In grand opening of Ram temple, a semblance of closure

It is all that is left of Mohammad Shahid’s childhood; a hulking arc of rusting metal, jutting out of a sea of weeds and cracked bricks.

It was once a home that was flourishing; a home with a courtyard; the home of an important man — the last imam of the Babri Masjid, Haji Abdul Gaffar Khan, Shahid’s grandfather. Today, there is only a crumbling wall that separates it from the road, overrun by creepers and time, and the skeletal frame of a charred window.

Shahid remembers looking out that window, 32 years ago, petrified. He remembers the communal frenzy that blanketed Ayodhya, and the mob that began to assemble. He remembers sprinting breathlessly behind his father Mohammad Sabir, weaving one way and then the other, as menacing crowds marched through the streets. The family had been preparing for a wedding and the courtyard was festive. But the riots didn’t spare his father and uncle. Then 21, Shahid fled town with his mother Taibunnisa Begum. By the time they returned, their home had been set ablaze. The only constant in the neighbourhood since then has been a thicket of police barricades.

For three decades, the house has held its breath. Every anniversary of the razing of the Babri Masjid has meant a return to fear. Shahid would send his family away to Gonda. Hostilities choked the city’s economy, incomes dried up, and Shahid’s three brothers moved abroad. Their wages helped steady the ship a little, but peace was elusive. “Now, I hope we can end all this strife. The Ram Temple is opening, and we hope it brings peace and development to the city,” said Shahid. “We have little left, but want to see our children grow up in safety.”

Across the road, the land slopes downward towards the house of Iqbal Ansari, the son of the original litigant of the title suit, Hashim Ansari. Sitting in his carpeted living room, Ansari is busy preparing for the January 22 ceremony, having accepted an invitation last week. Behind his chair is a framed photograph of a whitewashed Babri Masjid from the early 20th century. “Every Muslim here welcomes the Ram Temple. We want development and peace. After all, who suffered the most when violence rocked Ayodhya? It is us,” he explained.

In 2019, the Supreme Court ruled against a raft of cases by Muslim groups and individuals, including Ansari, and said the Hindu claim to the 2.77 acre plot was stronger. But he betrays little emotion at having lost the case his father dedicated his life to. “Muslims across the country respected the verdict. We fought the case with dedication, but that is now over,” he said. “We want to move on.”

This sentiment finds an echo across Ayodhya, a city whose identity came to be tangled, for better or for worse, with the violence of December 6, 1992. Now, the Ram Temple is seen as a chance to turn the page. For Muslims, it represents a hope for a more secure future even if it means bottling resentment at the outcome of the criminal cases from 1992 and the 2019 verdict. And for Hindus, it is a civilisational moment that allows many, long resentful of the association of the city to the 1992 violence, to shake off that blemish.

A barren plot

The site that was supposed to act as the repository of Babri Masjid’s memory lies barren. In 2019, the top court ordered the government to allot five acres of land to build a new mosque in lieu of the destroyed 16th century structure. Months later, the government allotted land in Dhannipur village, about 20km away from the heart of Ayodhya. In July 2020, the UP Sunni Central Waqf Board set up the Indo-Islamic Cultural Foundation (IICF) to oversee the construction of the mosque.

Yet, little has moved. The cavernous plot is empty, save for a discoloured signboard slapped with a poster of the initial design of the mosque – a futuristic glass-topped dome with carved spires – that has since been abandoned. The new design, approved at a meeting in Mumbai last year, is more traditional with four minarets framing the white proposed building. Planners propose the mosque be named after Prophet Mohammed-Bin-Abdullah but only one billboard-size poster of it exists till now, pasted on a whitewashed wall of the only building that stands on the plot – a decades-old sufi shrine.

One misty morning in January, Sohrab Khan and his friend Mohammad Akbar are patrolling the tree-lined plot bifurcated by a dry canal now filling up with brown carcasses of leaves. “The trust is planning big. Yes, things have been delayed but see all the things (planned) – a cancer hospital, a law college, a medical college and community kitchen,” said Khan. The only time the sleepy village of 2,300 people comes to life is in April, when the dargah hosts its annual urs, or fair. This morning, the caretaker is wondering if the pedestrian gate to the dargah should be fastened since the trickle of visitors has petered out. The solitude couldn’t be in sharper contrast to the breathless bustle of the Ram temple site 20 km away. “Yes, there’s been a major delay, but here only a handful of men are involved, and there…” Akbar’s voice trailed off.

In the villages that ring the plot, the initial burst of hope that their locality will be catapulted into national recognition has since ebbed due to the many false starts. “It’s too slow, something should have come up by now. We had a lot of hope when people first came and measured the plot, but there was no movement,” said Mohammad Gufran. A worker at a footwear factory in Lucknow, Gufran has been looking for a job closer home, and hoped that if the mosque came up, it would attract investment – in much the same way that the government envisions the Ram Temple will for the broader region. “And maybe I could get a job at an industrial area nearby,” he said.

