How to wipe out secularism in India?

I couldn’t believe that the DNA under Aditya Sinha (one of the editors whom I deeply admire for his editorials, his guts in taking on the DMK, and his dedication in bringing to light the atrocities suffered by Tamils during the genocidal attack in 2009) had published such a rabid, anti-Muslim piece written by Subramanian Swamy.

This article is possibly the closest we will ever get to reading an almost-Nazi and absolutely chilling description of the Hindutva project in any mainstream publication.

For those who have difficulty imagining Swamy’s HINDU NATION, here is what it means.
Majoritarianism and political power to Hindus

If half the Hindus voted together, rising above caste and language, a genuine Hindu party would have a two-thirds majority in Parliament and the assemblies.

Portraying Hindus as the sole victims of terrorism 

The first lesson to be learnt from the recent history of Islamic terrorism against India and for tackling terrorism in India is that the Hindu is the target and that Muslims of India are being programmed by a slow reactive process to become radical and thus slide into suicide against Hindus.

Denying non-Hindus the fundamental right to vote, and the fundamental right to power-sharing making them non-citizens

The Muslims of India can join us if they genuinely feel for the Hindu. That they do I will not believe unless they acknowledge with pride that though they may be Muslims, their ancestors were Hindus. If any Muslim acknowledges his or her Hindu legacy, then we Hindus can accept him or her as a part of the Brihad Hindu Samaj (greater Hindu society) which is Hindustan. India that is Bharat that is Hindustan is a nation of Hindus and others whose ancestors were Hindus. Others, who refuse to acknowledge this, or those foreigners who become Indian citizens by registration, can remain in India but should not have voting rights (which means they cannot be elected representatives).

Retelling history in which even atrocities by Hindutva like the Babri Masjid demolition are recast into narratives where the Hindu becomes the “victim”

The third lesson is that whatever and however small the terrorist incident, the nation must retaliate massively. For example, when the Ayodhya temple was sought to be attacked, we should have retaliated by re-building the Ram temple at the site.

Meena Kandasamy in her blog. More Here

Babri Masjid, B R Ambedkar, Hindutva Terror and Injustice!

The Ayodhya Verdict was a judicial demolition and justification of the destruction of the Babri Masjid. The verdict stands in utter contempt of the Indian constitution, as was the demolition. The verdict is an affront to the very vision of an India that is rooted in its secular and plural values.

The judgment has set an unprecedented precedent by giving precedence to belief or aastha over law. A civil title suit was reduced to a theological verdict.

This is the process whereby the Brahmanic Manusmriti increasingly gains precedence over the Ambedkarite Constitution.

The verdict, far from ensuring a respectful closure, has opened up a Pandoras box, whereby every place of religious worship will be under threat from the RSS and its myriad militant affiliates, who have proved their prowess at conducting pogroms and destruction of mosques in Gujarat.

Thus this verdict has actually created new grave problems, instead of solving the old.

Clearly the verdict is less of a legal pronouncement and more of a political settlement sought by the Congress, RSS and the BJP. This has in turn only compounded the imbroglio.

What is also missing from the entire discourse is the fact that the mobilization and demolition of the Babri Masjid on the 6th of December, was the Brahmanical counter to the Punyatithi or death anniversary celebration of Dr. Ambedkar, wherein lakhs of Dalits, OBC's and other oppressed masses go to the Chaitya Bhoomi to pay their respects.

This was the revenge of the RSS, as Dr. Ambedkar had converted to Buddhism with lakhs of his followers on the last day of Dussehra in 1956.

Also the fact is that Advani's Rath Yatra was a counter to the announcement of the Mandal commission by VP Singh. Thus the focal point of the entire Ram Mandir movement has been to target the Muslim community and the co-option of the Dalit, OBC masses into the Brahmanic fold.

Thus at the core lies the ideological struggle between the emancipatory, egalitarian and humanitarian principles as enunciated by Mahata Phule, Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar and Brahmanism on the other.
Thus the design is to build a grand or Bhavya Ram Temple as a counter to the Chaitya Bhoomi.

