Digvijay Singh,Congress leader has said that Rajiv Gandhi had wanted the Ram temple at Ayodhya.How far it is true?
The answer is there in Zoya Hassan's book,Congress After Indira.
Halfway through his five-year term as prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi had faltered in most of his major initiatives.
One of the cardinal mistakes was to get directly involved in the controversy over the role of the state in regulating the personal law of religious minorities, and that at a time when Hindutva politics were on the rise. The timing of this initiative was obviously wrong. The prime minister, concerned about losing Muslim support, decided to enact the Muslim Women’s (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act (MWA) of 1986. This was done to revoke the landmark Supreme Court judgement, which granted a maintenance allowance to Shah Bano, a 73-year-old Muslim divorcee, to be paid by her husband under the Criminal Procedure Code (Cr Pc).
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| Rajiv Gandhi at Rishikesh,1991 |
The Court ruled that Section 125, as part of criminal rather than civil law, overrode all personal law and was uniformly applicable to all women, including Muslim women. At stake in this case was the right of a divorced Muslim woman to claim maintenance from her former husband under the Cr Pc.The verdict of the court was correct,and it would have been judicious on the part of Rajiv Gandhi,if he had gone with it,and had won the Hindu psyche.
This controversy sparked off a huge political uproar, demanding exclusion of Muslim women from the purview of the Cr Pc, to which otherwise all citizens have recourse. Acting on the advice of the clergy, the Congress government took the decision to nullify the court’s verdict and enact the MWA, declaring that Muslim women would not have recourse to the provisions of the Cr Pc in regard to maintenance in the event of divorce. Rajiv Gandhi succumbed to pressure from Muslims leaders in his own party to pass this statute.
This one piece of legislation which allowed Muslim personal law to prevail in reversal of the court decision ruined his reputation for modernity and progressiveness, and the move inflamed Hindu sentiments. It became a bone of contention between Muslim conservatives and critics of the government.
This excessive regard for Muslim sensibilities on personal law provoked an indignant reaction that India would be overrun by a rapidly rising Muslim population propagated by multiple wives. There was strong opposition from the middle classes, from Hindus more generally, and from the women’s movement, which regarded the MWA as a concession to Muslim fundamentalism and a break from secularism. This was a blessing for the BJP which for the first time experienced a conjunction of interests between the party and the middle classes which agreed that India’s Muslims were being pampered by the Congress.
For long the BJP had sought to demonstrate that the Congress was “pseudo-secular” because it had been interventionist with regard to the reform of Hindu personal laws while it refrained from interfering with those of Muslims. To the BJP and many other people outside the BJP circles, the Shah Bano episode was a touchstone of this.
The passage of the MWA gave them a significant opportunity to revitalise this critique and further condemn the double standards of the state’s constitutional law and jurisprudence. The political fallout was severe. Having done this, the Congress felt compelled to mollify Hindu militants demanding concessions on the Ayodhya dispute.
During this period, the BJP and its affiliates launched a nationwide campaign to construct a Rama temple at the site of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya. Hindu activists had been claiming that the mosque stood at the exact spot believed to be the birthplace of Lord Rama, and its use by Muslims was sacrilegious. A campaign to unlock the gates of the mosque and for the construction of a Rama temple at Ayodhya was launched by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) in 1984. The stir took a popular militant turn when it made the liberation of Rama’s birthplace the cornerstone of its programme, which was supported by the BJP and the RSS. The unresolved dispute in Ayodhya seemed to offer an opportunity for Hindu nationalism to garner support for the BJP.
The District and Sessions Judge of Faizabad, KM Pandey, ordered the locks of the Babri mosque, which had remained padlocked for decades, to be opened for Hindu worshippers on 1 February 1986. Arun Nehru, one of the chief advisors of the prime minister, was thinking in terms of a quid pro quo to appease the Hindu militants in exchange for the concession to Muslim clerics on the MWA. The unlocking of the gates was “manipulated through a judicial order” with the aid of the Uttar Pradesh government.
The operatives seized on the Ayodhya controversy to pre-empt the VHP plan for a large-scale agitation with little grasp of the explosive situation this would create. Significantly, this came as a surprise to the VHP because they feared that they were about to lose their most important issue for mobilisation. The Congress did not take into account that the VHP would view this concession as the first step towards the demolition of the Babri Masjid.
By the autumn of 1989, the atmosphere had become surcharged with tension when the VHP announced plans to perform shilanyas (consecration) in different parts of the country and carry bricks, manufactured for the purpose, to Ayodhya to lay the foundation stone of the Rama temple. In the face of this, the Congress government allowed the VHP to perform shilanyas at the disputed site. The shilanyas ceremony took place in November 1989, just days before the commencement of the parliamentary election. Unlike the opening of the gates to the Babri Masjid, which was supposed to have been undertaken under a court order, there was no such justification this time, except the hope that there would be a turnaround in the Hindu vote.
Rajiv Gandhi wanted to be present in Ayodhya at the time of the shilanyas but his handlers misguided him. In the end, he did not go to Ayodhya but instead went on a sadbhavna yatra which aimed at undoing the damage caused by opening the gates of the mosque and the shilanyas. In the event, Rajiv Gandhi launched his party’s election campaign with a meeting at Ayodhya-Faizabad on 3 November 1989. He was under pressure to start the campaign from Faizabad and not Nagaur as was earlier decided.It was widely expected that he would assert on this occasion his own and his party’s commitment to secularism but he instead promised to establish Rama Rajya. This was apparently not part of the draft of the speech and was added later in Faizabad.
Senior Congress leader from Uttar Pradesh, Kamlapati Tripathi, warned that this craven approach would destroy the unity and integrity of the country and the only course open to the party was mass mobilisation to counter the VHP moves. Needless to say, the party leaders did not heed this advice as it was keen to undercut the BJP’s temple campaign with its own gestures to appease Hindu sentiment but it backfired as the Sangh Parivar rapidly seized the initiative. The leadership admitted that permitting the shilanyas was a mistake, but it was too late to retrieve the ground it had lost.
Rajiv Gandhi may have believed in the faltered Nehruvian model,not learning anything from indian history.All the Hindu leaders in India,have failed when they tried to appease the muslim fundamentalists.The classic example is Gandhi,who witnessed a Hindu genocide in Malabar,after he tried to appease the muslims,by the totally unwanted Khilafat movement.Hence we need not now discuss the upstart,Rahul Gandhi.
© Ramachandran
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