A timely and revealing book on the takeover of the Babri Masjid on
the night of December 22-23, 1949. The authors’ political sophistication
emerges from the pointed questions they raise about a divide in our
polity. By A.G. NOORANI
THE Sangh Parivar is all set
to revive the Ayodhya issue and for the same reason for which it is
seeking to make Narendra Modi its frontman in 2014. It is desperate
because it has no vote getter. L.K. Advani’s ambitions have far outrun
his abilities as a vote getter. He draws a yawn even in the parivar.
Radhika
Ramaseshan, a correspondent very much in the know, reported a meeting
on January 31, 2013, at the residence of Shripad Yeso Naik, MP, a
Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) regular, which was attended by Advani,
Murli Manohar Joshi, Rajnath Singh and Sushma Swaraj. The
long-neglected Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s leaders Ashok Singhal, Praveen
Togadia, Champak Rai and Dinesh Kumar dusted off the cobwebs that had
covered them to make themselves presentable at the meeting (
The Telegraph,
February 1, 2013). On February 7, the VHP’s steering committee meeting
at the Kumbh Mela in Allahabad passed a resolution on the construction
of a Ram temple on the ruins of the Babri Masjid which the parivar
demolished 20 years ago on December 6, 1992.
Radhika Ramaseshan
reported: “VHP sources admitted that the agenda was political and was
drawn up with the 2014 elections in mind and the possibility that the
recycled Ayodhya card might help the BJP in the Hindu belt and the west.
They also said the blueprint was firmed up in conjunction with the
RSS.” One of the reasons for the meeting on January 31 was to “prop up a
‘Hindutva’ context for Narendra Modi’s prospective projection
nationally”.
This book could not have made a more timely
appearance. It uncovers a wider plot to recast the Indian polity, of
which the takeover of the Babri Masjid on the night of December 22-23,
1949, was but a subplot. It is by far the most revealing book on that
sordid episode. The authors, both Delhi-based journalists, did fieldwork
for years. Their stupendous research in the archives would do any
scholar proud. Two lies used repeatedly to cover up the crime are
exposed; namely, that the idol of Ram “appeared” that night as L.K.
Advani asserted on August 1, 2003. He has also systematically spread the
tale that no prayers were said at the mosque for years. The RSS’ organ
Organiser said it “meticulously appeared” (March 29, 1987).
The authors record the testimony of the Babri Masjid’s last
muezzin,
Muhammad Ismail, who put up a fierce resistance to the intruders who
had scaled the walls and were about to plant the idol. He was beaten up
and forced to flee and he spent the remaining years of his life as a
muezzin in a mosque in Paharganj Ghosania on the outskirts of Faizabad.
The
muezzin delivers the
azan,
the call to prayer, and looks after the mosque. The imam leads the
prayers five times a day. Haji Abdul Ghaffar, who lived in Mohalla
Qaziana in Ayodhya, functioned as imam of the Babri Masjid from 1930 to
1949. His father, Maulvi Abdul Qadir, was imam from 1901 to 1930. Abdul
Ghaffar wrote a book
Gungashta Haalat Ayodhya,
Awadh,
which contains a wealth of information and deserves to be translated
into English. The authors tracked down the principal actors. Their
lively, evocative style of writing brings the events to life. They had
located some of the critical eyewitnesses too.
Advani’s ambitions and BJP’s campaign
It was not religion but politics, specifically the lure of power and
Advani’s prime ministerial ambitions, which inspired the campaign. In
1990 he waded through pools of blood in his rath yatra from the Somnath
temple in Gujarat to Ayodhya. Immediately on the passing of the BJP’s
Palampur (Himachal Pradesh) resolution on Ayodhya on June 11, 1989,
Advani said, “I am sure it will translate into votes.” On December 3,
1989, after the general elections, he expressed satisfaction that the
issue had contributed to the BJP’s success. On February 24, 1991, as
India teetered towards another election, he was confident that the issue
would “influence the electoral verdict in favour of the BJP”. On June
18, 1991, he made this pathetic confession: “Had I not played the Ram
factor effectively, I would have definitely lost from the New Delhi
constituency.”