It is also a religio-cultural counter-revolution against the fast spreading Buddhism across all of North India, especially amongst certain sections of the empowered Dalits.

The most dangerous and offensive part of this judgment is the fact that it has justified the ravings and rantings of L. K. Advani, Uma Bharti, Vinay Katiyar, Kalyan Singh and their entire ilk.

For the judgment to mention that Bhagwan Ram was born under the central dome of the Babri Masjid, is an incredible leap of aastha. Even the findings of the ASI report that could not be determined even by the best of historians and archeologists, was used as conclusive evidence.

Most incredible of this all is that one of the parties to the dispute is Ram Lalla Virajman himself. This is again unprecedented. A deity is a participant in a legal dispute, who is then granted a judicial status with a birth certificate.

Do we need the courts to go into this terrain of beliefs, where tomorrow the very status of God or Eshwar or Allah or Ahura Mazda will be decided?? Ridiculous and preposterous!!

ven though the Court agrees that the idols were placed there in 1949, itstill does not find it a criminal act, even though an FIR had been lodged.

So the entire criminal act, leading to the very demolition is then justified and the precedent thus set, that can be replicated with little cause for worry for the RSS and it’s fanatic hordes.

Though the Congress is shouting from the rooftops, that the Civil suite will have no bearings on the criminal case, the glaring delays over the Liberhan Commission (extended 49 times!!) report is proof of the collusion between the Congress and the RSS-BJP.

LK Advani has taken all precautions to differentiate between the leadership that stood at the frontline directing the crazed mobs and those of the thousands who were indulging in the violence and destruction.

Actually the matter could have been resolved in a different and far more sensible manner that would have given a respectful closure to all of Indian society.

We are amongst the world's most ancient civilizations and if we start digging up, every little plot of land will throw up a religious dispute.

And even though there is no evidence that a Temple was destroyed to build a mosque, yet judge Sharma behaved like he was writing a pamphlet for the RSS.

The very Ramcharitramanas of Tulsidas never mentioned even the possibility of this dispute, even though he was around 30 years old when the Babri mosque was built in 1528 and was functioning till 1949.

The Nirmohi Akhada were staking their claim to the property, but never raised the issue of Bhagwan Ram's birthplace.

The ASI report also mentions Buddhist and Jain remains, but very little public debate on this aspect, as clearly Ayodhya was and is an important centre for these two religions as well.

Thus a number of legal luminaries have been astonished at the judgment & have debunked it as a mere panchayati faisla.

This judgment actually proves that the judges had no aastha or faith in the Indian constitution and thus the Brahmanical sham.

From an article by Feroze Mithiborwala in Two Circles. More Here

The Indian State failed to stop the demolition of Babri Masjid : K N Panikkar

The history of the Mandir-Masjid dispute during the post-Independence period is but a record of aggression by Hindu communal forces, and a series of compromises and reconciliation bids by the Central government led by the Indian National Congress, particularly under Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao.

In 1949, Hindu communal forces conducted a seven-day continuous recitation of Ramcharitamanas, which proved to be the precursor to the installation of an idol of Ram Lalla in the mosque. The fact that they got away with the defiance of the state not only emboldened them to indulge in further aggression, leading ultimately to the demolition of the Masjid. During this period, the Sangh Parivar not only organised a series of agitations to mobilise Hindus in the name of Ram but also made preparations for the construction of the temple. It assiduously built up a tempo of aggression, with Uma Bharti and Rithambara leading the charge. The finale of this carefully constructed aggression was the Rath Yatra led by Lal Krishna Advani 20 years ago, which finally led to the demolition of the Masjid in 1992. 

The demolition was a criminal act according to the laws of the country, as the mosque was a 400-year-old historical monument that the state was committed to protect.

