From ‘severe’ to ‘very poor’

Jawed Naqvi in The Dawn

The Delhi Met Bureau may have actually made a deeply philosophical observation with its imagery applicable to several facets of life these days. Spurred by an unexpected breeze, the quality of air in Delhi ‘improved’ from ‘severe’ to ‘very poor’. Some improvement, you would say, but do tarry a little

This intriguing metaphor of improvement between severe and very poor certainly applies to extant political choices in a large number of locations.

Take Pakistan, where the PPP is compelled to swear by Z.A. Bhutto as a great liberal even though he heaped misery on a minority community in a moment of communally inspired political opportunism. And Nawaz Sharif is the preferred symbol of the nation’s hopes for a democratic recovery having conjured images of a Taliban-style amirul momineen replacing the country’s elected prime minister.

As for Imran Khan, he continues to flirt with some kind of liberation theology given his abiding faith in the Muslim clergy. As for the generals, they trump everyone by merging the options into a seemingly irreversible order of things.

Transpose the irony of self-limiting choices on American politics. Is it not true that Obama was to Libya what Bush was to Iraq and Clinton was to Yugoslavia? To the American voters, however, these former icons define all that they can choose from. The slightest difference in demeanour and style becomes the critical inflection. Elizabeth Warren, or whoever gets to lead the Democratic challenge against Donald Trump next year, thus needs to fight not just Trump but the ghost of his predecessors to progress from choosing between severe and very poor.

In this regard, the choices for Indians have been even more notably stifling. It seems as though the ‘Good’ has been removed as an option from a Clint Eastwood movie, leaving only the ‘Bad’ and the ‘Ugly’ to battle it out. Among other regressions, Nehru’s Congress is talking to the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra where they could come together along with the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) of former chief minister Sharad Pawar.

Following recent state elections, which the BJP-Shiv Sena had fought together, the BJP’s numbers in the new assembly dwindled. In Haryana too, in Delhi’s neighbourhood, Modi’s party lost seats, but it co-opted the services of a discredited legislator to cobble a wafer-thin majority. The BJP had earlier sought the man’s arrest for alleged rape but it is now beholden to him for critical support. The Congress has no role in the ugliness of the moment and needs to just watch the BJP choke on its own muck.

It is significant that in Maharashtra and Haryana Modi’s appeal didn’t work. And this happened despite the Congress grappling with its own severe crisis as it limps on under an interim president in Sonia Gandhi. It has the numbers with the NCP to wean Shiv Sena away from the BJP by offering it greater share in the power structure. But should it morally do so?

The Shiv Sena has run on fascist principles with a pernicious anti-Muslim and anti-Dalit ideology. The outfit shored up by militant middle-caste Marathas was actually set up by the Congress, as a cat’s-paw against the influence of Brahmin-led communist unions that greatly troubled Mumbai’s business captains. The strike-breaking Sena conjured different enemies in stages and is currently positioned as anti-Muslim and anti-Dalit. Its volunteers confessed to taking part in the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992.

What’s significant about this Congress-NCP-Shiv Sena project, though it is still on the anvil, is that it follows the supreme court’s judgement on the Ayodhya dispute, which rather controversially assigned the piece of land where the Hindu mob razed the 16th-century mosque against the supreme court’s orders to the very mob with a mandate to build a temple to Lord Ram there.

Many Hindus worship Ram as the god-prince of Ayodhya, but only the BJP and its linked groups seem to know the precise spot where he came into the world. There was a time when the Congress government under Manmohan Singh told the apex court tartly that though Ram was worshipped across the country — and Muslim poets including Iqbal had written paeans to him — there was no scientific evidence he actually existed. Be that as it may, the Congress is now fully on board with the temple project, which is not surprising at all.

Ever since the communists parted ways with the Congress party in the wake of Indira Gandhi’s emergency rule, the Congress has veered closer to the Hindu right. This was a leading factor in Mrs Gandhi’s hurried calculations that led her to misjudge the mood in Punjab where she weighed in against the alienated Sikh community with military might.

The consequence was disastrous for India even though in the short run Rajiv Gandhi did win an unprecedented landslide, seen as a sympathy vote over his mother’s assassination by her Sikh bodyguards. Thousands of Sikhs were slaughtered in Delhi by mobs that were encouraged by the Congress party’s backroom cosiness with the Hindu right.

As for Maharashtra, there is nothing new or even surprising about the Congress and the NCP coming close to the Shiv Sena even if they pretend to be wary of its pronounced fascist tag. One needs only to flick off the dust from the Justice Shri Krishna Commission report on the 1992-93 anti-Muslim violence in Mumbai in the wake of the Ayodhya outrage. The commission cited direct evidence to illustrate complicity between the Shiv Sena, sections of the police and the Congress government of the day who were together named by the report, the reason why they jointly buried it. Not unlike the Delhi Met, William Shakespeare’s witches may have been pointing to a similarly deep universal reality as they sang in unison: “Fair is foul and foul is fair. Hover through the fog and filthy air.”

Close reading of Ayodhya verdict & powerful implications for Kashi, Mathura etc

Ayodhya judgment is a setback to evidence law

Certainly in matters of freedom of religion, the court should not have any say, but deciding title suit on the basis of faith is a thorny proposition.

The Supreme Court has tried to please everyone in its much awaited judgment on the property dispute in Ayodhya writes Faizan Mustafa and Aymen Mohammed in The Indian Express

The Supreme Court has tried to please everyone in its much awaited judgment on the property dispute in Ayodhya. The worshippers of Lord Ram have been given land for the construction of a temple at the very site where the Babri Masjid stood between 1528 and December 6, 1992.

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The Nirmohi Akhara has welcomed the judgment as it will be given some representation in the trust that would construct the temple. The Sunni Waqf Board too must have the satisfaction that the highest court has accepted their central argument that the Babri Masjid was a Sunni, and not Shia, waqf property, and the same was not constructed after demolishing the Ram temple. Thus, the court has rejected the Hindu right’s narrative on the Babri mosque. This false narrative not only was responsible for galvanising the ordinary Hindus, but also gave some sort of legitimacy to divisive electoral politics. Similarly, Muslim grievances about the trespass in 1949 and the tragic demolition of the mosque in 1992 have been accepted by the court. In fact, the court has accepted that there was an injury caused to them — i.e. violation of their legal right. Accordingly, the court, invoking its extraordinary jurisdiction of doing complete justice, has given them almost double the land in Ayodhya.