Shortly after the demolition of the Babri Mosque
on December 6, 1992, and another wave of carnage that came in its train,
Advani wrote that if Muslims were to identify themselves with the
concept of Hindutva there would not be any reason for riots to take
place (
The Times of India, January 30, 1993). In July 1992, he
argued in the Lok Sabha Speaker’s chamber: “You must recognise the fact
that from two seats in Parliament in 1985 we have come to 117 seats in
1991. This has happened primarily because we took up this issue
[Ayodhya].”
Behind the BJP’s religio-cultural rhetoric, however,
there has always been cold political calculation. The BJP leader Sushma
Swaraj ripped apart this pretence in Bhopal on April 14, 2000, when she
admitted that the Ram Janmabhoomi movement was “purely political in
nature and had nothing to do with religion” (
The Telegraph; April 16, 2000). She was once a socialist and an acolyte of George Fernandes.
The
authors recall: “The hands that pumped bullets into the chest of the
Mahatma were that of Nathuram Godse, but, as was proved later, the
assassination was part of a conspiracy hatched by top Hindu Mahasabha
leaders, led by V.D. Savarkar, whose prime objectives were to snatch
political initiative from the Congress and destabilise all efforts to
uphold secularism in India. The conspiracy to kill Gandhi could not
remain hidden for long even though the trial, held immediately after the
assassination, had failed to uncover its extent.
“
The
surreptitious occupation of the Babri Masjid was an act planned by
almost the same set of people about two years later—on the night of
December 22, 1949. It was, in many ways, a reflection of the same
brutalised atmosphere that saw Gandhi being murdered. Neither the
conspirators nor their underlying objectives were different. In both
instances, the conspirators belonged to the Hindu Mahasabha
leadership—some of the prime movers of the planting of the idol had been
the prime accused in the Gandhi murder case—and their objective this
time too was to wrest the political centre stage from the Congress by
provoking large-scale Hindu mobilisation in the name of the Lord Rama.”
(Emphasis added, throughout.)
Yet the two incidents differed—as much in the
modus operandi
used by Hindu communalists as in the manner in which the government and
the ruling party, the Congress, responded to them. While the Mahatma
was killed in full public view in broad daylight, the Babri Masjid was
converted into a temple secretly, in the dead of night.
Also,
while the conspiracy to kill the Mahatma was probed thoroughly by a
commission set up by the Government of India, albeit two decades later,
no such inquiry was conducted to unmask the plot and the plotters behind
the forcible conversion of the Babri Masjid into a temple. “As a
result, an event that so remarkably changed the political discourse in
India
continues to be treated as a localised crime committed spontaneously by a handful of local people led, of course, by Abhiram Das, a local sadhu. It was, however a well-planned conspiracy involving
national,
provincial and local level leaders of the Hindu Mahasabha undertaken
with the objective of reviving the party’s political fortunes that were
lost in the aftermath of the Gandhi assassination.
Interestingly,
no major newspaper gave the event the coverage it deserved.
Investigative journalism, such as it was, was confined to the tabloids.
It would have exposed the deep divide within the Congress between Prime
Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, the secularist, and his Deputy Vallabhbhai
Patel, the communalist, who had even inaugurated, in Mumbai in 1945, the
Pranlal Mansukhlal Swimming Bath whose membership was confined to
Hindus.
First information report
The first information report (FIR) lodged at 9 a.m. on December 23,
1949, hours after the Ram idol was installed, speaks for itself. Pandit
Ramdeo Dubey, officer-in-charge, Ayodhya Police Station, Faizabad, Uttar
Pradesh, lodged this FIR against Abhiram Das, Ram Sakal Das, Sudarshan
Das and 50 to 60 other persons, whose names were not known, under
Sections 147 (rioting), 448 (trespassing) and 295 (defiling a place of
worship) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC):
“That
at about 7 in the morning when I (Ramdeo Dubey) reached the
Janmabhoomi, I came to know from Mata Prasad [Constable No. 7, Ayodhya
Police Station] that a group of 50 to 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. That Hans Raj [Constable No. 70, who
was on duty at the time when 50-60 persons entered] stopped them [from
doing so] but they did not care. The PAC [Provincial Armed Constabulary]
guards present there were called for help. But by then the people had
already entered the mosque. Senior district officials visited the site
and got into action. Later on, a mob of five to six thousand people
gathered and tried to enter into the mosque raising religious slogans
and singing kirtans. But due to proper arrangement, nothing happened.
