Ayodhya ‘Surplus Land’ Plea: Keeping BJP’s Poll ‘Brahmastra’ Alive

Since 1989, on various occasions, the Ram temple issue has been milked to derive political and electoral benefit.

Image used for representational purposes.

(Photo: The Quint)

If they were honest, proponents of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement in the entire Sangh Parivar, especially those in the government and the ruling party at the Centre, would accept two home truths about the agitation which has instigated strife in political and social life since the mid-1980s.

First, if an issue is not resolved straight away, it becomes knottier. Second, from 1989 onwards, on various occasions, the Ram temple issue has been milked to derive political and electoral benefit.

None of the previous 'construction' or kar seva programmes have taken people nearer to their “mandir waheen banaenge” aspiration.

Original Size of Disputed Land

To return to the first home truth – when the issue became subject to a legal dispute in December 1949, it was limited to 0.313 acres or just about 13,000 sq feet of land. This was the size of the shrine that was under no, or little dispute for centuries.

The shrine comprised inner and outer compounds. The inner portion could be entered through a small gate and was separated by a wall. Inside were the three domes, and it comprised the mosque part of the conjoined shrine. There was an adjoining unroofed area within the inner portion, possibly for wuzu or ablution before offering Namaz.

The entire complex had a big gate called Hanuman Dwar. Inside and outside the inner compound, there was a bhandar or store, Ram Chabutra and Sita Rasoi. These were built in the late 19th century, almost 350 years after the Babri Masjid. Significantly, almost a 100 feet away, stood the mandir janmasthan. Till the late 1980s, this was considered the temple, marking the exact site of the deity's birth.

Ram Mandir Row: From a Land Dispute to a National Political Issue

From 1949 to 1987, various civil cases were filed by Hindus and Muslims in the local Faizabad court. With the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) agitation gaining ground, the Rajiv Gandhi government transferred all court cases for ownership of the land, and the shrine to the Allahabad High Court.

This changed the complexion of the conflict. From a pure land dispute it transformed into a national political matter, in time, dramatically altering political discourse in the country. It is also instrumental in the Bharatiya Janata Party’s rise from the periphery to political power.

In October 1989, weeks before the election which unseated Rajiv Gandhi, the VHP successfully impleaded itself as a party on behalf of “Ram Lalla Virajman" or the “enthroned infant Lord Ram's idol”. The court accepted this, and Lord Ram, the mythological hero-turned God, became party to the case. The dispute however, still pertained to 0.313 acres.

This was altered when the state government headed by BJP's Kalyan Singh acquired 2.77 acres – or 120,661.2 square feet – around the disputed shrine in October 1991, to provide "facilities to pilgrims and the development of tourism". In court cases, this too became part of the land on which status quo had to be maintained. The dispute was now over nine times the originally contested piece of land!

How a Small Piece of Disputed Land Became The Size of a Colony

Instead of the conflict being restricted to the already expanded territory, its arena of dispute expanded in January 1993 after PV Narasimha Rao's government, in the aftermath of the Babri Masjid's demolition, acquired another 67.03 acres.

With this, a small piece of disputed land had expanded to a size which could hold an entire colony. 

Benches of both the High Court and Supreme Court ruled on various occasions that status quo must be maintained on the entire land till the title suit is dismissed.

The Centre is obviously obfuscating the matter with its application in the apex court, because it wishes to convey “doing something” to placate its core constituency. The legal dispute is elephantine compared to what it was in 1949.

On the second matter, the Sangh Parivar has, all along, mounted programmes to convey the sense of the "temple being constructed", although the truth could not be farther. Since the summer of 1989, the VHP has intermittently organised various shila pujans and shila yatras to “construct the temple”, which have also led to some of the worst riots and clashes seen in independent India.

The VHP & Its Ram Mandir Agenda

In 1992, before the demolition, the VHP organised another round of kar seva. In this phase, the assembled activists leveled the ground in front of the disputed structure, and constructed a concrete platform, in violation of the court order.

This engagement too was successful because the VHP depicted it as one that would lead to the construction of the temple. But it just kept supporters enthused, and allowed them to remain firm on their first objective – demolishing the Babri Masjid.

In January-February 2002, the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government was in office; the VHP mobilised supporters for kar seva. The plan was for the Centre to return acquired portions owned by the VHP-controlled trust, ‘Ram Janmabhoomi Nyas’. The court disallowed this, and volunteers were forced to return. One batch of dissatisfied kar sevaks reportedly entered into a tussle with vendors at the Godhra railway station, and the rest is history. Narendra Modi's political graph began rising thereafter.

Ram Mandir Issue: BJP’s ‘Brahmastra’ For Polls

For four years, the government has done precious little. It possibly retained the Ayodhya card as a ‘Brahmastra’ for the polls. The intention is to secure the apex court's permission to transfer the land back to the Nyas trust so that they can, as union minister Prakash Javadekar said on Tuesday (in an obvious faux pas), “they can build (pauses) a temple (falters thereafter). The Trust wants to build a temple.”

The moot point is not just whether the Court is going to permit such a transfer by delinking it from the main case. Rather, the matter becomes more tangled because ‘Nirmohi Akhara’, awarded one-third of the disputed land in 2010 by the Allahabad High Court, has jumped into the fray. It won’t be easy to rescind the acquisition under an Act of Parliament.

The BJP's hope now lies on the VHP-organised Dharam Sansad on the sidelines of the Kumbh Mela. The government and the BJP will expect to seek the Supreme Court's nod, failing which it will have little option but to wring its hands and turn to supporters, arguing they took the best shot but failed, because the judiciary has “time for cases dealing with LGBTQ+ rights, but not for matters concerning Hindus”.

“Emotional Issues Can Attract People Only When Belly Is Full”

With backing from the sant samaj, the attempt is to polarise society by campaigning that state institutions too are divided between pro-Hindu and anti-Hindu forces.

The party will contend that only the BJP can deliver the Ram temple.

It would be prudent for the party and its affiliates to recall what an unnamed national executive member of the BJP told academic Christophe Jaffrelot, after an electoral debacle, “Apart from emotional issues, people are interested in issues which affect their day-to-day life; we did not pay enough attention to farmers' problems with shortage of water. Emotional issues can attract people only when the belly is full.”

(The writer is an author and journalist based in Delhi. He has authored the book ‘The Demolition: India at the Crossroads’ and ‘Narendra Modi: The Man, The Times’. He can be reached @NilanjanUdwin. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)