The Ayodhya dispute did not begin in 1528 with Babur, the founder of Mughal empire, but in 1886 with litigation in the British courts over a chabutra (courtyard) that was constructed outside the Babri Masjid by one Mahant Raghubar Das in the late 1850s. When the British prevented the construction of a canopy over the chabutra, Das unsuccessfully litigated his cause in three judicial forums. Each time, the courts emphasised status quo — that is, the Muslims would pray inside the Babri Masjid while the Hindus had limited rights to pray at the chabutra. Surprisingly, the apex court has rejected title of Muslims for want of proof of title document. This may have repercussions for several temples and mosques. The court rejected the revenue record and gazetteers as sufficient proof. Even the British grant papers were said to be sufficient only for proving the upkeep of the mosque.

In law, the phrase “status quo” means the situation at the time of the judgment must not be changed. The Babri litigation is a story of changing “status quo”. On the night of December 22-23, 1949, trespassers placed Lord Ram’s idol under the central dome of the Babri Masjid. In a few days after the incident, a new status quo would be sanctified by the local courts: Muslims were not allowed to pray inside the mosque, the idol would not be removed, and that Hindus would have a “limited” right to pray and pujaris would ensure daily bhog. By one act of criminal trespass, a mosque was converted into a temple.

On February 1, 1986, District Judge K M Pandey would order the unlocking of gates that acted as a “barrier” between the idols inside the masjid and the devotees who had come for the darshan. This decision had the blessing of then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, who in order to mollify the self-anointed regressive Muslim leadership would subsequently introduce the bill to reverse the Shah Bano judgment on February 25, 1986.

The demolition of the mosque on December 6, 1992 was also the destruction of the rule of law. The SC has rightly criticised it and accepted that it was in violation of the “status quo” order passed by it. Within a few hours of the mosque’s demolition, a makeshift temple had come up at the structure’s location. Within a month of the demolition, the Allahabad High Court allowed for darshan at the makeshift temple. In 1994, the Supreme Court, while dealing with the Acquisition of Certain Areas of Ayodhya Act, ordered the protection of the latest “status quo”: No mosque but a makeshift temple and legally protected darshan at the site.

In 2010, the Lucknow bench of Allahabad High Court ruled that the title suit must be decided as a question of joint-ownership of property. Muslims, the deity Ram Lalla and Nirmohi Akhara were to get one-third share of the disputed property. The Supreme Court has overruled this judgment and rightly held that it was not a partition suit.

The judgment will be remembered for the victory of faith over the rule of law as the Supreme Court considered religious beliefs even in deciding a property dispute, and despite conceding that faith cannot confer title, it still went ahead to give property to worshippers on the basis of faith. The court should not have any say in matters of freedom of religion, but deciding title suit on the basis of faith is a thorny proposition. In brief, it is the red letter day for the constitutional right to religion but a setback to property law and a setback to evidence law with differential burden of proof being demanded from different parties.

How did Sri Rama's idols suddenly appear in Babri Masjid on 22 December 1949?

Krishna Jha and Dhirendra K Jha in The Wire.In


The night was almost over. Ayodhya was still numb with sleep. Piercing through the quiet, a young sadhu, drenched in sweat, came scampering from Hanumangarhi, a fortress-like Hindu religious establishment housing over five hundred sadhus in Ayodhya. He had been sent to summon Satyendra Das to his guru, Abhiram Das, who seemed to be breathing his last. Those were the early hours of 3 December 1981, and a curtain was coming down over a few forgotten pages of history.

Dharam Das, the other disciple who stayed with Abhiram Das in his one-room tenement, the asan in Hanumangarhi, had asked for him so that they could be with their guru in his last moments. The news did not come as a shock. Satyendra Das had been almost awaiting the moment, since he had known for long that his guru was nearing the end of his journey. He had been at his bedside the whole day and the signs were not encouraging. Even when he had left Abhiram Das’s asan to get a breather after hours of tending to the terminally ill, he had a premonition that his guru – the man who had led a small band of Hindus to surreptitiously plant the idol of Lord Rama in Babri Masjid on yet another December night three decades ago – might not live long. After he had come away from the bedside, unwilling but tired to the bones, Satyendra Das was restless and unable to sleep. He dreaded the moment, yet knew that someone would knock on his doors with the news any time, and when it came, he responded fast, wrapped a quilt around himself and ran out along with the young sadhu who had come to fetch him.

It was very cold outside. The winter night was fading into a dense fog that smothered everything in its folds. Nothing was visible. The duo, almost running in total invisibility, knew the nooks and crannies of Ayodhya like the back of their hands. As Satyendra Das arrived at the asan, he saw Abhiram Das lying in the middle of the room on a charpoy, surrounded by a few sadhus from Hanumangarhi. No one spoke; it was very quiet. Only Dharam Das moved close to him and murmured softly that their guru had passed away minutes before he had stepped in. Slowly, as the day began to break, devotees and disciples started pouring into the room. Soon, preparations for the last rites of the deceased were begun with the help of some residents of Hanumangarhi.

The rituals for the final journey of ascetics are not the same as those for non-ascetic Hindu grihasthas, particularly in north India. Sadhus, unlike Hindu grihasthas, are rarely cremated. There are two options: either their bodies are smeared with salt and buried sitting in a meditative posture or they are dropped down a sacred river tied with a rock or sacks full of sand. The fact that sadhus who take vows of complete renunciation are not cremated symbolizes their separation from the material world. The claim goes that cremation for sadhus is superfluous since they have already burnt their attachments through ascetic initiation, opting for a life of austerities and renunciation.

In Ayodhya, the normal ascetic practice has been to immerse the body of a sadhu in the Sarayu – the name given to the river only as long as it touches the shores of the town. Before and after Ayodhya, the river is known as the Ghaghara. The reason for this nomenclatural confusion lies in a particular Hindu belief. As mythology has turned Ayodhya into the birthplace of Lord Rama, the river owing by it has also assumed the mythical name of Sarayu – the stream that is believed to have owed through the kingdom of Lord Rama.

Back in Hanumangarhi, by the noon of 3 December 1981, Abhiram Das’s disciples and friends had completed all preparations and were ready to initiate the final rituals for the deceased. Outside the asan, the body of Abhiram Das had been placed on a platform made of bamboo in a seated posture, his face frozen into a mask of self-control, his eyes half-closed as if he were deep in meditation. A saffron piece of cloth that had the name of Lord Rama printed all over – a particular kind of cotton or silk material called ramnami – had been carefully wrapped around his body. A similar cloth covered three sides of the arch made out of split bamboo that rested on the hard bamboo platform holding the corpse. The bamboo structure – euphemistically called viman to symbolize the mythical transporter of souls to the heavenly realm – had been kept uncovered on one side to enable people to have a last glimpse of the deceased.

