File photo of Babri Masjid | Credit: PTI
I seek your indulgence for starting with a personal anecdote. It can only be described as an unhappy conjuncture of events in the ninth decade of the century gone by that, just when the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) started flexing its muscles to turn Ayodhya into a battlefield, the fledgling journalist in me opened his eyes to the world. Coming from an extremely backward village – then in Faizabad district (where Ayodhya is located) and now in Ambedkar Nagar district – I set out on my journey with few belongings other than the social and moral values and principles given to me by parents living in straitened circumstances. It so happened that my very first assignment brought me face to face with the VHP’s rath yatra from Sitamarhi to Ayodhya under Daudayal Khanna’s leadership.
As many might recollect, the yatra with its rousing slogans such as ‘aage badho, zor se bolo, janmabhoomi ka tala kholo (step forward, speak out, open the janmabhoomi lock)’, went largely unheeded by ordinary people to eventually sink in the sea of sympathy that surged in the wake of Indira Gandhi’s assassination. It could not but sink, for Mrs Gandhi, when alive, had not reacted to the yatra even once. She knew any comment from her would only add stature to the yatra. The Sangh parivar was understandably dejected. The dejection increased as the Sangh’s political front, the BJP, almost committed hara-kiri with its Gandhian socialism misadventure.
As the Sangh and the BJP resorted to new farces for a fresh lease of life during Rajiv Gandhi’s prime ministerial tenure, an insecure prime minister and his band of Doon School advisors were so traumatised they saw only one way out – appropriate the Sangh parivar’s so-called Hindu card by themselves arranging to have the [Babri Masjid] locks opened, thus leaving the parivar ‘disarmed’. In a trice the then Uttar Pradesh chief minister Vir Bahadur Singh offered his services for the needful. From the outset what was ignored was the fact that the opening of the locks would not solve the issue; if anything it would ignite the issue afresh, letting such genies out that could never be put back in the bottle.
In any case, the VHP and BJP were not going to be placated by a mere opening of the locks. As the lustre of the mandate won by Rajiv Gandhi gradually dimmed and he increasingly found himself entrapped in a political maze, the machinations for the so-called construction of a grand temple at the ‘ram janmabhoomi’ gathered pace.
Decoding what ‘ram janmabhoomi’ means
Here it is important to pause a bit and understand the meaning of ‘ram janmabhoomi’ as is known and understood in Ayodhya and Faizabad: on the night of December 22-23, 1949, in a mosque several hundred years old and known by the name of Babri, an idol of Lord Rama was secretly planted with the connivance of the then district magistrate of Faizabad, K.K. Nair, and members of Hindu communal organisations, and it was claimed that Lord Rama had manifested himself. The police FIR of December 23, 1949 named Abhiram Das as the prime accused and mentioned that the idol was planted there.
Thereafter, a line of ‘reasoning’ was provided by ‘logicians’ to state that what had happened was in no way improper, for the mosque stood on the very site of the temple which had been destroyed – therefore, the mosque was a symbol of enslavement.
Without a proper grasp of this meaning of ‘ram janmabhoomi’, the aberrations that cropped up among Hindi journalists who kept the company of such masterful ‘logicians’ will not be apparent. Take this meaning as the yardstick and all you will see is aberration upon aberration among journalists.
To cut a long story short, the locks were opened in 1986 and, in 1989, in yet another attempt to seize advantage by playing the ‘Hindu card’, Rajiv Gandhi enabled the shilanyas for the much propagated VHP’s temple construction – that too, ‘wahin’ (there), in the premises of the mosque which was a ‘symbol of enslavement’. As Rajiv and UP chief minister Narain Dutt Tiwari understood it, while the shilanyas would bring ecstatic Hindus into the Congress fold, by putting the ‘construction’ of the temple on hold they would be able to satisfy the Muslims as well. The Congress would be in a win-win situation. Then, despite being mired in the Shahbano and Bofors controversies, they wouldn’t face any difficulty in crossing the electoral Vaitarani.
The very opposite happened. Both the VHP and the BJP interpreted the shilanyas as a sign of retreat by an unnerved Congress government in the face of their rising strength. In that moment of elation they unleashed a volley of new manoeuvres. After that even Rajiv’s vow to start the election campaign from Ayodhya and restore Ram rajya did not have the desired impact – in 1989 the Congress failed to win the Faizabad Lok Sabha seat.