Committers of crime [Abhi] Ram Das, [Ram] Sakal Das, Sudarshan Das with
50 to 60 persons, names not known, have
desecrated [
naapaak kiya hai]
the mosque
by trespassing the mosque through rioting and placing idol in it.
Officers on duty and many other people have seen it. So the case has
been checked. It is found correct.”
Ramachandra Das Paramhans, who told
The New York Times,
“I am the very man who put the idol inside the masjid” (December 22,
1991), was nowhere on the scene. Many believed he had left town to
attend the conference of the Hindu Mahasabha that was to begin on
December 24 in Calcutta (now Kolkata). The man who had planted the idol
was Abhiram Das.
Fight for control
There was a rift
between the intruders as well; Abhiram’s aim was to establish his
Nirvani Akhara’s complete sway over Ayodhya. “It was an established
tradition that the Nirvani Akhara possessed the temple of Lord Hanuman
inside Hanumangarhi, meaning thereby that it would have control over all
the offerings and donations that the temple received from devotees and
patrons. As part of this arrangement, the Nirmohi Akhara, another
prominent Ramanandi Akhara, had been assigned control over the
Ramachabutara. The Ramachabutara until then was worshipped as Lord
Rama’s janmabhoomi. Accordingly, all the offerings at this site were
collected by the Nirmohi Akhara.”
The claim of the Nirmohi Akhara
over the janmabhoomi would automatically be diluted if Abhiram Das, a
member of the Nirvani Akhara, succeeded in installing an idol of Ram
inside the Babri Masjid—almost 50 feet [15.2 metre] away from the Ram
chabutara. The “real janmabhoomi” that would thus emerge inside the
mosque would make the janmabhoomi owned for almost a century by the
Nirmohi Akhara redundant. And by becoming the Janmabhoomi Uddharak,
Abhiram Das would have sole control over this potentially most
significant spot in Ayodhya.
He
held the idol firmly as he began climbing the Masjid wall. He, who led
the march, was an active Mahasabhaite and was a trusted lieutenant of
Mahant Digvijai Nath, president of the U.P. unit of the Mahasabha.
Ramachandra Das Paramhans was president of the Ayodhya unit.
The
authors are scrupulously fair to V.D. Savarkar and accept that “there is
scant evidence implicating Savarkar in this conspiracy”. But the top
leadership could not have been ignorant of what was afoot. A resolution
adopted at the special session of the Mahasabha in Poona (now Pune) in
December 1950 claimed: “During this year, [the]
Hindu Mahasabha undertook the work of regaining the Ram Janmabhoomi temple at Ayodhya.
Sri Mahant Digvijai Nath [Hindu Mahasabha’s national general secretary
and president of the party’s U.P. unit], Sri V.G. Deshpande [the party’s
national vice president] and Sri Tej Narain [working president of the
party’s U.P. unit] went there and the Ram Janma Bhoomi shrine is now in
the possession of the Hindu Mahasabhaites.…”
After Gandhi’s assassination on
January 30, 1948, the Mahasabha’s former president, Shyama Prasad
Mookerjee, then a Minister in Nehru’s Cabinet, suggested two options to
the Mahasabha on February 6: “to break with its political activities”
and confine itself to “social, cultural and religious objects” or open
its doors to every citizen who accepted its programme. The Mahasabha
accepted the first in a qualified form. It decided to “suspend political
activities”, not abandon them. On August 8, 1948, the party’s executive
decided to renew its political activities, which it ratified on
November 6-7, 1948. On April 3, 1948, the Constituent Assembly had
passed a resolution denouncing communal political parties, leaving
Mookerjee with two choices, quit the Cabinet or the Mahasabha. He chose
the latter on November 23, 1948. But if political activity was to be
renewed, an attractive plank was necessary. It was the Ram temple. The
BJP followed this course in 1989 and is likely to do so again in 2013.
However,
success required support from the bureaucracy and from the ruling
party, the Congress. “The idea that eventually changed the politics of
India, though much later than its originators had anticipated, emerged
for the first time among three friends —Maharaja Pateshwari Prasad
Singh, head of the princely state of Balrampur, Mahant Digvijai Nath and
K.K.K. Nair. The three were joined as much by their Hindu communal
sentiments as their love for lawn tennis.” K.K.K. Nair, ICS was then
District Magistrate of Gonda. Between June 1, 1949, and March 14, 1950,
he was Deputy Commissioner-cum-District Magistrate of Faizabad. Later he
was elected to the Lok Sabha on the Jana Sangh ticket. His accomplice
was the City Magistrate of Faizabad Guru Datt Singh. Both were forced to
quit the service after the masjid’s take over.