Slowly, a group of sadhus lifted the viman on their shoulders and climbed up the flight of stairs leading to the temple of Lord Hanuman in the centre of Hanumangarhi. At the temple, the group swelled further and as the viman was taken out of Hanumangarhi, the motley crowd accompanying it chanted, ‘Ramajanmabhoomi Uddharak amar rahen (Long live the saviour of the birth place of Rama).’

Three decades back, on the morning of 23 December 1949, the First Information Report (FIR) registered by Ayodhya Police following the planting of the idol of Lord Rama in Babri Masjid on the night before had named Abhiram Das as the prime accused. He had also been tried for the crime he and his friends had committed that night, but the case had remained inconclusive. In course of time, many Hindus in Ayodhya had started calling him Ramajanmabhoomi Uddharak.


Krishna Jha and Dhirendra K. Jha, Ayodhya – The Dark Night, Harper Collins

The slogan-shouting grew louder as the viman reached the entrance of Babri Masjid, where it was carefully laid down. The priests of Ramajanmabhoomi, the temple that operated inside Babri Masjid ever since the idol was planted in it, as well as those of nearby Hindu religious establishments already knew about the demise of the sadhu, and they came out and garlanded the corpse and paid their homage to the departed soul.

By and large, however, Ayodhya remained unaware of Abhiram Das’s death. Though some residents looked at this funeral procession with curiosity, for the majority it was the demise of yet another old sadhu. After three decades, the historical facts associated with the developments in 1949 had slipped into obscurity. e propaganda of All India Hindu Mahasabha and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) – that the idol had never been planted and Lord Rama had manifested Himself at His place of birth – had gained ground among devout Hindus by now, largely delinking Abhiram Das from what he had done in the dark hours of that fateful night. Booklets and pamphlets written by Hindu communalists during the intervening period had flooded the shops of Ayodhya and had gone a long way in reinforcing the myth of ‘divine exercise’. For legal reasons, even those who had a role in that surreptitious act found it convenient to let the myth grow and capture popular imagination. e law, after all, could catch human conspiracies, but a ‘divine exercise’ was beyond its reach. Yet, to a small group of Hindus in Ayodhya, Abhiram Das continued to remain till his death Ramajanmabhoomi Uddharak or simply Uddharak Baba.

Whatever be the case, the lack of interest among locals could not be missed by many present in the cortège as it wound down the narrow lanes of Ayodhya and moved towards the banks of the Sarayu. On the bank, where the cortège reached at around two that afternoon, those carrying the viman on their shoulders bent down to put their burden on the ground. The sadhu’s body was taken out of it, bathed in the river and, after being smeared with ghee all over, was wrapped in a fresh white cloth. Two sand-filled sacks were tied to the back of the body, one beneath the shoulder and the other under the waist, which was then gently laid out in the boat that sailed o the moment Satyendra Das, Dharam Das and three other sadhus of Hanumangarhi boarded it. Within minutes, the boat reached the centre of the river, where it was no longer shallow and which had traditionally been used for such water burials. Those present on the boat performed the final rites before lifting Abhiram Das’s body and casting it into the cool, calm waters of the Sarayu.

II

The indifferent response that Abhiram Das’s death evoked among the local populace in 1981 was at odds with the atmosphere the town had witnessed three decades ago, during the years following Independence. At that time, many in Ayodhya, as in several other parts of the country, had seen things differently. The communal frenzy which had accompanied the partition of India had intensely brutalized the atmosphere. No less important was the role played by organizations which saw the immediate aftermath of Partition as an opportunity to derail the secular project of independent India. e conspirators associated with these organizations and the conspiracies they hatched had already resulted in major national tragedies.

One such was the gruesome murder of Mahatma Gandhi on 30 January 1948. The hands that pumped bullets into the chest of the Mahatma were that of Nathuram Godse, but, as was proved later, the assassination was part of a conspiracy hatched by top Hindu Mahasabha leaders, led by V.D. Savarkar, whose prime objectives were to snatch political initiative from the Congress and destabilize all efforts to uphold secularism in India. The conspiracy to kill Gandhi could not remain hidden for long even though the trial, held immediately after the assassination, had failed to uncover its extent.

The surreptitious occupation of the Babri Masjid was an act planned by almost the same set of people about two years later – on the night of 22 December 1949. It was, in many ways, a reflection of the same brutalized atmosphere that saw Gandhi being murdered. Neither the conspirators nor their underlying objectives were different. In both instances, the conspirators belonged to the Hindu Mahasabha leadership – some of the prime movers of the planting of the idol had been the prime accused in the Gandhi murder case – and their objective this time too was to wrest the political centre stage from the Congress by provoking large-scale Hindu mobilization in the name of Lord Rama.

Yet the two incidents differed – as much in the modus operandi used by Hindu communalists as in the manner in which the government and the ruling party, the Congress, responded to them. While the Mahatma was killed in full public view in broad daylight, the Babri Masjid was converted into a temple secretly, in the dead of night. Apparently, the quick and massive government reprisal in the aftermath of Gandhi’s assassination had taught the Hindu Mahasabha leaders several lessons. One was to avoid confrontation with the government so that they could extract maximum political advantage out of their act. Another was to involve a section of the Congress that was sympathetic to their cause. So when, two years later, they set out to execute the Ayodhya project, they remained extremely careful, keeping themselves in the backstage until the mosque was actually impounded and ensuring a large-scale mobilization of Hindus in the immediate aftermath without wasting any time. Though the political objective they had planned through this act of communal aggression in Ayodhya could not be achieved in the manner they had hoped for, they greatly succeeded in keeping the story of the night and the conspiracy behind it a secret, for it never came out in its entirety.

Also, while the conspiracy to kill the Mahatma was probed thoroughly by a commission set up by the Government of India albeit two decades later, no such inquiry was conducted to unmask the plot and the plotters behind the forcible conversion of the Babri Masjid into a temple. As a result, an event that so remarkably changed the political discourse in India continues to be treated as a localized crime committed spontaneously by a handful of local people led, of course, by Abhiram Das, a local sadhu. It was, however, a well-planned conspiracy involving national-, provincial- and local-level leaders of the Hindu Mahasabha undertaken with he objective of reviving the party’s political fortunes that were lost in the aftermath of the Gandhi assassination.

