demolition of Babri Masjid

As Most BJP Leaders Celebrated Fall of Babri Masjid, Atal Bihari Vajpayee Was Aghast

A new book says that he stayed away from Ayodhya for a range of reasons, including ‘political instinct.’

This excerpt from Sagarika Ghose’s book Atal Bihari Vajpayee is republished with permission from Juggernaut.

6 December 1992. Down Ayodhya’s winding, narrow streets, on a grassy hillock, stood the three-domed Babri Masjid. The small mosque was in the eye of a storm, the focal point of hysterical rage on one side and defiant assertion on the other. Railings, barricades, steel fences and ropes ringed the controversy-ridden structure. A thin line of police stood against an advancing wave. Thousands of self-styled ‘kar sevaks’, mobilized and galvanized over two years by the VHP, Bajrang Dal and other Hindu organizations had descended on Ayodhya.

Sagarika Ghose
Atal Bihari Vajpayee
Juggernaut (December 2021)

By early morning on the 6th, angry crowds gathered some distance away from the Babri Masjid at Karsevakpuram, the camp that had been created for them. Shouts and cries rose: ‘It is time for kar seva at the Babri Masjid, it is time to seize the Babri Masjid, it is time to destroy the Babri Masjid.’

Wiry, bright-eyed young men, some with ‘Jai Shri Ram’ tattooed on their chests, jumped and jostled, waving saffron flags and trishuls, their voices high-pitched. ‘Jis Hindu ka khoon na khaule, woh khoon nahin pani hai [The Hindu whose blood doesn’t boil, doesn’t have blood in his veins but water].’ ‘Jai Shri Ram, mandir yahin banayenge [We will build the Ram temple right here].’

Gathered at a nearby dharamshala, BJP, VHP and Bajrang Dal leaders watched the oddly excited crowds with a growing sense of unease. Today, Sunday, 6 December 1992, was the day they had set for a ‘symbolic’ kar seva, to establish the presence of the Ram temple at the disputed site. The leaders hoped the ‘Ram bhakts’ or kar sevaks would gather at the puja and that their planned public meetings would divert the crowds away from the masjid.

But the kar sevaks had other plans. As early as 6 a.m. they began to arrive in front of the 2.77-acre disputed area where the masjid stood. ‘If the leaders do not allow kar seva, they will face our maar seva,’ shouted one of the kar sevaks. Police stood at the ready, guarding the security cordon around the mosque. PAC jawans patrolled the barrier. RSS volunteers wearing armbands stood in single file alongside the police.

At 10 a.m. L.K. Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi and the VHP and Bajrang Dal leaders arrived at the site and went to the Ram Katha Kunj, 150–200 metres from the disputed site, where a raised dais had been placed. They began their speeches. But who cared about the leaders and their orations? This was the hour of the kar sevak, the moment of historical vendetta, the time to unleash pent-up and well-mobilized fury. The kar sevaks had their eyes fixed on the masjid, as the leaders speechified in vain. The leaders were irrelevant. The crowd took charge. Some youths began to push against the barricades and security cordons. In big groups, they shoved aside the police and RSS volunteers and lunged at the metal fences, some attempting to clamber over them.

The police fell back.

At around 11 a.m., one youth emerged running from the crowd. He pushed aside the constable trying to stop him and jumped clear over the barricade. There was a split-second pause, then others followed him, racing towards the security line and vaulting over the barrier at several places. A scream rang out: ‘Mandir yahin banayenge.’ The RSS men scurried after them, trying to stop the flow of running, leaping kar sevaks, but the kar sevaks powered on, deftly dodging the cops. As the PAC looked on helplessly and units of the CRPF quietly departed the scene, groups of kar sevaks broke free of security.

Behind the masjid another group of kar sevaks pulled themselves over the barricades. When police and some RSS volunteers tried to stop them, the gathered crowd began to hurl stones, providing a cover for those pushing forward towards the masjid.