 While the Hindu communal forces were engaged in a progressive assault, the state was unable to solve its own political dilemma. The Congress which led the government during this period was committed to secularism in principle, but the party realised that it was not possible to survive without the electoral support of Hindus. As a consequence, the party indulged in secular rhetoric, but followed communal politics in practice. It pursued what has now come to be termed ‘soft Hindutva'. Through this means it hoped to outsmart the Hindu communal forces.

The leader who initiated this disastrous policy was Rajiv Gandhi. He ordered the opening of the locks of the Masjid, thereby permitting Hindus to perform puja inside. He did this in order to steal the thunder from the Hindu communal forces. His successor-Prime Minister pursued the policy of compromise much more vigorously, and ‘officially arranged' the shilanyas of the temple. The Congress thus became an appendage of communal forces; that is what emboldened a mob to demolish the Masjid, thus inflicting a major blow on democracy and secularism.

Decisive factor

The failure of the Indian state was a most decisive factor behind the act of demolition. As is evident from the account given later by Narasimha Rao, it is clear that the state failed to discharge its duty of protecting the monument. It failed to prevent Mr. Advani's Rath Yatra, which led to the loss of several lives: everybody knew it would have disastrous consequences. Even after the demolition, the construction of a temporary temple was not stopped. At least now the state can rectify its mistakes by charting out a bold and innovative step in line with the principles of secularism.

From K N Panikkar's article in The Hindu. More Here.

Babri Masjid case: It is Emotions Vs Evidence: Hashim Ansari

Hashim Ansari is ninety years old. He is the resident of Ayodhya and has been attached with the Babri Masjid for many decades. 
In an interview to Mumtaz Alam Falahi of Two circle.net he has summed up the Babri Masjid crisis in a single sentence : "Ek taraf bhavna hai. aur ek taraf suboot hai" (On one side we have emotions and on the other is pile of evidence")
He has also said, "We have evidence of more than 550 years". He blames Congress and the Muslim leaders of secular parties more than the frenzy fringe groups of Sangh Parivar. "Jaffer Shariff was the Railway Minister then. He organised special trains to Ayodhya."he laments.


Listen him in youtube:

Jazakallah Mumtaz Bhai!

Source : Twocircle.

Babri Masjid demolition was preplanned by L K Advani

Let’s go back to what really happened on December 6. When BJP leaders tell us that the masjid was demolished by a spontaneous outpouring of public emotion, they are knowingly telling lies. You cannot bring down a huge structure and then construct a makeshift temple on the same spot with your bare hands or on the basis of public anger. You need a plan and you need implements.

On December 6, eye witnesses and video cameramen saw a band of men in yellow bandanas advancing determinedly towards the temple. They had rappelling ropes that allowed them to climb to the top and possessed spades, shovels and other implements with which they broke the masjid’s walls.

The BJP’s government in UP — then headed by Kalyan Singh — had promised the courts and the Centre that its policemen would ensure that no implements or weapons of any kind were allowed near the Babri masjid. We know from photographic evidence that either Kalyan Singh and his policemen were so inept that kar sevaks were able to smuggle construction tools into the area under their eyes or — and this is more likely — that Kalyan Singh simply lied and that his policemen looked the other way when implements arrived.

Within minutes of the men in yellow bandanas approaching the masjid, another group of kar sevaks targeted journalists and cameramen. The BJP would claim later that this too was an example of spontaneous anger. In fact, it was a well- coordinated operation to prevent any photographs of the actual demolition being taken. By the time the demolition was well under way, the vast majority of journalists had fled for their lives.

Who were these men in yellow bandanas? I was editor of Sunday at the time and my deputy Rajiv Bagchi (now editor of the HT’s Calcutta edition) was in Ayodhya. Rajiv wrote about drills at which Sangh parivar members practised using ropes to reach the top of a building and rehearsed the demolition. In the HT a few days ago, Vijay Jung Thapa recalled being taken to see a similar exercise.