Time has further pushed the secret story of the Hindu Mahasabha’s Ayodhya strategy into obscurity, leaving only what is most apparent for public debate. The unending process of litigation which it triggered completely shifted the focus away from that fateful night and has now become the basis of communal politics in the country. Incidentally, the most crucial part of the controversy – the hidden one – remains an ignored area of research. For instance, the White Paper on the Babri Masjid–Ramajanmabhoomi dispute of the Government of India dismissed the incident of 1949 – legally the root cause of the dispute – in just one paragraph. Issued in the aftermath of the demolition of the mosque on 6 December 1992, the document does not have more to say on the incident:


The controversy entered a new phase with the placing of idols in the disputed structure in December 1949. The premises were attached under Section 145 of the Code of Criminal Procedure. Civil suits were led shortly thereafter. Interim orders in these civil suits restrained the parties from removing the idols or interfering with their worship. In effect, therefore, from December 1949 till December 6, 1992 the structure had not been used as a mosque.

It seems impertinent to say that so little is known about the night of 22–23 December 1949 since, in a sense, almost the entire dispute over the mosque emanates from the appearance of the idol of Rama inside that structure. Nevertheless, it is true that there has been little research by contemporary or later writers to fill the gap. This missing link of history remained out of focus till the issue was politically revived and strengthened by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) in the mid-1980s. And by then the story of the night had been taken over by the politics of communalism and the debate over the proprietorship of the disputed land. 

But till Lord Rama ‘manifested’ Himself inside the Babri Masjid, all moves had sought to construct the temple at Ramachabutara, an elevated platform outside the inner courtyard of the mosque. Only after the idols were placed inside did the demand for converting the Muslim place of worship into a temple enter the legal arena. And yet the development of that night did not attract much attention in the media when it actually took place. No major newspaper or journal of the time gave it the kind of serious coverage it deserved even though the import of the development was not at all lost on Congress leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Govind Ballabh Pant and Akshay Brahmachary as well as Hindu Mahasabha president N.B. Khare, its vice-president V.G. Deshpande and its all India general secretary and president of the party’s UP unit Mahant Digvijai Nath.

The only journal that covered the events in detail was a local Hindi weekly in Ayodhya called Virakta. Its editor, Ramgopal Pandey ‘Sharad’, was a known Mahasabhaite. The kind of material that Virakta published had a pronounced Hindu communal bias, and it was hardly expected to carry objective reportage on the developments. If anything, this journal was the first to promote the theory of ‘divine exercise’ – though in bits and pieces – to explain the appearance of the idol of Lord Rama inside the mosque.

Later, Ramgopal Pandey ‘Sharad’ wrote a booklet in Hindi – Shree Ramjanmabhoomi Ka Rakta Ranjit Itihaas (The Blood-soaked History of the Birth Place of Lord Rama). In Ayodhya, this has remained the most popular and perhaps only available material on the subject ever since. Like Virakta, this booklet, too, explains the developments of that night in terms of divine intervention rather than as a communal tactic conceived and executed by the Mahasabha in collaboration with local communalists. is is what the booklet says:


Twenty-third December 1949 was a glorious day for India. On that day, after a long gap of about four hundred years, the birth place of Lord Rama was redeemed. e way developments happened [on the night before], it can be said that Lord Rama himself redeemed his place of birth.

While this theory was being used by communalists to explain the mystery of those dark hours, no serious attempt was made to explore the events of that night objectively, neither by the government nor by any institutions or individual researchers. Debunking the theory of ‘divine exercise’ is one thing (and there is no dearth of works in this regard), but unravelling the truth that was sought to be covered is something else.

Surely, part of the reason why the facts could not come out as and when they occurred – as happened in case of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination – had greatly to do with the power politics of the time. After the assassination of Gandhi in 1948 until the death of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel in 1950, the Congress party was beset with an intense intra-party power struggle. Though it had witnessed factional fights earlier as well, there had always been an element of restraint under the influence of Mahatma Gandhi and the idealism of the freedom struggle. But as soon as these restraints disappeared, the fight between the two power blocs in the Congress – Hindu conservatives led by Patel and secularists led by Nehru – came out in the open.

The United Provinces, in particular, emerged as one of the main battlegrounds for these power blocs in the Congress, merely months after Gandhi’s assassination. Govind Ballabh Pant, the chief minister of the province (called prime minister before adoption of the Constitution on 26 January 1950), was a staunch loyalist of Patel. His desperation to remove all those who appeared to be potential challengers to his authority in the state Congress led him to align with Hindu revivalists in Ayodhya – a move that, apart from paying him dividends, greatly emboldened Mahasabhaites and set the ground for the eventual appearance of the idols at the Babri Masjid.

With the Hindu conservative faction of the Congress, in a bid to neutralize Nehru, openly trying to outsource political strength from communal elements outside the party, and the latter endeavouring to arrest this political drift and salvage its own position, there was hardly much time, or determination, to probe the misdeeds of the Mahasabhaites. This was even more so in the United Provinces where the government appeared to be more interested in protecting the Hindu communalists than bringing them to book.

By the time this battle was won by Nehru in late 1950, the incidents of the night of 22 December 1949 had got lost in legal thickets, and the mood of the nation had changed, with the secular fabric seemingly no longer threatened by Hindu revivalists. As the focus shifted following the promulgation of the Constitution of India on 26 January 1950, almost all the players of the Hindu Mahasabha’s Ayodhya strategy either lost their relevance or, in cases where some of them managed to remain in currency, their ability to break the secular equilibrium got severely restricted and their link with the night became part of this missing link of modern India’s history.

Ram Janambhoomi - Wading forward into the past

Jawed Naqvi in The Dawn


THE chief justice of India, Justice Jagdish Singh Khehar, says he would prefer that the Ayodhya dispute be settled outside the court, mutually, between the perpetually unyielding Hindu and Muslim petitioners. The apex court is currently studying the Allahabad High Court’s decision of 2010, which had insinuated that there was in fact a birthplace of Lord Ram as claimed by Hindu militants at the disputed site where the 16th-century Babri Masjid once stood. World-renowned historians and archaeologists have desisted from supporting such claims for want of basic evidence.

A progressive judge was earlier dealing with the dispute for years at the Allahabad High Court. He retired with his unalloyed belief that matters of faith were essentially non-justiciable in a secular court such as the one he presided over. A secular court must ideally protect everyone’s religious beliefs as well as the right to remain aloof from all of them. Religious courts would begin from the premise that they are carrying out God’s command, which has its own set of consequences as one can glean from the poison-spewing clerics having the run of Jinnah’s dream nation.

The Ayodhya dispute, therefore, given India’s secular constitution put together by 85 per cent Hindus in the constituent assembly, boils down to a temporal standoff — the rival claims on the land in question between those who say that the mosque was arbitrarily built on what they believe to be the birthplace of Ram and those that want the courts to prevent their forcible eviction from the land on which the mediaeval mosque stood until Dec 6, 1992.