As stones and brickbats pelted down, the police melted away and hundreds of kar sevaks breached the barricades and streamed towards the Babri Masjid. A slightly built youth leapt up the steel railings encircling the structure like a ‘circus acrobat’. Others gathered at the base of the masjid and, using ropes and grappling hooks, clambered to the top of the middle dome ‘as if they were trained mountaineers’. On the ground someone planted a saffron flag. The crowd action didn’t seem like a sudden insurrection; instead it appeared well planned and executed by an able-bodied infantry.

RSS general secretary H.V. Seshadri’s voice came over the loudspeaker, appealing to the kar sevaks in several different languages not to damage the masjid. But by now the crowd was shrieking and chanting so loudly that he could barely be heard. Well equipped with pickaxes, chisels, huge blacksmith’s hammers and shovels, the kar sevaks, holding up saffron flags, climbed to the top of the masjid. They swarmed all over the three domes as riotously as a colony of bees shaken from their hive. Advani, looking flustered, asked Uma Bharti to try to pull the kar sevaks away from the masjid. Trying to draw them off the masjid and towards the kar seva site, Uma Bharti cried, ‘Ram bhakton se meri appeal hai ki kar seva ka samay ho gaya hai . . . wapas aa jayen [I appeal to the Ram devotees that it is time for the kar seva, they must come back].’

The same Uma Bharti would be pictured hours later beaming before cameras after the domes were demolished when she said: ‘Today is the most blissful day of my life.’

The mob was working to its own rhythm, deaf to the leaders’ pleas. An almighty battering and bashing began. The kar sevaks worked with maniacal energy in coordinated teams, as if well trained for the task. Some hammered, some chiselled, others slithered down ropes for tool supplies. Clouds of dust mixed with columns of dark smoke which began to billow from mosques and homes in Ayodhya town that had been torched by the crazed kar sevaks. At Ram Katha Kunj, Sadhvi Rithambara, dressed in flowing saffron, began to sing and dance, like a high priestess of doom, her eyes half closed, a smile playing around her lips: ‘Ek dhakka aur do, Babri Masjid tod do [Give one more shove, bring the masjid down].’ Gangs of kar sevaks waving saffron flags stood on the domes of the Babri Masjid, like a ragged pirate army aboard a conquered vessel. The scene flashed into the camera lenses of gathered journalists, some of whom were beaten and had their cameras smashed.

As the masjid began to crumble, kar sevaks held up bricks – ‘Babur’s bricks, Babur’s bones,’ they yelled – as if they were trophies. All of a sudden, at 1.55 p.m. the first dome collapsed. Some kar sevaks fell and were buried under the rubble; they were extricated and rushed to hospital. Others attacked the base of the other domes with long wooden poles. A four-centuries-old structure, weather-beaten by time, could not withstand this ferocious demolition squad working as if possessed by supernatural spirits. Within hours the other two domes of the masjid broke apart and fell to the ground. By five that evening, in a cloud of blood-red dust, the Babri Masjid came crashing down.

Demolition of the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992. Photo: PTI

‘The Republic Besmirched’, thundered the Times of India in a front-page editorial the next day: ‘The pernicious features of Hindutva espoused by the Sangh Parivar have been exposed . . . the hate, bigotry
and prejudice’.

It had taken a little over five hours to flatten the Babri Masjid and to arrive at that fraught moment of its demolition had taken five years of a systematic campaign of religious hatred. A decade later, the VHP’s president Ashok Singhal said in an interview: ‘Ever since the movement began, it was certain from the first day that the masjid was bound to fall.’

In Delhi, Vajpayee was, initially, aghast. He was the only top leader of the BJP not present in Ayodhya at the time of the demolition, part by calculated design, part by political instinct, part by a personal recoil from the spectre of violence, and part because of wanting to remain loftily aloof from sharing the stage with a gaggle of VHP and Bajrang Dal leaders. On 5 December evening he had said in Lucknow: ‘I wanted to go to Ayodhya, but I was told to go to Delhi and I’ll respect that order.’ A day after the demolition he expostulated outragedly in Delhi: ‘This is the worst miscalculation my party has made.’

After August 5, It’s Hard for India’s Muslims to Not Feel Orphaned in their Motherland

States that systematically discriminate against citizens on the basis of religious or any other ascriptive identity cannot also be democratic.

