Night of Terror: The Dust Kicked up Before the Babri Masjid Demolition
Ghazala Wahab
[Note: This article was originally published by The Wire on August 9, 2020. We are publishing it on December 6, 2021 – the 29th anniversary of the mosque’s demolition.]
The demolition of the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992 passed us by incident free. The horror of the actual act notwithstanding, my family members and I watched it calmly on our TV screen with a sense of disbelief.
While there was a cloud of dust on the screen hiding the falling debris and as the camera swerved to capture a joyous Uma Bharti with her arms around a seated Murli Manohar Joshi, we believed that the charade of demolition would end soon.
The reality of the scene playing out on the television hit home when my uncle picked up the phone and uttered three unbelievable words: “Masjid gir gayee (the mosque has fallen)”.
The cloud of dust on the screen settled. In place of the dome was debris. The illusion lay shattered.
We were shocked, but not scared. Our baptism by riots had already happened two years ago, in 1990. We knew the drill. Rooms in Agra’s Mughal Sheraton hotel had already been booked, in case we needed them.
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In 1990, when BJP president L.K. Advani’s rath yatra trampled upon the idea of India, leaving behind a trail of blood and bodies, we were caught unprepared. Actually, we were left holding the corpse of our idealistic optimism.
With no prior experience of communal violence, my family was both in denial and a dilemma. First, we didn’t anticipate that riots would break out in Agra; we didn’t know then where we would be more secure— in our upscale Hindu majority neighbourhood where the privilege of residents would throw a security blanket around us, or in the Muslim majority low middle class mohalla of my uncles where numbers would supposedly insulate us.
Each kept urging the other to move out. My father told his two brothers living in the mohalla to shift to our house, and they kept requesting us to move in with them.
Each secure in his optimism, we remained where we were.
Then, violence broke out. But my father was confident in the knowledge that over the last decade, he had cultivated a vast network of friends from among the bureaucrats who had served in Agra – those may district magistrates, senior superintendents and commissioners of police had gone up the hierarchy in the UP state administration.
They were our security blanket.
Then the violence hit home. It came with a fair warning. All through that November 1990 morning, several neighbours visited us to impart solemn advice. “Shift to your ancestral house for a few days,” they told my father. “Or at least send bhabhiji (referring to my mother) and the kids away.”
As the day drew to a close, we huddled together in the family room, waiting for an attack my parents were certain would happen that evening. I was handed a diary with phone numbers of all the police officials we knew, from the local police station to SSPs. I started to make calls. Mysteriously, none were being answered.
“Doesn’t matter, keep trying,” my father told me.
Then the slogans started.
At first, they seemed to come from a distance. But they started inching closer. And closer. My brother and I ran towards the main door, which had a narrow glass panel on the right through which one could see the porch, the gate and the road beyond. A mob with tridents and fire torches was marching towards our gate. My brother and I stood transfixed.
From inside, we could hear my mother screaming at us to get back inside. Outside, the mob was now at the gate and shouting violently. Right in very front was a neighbourhood boy whose younger brother was my brother’s playmate.
“Sanjay bhaiyya,” my brother whispered, as we ran inside to share our discovery.
My father was calm. He told my uncle that Sanjay’s presence implied that the mob would not harm us. “They will shout some slogans and move on,” he said.
Then the mob started throwing stones. We heard windows crashing. “Get back to the phone,” my father screamed at me, shaking visibly. As long as he had been calm, we feared no disaster. But once we saw his fear, there was panic.
In those moments of pure terror, we didn’t notice exactly when the mob outside started to disperse. Just as the noise outside receded, someone picked up my call to the SSP’s residence. That person made a note of our address and promised to send a patrol car.
Once we were convinced of the silence, my mother went to the door to confirm if the mob had indeed left. One of the glass panels had cracked, and by the shattered pieces of glass on the porch, we figured that several windows had succumbed to the assault, as had the car parked in the porch.
That evening, no dinner was served. Everyone stayed together in the family room, not daring to step out and assess the damage. Well after 10 pm, a few policemen arrived. They assured us that they would include our street in their night patrol.
Somehow, we got through the night. In my heart, I believed that everything would be fine in the morning.
And it was, for a few hours at least, when our domestic help started to arrive for work. Since ours was not Muslim area, there was no curfew here. Just as we were settling down for breakfast, someone rang the doorbell.