Justice Khehar has offered to personally mediate the complex case if accepted by the parties. There could be no doubt that the judge has offered his help with good intentions. A range of thoughts cross the mind nevertheless about why the apex court would not prefer to explore a legal route and settle the case one way or another as India’s secular law mandates.

A rival fact begs discussion. It is not easy to enforce the law in India, with or without the state’s patronage of rogue parties. Remember that the demolition of the Babri Masjid was carried out as a brazen snub to the Supreme Court’s authority. Its standing orders forbade any changing of the status of the disputed monument in Ayodhya. The world knows who all were complicit in disobeying the binding orders, and who led the mobs to wilfully undermine the highest and most revered institution of the Indian state. Among the leading campaigners for the temple movement was Prime Minister Modi. Would his government now allow his mentor L.K. Advani, named in the case, to be tried or punished?

Justice Khehar has described the dispute as a sensitive issue. What happens when he retires though, as early as August this year? Will there be a mechanism backed by the apex court and the government for him to continue as a mediator whose imprimatur is honoured by all when he finds a solution? And what will we do if the solution, in which he suggests a little bit of give and take, widens into a full-blown assault on law and justice as it did in 1992?

We have after all chosen to accept the route, willy-nilly, of vigilante squads and Hindutva zealots swarming through Nehru’s India. They are not dissimilar to the bigots that Pakistan and Bangladesh are struggling to tame after unwittingly releasing them from the bottle, beginning with the reign of the two Zias. What is happening in India is a third or fourth carbon copy of what we have seen elsewhere. Uttar Pradesh, for example, is a smudged copy of the moral policing in Iran. They too enforce dress codes there and are particularly severe on young men and women whose hands even brush each other in public squares. If the so-called anti-Romeo squads of UP (Shakespeare would be turning in his grave) are bodily lifted from the streets of Islamic Iran, the threat by another BJP chief minister to hang (without recourse to law, naturally) people who kill cows, brings to mind the ‘laughing assassin’ of the early days of the Iranian Revolution. Ayatollah Khalkhali would roam the streets with a crane from which he hanged countless innocent men and women without ever losing the smile on his bearded face. There is a somewhat similar atmosphere in India in which Justice Khehar has offered to stick out his neck on behalf of reason.

A less discussed highlight of the mandir-masjid controversy is that it has created a dialogue (or a standoff) between overtly religious parties, both garnering their constituencies with right-wing agendas that leave out India’s open-minded middle ground to worry for the future helplessly. Muslims claim to seek justice, their demand framed in a legal petition. The Hindutva case is framed in religion, which Hindus insist on passing as historical fact.

In these days of right-wing ferment, be it Muslim, or Hindu, or Jewish, or Christian ferment, any demand for justice does seem laughably anachronistic. The Palestinians have a just cause, as do the Kashmiris, the Latinos, the blacks, the tribespeople of Chhattisgarh, or the liberal students of Indian universities, for example, at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University. They have all been wronged and the world has put them together in a slot labeled ‘terrorists’. What they face is death, or eviction or slander.

If Justice Khehar can buck the trend, and prevent Ayodhya from mutating into Mathura and Kashi and a larger national inferno, India’s Muslims, but above all the overwhelming majority of secular Hindus, should give him a chance. The future cannot be worse than it looks.

The Dark Night - One Version of how Sri Ram's idols were installed in Babri Masjid in 1949

The secret history of Rama's appearance in Babri Masjid: what happened on the fateful night of December 22-23,1949 in Ayodhya that went on to change India’s polity forever

KRISHNA JHA, DHIRENDRA K JHA 

AYODHYA: THE DARK NIGHT BY KRISHNA JHA AND  DHIRENDRA K JHA HARPERCOLLINS INDIA RS 499; PAGES 232

This is what Awadh Kishore Jha remembers of the night:

That evening there was a glow on the face of Abhiram Das. I was certain that he was up to something, but did not know exactly what it was. For the last few months he had been very busy and of late he had started looking tired. But that evening he seemed to have become rejuvenated. He kept talking to us and had his evening meal there only. However, he did not say anything about the plan. Th e following night, despite Paramhans backing out, Abhiram Das led his small band of intruders, scaled the wall of the Babri Masjid and jumped inside with a loud thud.

The sound of a thud reverberated through the medieval precincts of the Babri Masjid like that of a powerful drum and jolted Muhammad Ismael, the muezzin, out of his deep slumber. He sat up, confused and scared, since the course of events outside the mosque for the last couple of weeks had not been very reassuring. For a few moments, the muezzin waited, standing still in a dark corner of the mosque, studying the shadows the way a child stares at the box-front illustration of a jigsaw puzzle before trying to join the pieces together.

Never before had he seen such a dark cloud hovering over the mosque. He had not felt as frightened even in 1934, when the masjid was attacked and its domes damaged severely, one of them even developing a large hole. The mosque had then been rebuilt and renovated by the government. That time, it had been a mad crowd, enraged by rumours of the slaughter of a cow in the village of Shahjahanpur near Ayodhya on the occasion of Bakr-Id. This time, though the intruders were not as large in number, they looked much more ominous than the crowd fifteen years ago.

As the trespassers walked towards the mosque, the muezzin— short, stout and dark-complexioned, wearing his usual long kurta and a lungi— jumped out of the darkness. Before the adversaries could discover his presence, he dashed straight towards Abhiram Das, the vairagi who was holding the idol in his hands and leading the group of intruders. He grabbed Abhiram Das from behind and almost snatched the idol from him. But the sadhu quickly freed himself and, together with his friends, retaliated fiercely. Heavy blows began raining from all directions.

Soon, the muezzin realized that he was no match for the men and that he alone would not be able to stop them.
Muhammad Ismael then faded back into the darkness as unobtrusively as he had entered. Quietly, he managed to reach the outer courtyard and began running. He ran out of the mosque and kept running without thinking where he was going. Though he stumbled and hurt himself even more, the muezzin was unable to feel the pain that was seeping in through the bruises. Soon, he was soaked in blood that dripped at every move he made. He was too stunned to think of anything but the past, and simply did not know what to do, how to save the masjid, where to run. There was a time when he used to think that the vairagis who had tried to capture the graveyard and who had participated in the navah paath and kirtan thereafter had based their vision on a tragic misreading of history, and that good sense would prevail once the distrust between Hindus and Muslims— which had been heightened during Partition— got healed. That was what he thought during the entire build-up outside the Babri Masjid ever since the beginning of the navah paath on 22 November, and that was why he never really believed the rumour that the real purpose of the entire show in and around the Ramachabutara was to capture the mosque.