August 5 was a difficult day for anyone who still believes in the idea of a secular and democratic India. The spectacle of a prime minister performing the ‘bhumi pujan’ for his political parivar’s temple in Ayodhya did no credit of the world’s largest democracy, one that incidentally is also home to more than 200 million Muslims.

In November 2019, the Supreme Court gave the disputed site where the Babri Masjid stood – till it was forcibly demolished in 1992 – to the Hindu litigants and said that an alternative site should be given to the Muslim litigants for their mosque. The court judgment – which, oddly enough, also accepted that the 1992 demolition was illegal – triggered an acute loss of faith among Muslims about the possibility of justice. And now, the open involvement of top state functionaries in the foundation-laying celebrations for the temple has put an official seal to the idea that the Indian state has a religion. Narendra Modi appeared there not as the leader of 130 crore Indians but as some sort of Hindu king who was marking the beginning of a new political and social order in which religion– his religion – would have pride of place.

As an Indian, a journalist and a Muslim, covering Ayodhya has been a tumultuous experience for me. After the Supreme Court’s judgment last November, I wrote a deeply personal piece on what my family and I – as a young girl in Uttar Pradesh – had to suffer in the post-Babri Masjid demolition riots and the imprints the violence left on my adult life. As the date of the August 5 ceremony came closer, the preparations for the event were being reported in the national press almost on a daily basis. From revisiting the horrors of 1992 to imagining what August 5 would bring, not a day passed without me wondering what had happened to the India my ancestors had fought for. As I flipped channels, I couldn’t recognise my country anymore.

Rear view of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya before it was demolished. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

What happened on August 5 may have brought home the change which has taken place, but this change did not come in a day.

Enough has been written on how, over the past six years, Narendra Modi and his party have single-mindedly and unapologetically done everything in their power to weaken the constitution. Virtually all their major policy decisions and the laws they took great pride in were aimed at turning India – a secular, federal democracy – into a state where Muslims and minorities, Dalits and Adivasis, live in fear. The fear of losing their rights, livelihoods, and access to resources.

Also Read: What’s Changed and What Hasn’t after Modi’s Ayodhya Show

Long shadow on the judiciary’s credibility

But what distinguishes the last one year from Modi’s first five years is the near abandonment of secular principles by India’s institutions. The politicisation and communalisation of the administration – particularly the law enforcement agencies including the police, lower bureaucracy and lower judiciary – underscore this shift. And when it comes to critical cases – like the Delhi riots investigations, the state crackdown on protesters against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, the illegal arrest and detention of Kashmiri leaders, activists and journalists – the higher judiciary’s lacklustre attitude and unwillingness to question the government narrative have cast long shadows on the credibility of the legal system.

The last few years have also seen the media – an important pillar of democracy that had earlier abandoned its duty as a watchdog against the powerful – cast away any pretence of secularism. The high decibel debates on national TV manufacturing a forced consensus in favour of the government politics, and attacking any contrarian views or delegitimising them as ‘anti-national’ is an old story. While many TV anchors continue to dehumanise Muslims and incite hatred and violence against them, it appears that this may not be enough to please the ‘master’. From top editors to junior reporters and anchors of popular news channels, August 5 witnessed the total surrender of Big Media to the saffron agenda. From hailing the Ram temple as a national accomplishment, shouting religious slogans and reciting prayers in the studio to declaring Narendra Modi as the Hindu king, it was almost impossible to distinguish some of these journalists from BJP/RSS workers.

Also Read: Day After Ayodhya Temple Ceremony, Newspapers Editorials Recall Mosque Demolition

Tired of carrying the ‘burden’ of opposing communalism, the Congress, India’s largest opposition party, finally resolved its ideological dilemma of oscillating between soft secularism and soft Hindutva. The party fielded none other than general secretary Priyanka Gandhi to hail the Ayodhya ceremony – which was a Sangh parivar-led event from start to finish – as a symbol of national unity and fraternity. Except for the Communists, no ‘national party’ could gather the courage to even explain to the people of India the actual significance of the event.