It was my cousin, my middle uncle’s older son from the mohalla. All of 14, he was dishevelled and quaking with fear. He must have been crying for some time because his voice was choked. That morning, the notorious Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC) had carried out a cordon and search operation in the mohalla and had taken away all adult men. My cousin was also picked up, along with his father and younger uncle. However, one of the constables took pity on him and allowed him to jump from the jeep as it turned on the main road.
From there, he had walked a couple of kilometres to our house. During the operation, the PAC had ransacked the house and disconnected the phone lines. My two aunts and younger cousins were at the house, and we could not go there because of curfew orders in that area.
There was no way of knowing where my uncles were. Though I didn’t realise it at that time, the memories of the Hashimpura massacre of 1987 must have sent cold shivers down my parents’ backs.
With breakfast left untouched, my father and uncle left immediately. My father went to see the police commissioner, who had been our guest on several evenings and had shared drinks with the host.
My uncle went to the police station closest to the mohalla. He was told that no such incident had taken place. But when my uncle insisted that the information was from from reliable sources, he was directed to another police station.
Something in their manner told him that the constables were lying, so he stayed put. No officer came to speak with him. Meanwhile, my father was told that the commissioner was not available, after which he tried the office of the SSP, another regular at parties at our home. The SSP briefly met my father, appearing to be extremely busy and told him that he was not aware of any such incident.
“But if something like this has happened, I will ensure that your brothers are not harmed,” he assured my father, but not exactly in these words. Word passed down the hierarchy. My uncle, who was at the police station, was handed a few curfew passes. He was also told not to worry and that my missing uncles would return home before evening.
I accompanied my mother and uncle to the house of my birth in his hatchback which had escaped the vandalism of the previous evening as it has been parked inside the garage. The open maidan at the mouth of lane where our house was located looked like a war zone. Stones were scattered all over the unpaved ground, and there were a few carcasses of two-wheelers. The windows of houses facing the maidan were broken and most of the doors hung by their hinges.
Leaving the car in the maidan, we walked inside the lane towards our house. From the outside, it looked normal. My grandfather had installed a heavy-duty door which had withstood the assault. As always, it was not bolted.
A gentle push opened it into the central courtyard. The first thing that caught my eye was a television lying face down on the marble floor of the courtyard. Then glass pieces and remains of crockery came into view, and clothes, toys, a cricket bat, an heirloom copper paan daan, as well as broken remnants of other things.
However, more frightening than this was the eerie silence that permeated the house. When I was growing up, I always associated this house with noise. There were far too many people in too little space. But now, when there was no sound, I could feel the tightness in my stomach and heaviness in my legs. Where was everyone?
My mother’s call to my middle aunt sounded more like a shriek. In response, a scream tore out from one of the rooms. All at once, the noise returned. My aunts, distraught and dishevelled, rushed out and engulfed my mother in a spasmodic embrace. Interspersed with frequent wailing, my aunts started to recount the sequence. How my uncles were dragged out in their sleepwear, how a few policemen came back inside to deliberately break things, how they made salacious remarks at my younger aunt, how they scared the kids and so on.
It took me a while to realise that both my mother and I were crying. Perhaps we were crying about it all – for my uncles, the narrow escape that my aunts had and what could have happened to us the previous evening.
But I knew for sure that some of my tears were for the sheer helplessness that I knew my father and my uncle were feeling. Physically, they may have travelled a small distance from the Muslim mohalla to upper class Hindu colony, but emotionally they had travelled the distance of a lifetime.
In the family comprising six brothers and four sisters, these two had most prominently shed their ghettoised Muslim identities. They were in with the social, cultural and economic life of Agra, hobnobbing with the who’s who. And yet when it came to the communal division, they were nothing but Muslims. Forever suspects, forever victims.
My uncles returned home late in the afternoon. A police vehicle dropped them at the mouth of the lane from where they hobbled inside and into the house which remained unbolted. Their shoulders, backs and calves were bruised and streaked with ugly blue welts. One had a wound just below the eyebrow, where he had probably been hit by a rifle butt or a baton. My aunt said a few prayers over his head, frequently thanking Allah for sparing his life, and his eye.
Soon, wailing women from the neighbourhood started pouring into in our courtyard. Their men were still missing. They pleaded with my mother and my uncle to help get their men back.
The bruised men started to come back during the night and the next morning. No case was recorded, no charges were filed. It was as if the incident never happened. Slowly, the situation started to calm down.