His neighbour, Mohammad Tarikh, is also disgruntled. “Every year, there is an announcement that from January 26 or August 15, construction will begin. But nothing happens,” he said. His mother Zaheeda Begum is more hopeful, having heard from the villagers about the possibility of tourists streaming into the village to see the mosque. “When such a big complex comes up, everyone benefits. There will be development; but kuch toh baat aage bade (it should inch forward a little),” she said.

Zufar Faruqi, the chief trustee of IICF, defended the pace of work, and said the inaugural ceremony for the mosque is scheduled for May. “The foundation’s website is anticipated to be operational by February,” he said. The delay in construction, Faruqi explained, is due to extra care given to the new plans. “These comprehensive designs will be submitted to the Ayodhya Development Authority in February,” he added.

A new cast rises

The Babri Masjid is fast fading from the city’s public memory, a mere blip in what is seen as the eternal seat of Ram. From shopkeepers arranging laddoos behind smudged glass counters to out-of-work college graduates offering temple tours for ₹500, there is a dogged refusal to refer to the dispute that once characterised Ayodhya, and the mosque that stood at its centre. “Was it ever a mosque? It was just a structure built by invaders to destroy our history. We should call it a ‘dhancha’ not any masjid,” said Ramakant Jha, a resident. Most people now refer to Babri as a vivadit dhancha, or disputed structure. This reflects not just the language used by Hindu groups but also the shifting self-image of the city. Taking the space vacated by the Babri Masjid is a new cast of characters, long seen as divisive and polarising for their actions in ratcheting up the dispute that eventually cost the lives of hundreds.

Now, however, their legacies are being recalibrated as heroes who fought for the faith at a time few others were ready to back the temple struggle. For most, their roles – as listed in documents before the Allahabad high court and the Supreme Court, and books by former prime minister PV Narasimha Rao and legal scholar AG Noorani – is further proof of how the Hindu faith endured.

“The temple trust and VHP hail the role of those who immensely contributed to the movement. In the days to come, both will do more to preserve the memories of these crusaders,” said Sharad Sharma, national spokesperson of the VHP.

Many of these legacies pivot around 1949, when idols of the infant god Ram, or Ram Lalla, appeared under the central dome of the Babri Masjid on the night of December 22-23, an act that changed the course of the dispute and forced the closure of the mosque. Central among these now-excavated figures is that of Kandangalathil Karunakaran Nair, the district magistrate of Faizabad who refused to remove the idols. Nair was born in the erstwhile Travancore state of present-day Kerala on September 11, 1907. Raised as the fifth of six children, he cleared the Indian Civil Service (ICS) examination at 21, before taking charge of Faizabad district in June 1949.

That winter, India was in ferment. The scars of Partition were yet to heal. The assassins of Mahatma Gandhi had just been hanged. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh was banned but as the actions of Nair and city magistrate Guru Dutt Singh would prove, there was considerable subterranean sympathy for Hindu groups. On November 29, 1949, Nair received a letter from Kripal Singh, the superintendent of police of Faizabad, who warned him that a large number of “hawan kunds” had encircled the mosque. “The plan appears to be to surround the mosque in such a way that entry for the Muslims will be very difficult and ultimately they might be forced to abandon the mosque,” the letter read.

Nair dismissed the concern. In a letter on December 16, 1949, to then home secretary Govind Narayan, he wrote, “Muslims, mostly of Faizabad, have been exaggerating these happenings …This is an entirely false canard.” He also signalled what side of the dispute he was leaning towards, observing that there once was a magnificent temple at the site constructed by Vikramaditya and one that was demolished by Babur.

At 7am on December 23, he was informed that three hours earlier, an idol was suddenly found in the Babri Masjid. There was immediate chaos. The central government, led by an agitated Jawaharlal Nehru, pushed for the removal of the idols. Nehru even wrote to then CM GB Pant, saying that a dangerous example was being set.

But Nair stood his ground. On December 25, 1949, he said the situation was too volatile to remove the idols. “If government still insisted that removal should be carried out in the face of these facts, I would request to replace me by another officer.”

In a letter written on December 26, 1949 to then chief secretary Bhagwan Sahai, Nair said asking why the idol was not removed was a facile question. “Such removal without consideration of consequences would in my view have been a step of administrative bankruptcy and tyranny…Even now I doubt if we can do much, if communal riot flares up in places remote from headquarters …. I fully believe that the solution must be found without tremendous cost in life and property as also in countrywide reactions on peace and policy. I would therefore emphasise that the question of removing the idol is not one which the superintendent of police and I can agree with or carry out on our initiative,” he wrote.

The next day, he was even more strident. “The idea of the removal of the idol is not one which I can agree with or wish to carry out on my initiative for it is fraught with the gravest danger to public peace over the entire district and must lead to a conflagration, of horror unprecedented in the annals of this controversy,” he told Sahai.

Nehru didn’t give up. In January 1950, he again wrote to the CM, asking about Ayodhya and even offering to travel to the town. But Pant dithered, instead giving his approval for an alternative scheme. On January 5, the chairman of the municipal board, Priya Dutt Ram, took possession of the spot, and made an inventory before sealing the premises. 1a in this list was, “Two idols of Sri Ram Lalla Ji, one big and another small.” The mosque was shut, never to open again.