Yagna and idea
In 1948 the Maharaja of Balrampur founded the Ram Rajya Parishad.
K.K.K. Nair was among his guests. He amassed massive plots of land. The
idea was mooted in the early months of 1947 when the Maharaja organised a
grand yajna. The plot was bared in 1991 in the Mahasabha’s weekly
Hindu Sabha Varta,
which the authors quote: “On the last day of the yajna, Sri Digvijai
Nath—as per the views expressed by Sri Vinayak Damodar Savarkar that the
[Hindu] religious places which had been under occupation of foreigners
must now be liberated—discussed the idea [of capturing the Babri Masjid]
with Karpatriji and Nair. Promising that he would get back to him after
considering the proposal seriously, Nair left for the district
headquarters of Gonda. The next day, reaching the place of yajna at
Balrampur, Nair went straight to Karpatriji and Mahant Digvijai Nath,
who welcomed him and asked him to sit next to them. They began
discussing the issue once again. When Nair inquired about the detailed
plan, the mahant laid before him the strategy to get back Sri
Ramjanmabhoomi in Ayodhya, apart from Kashi Vishwanath Temple in
Varanasi and Sri Krishna janmabhoomi in Mathura. Nair then promised
Digvijai Nath that he would sacrifice everything in order to accomplish
this task.”
Digvijay Nath exhorted Hindu militants on January 27,
1948, to kill Gandhi, three days before the assassination. He was in
favour of depriving “Muslims of the right to vote for five to ten
years”. The BJP is too astute to say that. But by harping on a
non-existent “Muslim vote bank” it wants to make political discourse an
intra-Hindu affair. The game would not have succeeded but for Chief
Minister Govind Ballabh Pant and his backer at the Centre, Vallabhbhai
Patel.
In 1998, the then Home Secretary of U.P., Rajeshwar Dayal, made a shocking disclosure in his memoir
A Life of Our Times.
Officials brought to him trunk loads of plans for a holocaust obtained
as a result of raids on the premises of the RSS. “I pressed for the
immediate arrest of the prime accused Shri Golwalkar (the RSS Supremo)
who was still in the area. Pant deliberately procrastinated. Golwalkar
disappeared. RSS sympathisers, both covert and overt, were to be found
in the Congress party itself and even in the Cabinet.” Speedy action
might have saved Gandhi’s life.
Congress, a house divided
The U.P. Congress was a house divided. Patel’s supporters were led by
Pant; Nehru’s by Rafi Ahmed Kidwai. But Pant controlled the party. The
Congress Socialist Party left the Congress in March 1948. All its 13
legislators resigned their seats and sought a fresh mandate. Byelections
were due in June. Acharya Narendra Dev, a Socialist, fought from
Faizabad. He had to be defeated. Pant’s faction replaced Siddheshwari
Prasad with Baba Raghav Das and Pant himself made a several visits to
Faizabad. In one speech he said that “Muslims and zamindars and other
vested interests were trying to undermine the Congress” and that
Narendra Dev did not believe in Ram.
So fouled was the atmosphere
that Nehru wrote to Mohanlal Saxena, a Cabinet colleague, in September
1949: “Indeed the U.P. is becoming almost a foreign land for me. I do
not fit in there. The U.P. Congress Committee, with which I have been
associated for thirty-five years, now functions in a manner which amazes
me. Its voice is not the voice of the Congress I have known, but
something which I have opposed for the greater part of my life […]
Communalism has invaded the minds and hearts of those who were pillars
of the Congress.” The hint was clear.
Mahasabhaites took heart
from this, as the BJP did in 1991-92 under P.V. Narasimha Rao’s regime.
When Narendra Dev lost, Digvijay Nath rejoiced that “to win the
elections the Congress leaders had to appeal to the Hindu feelings of
the voters.”