Representative image of Hindu organisations celebrating the Ram Temple bhoomi pujan on Wednesday. Photo: PTI

Twenty-seven years after the demolition of the Babri Masjid, the ‘nation’s shame’ is being termed as the ‘nation’s pride’ and there is virtually no political force that has the conviction or the intention to counter this narrative. While the country’s democratic institutions no longer feel obliged to uphold the constitution and almost all political parties find it politically inconvenient or even disadvantageous to stand for secular politics, it is pertinent to ask what remains of secularism. Disowned by politics and abandoned by key institutions, it is hard for Muslims to avoid feeling orphaned in their own country.

In the absence of a secular polity and an impartial administration, it is the Muslims of India who stand to lose their place as equal stakeholders in the country’s future. It is ironical that this lowest point in our secular-democratic life is coming right after the anti-CAA protest which was considered one of the most important – and peaceful – civil rights movements in the history of independent India. For a few months, it seemed as if the movement, primarily led by Muslim women, would succeed in stymying the RSS’s Hindutva project. But now that the anti-CAA protesters are being hounded and jailed for this ‘crime’, it is almost impossible that the protests will be resurrected once the coronavirus crisis passes and the lockdown is fully lifted.

And yet, something still remains. The protests may be over but history will stand witness that the Muslims of India fought not just for themselves and their rights but rose to defend India’s constitution and its democracy. Of course, it is not just the Muslims who have a stake in protecting the secular character of India. The abandoning of secularism goes hand in hand with the weakening of democracy. States that systematically discriminate against citizens on the basis of religious or any other ascriptive identity cannot also be democratic. And the burden of the resulting loss of rights will fall heavily on all. When the mandir euphoria is over, this realisation has to be the basis for new politics. The future of the Indian republic is at stake.

The Ram Temple in Ayodhya Will Always Remain a Crime Scene

Pious Hindus should introspect over whether the temple is about values that folk wisdom associates with the figure of Ram or feelings of political domination and victory.

Admiring the temples of yore, Jawaharlal Nehru wrote to his daughter Indira that they seem as if immersed in deep prayer, looking silently upwards. In contrast, he said, modern-day temples were more about their builders and owners. There was a crude worldliness about them, which he found repulsive. Nehru felt that the modern temples oozed opulence and lacked any sense of the sacred.

We can pardon Nehru for his bias in favour of the old, but there is some truth to what he says. I remember a young Indian woman telling me after visiting a famous ‘temple’ laid on the bed of Yamuna in Delhi, that she felt she was taking a tour of some exhibition. Another friend, a foreigner, told me that she left the temple untouched by any feeling of the sacred.

Nehru and his yearning for a feel of the sacred in the mundaneness he was surrounded by comes back to mind as August 5 looms on the horizon. There is a sense of excitement about it in the public sphere. After all, this is the date designated for laying the foundation of ‘the’ temple. The media thinks it is important to talk about its architectural plans and about the creative minds who are envisioning it.

Why, one news agency even went to the town to find Muslim enthusiasts for the temple. It took care to have quotes from them stating that even if they had converted to Islam and adopted the Muslim way of prayer, Ram remained their original ancestor! Is validation from Muslims for this temple still needed? Or, is this the final demand from them: after all this, just accept and celebrate the temple.

Also Read: Ahead of Ram Temple Bhoomi Pujan, Ayodhya Admin Puts Restrictions on TV Reporting

An occasion for the Hindus to look inward

Leaving all that aside, it should be an occasion for the Hindus to look inwards and ask what does this temple really mean to them. Is it about Ram or is it about the ‘abhibhavak (guardian) of Ram Lalla’? Since when has Ram become so weak and powerless that he needed ‘abhibhavaks’ to look after his interests? My young friend Satyam Shrivastava asks if Dashrath and his queens Kaushalya, Kaikeyi and Sumitra willingly handed over their first son to these ‘abhibhavaks’?

