The Real Ram Janmabhoomi Story

The seeds of what was to be a long-drawn battle were sown in the temple town of Ayodhya in the 1940s. Hindus contended that, at the site of the birth of Lord Rama, there had been a temple that Mughal emperor Babur had demolished in 1528 to construct the Babri Masjid. Not backed by archaeological evidence, the Hindu claim was disputed by the Muslims who continued to offer namaz in the Babri Masjid. A series of events in 1948–49 were to have repercussions in Ayodhya and ultimately in Indian politics over four decades later.

Baba Raghav Das, Hanuman Prasad Poddar's long-time friend, had won the June 1948 by-election from the Faizabad assembly constituency on a Congress ticket. His opponent, Congress Socialist Party's Acharya Narendra Dev, a native of Faizabad and well steeped in Hindu religious thought as well as Marxian ideology, had lost by a slender margin of 1,312 votes (Das: 5,392; Narendra Dev: 4,080). The Baba's victory was a shot in the arm for 'Hindu communalists, whether inside the Congress or outside it'. The Muslims of Ayodhya had overwhelmingly voted for Narendra Dev, the reason being Chief Minister Govind Ballabh Pant's public display of affection towards conservative Hindu groups and the communal campaign run by Baba Raghav Das. Even before the byelection, Muslims had been threatened by local sadhus and Hindu Mahasabha not to offer namaz in the Babri Masjid. Pant, engaged in a battle of supremacy within the UP Congress, was not only involved in the communal campaign in favour of Baba Raghav Das but was dismissive of Muslim fears. The Baba's victory offered an opportunity for further action.

On the night of 22–23 December 1949, an idol of Lord Rama appeared in the Babri Masjid, an event that was immediately portrayed as divine intervention and unambiguous proof that Rama had indeed been born there. The first information report (FIR) filed at the Ayodhya police station named Abhiram Das, Ram Sakal Das, Sudarshan Das and fifty to sixty unnamed persons for rioting, trespassing and desecrating a religious place. As it turned out, the police investigation hardly helped in sifting truth from myth. A conniving district and state administration (Pant was still chief minister) muddied the waters further by creating the fear of a Hindu backlash if the idol was removed. As a result, Hindus got the right to worship where the idol had allegedly manifested itself, and the mother of all legal disputes was born. Subsequently it has been proved beyond doubt that the act of the emergence of the idol was the handiwork of Abhiram Das of Nirvani Akhara and his associates, as part of a larger conspiracy of Hindu communalists.

Noted Hindi journalist and an RSS insider Ram Bahadur Rai recently provided a new and shocking revelation about the sudden appearance of the idol in Ayodhya. Rai wrote that he had been told by RSS leader Nanaji Deshmukh that the idol had been introduced into the Ayodhya complex after holy immersion in the Sarayu river under the leadership of Poddar. When Rai expressed a wish to record this fact, Deshmukh did not agree, though he maintained it was the truth. Deshmukh's claim has not found any mention in scores of published works on Ayodhya, but points at a web of conspiracy whose threads are yet to be untangled.

Poddar, who throughout the 1940s had been involved in Hindu nationalist propaganda, received the news of the appearance of the idol of Lord Rama with great joy. Irrespective of his involvement or otherwise, the news must have meant a lot to him as he was already working on a plan to restore places related to Hindu deities—Ayodhya (Rama), Mathura (Krishna) and Salasar (Hanuman). Within days of the appearance of the idol, fondly called Ramlalla by the devout and the Sangh Parivar, Poddar reached Ayodhya for confabulations about the future course of action. For a man whose own life was full of claims of direct communion with the gods, the emergence of the idol of Rama was not to be questioned at all. Instead, he was interested in planning the future of the idol that needed a magnificent abode in the shape of an imposing temple.

When he heard government might remove the idol, Poddar wrote to prominent people: 'Ayodhya has the ancient site of Ram Janmabhoomi. Muslims came and built a masjid there. It is said that an idol of Rama has appeared there. Akhand recitation of Ramayana and kirtans is taking place there. I have heard government wants to remove the idol and efforts are being made in that direction. The birthplace of Lord Rama is related to the Hindus of India. If the idol is removed, it would become impossible to wrest control of places of worship that were occupied by Muslims.'

During his stay in Ayodhya, Poddar found that the local Hindu groups did not have the financial means to bear the cost of performing daily puja at the disputed site. Another big burden was going to be the cost of fighting the legal battle that promised to be protracted and messy. Poddar made a promise of Rs 1,500 each month for akhand kirtan (uninterrupted religious recitation) and daily worship of the idol, and additionally, promised to take care of the legal costs and other major or minor expenditure that might have to be incurred from time to time.