Sequence of events
The authors
carefully trace the events from October 28, 1949, onwards when a huge
congregation resolved to organise a function at the Ram chabutra on
November 24. As they point out, “till then the Ramachabutra, and not the
Babri Masjid, was referred to as Ramajanmabhoomi”. The trio—K.K.K Nair,
Guru Datt Singh and Gopal Singh Visharad, head of the Faizabad
Mahasabha —went to work. One man saw what was happening and spoke up
loud and clear. He was Akshay Brahmachari, a Gandhian who was secretary
of the Faizabad District Congress. “Developments taking place in Ayodhya
and Faizabad and the question of Babri Mosque are neither a simple
question of mosque or temple nor a fight between Hindus and Muslims.
This is a serious conspiracy by reactionary forces who want to use it to
kill the ideals of Mahatma Gandhi and win electoral battle by raising
communal passion. Local officials have also participated in this
conspiracy.”
The plotters decided, on K.K.K. Nair’s advice, that
planting the idol was better than taking over the mosque by mass action.
A meeting was held on December 2, which was attended by leaders of the
Mahasabha and Nair.
As Abhiram Das led the attack, the
muezzin
Mohammed Ismail woke up from his slumber and “grabbed Abhiram Das” from
behind and almost snatched the “idol from him”. He was beaten badly and
ran for his life. Thus a mosque was forcibly and deceitfully converted
into a temple. Islamic carvings were erased. As arranged, a crowd
collected the next morning. The reader must peruse this meticulously
documented work to appreciate the political events before the takeover
and the legal skulduggery thereafter to legitimise a crime. The
correspondence between K.K.K. Nair and the higher-ups and between Nehru
and Pant as well as Patel’s make-believe letter to Pant are all set out.
Nehru’s soft approach
Matters came to a head in August 1950 when Purushottamdas Tandon
defeated Acharya Kripalani in the polls for the post of Congress
president. Tandon, anointed at the Nasik session in September 1950,
resigned less than a year later, Patel having died in December 1950.
The
authors’ political sophistication emerges from the pointed questions
they raise about a divide in our polity. They note: “[U]ntil he
succeeded in marginalising Hindu traditionalists inside the Congress and
their source of strength outside the party, Nehru seemed to have
allowed his secularism to suffer from a certain ambiguity, doubtless due
to his concern not to hand over his opponents a chance to brand him
anti-Hindu and thereby score a deadly point over him. Pragmatists may
argue that was the reason why Nehru, as he jostled with Patel for
supremacy within the party, did not mind a great part of his vision of
secularism falling by the wayside.
“There is a counter-argument as
well, which raises some pertinent questions. Was it necessary for Nehru
to remain a mute spectator while Govind Ballabh Pant and Purushottamdas
Tandon played the communal card to finish off their opponents in
U.P.—especially Acharya Narendra Dev—and thus created a ground conducive
for the Mahasabhaites in Ayodhya? Could it have been avoided? Would
communalists still have succeeded in taking over the Babri Masjid and
retaining it in the face of all hue and cry, had Nehru opted for an
uncompromisingly tough attitude towards them right from the beginning?
Wouldn’t
a harder attitude have forced the State government to take effective
steps to remove the idol from the mosque and, thereby, undo the wrong
committed on the night of December 22, 1949? Could the Hindu Mahasabha have succeeded in going that far in implementing its Ayodhya strategy without Nehru’s soft approach?”
As
Sampurnanand wrote in his memoirs, Nehru never threw his weight behind
the Congress Socialist Party. That does not diminish the majesty of his
vision of a modern secular India. It is debatable how much power he
wielded before Patel’s death on December 15, 1950. Nehru’s mass appeal
was far greater than Patel’s, but it was Patel who controlled the party
machine. In this task Patel was aided by rank communalists such as
Rajendra Prasad, Pant, Ravi Shankar Shukla and B.C. Roy, Nehru’s old
friend, and Tandon, who said on June 14, 1948: “The Musulmans must stop
talking about a culture and a civilisation foreign to our country and
genius. They should accept Indian culture. One culture and one language
will pave the way for real unity. Urdu symbolises a foreign culture.
Hindi alone can be the unifying factor for the diverse forces in the
country.”
He became president of the Congress. Moraji Desai said
on November 29, 1964: “The Hindu majority is clean hearted and
fair-minded. I cannot say the same about the majority of the Indian
Muslims” (
Hindustan Times, November 30, 1964). He became Prime Minister of India.