They also need to ask whether in the small temples that devout Hindus have in their houses, have they ever kept the figure of ‘Ram Lalla’ – the child Ram – as one of the deities they pray to? It would be argued that since this temple is to be located at the birthplace of Ram, it is natural to invoke the image of Him as a child. If it has to do with the birth of the Lord, how is it that the mothers do not find a place among the deities to be placed in the garbha-griha (sanctum sanctorum), Satyam asks. Was not the battle all about securing the ‘very spot’ where Ram was born?

Devotees look at a model of the proposed Ram temple that Hindu groups want to build at a disputed religious site in Ayodhya, October 22, 2019. Photo: Reuters/Danish Siddiqui/File Photo

Some of these questions are bound to make the ‘devotees’ impatient. “You know what this is all about,” you would be told. Let us then forget them and think about the genuine devotees of Ram. What would they remember when they enter this temple? Would it be maryada, mangal or sumati, values folk wisdom associates with the figure of Ram or would it be bal, dambha and aneeti? The principles of propriety and fairness have defined Ram in the popular imagination. Are these values embedded in the imagination of this temple or are temporal domination and victory the foundation emotions of this modern shrine?

It should shame pious Hindus that lies, conceit, deception, cowardice and violence were used in the name of a divine figure. Even the convoluted judgment of the Supreme Court giving the title of the site of Babri Masjid to the Vishwa Hindu Parishad lists all these. It admits that the smuggling of the Hindu idols in the premises of Babri Masjid in 1949 was an illegal act, it also accepts that the destruction of the Babri Masjid in 1992 was a violation of the law. It was also an act of violence. Since the Court had to anyhow secure the site for the Hindu party, it did that but not before detailing the acts of crime and violence, perhaps to be at peace with its own soul.

Also Read: The Political Undertones of Choosing August 5 for Ayodhya Ram Temple ‘Bhoomi Pujan’

The main actors now disown the ‘brave’ feat

With preparations for the temple underway, another drama is drawing to its end. The main actors of the ‘criminal act’ are disowning the ‘brave’ feat of demolishing the Babri Masjid. All legal minds accept that without this demolition, the court could not have gathered the courage to give the judgment it gave last year.

The leaders of the drive to demolish the Babri Masjid, again deceptively called the ‘Ram Janmabhumi Abhiyan’, shrug off any responsibility for the final act. A member of the Shiv Sena, the erstwhile ally of the Bhartiya Janta Party asks a simple question, “Why can’t the BJP and its top leaders show the courage and conviction to own up to the demolition instead of blaming it on a mob of kar sevaks?” It was definitely not the mob which, at the spur of the moment, enraged by the sight of the Babri Masjid, pulled it down. The leaders cheering the destruction now say that they had nothing to do with it.

The man who had taken the oath to protect the Masjid says publicly that he was proud that it got demolished, though bound to protect it. He was then the head of the state. But the same man, when asked by the courts, denies his role. The fiery leaders whose taped speeches we had heard even in Patna in the late 80s and early 90s, spewing venom against Muslims, now say that they have been falsely implicated in this case.

Kalyan Singh. Photo: PTI/Files

So, the question is who mobilised the ‘mob’ and who broke the oath? You can notice deception in the speech of the ‘liberal communal’ Atal Bihari Vajpayee, which he gave before the kar sevaks. He very cunningly tells them that, although he would not be with them at the site the next day, the Supreme Court had allowed them to do kar seva there and how can they do it with bare hands as they have to level the uneven land there! His audience merrily decodes the speech, which is a call to do what is planned and not care for the oath.

There is no escape from these questions. The temple will always remind people of the Babri Masjid. The question, therefore, before the followers of those who do not want to own up to the demolition of the masjid, is how do they reconcile with this untruth or lie. Is this not lack of courage on the part of their leaders or, simply put, cowardice? Or, would they say that we knew all along that it was ‘aneeti’, untruth, a lie but we do not mind it because they are our liars and we love them.

The might of the state and connivance by the judiciary helped the guardians of Ram Lalla usurp the land on which the Babri Masjid stood and functioned for nearly 450 years. The ghost of Babri Masjid will keep reminding us that, what we have done eventually is to build a monument to ‘durneeti’ and ‘asatya’.

