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All rows lead to demolished
mosque
By Ranjit Devraj
NEW
DELHI - A little more than 10 years after Hindu zealots
brought the tri-domed Babri masjid in northern Uttar
Pradesh state crashing down, the ghost of the medieval
mosque continues to make or break governments in India.
Last week, when Mayawati, the Dalit (socially
deprived Hindu caste) leader and chief minister of Uttar
Pradesh resigned from office, she blamed it on pressure
brought on her by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP),
which rules India at the center.
The ruling
party, she said, had pressed her to go slow on cases
pending in the state's courts against top officials like
Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani for their role
in demolishing the mosque.
Mayawati's resignation
not only brought down the Uttar Pradesh government, but
also ended an opportunistic alliance between her
pro-Dalit Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and the pro-Hindu,
upper-caste dominated BJP.
The BJP spearheaded
the drive to demolish the mosque in 1992 and reaped rich
political dividends for it afterwards. By 1998, the
party, until then confined to Uttar Pradesh and the "cow
belt" of northern India, had seized national power
largely on the strength of a campaign to re-dedicate a
temple to the Hindu god Rama at the exact spot where the
Babri masjid stood.
That campaign deeply
polarized the Hindus and the minority Muslim community
in India. The actual demolition of the mosque unleashed
wave after wave of communal riots across the country,
including an anti-Muslim pogrom in western Gujarat state
last year.
Much of the BJP's campaign rested on
strengthening popular belief in this Hindu-majority
country of more than one billion people that the Babri
masjid was built by Muslim invaders over a temple that
marked the birthplace of Lord Rama some 10,000 years
ago. Although this is not easily proven, BJP leaders
have insisted that it is a question of faith rather than
proven fact.
The immediate consequence of the
fall of the Mayawati government for the BJP is that its
top leaders cannot expect help from its successor - the
avowedly secular Samajwadi Party government led by
Mulayam Singh Yadav, sworn in as Uttar Pradesh chief
minister on Thursday.
Until she fell out with
the BJP, Mayawati served the interests of the top
leaders of the nationally-ruling party by arranging for
them to have separate trials at a smaller court in Rae
Bareilly town, while the main case continues to be heard
at a special court set up in the state's capital of
Lucknow. This was to help them avoid serious charges of
conspiracy in relation to the demolition of the Babri
masjid.
Worsening matters for the BJP, on Monday
the Supreme Court refused to stay trial proceedings in
Rae Bareilly against Advani, Union Minister for Human
Resources Development Murli Manohar Joshi and several
other political leaders for inciting the demolition.
Instead, the court issued notices to Advani and
Joshi and other leaders of the BJP and its affiliate,
Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council), in response
to writ petitions challenging the dropping of charges of
"criminal conspiracy" by the federal government's
Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) at the Rae
Bareilly court.
Petitioner Wajahat Ansari said
that the CBI's action of dropping charges of criminal
conspiracy against top politicians Advani, who holds the
key home portfolio, and Joshi and others was a "colorful
and malafide exercise of authority".
"The
message that has gone across the country is that by
somehow or other delaying the trial, it is easy to
escape culpability by manipulating procedure and
deleting uncomfortable charges like criminal
conspiracy," Ansari said.
Advani has denied
interfering with the case. However, the fact that the
home ministry controls the CBI has resulted in the
sleuthing agency coming under charges that it
deliberately diluted the charge sheets under political
pressure and that it withheld important evidence in the
Babri masjid demolition case.
Soon after
Mayawati resigned, BJP president Venkiah Naidu denied
that any pressure had been brought to bear on her to
delay the Babri masjid case. "This seems like an
afterthought after she had made up her mind to resign,"
he said.
After being sworn in as chief minister,
Yadav said that he would not interfere with the Babri
masjid case and that whatever he did he would consult
those parties that had supported him in coming to power.
Yadav was referring mainly to the BJP's arch
rival, the opposition Congress party which declared
support for Yadav on the grounds that its main goal was
to see that Uttar Pradesh was run by a secular
government rather than one run on religious
factionalism.
But after Monday's ruling, Yadav
may move to ensure that all those accused of conspiring
to demolish the Babri masjid stand trial in the special
court set up in Lucknow irrespective of their status.
Trouble began for the BJP in Uttar Pradesh,
India's largest state with 170 million people and
considered its stomping grounds when it was unseated in
state assembly elections, last year, in spite of
flogging the issue of building a temple at the site
where its supporters had demolished the Babri masjid.
The Samajwadi Party emerged as the largest
single party but did not have the numbers to form its
own government. The BJP then forged an alliance with the
BSP to mainly to keep the Samajwadi Party out of power
but, last week, the BJP-BSP coalition came unstuck.
The return of the Samajwadi Party, which draws
part of its support from the minority Muslim community
in the state, may only help the BJP resume its agenda of
rebuilding a temple dedicated to Rama at the Babri
masjid site and shore up a Hindu vote-bank ahead of next
year's general elections. The BJP could not do that
while in government or while sharing a government led by
Mayawati, who was also opposed to the temple-building
plan as essentially an upper-caste project.
"Nothing can stop us from building the temple
now and we also have the support from the report of
Archaeological Survey of India [ASI]," said Vinay
Katiyar, the fiery leader of the BJP in Uttar Pradesh.
Katiyar was referring to a report presented to
the Uttar Pradesh High Court on August 22 by the ASI
that appeared to support the theory that a temple may
have lain below the foundations of the demolished Babri
Masjid. The ASI report has already drawn a storm of
protests from India's top historians and independent
archaeologists who say that, in fact, what lay beneath
the Babri masjid was likely to be an earlier mosque
rather than a temple.
While the Babri masjid was
built by Moghuls who invaded India in the 16th century,
northern India had been under Islamic rule for several
preceding centuries. Archaeologist Suraj Bhan told Inter
Press Service in an interview that the earlier
structures excavated by the ASI were covered with lime
plaster, which was unknown in Hindu temple architecture.
Said leading lawyer and constitutional expert,
Rajeev Dhavan, "The ASI report cannot change living
history, which is that the Babri masjid existed and was
demolished by miscreants in a criminal act. Besides, the
ASI report cannot change the revenue records which show
that property was owned by the waqf [the trust
that holds Islamic property in India].
(Inter
Press Service)
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