Nehru’s
biographer records that “in performing this duty (protection of
Muslims), his first as the leader of a free people, Nehru could not rely
on the unqualified support of his Cabinet”. Patel and Rajendra Prasad,
backed by S.P. Mookerjee, opposed him. Patel was opposed to the return
to Delhi of the Muslims who had fled the city to escape butchery, thanks
to his own failure to protect them (S. Gopal,
Jawaharlal Nehru, pages 15-16).
Nehru
temporised and contented himself with delivering speeches and writing
to Chief Ministers, exerting himself actively when he could. On February
15, 1954, a deputation of Anjuman Taraqqi-e-Urdu met the President of
India Dr Rajendra Prasad and presented a petition asking for a Central
directive under Article 347 of the Constitution that Urdu be recognised
as one of the regional languages of Uttar Pradesh. It was presented by
Dr Zakir Husain and among its signatories were Pandit Hriday Nath
Kunzru, Mrs Uma Nehru, Pandit Sundarlal and Kishen Chander.
It
drew a rare snub to Maulana Azad from Nehru, on March 12, 1954. The
petitioners should have approached the U.P. government itself! A Central
directive “might well create some kind of a constitutional crisis”. But
invoking a constitutional provision does not create a
constitutional crisis; perhaps a
political one which Nehru feared, given the mood there (see the writer’s
The Muslims of India, OUP, pages 299-305).
Hindu chauvinism
Later, Indira Gandhi so fouled the atmosphere when she returned to
power in 1980 that even Atal Bihari Vajpayee was provoked to tell M.
Markham of
The New York Times (June 14, 1984) that her conduct in
“encouraging Hindu chauvinism is not going to pay. As the majority
community, Hindus must be above parochial politics.” This is precisely
the course Advani took in 1990.
The
demolition of the Babri Masjid in December 1992 drew a fierce attack by
a politician not only on the crime and its perpetrators, and on their
entire outlook, but also on the acquiescence of “non-Congress centrist
secular parties”. He wrote:
“We were not conscious of our own
strength either in 1977 or in 1989 and carried the BJP on our shoulders
from strength to strength…. Religious fanaticism soon became the
declared electoral platform of the BJP. Capture of power in UP led it to
believe that it could capture power at the Centre by the same tactics….
“India
is being pushed back into the dark ages by obscurantist, fundamentalist
and fascist forces. Their appeasement… has today given them the
strength and the audacity to seek to destroy the very basis of our
nation state…. [T]he secular forces will have to unitedly and
determinedly meet this challenge if India is to survive as a democratic,
secular, progressive, liberal and modern nation.”
It is hard to think of a stronger and more just denunciation of the BJP. It was written in
The Sunday Observer of December 14, 1992. On November 13, 1993, he joined the BJP. The politician was Yashwant Sinha. To
The Times of India
he pleaded dishonestly that “by then the difference between communalism
and secularism had blurred” (June 24, 2007). All the more reason for
espousing secularism even more strongly. There was no such blurring
between December 14, 1992, and November 13, 1993, at all; only the
opening of a more promising avenue to power than his mentor
Chandrashekhar could provide. As Finance Minister in the BJP-led regime
he “consulted RSS leaders before I finalised the 1998 budget” (
Confessions of a Swadeshi Reformer, page 183).
But,
of course, Yashwant Sinha was and is neither a secularist nor a
communalist; neither a fascist nor a socialist. He is simply a committed
opportunist. The likes of him will follow his example if the BJP shows
signs of renewal.
In this there is a lesson for all secularists,
but mainly for the Muslims of India. They should by all means fight for
redress of grievances which are serious; but it is an abdication of duty
as citizens of a secular state to confine politics to redress of the
community’s grievances. Secularism demands not detachment but
involvement in the entire range of the nation’s activities—economic,
social, political and constitutional. The course they have followed in
recent decades has furthered the fortunes of the thugs in New Delhi who
claim to be their “leaders”, earned them favours and marginalised
Muslims. The BJP would not have travelled as far as it did, nor would
the Babri Masjid have been demolished if the Muslims of India had lent
their shoulder to the cause of secularism. A lot of time has been
wasted.
It would be sheer folly to ignore the omens. The political clime is deteriorating fast.