Apoorvanand teaches at Delhi University.

Two Urdu Poems Reflect How Babri Masjid Demolition Was an Attack on India as a Whole

Jagan Nath Azad’s poems condemning the demolition of the mosque say that the event tore apart India’s secular culture, one shaped through centuries of assimilation.

Kar sevaks on top of Babri Masjid minutes before it was demolished by them on the December 6, 1992 in Ayodhya. Credit: T. Narayan

Karsevaks on top of Babri Masjid minutes before it was demolished by them on December 6, 1992 in Ayodhya. Credit: T. Narayan

Twenty five years after the demolition of the Babri Masjid, The Wire, through a series of articles and videos captures how the act of destruction changed India forever.

The demolition of Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992 is often seen as an attack on Muslims by the Hindus, but what happened on that tragic day was actually an assault on this country’s secular fabric and the constitution. While there is no denying that the destruction of the mosque terrorised India’s Muslims like never before, it also deprived secularism of the legitimacy it once enjoyed.

The tearing down of the mosque in Ayodhya was an attack on the very idea of India. When India and Pakistan gained independence, both the countries had different ideas towards nationhood. While Pakistan symbolises an Islamic state, India stood for secularism. December 6 was an attempt to bridge the gap between the two ideas, and the process is still on.

The event pained all Indians alike, not just the Muslims. Jagan Nath Azad, a famous Urdu poet and the author of the first national anthem of Pakistan, was forced to migrate to India after the Partition, leaving his job as an editor of an Urdu daily. Partition affected him deeply, which can be seen in his poetry, yet he always adhered to secularism.

On that fateful day, Azad was flying from Jammu to Delhi. He writes that a co-passenger informed him that a dome of Babri mosque had been demolished. This news pained him deeply and he wrote a three-stanza poem while onboard. Upon reaching the home of his son he was informed that the mosque had been completely razed. Engulfed in anguish he wrote further stanzas to the poem, one which helps us understand the shock and sadness that all Indians – Hindus and Muslims alike – felt.

Ye tune Hind ki hurmat ke aaine ko toda hai
Khabar bhi hai tujhe Masjid ka gumbad todne wale

Humare dil ko toda hai imaarat ko nahi toda
Khabaasat ki bhi had hoti hai had todne wale

(What you have broken is the image of reverence of India
Do you have this idea, you who have broken the dome of the mosque

Not the building but our hearts have been broken
Your wickedness is limitless)

For Azad, this destruction harmed not just Islam but also Hinduism. Being a Hindu himself, he feels that this act shamed the whole religion. At an international stage, India lost its reputation of being secular. He writes:

Tere is fael se Islam ka to kuch nahi bigda
Magar ghonpa hai khanjar tu ne Hindu dharm ke dil me

Idhar Hindustaan ka chehra tune maskh kar dala
Udhar boye hain tu ne kaante is ki raah-e-manzil me

(Your deed has not harmed Islam a bit
But you have stabbed a knife into the heart of Hindu religion

You have mutilated the face of India
you have grown thorns in its path to progress)

Just as several have pointed that there is no place for the Hindutva brand of politics in Hinduism as a religion, Azad too says to those who torn down Babri that they failed to understand the true meaning of Hinduism. For him, those who grasp the Hindu ethos of self and God cannot commit such a heinous crime.

Tujhe kuch bhi kahbar iski nahi ae badnaseeb insaan
Ke Hindu dharm kya hai aur us ki atma kya hai

Nahi hai dharm wo hargiz jise tu dharm kehta hai
Tujhe kya ilm kya hai atma parmatma kya hai

(O unfortunate man you have no idea
What is Hindu religion and its soul

What you call religion is not the religion
You have no knowledge about the self and the God)

In the next part of the poem, he points out that the pain of the knowledge that one dome has been demolished was unbearable but now the news that the whole mosque has been razed will not let him live. He sees it as an attack on the Indian culture, which shaped itself through centuries of assimilation.

Khabar kal tak bas itni thi ke gumbad ek tuta hai
Khuli ab baat Masjid ka nahi chodha nishaan baqi

Wo tehzibi tasalsul jo tha jari char sadiyo se
Tu samjha hai na reh payegi us ki dastaan baqi?