Clearly all that stuff about spontaneous anger was nonsense. This demolition was planned down to the tiniest detail (including the assaults on journalists to prevent us from photographing the men who carried it out) and executed with military precision. After they had broken the masjid, the kar sevaks actually built a makeshift temple on the spot. Nobody can spontaneously generate cement from anger. Obviously the kar sevaks had brought everything required for the operation to the site.

CBI officers investigating the demolition came and spoke to such journalists as Rajiv Bagchi. I remember handing over photographs from the Sunday library that showed Kalyan Singh’s policemen helping kar sevaks cross the so-called police barriers.

I believed that one way or the other the Centre’s investigative agencies would crack the mystery of who it was that actually brought down the Babri masjid. I believed that they would uncover the conspiracy and identify the conspirators.
I was wrong. Nobody has been identified.

Then, I believed that Justice Liberhan who spent Rs 9 crore of taxpayers’ money and took 17 years to inquire into the demolition would tell us who the men in the yellow bandanas were and explain how the operation had been undertaken.
No such luck. The Liberhan report is a poorly written version of the kind of agitated editorials we were all writing in the week after the demolition. I’m sure the judge has enjoyed his 17 years at government expense.

I don’t wish to make too much of Advani’s pious hand-rubbing or his crocodile tears. But the furore about the demolition should serve to remind us that no matter how reasonable BJP leaders may seem on television, at the heart of the parivar, there lurks a nasty fascist core.

These are the religious soldiers who brought down the Babri masjid. Seventeen years later, we still don’t know who they are. And they lurk in the shadows, waiting for another opportunity.

From Vir Sanghvi's take on Babri Masjid in Hindustan Times. More Here

Babri Masjid, Muslims, Hindus and Basharat Peer

IN THE AFTERNOON of 6 December 1992, Tariq Masood, a ninth-grade student in Gorakhpur, western Uttar Pradesh, saw the television go black in the middle of a Doordarshan news bulletin. The electricity in the town was cut off for the rest of the day and the batteries in their radio were dead. A few hundred kilometres away, thousands of karsevaks led by various Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) workers had converged on the disputed site of Babri Masjid-Ram Janambhoomi. Gorakhpur was under curfew. A phone call broke the news that the karsevaks had destroyed the Babri Mosque. Tariq sat quietly by his lawyer father, numb, watching him repeat the same words, “There must be a mistake. They must be lying.” In the days following 6 December, India was torn apart by a series of riots, which killed around 2,000 people, mostly Muslims. “For many years the destruction of the Babri Masjid shaped my life,” Tariq, now a 32-year-old IT consultant, told me when we met recently in Delhi’s Zakir Nagar area. “We went into a huddle. My father’s Hindu friends stopped inviting us home and we stopped inviting them to our ceremonies. I had no Hindu friends for years.”

After 17 years, 400 meetings, and 80 million rupees, the Liberhan Commission came out with its 1,029 page report in December, blaming the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) for organising the demolition of the mosque and naming 60 BJP, RSS and Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) leaders, including former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Riotous scenes followed in the parliament for a few days, but the commission’s disclosures were hardly a revelation. Videos of Atal Bihari Vajpayee inciting a crowd of karsevaks at a Lucknow rally on 5 December, two days before the masjid’s demolition, have become staples on YouTube. Soon after the Liberhan report was made public, VHP leader Vinay Katiyar bragged to a television channel that 6 December 1992 was the “proudest day of my life.” Katiyar’s voice seemed to have an edge of desperation, a world away from the confidence of the 1990s, when he was a man journalists wanted to interview, when the Ram Temple movement had its last burst of fervour. He reminded me of March 2002, when a few weeks after the Gujarat pogrom, Ramchandra Paramhans, who headed the Ram Janambhoomi Nyas Trust, was leading thousands of karsevaks from across India in an attempt to defy a Supreme Court ban on construction at the disputed site by laying a foundation stone for the Ram Temple.

