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News > India

India Mourns Deadly 1992 Riots Amid Hindus' Call For Controversial Temple

  • Hindus tearing down 16th century Babri Mosque on Dec. 6, 1992.

    Hindus tearing down 16th century Babri Mosque on Dec. 6, 1992. | Photo: Facebook / Sayan Saha

Published 5 December 2018
Opinion

On Dec. 6, 1991, a mob of right-wing Hindus under the leadership of BJP, destroyed a 16th-century mosque kicking off a deadly riot. 

Repeating a scenario from December 1992, more than 200,000 Hindus gathered in Ayodhya, a disputed religious site in India, on Nov. 25.

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Their demand to the far-right government is to build a temple at the site of a 16th-century Mosque, namely, Babri Masjid (mosque) built by a Mughal general Mir Baqi and named after Mughal emperor Babur.

Fearing the re-run of macabreness of 1992, the Muslims of Ayodhya, urged the government to provide them security. Not wanting to risk lives, many families sent their children, women, and elders out of the town ahead of the gathering.

"On Dec. 6, 1992, 17 Muslims were burnt alive and the community has not forgotten this," said a resident of the temple town to a local media.

Dec. 6, 1992 has been etched in the memory of the minority Muslim community of India as the day when a fanatic Hindu mob led by the current ruling party unleashed a violence that the country has not yet recovered from, and under the far-right rule, probably will never recover.

The 16th century Babri Mosque tore down by Hindu fanatics in 1992. | Photo: Twitter / @DhwaniBharat

Twenty-six years ago, responding to the call of a group of far-right Hindu organizations, which was led by the current ruling party BJP, around 150,000 Hindu Karsevaks (Volunteers), descended upon Ayodhya.

The rally started with speeches from renowned BJP leaders like L.K. Advani, Uma Bharti (presently a cabinet minister). During the speeches, the Hindus started raising violent slogans.

Around noon, a man slipped away from the rally, managed to get past a weak police cordon, climbed on the top of the Babri Masjid, and unfurled a saffron flag which is the flag of RSS, the father of far-right Hindu organizations in India.

Thinking of it as a signal, the mob broke the police cordon. Armed with axes, stones, hammers, and grappling hooks, they set upon the structure. It just took a few hours for these men to level the historical mosque.

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Muslims, enraged by the destruction of their holy site, retaliated, snowballing one of the worst riots that India had witnessed since independence in 1947. The months-long riot spread all over India, killing more than 2,000 people.

The communal riot was succeeded by a long drawn legal battle at the Supreme Court in India which is still going on.

Since the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to power in 2014, the demand of building a temple at the site has increased. The justification of the 1992 violence and subsequent demand for a temple is a mythical story of Ayodhya being the birthplace of Lord Ram, a fabled warrior-turned god of Hindus. The majority community did not want a Muslim structure where their supposed god was born.

It is also widely believed that a temple was destroyed by the Muslim rulers to build the mosque. However, evidence of the temple had not been found yet even after large-scale excavation by alternative groups of archeologists. However, the Archeological Survey of India (ASI) fabricated evidence when it said that they found remains of structures at the site.

A poem on the demolition of the mosque by Akhil Katyal, a progressive poet from Delhi, India. | Photo: Facebook / Akhil Katyal

Two archeologists, Supriya Varma, and Jaya Menon said that ASI was under pressure to reinforce a Hindu right-wing narrative.

The far-right Hindu organizations affiliated with India’s ruling party have ratcheted up demands for a temple at the site ahead of a general election due by May next year which is instilling fear among the already persecuted Muslim community in India.

Since Modi’s ascendence to power, the country has seen an increase in violence against Muslims. Ban on eating beef, lynching people on suspicion of eating beef, lynching people just for being born Muslim have increased, and killers being celebrated by the right-wing government has contributed to the increasing violence.

Hence, more than two decades later, the slogans for a temple in Ayodhya haunts a community which has lived with a scar for far too long.

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