(Till yesterday I knew of one dome being destroyed
Now I have come to know that the whole mosque has been razed

Cultural bonding that is continuing for four centuries
Do you think that it will be destroyed?)

Main ek gumbad ko rota tha magar ab ye khula mujh par
Gira dala hai is sari ibadat gaah ko tu ne

Diya tha ek dil-e-agah tujh ko dene wale ne
Ye kis raste pe dala hai dil-e-agah ko tune?

(I was mourning the demolition of a single dome
But you have razed the complete prayer house

God bestowed upon you an intelligent mind
For what purpose are you using this mind?)

Azad reiterates that for a Hindu, mosque and temple both are the abode of God and the people who think otherwise are directed by political motives. He calls this politics of hate.

Khuda ka ghar hai Mandir bhi khuda ka ghar hai Masjid bhi
Mujhe to mere Hindu dharm ne bas ye sikhaya hai

Nahi hai dharm hargiz wo faqat andhi siyasat hai
Tujhe tera ye dars-e-shaitaniyat tujh ko padhaya hai

(Mosque and temple both are the abode of God
My Hindu religion has taught me only this much

This is not religion but the politics of hate
You have been taught a satanic lesson)

He further points out that the criminals will not go unpunished and karma will teach them the lesson.

Khuda ke ghar ko jab tu munhadam karne ko nikla tha
Khuda jane tere dil me khayal-e-kham kya tha

Makafat-e-amal kehte hain jis ko ek haqiqat hai
Shaqi alqalb kya kahiye tera anjaam kya hoga

(When you set out to destroy the abode of God
God knows what were you thinking

Retribution of act is a reality
O wretched heart, think about your fate)

Azad hopes that while a few people are trying to vitiate the secular environment of the nature majority of this country is secular. People of the nation will undo this crime and heal the wounds. He shows an immense faith in this land and the people who live here.

Ye Masjid aaj bhi zinda hai ahl-e-dil ke siino me
Khabar bhi tujhe hai Masjid ka paikar todne wale

Abhi ye sar-zameen khali nahi hai nek bando se
Abhi maujud hain tuute hue dil jodne wale

(This mosque is still intact in the hearts
Do you have this idea, destroyer of the structure of mosque

This country is not yet empty of good people
People who heals the wounds of heart, still reside here)

Azad wrote another poem with the same title ‘Babri Masjid’ which reveals his anger towards those who destroyed the mosque. His entire life he upheld the idea of a secular India against a theocratic Pakistan but felt that with this act he had been proven wrong. He writes:

Tune ae Azad ! sari umr jo kuch bhi kaha
Tune ae Azad ! sari umr jo kuch bhi likha
Ahmaqo ne ek pal me kar diya barbad use

(O Azad ! whatever you have spoken
O Azad ! whatever you have written
Silly fellows destroyed in a moment)

Tu to kehta tha zulmat raat ki jaane ko hai
Tu to kehta tha vatan me subah-e-nau ane ko hai
Kya yahi vo subh-e-nau hai
Jis pe tujh ko naaz tha, jis par raha tujh ko ghurur
Dekh aaina teri tehzeeb ka hai chur chur

(You used to tell that darkness of the night is about to end
You used to tell that a new dawn is awaiting the nation
Is it that new dawn
Of which you were proud
Look, mirror of your civilisation has shattered into pieces)

While reading his two poems on the destruction of Babri Masjid one can gauge his immense faith in Hinduism and belief that a true Hindu can never perform such an act. His belief in the idea of India and the faith that such people are in minority also stands out.

What followed the event shows that he wasn’t wrong. India, with almost 80% Hindu population, rejected the BJP’s divisive politics after the demolition of Babri Masjid. On December 6, 1992, four states had BJP in power. In the elections that followed, the party was voted out in three, while all other states saw a significant decrease in its vote share. Next general elections also could not get the BJP a majority or a government. His poems speak the language of the majority of the Indians.

Saquib Salim is an independent socio-political commentator and a historian.