal #HMDA #CasteViolence #casteism #IndianChristians #VHP #HinduMobs #caste #dalits #DalitChristians #india
-
Hyderabad: HMDA official seeks action against Bajrang Dal members for attack on church
The Hyderabad Metropolitan Development Authority official filed a complaint on February 14, a day after the Dalit Christian church was attacked by a mob of 200 Bajrang Dal members from various dominant castes.
#telangana #hyderabad #CommunalViolence #BajrangDal #HMDA #CasteViolence #casteism #IndianChristians #VHP #HinduMobs #caste #dalits #DalitChristians #india
-
Hyderabad: HMDA official seeks action against Bajrang Dal members for attack on church
The Hyderabad Metropolitan Development Authority official filed a complaint on February 14, a day after the Dalit Christian church was attacked by a mob of 200 Bajrang Dal members from various dominant castes.
#telangana #hyderabad #CommunalViolence #BajrangDal #HMDA #CasteViolence #casteism #IndianChristians #VHP #HinduMobs #caste #dalits #DalitChristians #india
-
Hyderabad: HMDA official seeks action against Bajrang Dal members for attack on church
The Hyderabad Metropolitan Development Authority official filed a complaint on February 14, a day after the Dalit Christian church was attacked by a mob of 200 Bajrang Dal members from various dominant castes.
#telangana #hyderabad #CommunalViolence #BajrangDal #HMDA #CasteViolence #casteism #IndianChristians #VHP #HinduMobs #caste #dalits #DalitChristians #india
-
Hyderabad: HMDA official seeks action against Bajrang Dal members for attack on church
The Hyderabad Metropolitan Development Authority official filed a complaint on February 14, a day after the Dalit Christian church was attacked by a mob of 200 Bajrang Dal members from various dominant castes.
#telangana #hyderabad #CommunalViolence #BajrangDal #HMDA #CasteViolence #casteism #IndianChristians #VHP #HinduMobs #caste #dalits #DalitChristians #india
-
Mira Road: BJP Leader Gave Communal Speech – in the Police Commissioner's Office
Nitesh Rane’s press conference was not for all. Only a select few journalists, with established pro-Hindutva credentials, were allowed for the conference.
#maharashtra #MiraBhayander #CommunalViolence #MaharashtraPolice #HinduMobs #media #BJP #NitishRane #bulldozers #demolitions #IndianMuslims #india
-
‘It’s as if they wanted to kill us’: How the attacks on journalist Nikhil Wagle unfolded
His vehicle was attacked four times last evening in what Wagle called a ‘narrow escape from death’.
#maharashtra #pune #NikhilWagle #PressFreedom #dissent #BJP #ShivSena #BJPStates #hindutva #HinduMobs #india
-
Assam: Hindu Group Threatens Christian Schools to Remove Religious Symbols or ‘Face Dire Outcome’
The ultimatum issued by one Kutumba Surakshya Parishad includes removal of idols and photographs of Jesus and Mary as well as churches located on school complexes.
#assam #IndianChristians #christians #KutumbaSurakshyaParishad #christianity #CheustianSchools #hindutva #communalism #education #BJPStates #HinduMobs #india
-
Assam: Hindu Group Threatens Christian Schools to Remove Religious Symbols or ‘Face Dire Outcome’
The ultimatum issued by one Kutumba Surakshya Parishad includes removal of idols and photographs of Jesus and Mary as well as churches located on school complexes.
#assam #IndianChristians #christians #KutumbaSurakshyaParishad #christianity #CheustianSchools #hindutva #communalism #education #BJPStates #HinduMobs #india
-
Assam: Hindu Group Threatens Christian Schools to Remove Religious Symbols or ‘Face Dire Outcome’
The ultimatum issued by one Kutumba Surakshya Parishad includes removal of idols and photographs of Jesus and Mary as well as churches located on school complexes.
#assam #IndianChristians #christians #KutumbaSurakshyaParishad #christianity #CheustianSchools #hindutva #communalism #education #BJPStates #HinduMobs #india
-
Assam: Hindu Group Threatens Christian Schools to Remove Religious Symbols or ‘Face Dire Outcome’
The ultimatum issued by one Kutumba Surakshya Parishad includes removal of idols and photographs of Jesus and Mary as well as churches located on school complexes.
#assam #IndianChristians #christians #KutumbaSurakshyaParishad #christianity #CheustianSchools #hindutva #communalism #education #BJPStates #HinduMobs #india
-
Assam: Hindu Group Threatens Christian Schools to Remove Religious Symbols or ‘Face Dire Outcome’
The ultimatum issued by one Kutumba Surakshya Parishad includes removal of idols and photographs of Jesus and Mary as well as churches located on school complexes.
#assam #IndianChristians #christians #KutumbaSurakshyaParishad #christianity #CheustianSchools #hindutva #communalism #education #BJPStates #HinduMobs #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
-
‘They saw a Muslim name and attacked’: How Hindutva mobs ran amok in Mira Road
The attacks were preceded by the demolition of Muslim shops, a form of ‘bulldozer justice’ that Maharashtra had not seen before.
#maharashtra #mumbai #MiraRoad #RamTempleInauguration #HinduMobs #MuslimBusinesses #RamTemple #hindutva #IndianMuslims #bulldozers #demolitions #india
-
The removal of Annapoorani from Netflix and Kollywood‘s loud silence on it
For an industry that has made several anti-caste films questioning the status quo, Kollywood has surprisingly not condemned Netflix’s decision or extended support to the cast and crew of Annapoorani.
#TamilNadu #nayanthara #TamilFilmIndustry #kollywood #AnnapooraniMovie #netflix #VHP #HinduITWing #HinduMobs #hindutva #cinema #TamilCinema #FreeSpeech #censorship #india
-
Muslim Teen Gets Bail After 151 Days In MP Case Of Spitting On Hindu Procession. Complainant, Witness Deny Police Claims
Acting on a complaint with no evidence, police in the Madhya Pradesh city of Ujjain in July 2023 arrested three Muslim teenagers accused of spitting on a Hindu procession. Now, the complainant and witness have told a local court that police asked them to sign a complaint, that they neither knew what was in the first information report nor had agreed to it. Based on these statements, the High Court granted bail to the only adult of the three accused.
#MadhyaPradesh #ujjain #MPPolice #HinduMobs #hindutva #muslims #bulldozers #demolitions #BJPStates #india
-
Meitei Christians in India’s Manipur Face Broad Attacks
While the conflict has been ethnic in nature, there has been an underlying communal element to the violence, write Makepeace Sitlhou and Greeshma Kuthar.
#manipur #AntiChristianViolence #meiteis #MeiteiChristians #BJP #RSS #HinduMobs #hindutva #BJPStates #minorities #ManipurViolence #india
https://newlinesmag.com/reportage/meitei-christians-in-indias-manipur-face-broad-attacks/