At that time, there was no way of knowing how many people died in Agra that week. There was a huge gap between the figures put out by the local Hindi media and what the people believed. However, according to a compilation by the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies under Nagarik Mancha by B. Rajeshwari, 31 people, most of them Muslims, died in Agra in November 1990.
According to the same study, in the wake of Advani’s rath yatra, nearly 1,800 people died in different parts of India between April-December 1990. As it happens with communal violence in India, the majority of the dead were Muslim.
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As I prepared to return to college in Delhi at the end of November, my mother told me not to mention the two incidents to anyone.
“Why?” I asked her.
“Why,” she retorted. “Are they to be proud of?”
I couldn’t understand the shame in being a victim. She explained to me, for my father it was not about being a victim. It was about the humiliation that the two incidents implied. He believed that his successful business, his social commitments, his national and state awards had placed him in a different league, where his name carried respect, and maybe awe. He never went to anyone; everyone came to him.
But those two November days had left him helpless and fearful. The hour he spent outside the commissioner’s office, which was crowded by people who would probably wait outside his own office, devastated him. If he could, he would have erased those two days from his life.
So, collectively we worked towards erasing them from our lives.
Babri Masjid meant little to us then, it means little now. For Muslims, prayer is important, a mosque is not. Prayer is piety. A mosque is vanity. As Mohammed Iqbal wrote:
“Aa gaya ain ladai mein agar waqt-e-namaz
qibla-ru ho ke zamin-bos hui qaum-e-hijaz
ek hi saf mein khade ho gaye mahmud o ayaaz
na koi banda raha aur na koi banda-navaz.
(In a middle of a battle when it was time for prayer
facing west, the devout touched their forehead to the ground
standing shoulder to shoulder Mahmud and Ayaz
remained unmindful of the difference between king and slave.)
The demolition didn’t hurt us, but the impact of the demolition did – the progressive marginalisation, everyday communal profiling and normalisation of violence against Muslims. All of this has been shrinking the access a Muslim has to public spaces in her own country.
Today, when angry Muslims call for the construction of a mosque in Ayodhya, grander than the Ram temple, they are succumbing to competitive communalism. This is a sport they can never win.
The road ahead is both narrow and perilous. Muslims must choose their battles wisely. The biggest challenge is to widen the space available to them. For this, not only do they have to speak in a coherent voice, but also move others to lend their voices to them.
After all, it is the battle for the soul of the nation we call home.
(Ghazala Wahab is executive editor FORCE newsmagazine. Courtesy: The Wire.)
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The Babri Masjid Demolition was Impossible Without RSS Foot-Soldiers Like These
Lalit Vachani
[Note: This piece was originally published by The Wire on December 8, 2017. We are re-publishing it on December 6, 2021 – 29 years after the mosque was demolished.]
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In September and October 1992, the Wide Eye Films team and I filmed The Boy in the Branch at the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) headquarters in Nagpur. Commissioned by SOUTH, a documentary and current affairs programme on UK’s Channel 4 television channel, the film looked at the process of indoctrination and recruitment of young Hindu boys by the RSS shakha system.
Prior to this, in December 1990, I had observed my first RSS shakha while working with journalist Lindsey Hilsum on a BBC radio documentary about the Ram janmabhoomi movement.
We visited the RSS headquarters at Jhandewalan in Delhi where we interviewed K.S. Sudarshan, who was sah sarkaryavah (joint general secretary) of the RSS at the time. Sudarshan organised an ekatrikaran (a gathering of shakhas in a show of RSS strength) for us to document, and seeing the two of us arrive with just a tape recorder and a few microphones he seemed visibly disappointed that there were no cameras or a TV crew.
Subsequently, I began my research on the shakha at the RSS headquarters in Delhi, secured permissions and a year later, found myself in Nagpur filming The Boy in the Branch.
Juxtaposing the activities of two different RSS shakhas or branches, my film documented the stories and the games, the rituals disciplining the body and the mind, and the social worlds and sense of community that the young RSS initiate inhabits. In the process, I hoped to reveal how the shakha regime enabled the RSS to revitalise, reproduce and replicate itself and spread its Hindutva ideology to newer areas.
The Boy in the Branch never had the Ram janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid issue as its central focus – yet, it was impossible to escape the mandir-masjid discourse that was at the core of RSS activity at the time in Nagpur.