Muhammad Ismael had always had cordial relations with the priests of the Ramachabutara. The animosity that history had bequeathed them had never come in the way of their day-to-day interactions and the mutual help they extended to each other. Bhaskar Das— who was a junior priest of the small temple at the Ramachabutara in those days and who later became the mahant of the Nirmohi Akhara— also confirmed this.

Before 22 December 1949, my guru Mahant Baldev Das had assigned my duty at the chabutara. I used to keep my essential clothes and utensils with me there. In the night and during afternoon, I used to sleep inside the Babri Masjid. The muezzin had asked me to remove my belongings during the time of namaz, and the rest of the time the mosque used to be our home.

While the chabutara used to get offerings, enough for the sustenance of the priest there, the muezzin usually always faced a crisis as the contribution from his community for his upkeep was highly irregular. Often, vairagis, particularly the priest at the chabutara, would feed the muezzin. It was like a single community living inside a religious complex. Communalists on both sides differentiated between the two, but, for the muezzin they were all one.

But it was not so once the vairagis entered the mosque that night. The trust that he had placed in them, he now tended to think, had never been anything but his foolish assumption. It had never been there at all. In a moment, the smokescreen of the benevolence of the vairagis had vanished. The muezzin seemed to have experienced an awakening in the middle of that cold night. His new, revised way of thinking told him that the men who had entered the Babri Masjid in the cover of darkness holding the idol of Rama Lalla had no mistaken vision of history. Indeed, these men had no vision of any kind; what they had done was a crime of the first order, and what they were trying to accomplish was simply disastrous.

Despite his waning strength, Muhammad Ismael trudged along for over two hours and stopped only at Paharganj Ghosiana, a village of Ghosi Muslims— a Muslim sub-caste of traditional cattle-rearers— in the outskirts of Faizabad. The residents of this village, in fact, were the first to awaken to the fact that the Babri Masjid had been breached when a frantic ‘Ismael Saheb’ came knocking on their doors at around 2 a.m. on 23 December 1949. Abdur Rahim, a regular at the mosque before it was defiled, had this to say:

They might have killed Ismael saheb. But he somehow managed to flee from the Babri Masjid. He reached our village around 2 a.m. He was badly injured and completely shaken by the developments. Some villagers got up, gave him food and warm clothes. Later, he began working as a muezzin in the village mosque, and sincerely performed his role of cleaning the mosque and sounding azan for prayer five times a day until his death in the early 1980s.

In Paharganj Ghosiana, Muhammad Ismael lived like a hermit. He could neither forget the horror of that night, nor overcome the shock that broke his heart. He was among the few witnesses to one of the most crucial moments in independent India’s history, and the first victim to resist the act. Spending the rest of his life in anonymity, he appeared immersed deep in his own thoughts, mumbling, though rarely, mostly about ‘those days’. Life for the trusting muezzin could never be the same.

Th at was it, then: after over four centuries of being in existence, the Babri Masjid, the three-domed marvel of Ayodhya, had fallen into the hands of a small band of intruders, and Hindu communalists of all shades had conspired to achieve this carefully woven key aspect of the Mahasabha’s Ayodhya strategy. Th e involvement of K.K.K. Nair and Guru Dutt Singh, in particular, proved to be critical. For in those days, district magistrates used to be powerful fi gures in local administration, and city magistrates were among their more formidable administrative adjuncts.

With the two most significant officials in the district administration openly working for the conversion of the mosque into a temple, it was only to be expected that the offi cials under them would help the Hindu Mahasabha in whatever manner they could. Th e government enquiry that followed the surreptitious planting of the idol in the masjid ratifi es this hypothesis. Th ough never made public for many reasons, the enquiry report revealed that the followers of K.K.K. Nair and Guru Dutt Singh used the authority which these two men commanded to persuade the police guarding the mosque to look the other way while Abhiram Das led his band of intruders carrying the idol of Rama.

Th at the policeman guarding the Babri Masjid did play this role in seeing the conspiracy through was also hinted at by Bhaskar Das, the junior priest in the temple of Rama Lalla at the chabutara in 1949:

At that time a guard was posted at the gate [of the Babri Masjid] because the Muslims had complained that the Hindus would try to capture the mosque. Th is complaint had been fi led after the large-scale defi ling of graves in the vicinity of the Babri Masjid. Th e police used to encourage us to capture the mosque and install the idol there …

That being the mood of the police, it would not have been too diffi cult for the Hindu communalists to take the guard into confi dence— and there were various ways to do that— and persuade him to look the other way. On being asked as to what kind of help the guard provided to the intruders, Mahant Bhaskar Das laughed and said, ‘It was all God’s miracle. Till the time He wished to stay at the chabutara, He remained there, and when He decided to shift inside the mosque, He did that.’

Yet the miracle, before it could happen, had to be adjusted with the duty hours of the guard who had been won over. It was for this reason that the idol of Rama had to be smuggled in before twelve in the night on 22 December 1949. For a Muslim guard— Abul Barkat— was to take charge after that. Abul Barkat, in a sense, was himself a victim of the police conspiracy hatched to ensure the success of the Mahasabha’s plan. By the time Barkat resumed his duty at midnight that fateful night, the intruders had already gone inside with the idol of Ram Lalla along with a silver throne for the deity, the photographs of some other deities as well as various materials used for pooja and aarti. By twelve o’clock, the mosque had already been captured and the sole resistance capitulated after being brutally dealt with. For a few hours after capturing the mosque, Abhiram Das and his gang lay low, not doing anything loud enough to make Abul Barkat suspicious. He was totally ignorant of the developments that had taken place behind his back. Recounted Indushekhar Jha:

Abhiram Das sat just beneath the central dome of [the] Babri Masjid fi rmly holding the idol in his hands and we got active. We threw away all the articles [of previous possessors], including their urns, mats as well as clothes and utensils of the muezzin. We then erased many Islamic carvings with the help of a khurpi [a sharpedged instrument generally used for gardening purposes] from the inner and outer walls of the mosque, and scribbled Sita and Rama in saff ron and yellow colours on them.

