The Indian Supreme Court recently announced that 13 members of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will be tried for the role they played in the demolition of historical Babri Masjid 25 years ago i.e. in the year 1992. Among those who will be tried includes a sitting government minister Uma Bharti.
On December 6, 1992, a large gathering of extremist Hindus completely demolished the-then 464-year-old Babri Masjid erected by Mughal emperor Babar. The demolition occurred after a rally supporting the movement turned violent following a guarantee from the state government to the Indian Supreme Court that the mosque would not be demolished. This led to several months of inter-communal rioting between Hindus and minority Muslim community, causing the death of around 2,000 people, mostly Muslims. The episode and the decision raise some pertinent issues.
One can see that the Indian judicial system is ‘so fantastic’ that it has taken only 25 years to decide that 13 people were responsible for the deadly demolition that ended up in claiming 2,000 lives of Muslims.
One can also see that the so-called largest democracy in the world has no regards for the rights of the minorities as one deadly incident after another has proven since
Independence. Were Sikhs not targeted in the Operation Blue Star and then after the killing of Indira Gandhi? Were the Muslims not butchered after the Babri Masjid demolition and in Gujarat after the Godhra train bombing? Are Christians safe in India today? The list goes on and on.
What sort of country India is where the leaders of BJP, which became a major player on the Indian political scene over the years, still proudly talk about their part in the Babri Masjid demolition episode? What sort of law-abiding democracy India is where the most sensitive Babri Masjid political issue could not be resolved by courts and successive parliaments over the years? As it is, the Babri Masjid has emerged as a symbol of militant Hindu revivalism or a central theme of Hindutva ideology. The BJP whips up the Hindu support for an electoral strategy that aims to sideline India’s minorities.
Savarkar, the man who coined the ugly term of Hindutva, implies that only Hindus and those following Sikhism, Jainism and Buddhism can be true citizens of the country while Zoroastrian, Christianity, Islam and Judaism originated outside the Subcontinent and thus their followers have no rights. They are aliens and will remain so. A senior leader of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council) Praveen Togadia has gone to the extent of declaring that the percentage of Hindus in India should be raised from 82 percent to 100 percent. He talks about forcibly converting or eliminating the minorities altogether.
Yashwant Sinha admitted to The Sunday Observer of December 14, 1992, after the demolition of Babri mosque: “India is being pushed back into the dark ages by obscurantist, fundamentalist and fascist forces. Their appeasement… has today given them the strength and the audacity to seek to destroy the very basis of our nation state…. [T]he secular forces will have to unitedly and determinedly meet this challenge if India is to survive as a democratic, secular, progressive, liberal and modern nation.” Only now Sinha is a BJP leader and working in the direction and for the aims which once he described above.