When we talked to the young boys at the RSS shakha, six-year-olds would tell us about the need for Hindu unity, how the Muslims were not letting the Ram temple be built in Ayodhya and why the mosque should not be there.
At proudh (adult) RSS shakhas, swayamsevaks read and discussed journalist Arun Shourie’s writings on the Ram janambhoomi movement. Later, Shourie would make an appearance in Nagpur on October 5, 1992, as the chief guest for the RSS founders’ day.
In his speech as the chief guest, Shourie praised the RSS for highlighting symbols and transforming them into national issues, as they had done with the Ram Janmabhoomi Andolan:
“We will have to achieve the aims of this movement.
“If you were to present the average Muslim in UP with the archaeological evidence and the historical proof of the temple’s destruction, the Muslim would realise that leaders like Shahabuddin are giving him false information.
“… They say that Islam will be destroyed by breaking a mosque… Prophet Mohammed had himself broken mosques. It is written in the Koran… Allah approved it in the Koran. Mosques would be shifted routinely…”
At the time, the RSS and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) were promoting the Ram Paduka Poojan Abhiyan (worship of Ram’s slippers) as a way of enlisting support for the Ram mandir. The padukas would be blessed at a central temple from where they would be taken to neighbouring districts and villages. The aim was to raise finances and enlist volunteers for karseva at the end of November and December. We documented the puja at the Durga mandir in Pratapnagar and filmed ‘our’ volunteers taking the padukas to different neighbourhoods in Nagpur.
I was aware of the sleight-of-hand by which the Kalyan Singh-led UP state government had acquired 2.77 acres of land around the Babri Masjid for purposes of ‘promoting tourism’. Subsequently, the area around the masjid had been built up to lay the foundation for a temple, even though the UP government claimed this was merely a platform for ‘performing bhajans’.
There had also been assaults on the Babri Masjid on October 30 and November 2, 1990, and police firing on karsevaks by the Mulayam Singh administration in UP. While official accounts claimed that 16 karsevaks were killed, the RSS and VHP suggested that thousands had died, and in a highly emotive and communally charged atmosphere, volunteers carried the asthi kalash (urns with the ashes of the dead karsevaks) in a national campaign to accelerate the mobilisation of volunteers for the December 1992 karseva.
As we began editing the film in mid-October, I had an uneasy sense that something was going to happen at Ayodhya in the coming weeks. I expected there would be unrest, and perhaps some violence and clashes between security forces and the karsevaks. But I had also come to believe the Hindutva propaganda that all of the mobilisation of personnel and resources we were witnessing was towards a symbolic karseva – at best a political tool to pressure the courts to allow the building of the temple in the distant future.
When the Babri Masjid was demolished, we were near completion of our film.
As I watched the images of the demolition, I was stunned. How had this been achieved? How spontaneous was this movement? What was the RSS’s role in all of this? Had the RSS volunteers in my film any part to play in the mobilisation and the demolition?
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Eight years later, in 2000, as the RSS-BJP reaped the benefits of the mosque demolition and moved from the opposition and the periphery of Indian politics to the centre, I returned to Nagpur to meet the boys in the branch – Sandeep, Sripad and Purushottam – to renew my engagement with the RSS and to talk with them about their role in the Ram janmabhoomi movement. This journey was to result in a sequel and my second film on the RSS – The Men in the Tree.
The 1992 film was made with official RSS permission and therefore we had to negotiate a system of constraints and an informal system of surveillance. There was always an appraisal of the questions we asked and the inquiries we made, along with pressure to project and promote certain RSS social service initiatives. The current sarsanghchalak of the RSS – Mohan Bhagwat – was All India Sharirik Pramukh in 1992 and was in constant touch with the RSS volunteers during our filming.
In contrast, my visit to Nagpur in 2000 was a personal one just to meet the characters from my earlier film and it happened largely under the radar of the RSS.
I traveled alone on my first two filming trips in August and October 2000, and was accompanied by cameraman Ranjan Palit on a third shoot in April 2001.
When I met Sandeep, Sripad and Pururshottam, they were eager to tell me about what had happened in their lives in the intervening years. But most of all, they wanted to talk about the demolition of the Babri mosque, their contribution to the movement, and “how they made history”. There was absolutely no holding back and I was surprised at how outspoken they were.
Sripad described the Ram janmabhoomi movement planning as a “war strategy where some are sent to the front while others man the base camp”.