Around four in the morning, while it was still pitch dark, the intruders, following the script fi nalized in Jambwant Quila the day before, lit the lamp and started doing aarti. Th is must have frightened Abul Barkat who was completely unaware of the developments of the previous night, for it would now be impossible for him to explain as to what he was doing when the vairagis sneaked into the mosque. Dozing off or being away from the spot— even if he was not— while on his job to guard such a sensitive structure was an utmost dereliction of duty. Abul Barkat, therefore, must have been in a fi x, and what he saw inside the mosque must have numbed him to the core. Th is predicament explains not just his inability to do anything that night but also his statement much later.
In the charge sheet fi led on 1 February 1950, based on the FIR registered in the morning of 23 December 1949 against Abhiram Das and others for intruding into the mosque and defi ling it, Abul Barkat was named as one of the nine prosecution witnesses. What he said in his statement to the magistrate elated the Hindu communalists, but any sane person could easily see through it. Justice Deoki Nandan in his ‘Sri Rama Janma Bhumi: Historical and Legal Perspective’ has cited a ‘concise translation’ of Abdul Barkat’s statement:

He [Abul Barkat] was on duty at the Police Outpost Rama Janma Bhumi on the night between December 22nd and 23rd, 1949. While on duty that night, he saw a fl ash of Divine Light inside the Babari Masjid. Gradually that light became golden and in that he saw the fi gure of a very beautiful godlike child of four or fi ve years the like of which he had never before seen in his life. Th e sight sent him into a trance, and when he recovered his senses he found that the lock on the main gate (of the mosque) was lying broken and a huge crowd of Hindus had entered the building and were performing the aarti of the Idol placed on aSinghasan and reciting: Bhaye prakat kripala Deen Dayala [God has manifested himself].

The Hindu Mahasabha and other communal organizations immediately lapped up Abul Barkat’s statement as a proof of the ‘miracle’ that had happened on that fateful night when Lord Rama himself ‘reclaimed’ his ‘original’ place of birth. Decades later, however, even those who had propagated the miracle theory in order to prove their point were found laughing at it. Bhaskar Das, for example, said, ‘What else could Abul Barkat say? When such an incident happened while he was on duty, he had no other option but to say what he was told to say in order to save himself.’

Acharya Satyendra Das, one of the disciples of Abhiram Das who later became the chief priest of Ramajanmabhoomi, was no less straight in his observations:

Abhiram Das and others had taken the idol of Rama Lalla inside the mosque well before twelve o’clock that night when the shift at the gate changed and Abul Barkat resumed his duty. And when after midnight and before dawn the beating of ghanta-gharial began along with the aarti he woke up and saw that scene. In his statement, he said what he saw thereafter.

Abul Barkat could never explain his position. Perhaps the pressure of the district administration that had already gone communal and his own desperation to save his job at any cost never allowed him to come out of the darkness of that night.

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(Krishna Jha is a Delhi-based freelance journalist and biographer of SA Dange, one of the founding fathers of the Indian communist movement. Dhirendra K Jha is a political journalist with Open magazine in Delhi.)

All Indians must have the courage to face up to our past and present

By Anil Dharker

Was V S Naipaul right or was Girish Karnad right? The sound and fury generated by the controversy at Literature Live!, Mumbai’s literary festival, has obscured one important aspect of our national life: we are afraid of our own history.




Let’s recap for a moment how the controversy began. Naipaul was given the Landmark Lifetime Achievement Award at the festival. This aroused Karnad’s ire: the award should not have been given, he said, because Naipaul was anti-Muslim . In his non-fiction books, Naipaul’s stance, according to Karnad, is to depict Indian Muslims as “raiders and marauders” and so, in effect, Naipaul has “criminalised a whole section of the Indian population as rapists and murderers.” “I have Muslim friends and I feel strongly about this,” Karnad added.



I have Muslim friends too, and i feel strongly as well, not about our shared history but about the state of the community in our country today. That feeling has been strong enough for me to be a trustee of Citizens for Justice and Peace, an NGO which (among other things) has taken up multiple cases on behalf of the Muslim victims of the 2002 Gujarat massacre. As a direct result, many people including Maya Kodnani , a former minister in the Modi government and Babu Bajrangi, the Bajrang Dal leader, have been sentenced to long prison terms. My strong feelings, therefore , are not just emotional but take the practical shape of righting today’s wrongs.



But should that blind me to our history? Right from the 12th to the 15th century, Afghan and Central Asian invaders like Mohammad Ghori and Mahmud Ghaznavi came as marauders and plunderers: they came to loot (places like the Somnath temple were immensely rich and obvious targets ), and even to destroy local religions like Hinduism and Buddhism. The sacking and burning in 1193 by the Turk, Bhaktiyar Khilji of the Nalanda library, one of the greatest places of learning, and whose collection of books was so extensive that it took three months to be gutted, is a case in point. Hampi, which is now a Unesco Heritage site, was burned down by the Bahamanis , an act of vandalism which took days. Later, the Mughals led by Babar may have come, not as raiders but as settlers, but they did proselytize. Emperor Aurangzeb’s depredations were extensive and go far beyond the Shivnath temple: when you think that Ahilyabai Holkar rebuilt as many as 350 temples in and near Varanasi, you realize how far-reaching the damage was.

This is a rather jumbled, and hurried look at our history, but it makes the point that in spite of the enlightened rule of emperors like Akbar (notably), Jehangir and Shahjahan, a great deal of the nation’s heritage was wilfully destroyed by Afghan, Turk, Central Asian and Mughal invaders and rulers. You can overstate the case, as Naipaul does, by seeing in the Taj Mahal only the ‘blood and sweat of slave labour’ (you can say that of the pyramids too), but that’s only overstating the case, not making one up. By stating it, you do not become anti-Muslim.



That’s the important point. Girish Karnad , like a lot of secularists who want to see present-day India live in a harmonious blend of communities, bends over backwards to gloss over the negative aspects of Islam in our history, because of the harm this reiteration can cause to present-day Muslims. (In his attack on Naipaul, for example , Karnad said off-handedly , “Oh, I do admit some temples and monuments may have been destroyed by the Mughal".

I belong to that group of secularists too, and i would not be writing this article if it weren’t for the recent controversy. But we need to remind ourselves about something that should be obvious: Yes, it’s true there was a Ram temple where the Babri Masjid stands; yes, it’s true that the temple was demolished and a mosque built on the site-… But it’s also true that over the many years after this happened, not too many people were bothered either about the now-decrepit mosque, nor the once existing temple until L K Advani and the BJP made it an issue to revive its electoral chances. The Babri Masjid demolition and the subsequent riots did not happen because people like Naipaul wrote their versionsof history.



Sadly, the laudable wish to ensure that today’s Muslims are not victimized any more than they are, also prevents secularists from lashing out at the pronouncements and actions of the ultra-orthodox in the community, for example the recent edict banning women from entering the sanctum of Mumbai’s Haji Ali dargah. Our silence only helps those in the minority community who stop it from moving into modernity. It’s something we need to face squarely, as squarely as we need to face our history.

