Escaped by Danish Khan & Ruhi Khan

Author:Danish Khan & Ruhi Khan [Khan, Danish & Khan, Ruhi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789390914739
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
Published: 2021-03-08T00:00:00+00:00

6

TERROR TIGER

A sixteenth-century mosque that had stood erect for more than four centuries became the topic of many heated debates and discussions in the early 1990s, when members of the right-wing Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) alleged that Mughal emperor Babur erected the mosque on the exact location of Hindu deity Lord Ram’s birthplace after destroying a temple that once stood there.

RSS is the ideological power centre for the Hindutva groups including the political Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). On 6 December 1992, over 1.5 lakh RSS and VHP ‘karsevak’ cadres and supporters, following the war cry of BJP leader Lal Krishna Advani, joined the rath yatra (march) to Ayodhya, to ‘reclaim’ the land of one of the most popular ‘Indian’ deities.

The entire nation was glued to their television sets; many gathered together on the roadside listening to the radio broadcast with trepidation. This was unprecedented and everyone waited with bated breath to know how this would unfold.

As the yatra neared its destinations, the sloganeering grew louder and fears stronger. Policemen and volunteers stood guarding the mosque. Journalists and photographers stood on the fourth floor of a building overlooking the mosque, recording history in the making. Around noon, the mob turned threatening, broke through the police cordon and started attacking the volunteers and even the press. As the mob picked up their iron rods, shovels, axes and rocks and began breaking through the 400-year-old structure, riots broke out.

The centuries-old Babri Masjid was demolished to reclaim that land for the Hindus and construct a grand Ram mandir (temple). This sparked off several clashes across the country between the Hindus and the Muslims. Headlines in Indian newspapers shouted of ‘a betrayed nation’, calling the event a ‘national shame’ as the government failed to defend the shrine even with the country’s apex court opposing any destruction to the mosque and BJP leaders promising to abide by the Supreme Court’s diktat.

To Hindus, the destruction of the mosque was to correct the perceived wrong done to the Indians by the foreign Mughal rulers; for the Muslims, it was a direct attack on their religion and identity as a minority in India.

The country was consumed in communal riots, the worst of which were in Mumbai where 900 people were killed, most of them from the Muslim community. While the focus was largely on the metropolitan commercial capital of India, the small trading town of Surat in Gujarat too witnessed brutal violence. Irfan Engineer writes in the Economic and Political Weekly (EPW) in 1994 that ‘hundreds of people belonging to the minority Muslim community were done to death in an extremely cruel manner, women were subjected to repeated rapes and were humiliated by hoodlums of organized communal outfits like BJP, VHP, Shiv Sena and Bajrang Dal’. He goes on to write that ‘Muslims provided the necessary spark by giving a bandh call to protest’ against the Babri Masjid demolition and by ‘indulging in violence either due to anger or frustration’. According to him, each side was using the riots to garner support for the upcoming elections in the state.

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