Both Sripad and Purushottam were at the front lines, while Sandeep was one of the RSS volunteers who was deputed to “stay behind and work on the foundation”.
They explained that there was detailed, meticulous organisation and deployment of personnel for months before the karsevaks were to arrive in Ayodhya. As Sandeep said, “there was micro-planning”. Groups of five karsevaks were formed and sent to Ayodhya under a leader. Purushottam was one of the group leaders. Sripad was one of ten RSS swayamsevaks from Nagpur especially selected to do ‘a job’, which he was proud to have accomplished.
Both Sripad and Purushottam climbed onto the dome of the Babri mosque and took turns with the other karsevaks breaking it. Sripad told me proudly that they were able to accomplish their mission of breaking the mosque in just five hours.
But what about the ordinary Ram bhakts unconnected to the RSS family of organisations who spontaneously ventured to Ayodhya to perform karseva out of a sense of personal devotion and enthusiasm?
Sandeep told us that there might have been a few volunteers who arrived in Ayodhya independently, but they would have had to report to RSS workers at the centre who made all local arrangements and effectively controlled the activity of such persons.
It was a movement – there was planning and discipline. It wasn’t possible for just anyone to land up there as a temple volunteer.
Sandeep, Sripad and Purushottam’s accounts suggested that there was nothing spontaneous about the Babri mosque mobilisation. It was a highly controlled, disciplined and secretive operation carried out with months of prior planning and premeditated calculation.
A persistent strain in Sangh parivar discourse about the Babri Masjid demolition is the spontaneous nature of the mobilisation, as an assemblage of angry, outraged Hindu victims congregates. This is invariably followed by a significant rupture as the mob gets unruly and breaks the rule of law in an outburst of emotional outrage and indisciplined excess.
Ten years later, we would be witness to a re-enactment of the same performance programme of ‘spontaneous mob combustion’ during the horrific Gujarat pogroms that would catapult Narendra Modi to the centre-stage of the Indian polity.
In studying RSS and Sangh parivar movements, there is an urgent need to look beyond the manifest and performative dimensions of an action that often involves the staging of events to create the illusion of spontaneity.
After painstakingly compiling its evidence over 17 years, the Liberhan Commission indicted the Sangh parivar in 2009:
“Prognosis of the evidence leads to the conclusion that the mobilisation of the kar sevaks and their convergence to Ayodhya and Faiziabad was neither spontaneous or voluntary. It was well-orchestrated and planned. In conformity with the army-like discipline of the organisations like the RSS, the manner in which the arrangements and mobilisation was carried out does not corroborate the theory that the convergence or the mobilisation of such a large number of karsevaks was for symbolic karseva alone.” (pg 917)
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In 2016, I stop by Nagpur to meet the RSS men from my two films. It has been 15 years since we met last. Today, both Sandeep and Sripad have successful careers and shakha-going children. Although they are not full-time activists, they continue to be involved peripherally in RSS work. They continue to feel great pride in their involvement in the Ram janmabhoomi movement and their ‘historic achievement’ of December 6, 1992 – the day the ‘dhancha’ – or ‘structure’ – was destroyed.
But when I meet them this time, there is an embellishment to the story:
“Lalitji, woh jo aapne gift diya tha, woh Bangali shirt to bahut kaam aaya! (The Bengali shirt that you gifted was very useful)”
‘Bangali shirt’?
Sripad reminds me that at the end of our shoot in October 1992 we had given gifts of ‘Bangali shirts’ (long, knee-length khadi kurtas) to the five main characters in the film.
Sripad tells me with a laugh:
“Jab hum Babri dhanchey par aakraman karne ja rahe the, ek vichaar tha ki hamein ganvesh mein nahin jaana chahiye. Par hum to RSS knicker pahen rakhe the. Phir hamne uske upar woh Bangali shirt pahen liya… aur issi tarah dhanchey par kaam karte rahe, todte gaye kaam karte rahe, todte gaye…
“Lalitji, aapka tohfa toh bahut hi kaam aaya…”
(When we were going to attack the Babri mosque, one thought was that we must not go in our uniform. But we were wearing the RSS knickers, so we wore the Bangali shirt over that.. and that’s how we worked on the structure, we kept breaking it and working on it..
Lalitji, your gift was very helpful indeed).”
[Lalit Vachani makes documentary films and teaches at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies (CeMIS) at the University of Göttingen, Germany. Courtesy: The Wire.]