I had travelled to Ayodhya, along with hundreds of other journalists. The city was barricaded and flooded with policemen, but hordes of karsevaks were sneaking in and converging there. The atmosphere was frenetic with slogans of “Jai Shree Ram” and “Ram Lalla Jaynege, Mandir Wahin Banayenge.” Ramchandra Paramhans, a robust man with long matted hair and an ageing prize fighter’s body, held regular press conferences in the Karsevakpuram compound, a couple of kilometres from the disputed site. Paramhans headed the militant Digambhar Akhara and was instrumental in installing a statue of Ram under the dome of the Babri mosque in 1949 and initiated in 1950 the legal battle to reclaim the Babri Masjid for the Hindus. “Even if Bhagwan Rama comes and says he was not born in Ayodhya, I will not believe him,” Paramhans was famously quoted as saying. Paramhans was a confident yet mercurial man, giving assurances of peaceful conduct one moment, telling jokes the other, and soon after threatening to drink poison and kill himself if he was not allowed to carry the foundation stones to the disputed site.

Scores of craftsmen worked full time, chiselling floral designs and figurines of Ram on the pink sandstone slabs that would come together to form the Ram Temple. Vajpayee was the prime minister, the worldwide condemnation of the Gujarat pogrom a fortnight earlier and the complexities of being in power had tamed the BJP. After a long series of negotiations, Paramhans’ boys were allowed a token ceremony, wherein a crowd of sadhus and four ten year-old boys from a Hindu gurukul led the procession carrying a sandstone slab from the temple workshop to a place near the disputed site, where they were made to hand over the stones to district authorities. “All we need is 24 hours and a few machines can put the temple together,” one heard often those days.

Seven years later, on a foggy December morning in 2009, I drove from Lucknow to Ayodhya to see what remained of that old fervour for the Ram temple. The repeated defeats of the BJP in the elections seemed to suggest the end of a phase of Hindu nationalism, anti-Muslim rhetoric and riots – from the demolition of the Babri Mosque in 1992 to the massacres of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002. Over the last few years, there has been much talk about India’s great power status and the surge in its economy. Thousands of Indian professionals based in the United States have returned home to cash in on the boom. India is pushing aggressively on the world stage, trying to make its presence felt through investments in Africa and buying influence in Afghanistan by providing trillions of rupees in aid and helping build infrastructure, sending sophisticated scientific expeditions to Antarctica and producing even more expensive movies. I wondered: how do India’s Muslims relate to the New India? Were they finding a way to a share in the growing economy? Had they made peace with the ghosts of Babri? Did they see an end to the rampant suspicion and arrests in the name of anti-terrorism measures? I decided to travel to a few cities and towns in Uttar Pradesh, where 31 million of India’s 154 million Muslims live to gauge how much the recent past mattered, how they saw the present and hear their hopes for a future. 

From Basharat Peer's piece in Caravan. More Here

Prosecute the culprits who demolished the Babri Masjid

The United Progressive Alliance (UPA) did very little during its first term to re-secularise Indian politics and society emphatically, barring the revamping of the National Council for Education Research and Training (NCERT) to produce non-communal and pedagogically superior textbooks, and the establishment of the Sachar Committee on the status of Muslims.

Today is the right moment to decisively marginalise the BJP and reaffirm secularism. The best way to do so would be for the UPA to seriously pursue the prosecution of the culprits of the Babri demolition and the wave of violence which followed, and above all, the Gujarat pogrom. Simultaneously, the UPA should do all it can to empower the marginalised among the Muslim community by aggressively implementing the recommendations of the Sachar Committee and the Ranganath Mishra Committee.

The testimony of police officer Anju Gupta in the case against Advani and others in a Rae Bareli court is a landmark development, which holds the potential for bringing the perpetrators of the Babri demolition to justice. Anju Gupta’s account of the events of December 6 can and should be richly corroborated by other evidence, including eyewitness accounts and video footage of the inflammatory speeches by Sangh Parivar leaders and the kar sevaks’ actions.

The UPA would do the public a great disservice if it drags its feet on this case. The urgency to end the impunity of Hindutva leaders cannot be overemphasised.

From Praful Bidwai's article in Frontline

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