As the court case dragged on and the Hindu–Muslim communal fault lines further deepened in Ayodhya, Poddar got involved in the task of finding a permanent solution to the dispute. However, his solution was majoritarian in nature—he wanted to convince the leading Muslims of Ayodhya and outside that the existence of a mosque inside a temple was unnatural and un-Islamic. A few liberal Muslims were sent to Ayodhya with the message of Poddar's solution that basically meant Muslims relinquishing their right over the Babri Masjid. Poddar claimed some of these liberal Muslims were even willing to go on a fast in Delhi against the Muslim agitation for restoring the site to them. He did not live to see the tragic outcome of the dispute…

It is interesting to consider two issues that Kalyan took up in the years following Poddar, both related to Lord Rama. First, the matter of Ram Janmabhoomi, which had remained unresolved for years after Poddar was no more. In 1989–90, VHP laid the foundations of a Rama temple on a property adjacent to the site under dispute. On 6 December 1992, VHP and its allies, including BJP, organized a huge rally of kar sevaks (volunteers) at the site, with disastrous consequences. The mob of kar sevaks swarmed into the disputed site and demolished the Babri Masjid within the space of few hours, all under the watchful eyes of BJP stalwarts L.K. Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi and Uma Bharati and a galaxy of top functionaries of the RSS, VHP and Bajrang Dal. What followed was a chain of incidents of rioting and communal violence on an alarming scale.

Kalyan took a bizarre position on the event. Poddar had been dead for more than two decades now, but the culture of ambiguity that he had fostered was on full display. (An interesting aside is the then prime minister P.V. Narsimha Rao's decision to issue a postal stamp in memory of Poddar earlier in 1992.) Two months after the demolition, editor Radheshyam Khemka began by calling the events in Ayodhya a 'mistake' and played down the spiral of communal violence throughout the country: 'I see no relevance of the political frenzy that is being created after the events in Ayodhya and subsequent violence. As long as the Hindus and the Muslims have to stay together, they will have to respect each other. There is no option but to bring the situation to normal.'

After a long appeal for peace that was general in nature, Khemka came to the demolition. 'The fact is a temple cannot be demolished to build a mosque and a mosque cannot be demolished to erect a temple. Both are against Indian culture. Ram Janmabhoomi is not a mandir–masjid issue. A temple can be built anywhere but a janmabhoomi cannot be changed and much less the birthplace of the avatar of Vishnu. This janmabhoomi is a magnificent memorial for crores of citizen and is among the holiest of places.'

Next, Khemka played the oft-repeated Hindus-as-victim card. He said temples in Kashmir, some of them ancient, had been demolished in the last few years, and after the demolition of Babri Masjid, Hindu temples had met the same fate in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Britain. 'But unlike the sensitivity being shown for the demolition of this structure in Ayodhya built by Babur, no sensitivity was shown for the destruction of these temples. According to some people, the structure in Ayodhya was not a mosque since no prayer had taken place there for 400 years. It also did not have minarets and a well for ablutions before prayers. It was just a structure that for the past fifty years was being used as a temple.'

Khemka reserved his best for the end, concluding that what had been demolished in Ayodhya was not a mosque but a temple: 'Till this clarity dawns on the political class, India will be a lost nation. Hindus and Muslims have to live together in India. The country belongs to both of them. If one of the two says India is not their homeland and they will not respect it, that community needs help.'

Months before the demolition, Kalyan had put out what it claimed was evidence from the shastras and Puranas about the birthplace of Lord Rama being the spot where the Babri Masjid stood. Khemka's discussion of the problem took note of the communal tension that was building up due to the continuous agitation of the BJP, led by L.K. Advani, the RSS, VHP and numerous Hindu right-wing organizations. Kalyan was not in favour of abandoning or brushing under the carpet an issue as important as Lord Rama's birthplace in the name of secularism. The journal said it would be ironic if a place of worship where no namaz had been offered for half a century but from where only the Ramdhun (recitation of the name of Rama) reverberated were to be called a mosque. 'No honest Muslim would favour ruffling Hindu sentiments and aggravating the problem further. He would choose to settle the dispute.' Politicians were told that a solution could be easy if they saw the problem from a larger perspective and not for their narrow political ends.

When a Delhi-based newspaper raised the question of the purity–impurity of the site, saying, 'If the spot inside the Babri Masjid where the idol of Ramlalla is kept is the exact spot where he was born, then it cannot be a place of worship because in any childbirth, blood is spilt, which renders the place unfit for worship,' Kalyan reacted sharply, stating that the human mind was limited and such limitations often resulted in illogical behaviour. Khemka liberally quoted from the Gita, Ramayana and other religious texts to argue that the birth of a god—whether Rama or Krishna—did not involve the usual labour pains or spilling of blood.

Even earlier, in 1990, as the Ram Janmabhoomi movement was gathering steam, Kalyan had lauded the efforts of India's first home minister Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel who had begun the project of protecting Indian culture by announcing the reconstruction of the Somnath Temple in Dwarka, Gujarat. After Patel's death, Khemka said, Indian politicians had not paid attention to such matters as they were too busy looking after their political interests. Khemka's refrain was that Ram Janmabhoomi should not be viewed as a political issue but purely as a spiritual matter and one of national pride. Repeating the argument that a site of birth could not be shifted, Khemka said that Hindus and Muslims could live as brothers only if there was mutual regard and willingness to sacrifice. He suggested that the Babri Masjid be respectfully shifted from its present site and rebuilt elsewhere. This would facilitate the revival of Ram Janmabhoomi as a place of worship of Lord Rama.