Ayodhya, a small speck on the map of central Uttar Pradesh, is a strange town where things are not always what they seem, says KUSHAN MITRA
On National Highway 28 out of lucknow towards Guwahati, as you drive on the most incongruously smooth stretch of concrete in the erstwhile state of Awadh, hoardings of Narendra Modi stare down at you every few kilometres. Flyovers lift you over town after town and a mass of unpainted bare-brick buildings marks the town of Faizabad on the outskirts of which we decide to stop to grab a bite.
If the highway is incongruous with the notion that most non-arterial Indian highways are potholed disaster zones, the Uttar Pradesh Tourism restaurant is even more so. Individual gazebos provide shelter to every table and surprisingly good mutton comes from the kitchen, but the beautifully manicured lawns and flower garden provide a sense of westernised order, far from the chaos of central Uttar Pradesh.
Soon after leaving Faizabad, the signboards point out that we are fast approaching the town of Ayodhya. The previous day, we had been forced to skip travelling to Amethi due to the abysmal quality of roads.
Ayodhya had always fascinated me; I was barely a teenager when the Babri Masjid was torn down by an army of Hindu kar sevaks. For those of us born between 1975 and 1980, December 6, 1992, was one of two defining moments in our lives. The other, of course, was the implementation of the Mandal Committee report a few years earlier — two events that were to change the Indian polity forever.
The town also had a personal interest for me. My father had (according to him) quite by accident covered the town in 1985 — when the Rajiv Gandhi Government ordered that the locks on the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid be broken — and had observed how in the few years after that this town became the centrepiece of a new Hindu revivalist movement.
My father was in Ayodhya on December 6, 1992, standing on the podium with a few other journalists. Whether he reveled or not at a historical wrong being ‘corrected’, I do not know. What I do know is that India changed that day. Many people on the left of the political spectrum claim it changed for the worse — which is a matter of conjecture — but change it did.
I did not climb the flyover that would have lifted us over the turn-off for Ayodhya. We were getting late for a scheduled appointment at Gorakhpur, still a quarter of a state away. But it did not take much persuasion to take that left turn following several buses full of Gujarati and Bengali pilgrims.
Ayodhya surprises you by turning out to be much smaller than you expect. It was the historical capital of the greatest Hindu king who ever ruled, but it certainly did not look like it. While tens of temple spires rose from the ground, they just about stood apart from the several mobile phone towers. This is a religious centre, but so many towns like this dot India.
Driving into the town in a relatively new Skoda Octavia, we attracted the attention of hundreds of youths. As we drove down the narrow streets of the town, many bike-borne youths pleaded with us to hire them for just “pachaas rupiye”. The initial consensus in the car was to just see the site of the 1992 violence and beat a hasty retreat. With the youths pleading for the ‘job’, it made sense to take one on.
While I do not consider myself a particularly religious Hindu, I have always been a temple tourist. To miss a darshan of Ram lalla would have been stupid from a personal point of view, let alone from that of faith.
Before we entered the controversial temple/mosque complex in this unabashedly Hindu town, we were asked to visit another temple outside. Some of the original bricks brought for 1992 with ‘Ram’ engraved on them lay in a corner of this temple. Pictures of Vishwa Hindu Parishad luminaries Ashok Singhal and Pravin Togadia lined the walls along with devotee memorial marble slabs. In addition to the mass of slabs in Devanagari, there were also ones in Gujarati.
The most peculiar thing about Ayodhya and walking to the site was not the shops selling December 6 memorabilia, but the term for the events of the fateful day — blast — a euphemism that makes it sound like an accident. What happened was that thousands of Hindu kar sevaks had demolished the Babri Masjid with anything they could find, righting what they felt was a massive historical wrong committed by the first Mughal emperor Babur, who had constructed the mosque at the site of Ram’s birth. Ironically, at every shop, along with the standard offerings of flowers and small sugar balls, DVDs of the events of that day were being sold.
“What a great day it was. We chased all the Muslims away,” a shopkeeper told me. And then he uttered something that had been left unsaid for the past one hour: “The temple will be built this time because the BJP has come to power.” But like the stories of 1992 I have heard from my father and his contemporaries, there has been a clear reassertion of the Hindu identity in Uttar Pradesh in 2014 — 73 out of 80 seats in the lok Sabha Elections would not have been won by the BJP if there wasn’t.
The temple/mosque complex had a level of security that is unmatched in India. Not even at Kashi Vishwanath in Benaras is there so much security. There are three security checks; proper thorough checks. A deeply buried two rupee coin in my jeans pocket was poked out at the second security point. Every single policeman and policewoman was a Hindu, and many were armed to the teeth. This level of security was deeply unnerving even to someone from Delhi. That said, almost everyone was happy to talk politics and as in the case of pilgrims, there was only one man on their mind — Modi. The police personnel, who were mainly local Yadavs, echoed one sentiment: “Enough is enough, the temple must be built.”
It is not too difficult to realise why a temple should be built on the site. Not to correct a historical wrong, but purely from a logistical and safety point of view. The site is a labyrinth of a caged path, less than two feet wide and seven feet high at best, ostensibly to protect devotees and pilgrims from thousands of monkeys. The monkeys still manage to attack pilgrims through gaps; a Gujarati woman had her finger bitten by one, yet continued singing “Sita Ram, Sita Ram”.
Many Indian temples and holy sites belie their importance by being extremely difficult and dangerous to access. This was no different, yet the levels of devotion were astounding. To risk life and limb to barely catch a glimpse of a small marble idol and walk in a cage that resembled one in abattoirs left me constantly fearing a stampede.
Yet, every single day, thousands of pilgrims come to Ayodhya, which is a small speck on the map of central Uttar Pradesh, and get subjected to what one would normally classify as torture. They had come to a site where India’s Hindus had, according to them, reclaimed their religion and country. And lest we forget, where were the pilgrims on-board that ill-fated train in Godhra returning from and why were they attackedIJ All to see something that does not exist. To see a sight that will remain indelibly etched on India’s psyche. Another temple might need to be built at Ayodhya sooner rather than later.