Lord Ram’s Story: Many Tellings

By Ram Puniyani

04 November, 2011
Countercurrents.org

Recently Delhi University Academic Council (Oct 2011) decided to drop the scholarly essay “Three Hundred Ramayanas” of A.K.Ramanujan, on different telling of Ram’s story from the syllabus of ‘Culture in India’ for BA Honors students. Of the four experts on the committee, one of them, whose opinion was finally accepted, said that undergraduate students will not be able to tolerate the portrayal of divine characters in the different versions given in the essay. In response to the ban while Akhil Bhartiya Vidyarthi Parishad, which is an affiliate of RSS, and company celebrated, the staff and many students protested against this ban. Just to recall earlier in 2008 ABVP activists had protested against the introduction of this essay, and indulged in vandalism on the issue.

This essay by the much acclaimed scholar, A.K.Ramanujan is part of his "The Collected Essays of A.K.Ramanujan (Oxford 1999). Earlier in the aftermath of Babri demolition, a Sahmat exhibition on different versions of Ramayana was attacked by RSS combine's goons in Pune in 1993. This was done on the pretext that one of the panels based on Jataka (Buddhist version) showed Ram and Sita as brother and sister, and it is an insult to their faith. Ramanujan's essay talks of different versions and presents five of them as an example.

It is known that there are hundreds of versions of Ramayana, Buddhist, Jain, Valmiki etc. Paula Richman in her book Many Ramayana's (Oxford) describes several of these. And again there are different interpretations of the prevalent Valmiki Ramayana, many of which are not to the liking of those who are indulging in politics in the name of their faith. Surprisingly all this intolerance is shown by those who assert that Hinduism is tolerant and other religions are intolerant.

It is a fascinating exercise to go through various tellings and interpretations of Ramayana. Even the other renderings acceptable to this intolerant but currently dominant political force are not uniform. Valmiki, Tulsidas and later the one adopted by Ramanand Sagar for his serial Ramayana have their own subtle nuances, which are very different from each other.

Ramayana has been rendered in many languages of Asia in particular. Ramanujan points out that the tellings of Ram story has been part of Balinese, Bengali, Kashmiri, Thai, Sinhala, Santhali Tamil, Tibetan and Pali amongst others. There are innumerable versions in Western languages also. The narrative in these is not matching. Those opposing this essay take Valmiki as the standard and others as diversions which are not acceptable to them for political reasons. The version of Ramayana, the communalists want to impose has the caste and gender equations of pre-modern times so it is hung up upon only that version as the only one acceptable to it.

Interestingly one can see the correlation between the class-caste aspirations of the narration-interpretation. In Buddhist Dasharath Jataka, Sita is projected both as sister and wife of Ram. As per this version Dashrath is King not of Ayodhya but of Varanasi. The marriage of sister and brother is part of the tradition of glorious Kshtriya clans who wanted to maintain their caste and clan purity. This Jataka tale shows Ram to be the follower of Buddha. Similarly Jain versions of Ramayana project Ram as the propagator of Jain values, especially as a follower of non-violence. What do both Buddhist and Jain versions have in common is that in these Ravan is not shown as a villain but a great spiritual soul dedicated to quest of knowledge, endowed with majestic commands over passions, a sage and a responsible ruler. Popular and prevalent "Women's Ramayana Songs" of Telugu Brahmin Women, put together by Rangnayakamma, keep the women's concern as the central theme. These songs present Sita as finally victorious over Ram and in these, Surpanakha succeeds in taking revenge over Ram.

In Thai Ramkirti, or Ramkin (Ram's story), there is a twist in the tale and Shurpanakh's daughter decides to take revenge attributing her mother’s mutilation primarily because of Sita. More interestingly here the focus is on Hanuman, who in this telling is neither devout nor celibate but quite a ladies’ man, looking into the bedrooms of Lanka. In Valmiki, Kampan and Tamil tellings Hanuman regards seeing another man’s sleeping wife as a sin, but not in this Thai version. Incidentally he is a very popular Thai hero even today. Also like Jain Ramayana this Thai telling focuses on genealogy and adventures of Ravana and not of Ram.

In recent times Jotiba Phule who stood more with the interests of Dalits and women, was amongst the first to interpret this mythological tale from the perspective of those subjugated by caste-varna-gender hierarchy. Phule points out that upper castes were descendents of conquering Indo-Europeans who overturned the original egalitarian society and forbade the conquered from studying texts. His mythology is woven around King Bali, who could invoke the image of peasant community. Needless to say his murder by Lord Ram from behind is condemned and is seen as an act of subjugation of lower castes by the upper castes. And Ram is seen as an avatar of Vishnu out to conquer the land from the Rakshasas (those protecting their crops) for establishing the hegemony of upper caste values of caste and gender hierarchy.

Dr. Ambedkar and Periyar's commentaries are more an alternative reading of the Valmiki's text rather than a separate version. There is a good deal of overlap in the interpretation of both. Dr. Ambedkar focuses his attention on the issues pertaining to Ram's killing of Shambuk for violating the prevalent norm where a low caste has no right to do penance, tapasya. Like Phule he also castigates Lord Ram for murdering the popular folk king Bali. He questions Ram's act of taking Sita's agnipariksha, trial by fire, and his patriarchal attitude towards her. After defeating Ravan he tells Sita that he had done all this battle not to get her released for her own sake but to restore his honor, and his banishing her in response to the rumors about her chastity when she was pregnant comes for severest criticism from Ambedkar.

Periyar is basically taking the same line but in his interpretation the North Indian upper caste onslaught-South Indian resistance becomes the central theme. Periyar the initiator of ‘Self Respect Movement’ was the pioneer of caste and gender equality in Tamilnadu. In one of the movements, which is very less known, on the lines of Dr. Ambedkar burning Manusmriti, he planned to burn the photo of Ram, as for him Ram symbolized the imposition of upper caste norms in South India. This was a part of his campaign against caste Hinduism. Periyar also upheld Tamil identity. According to him the Ramayana story was a thinly disguised historical account of how caste ridden, Sanskritic, Upper caste North Indians led by Ram subjugated South Indians. He identifies Ravan as the monarch of ancient Dravidians, who abducted Sita, primarily to take revenge against the mutilation and insult of his sister Surpanakha. In his interpretation Ravana is practitioner of Bhakti, and is a virtuous man.

It seems the dropping of the essay from syllabus is under indirect political pressure of communal forces. RSS and affiliates who have reaped rich benefit from the campaign around Lord Ram are also giving the political message of caste and gender hierarchy, through the version upheld by them, the one of Valmiki and presented in current times by Ramanand Sagar’s tele serial Ramayana. And the politics claiming to be tolerant is intolerant about scholarly renderings of ‘Many Rams: Many Ramayanas’ prevalent World over!