Between 1990-1992, at the Centre and in UP, during the tenures of Vishwanath Pratap Singh and Mulayam Singh followed by Narasimha Rao and Kalyan Singh, the manner in which ‘Ayodhya was bathed in blood’, ‘the Sarayu’s waters turned red’ and the Babri Masjid disintegrated into the folds of the past, carries the feel of a history that, even after the passage of 25 years, is still very current.
As a witness to cynical politics, what is the duty of a journalist?
This history of attempts to appropriate the Hindu card was part of my journalistic present at the time. Being witness to that period has undoubtedly been the most traumatic experience of my professional life, one which almost pushed me to the brink of disillusionment.
Maybe one should put it down to naïveté for thinking that that the job of a journalist, even in such dire times, was to be a ‘watchdog of the people’: to be an advocate of understanding an issue as it really is and presenting it as such; to cultivate a distance from the lure of gains and trickery; and with a habit of upholding moral and progressive values in life. It was painful to think that journalists, instead of giving a factual account of situations and events, could go to the extent of concocting them in the interest of an insular, communal group and be willing to work as their instrument.
To journalists like me, the very attraction of the world of journalism lay in the fact that one could constructively question the distortions abounding in the world – what makes the world such a heartless place; why, despite ceaseless efforts, is it not improving and, moreover, who are the people whose machinations are preventing it from straightening itself.
One witnessed journalists afflicted by communal and professional vested interests immersing themselves in the manoeuvres of the VHP and BJP, hawking their point of view as a ‘truth’ that was far more dangerous and toxic than any falsehood. Since I had no right over them to subject them to my questions, I would ask myself those very questions: in a pluralistic society such as in India, when some people gather belligerent crowds in the name of religion, use the very provisions of democracy to raze it, give it a bad name; spare neither the constitution nor its values; and are intent on dressing up animosity as consciousness and intolerance as a fundamental principle of life, what is the duty of journalists in such a situation? Should they break all professional limits to be tolerant towards such people, egg them on? If so, wouldn’t they themselves become participants in furthering the cynical game of intolerance?
Willing participants in the game of intolerance
It pains me to see that among the legatees of Hindi journalism, which has had a glorious history of opposition, many of my contemporaries have been willing participants in the game of intolerance in Ayodhya without pause – that too without the slightest pang of guilt.
From the early days of the movement, the mainstream in Hindi journalism has used it to further its commercial interests and in return showed utmost willingness to be used as well. In the period 1990-1992, their mutual dependence had increased to such an extent that people had started referring to Hindi journalism as ‘Hindu’ journalism.
As for the four standard bearers of Hindi journalism whose Hindu brand of journalism kept pace with the ‘Hindu brethren’, namely Aaj, Amar Ujala, Dainik Jagran and Swatantra Bharat, the Press Council of India had even rebuked them for the way in which they fuelled and instigated fear, confusion, terror, rumours and animosity. Those harsh words had no impact whatsoever on the publications.
A few sane voices and then the deluge: ‘if not real, fake will do’
It was not as if there were no voices of resistance against the prevailing state of affairs; just that they were confined to being voices in the wilderness.
I vividly recall one incident in 1990 when Vishwanath Pratap Singh was the prime minister and Mulayam Singh the UP chief minister. During a commotion masquerading as ‘kar seva’ on November 2, when as per the reports of Hindu journalism ‘Ayodhya was bathed in blood’, I was working in the editorial section of the daily Janmorcha, published from Faizabad. Several news agencies had set up temporary bureaus in the Janmorcha office located in the heart of the city.
Immediately after the police firing on the kar sevaks, one news agency started putting out inflated figures of casualties. When a correspondent of a rival news agency received a call from a flustered head office anxious not to be ‘left behind in the race’, he sarcastically replied, “I have given you the accurate figure of kar sevaks killed in police firing. As for the rest of the so-called casualties, you also know when and how the news agency in question killed them. But if you insist, I will try to find out once again. Although, if you wish to raise the number of casualties please send some guns. I myself will kill some to arrive at a figure that surpasses the rival news agency. But if an incident results in five casualties, don’t expect me to inflate the number to 15.” The phone conversation swiftly terminated on the other end.
The floodgates of self-control could not be maintained for long. In their rivalry to outdo the competition, the things journalists and newspapers did to sensationalise news by inflating the figure of kar sevaks killed in the firing is well-known. The conventional belief among ordinary people was that journalistic publications always underreported casualty figures, saying five had been killed when in fact the actual number would be 15. The police firing on the kar sevaks put paid to this innocent belief. Journalists busied themselves in cooking up ever more deaths adhering to the motto ‘if not real, fake will do’.