Nair was transferred out of Faizabad that spring. Two years later, he took voluntary retirement. In India’s first general elections later that year, his wife Shakuntala Nair won the erstwhile Gonda (west) seat, just across the river from Ayodhya, on a Hindu Mahasabha ticket, only one of four members from the party who were successful in a Congress wave. She would go on to win two more terms. In 1962, Nair was elected to the Lok Sabha from Bahraich.

“He played an important role in reclaiming an institution of Hindus without spilling a single drop of blood and without the support of the government…he gave his life for the movement,” said KK Padmanabhan Pillai, his nephew. His family has now proposed a ₹10 crore plan that includes a Ram temple in Kerala, an IAS coaching academy and a home for destitute people.

Recalibrating history

The cast of Hindu characters linked to the so-called miracle of 1949 has other characters. There is Abhiram Das, the little-known controversial mystic who led a band of 50-odd men to install the idols on the night of December 23 and who is listed as accused number one in the first information report (FIR) filed at the Thana Ayodhya, Faizabad.

“A group of 50-60 persons have entered the Babri Masjid by breaking open the locks of the compound and also by scaling the walls and staircases and placed an idol of Shri Bhagwan in it and scribbled sketches of Sita, Ramji etc. in saffron and yellow colours on the inner and outer walls of it,” the FIR said.

Das, a member of the Hindu Mahasabha, shot to overnight fame among Hindus as ‘uddharak [savior] baba’ because, as local pamphlets by the Mahasabha proclaimed, he had helped reclaim what they believed the birthplace of Lord Ram to be. Historians later marked this moment as pivotal because until then, Hindus only had legal access to the outer courtyard where the Ram Chabutara was established on a mound.

There is Gopal Singh Visharad, a local Hindu priest, who filed a suit in January 1950 before the civil judge at Faizabad seeking a declaration that according to his religion and customs, he was entitled to offer prayers near the idols – the first suit filed by the Hindu side claiming the entire building. Visharad alleged that he was being prevented by officials from entering the inner courtyard of the disputed site to offer worship. His son, Rajendra, will be among the 8,000 people in attendance at the consecration ceremony on January 22.

And there is Krishna Mohan Pandey, the Faizabad district judge who on February 1, 1986, ordered the locks of the Babri Masjid opened and allowed Hindus to offer prayers after an interlude of 36 years. At the time two or three priests were deputed to perform religious rites and the general public could see the idols from beyond the brick-grill wall.The judge considered a plea by a local lawyer, Umesh Chandra Pandey, and found that the locks were an unnecessary measure.

“This appears to be an unnecessary irritant to the applicant and other members of the community. There does not appear any necessity to create an artificial barrier between the idols and the devotees…it is clear that the members of the other community, namely Muslims, are not going to be affected by any stretch of imagination…” the judge held.

“… Heavens are not going to fall if the locks of the gates O and P are removed.”

In 2010, while adjudicating the title suit, the Allahabad high court questioned this verdict. Judge SU Khan noted that the petitioner Umesh was not a party to the dispute, and that procedures were disregarded. “There was absolutely no occasion to show such undue haste. The appeal was filed on 31st January 1986 and was allowed on the next day i.e. 1st February 1986. At least the reason for this extreme haste is not mentioned in the judgment. It is a sound principle that not only justice must be done but it must also appear to be done. Before passing the judgment dated 01.02.1986 the learned district judge first buried the second limb of the principle (appearance of justice) very deep,” the high court held. By then, 18 years had passed since the Babri Masjid was razed.

Hope and fear

A film of mist hangs in the dusty Ayodhya air as Shahid gets ready for the isha (evening) namaz after a day spent plying an e-rickshaw, his only source of income.His mosque is housed in a plain rectangular one-storey whitewashed building across the road where clots of young men gather after the prayers before dispersing home. Shahid Ali is among them. He is clear that communal conflagrations are the result of outsiders attempting to rupture the ganga-jamuna (syncretic) culture of the town. “There are so many dargahs and mazars in Ayodhya. Many pay obeisance at Hazrat Sheesh Alaihis Salam Dargah. Our urs and fairs attract thousands, and 60% of them are Hindus.”

From his richly furnished living room, Haji Mahboob observes the discussion occasionally. Now in his 80s, Mahboob, one of the Muslim petitioners in the title suit, is not bitter about the temple coming up, but complains about the memory of the mosque fading. “We don’t have any problems with the temple. It is a good thing. The temple should be magnificent. But Babri will remain in our hearts. No one can erase that memory,” he said.

But something else is bothering him – the slow simmer of religious disputes in Mathura and Varanasi, where over the last two years, Hindu petitioners have asked courts to remove well-known mosques abutting temples. For Mahboob, their argument – that the mosques were built after demolishing temples centuries ago, and therefore need to either be removed, or given worshipping rights – has echoes of the Babri dispute. “Whether Mathura or Varanasi, the things that are happening are wrong. It will hurt the nation,” he rued. “Don’t bring the nightmare of 1992 back.”