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That Fateful Day
The Babri Masjid was demolished a quarter century ago but it is evident today when we look back that much more than the demolition of a 16th century building is involved. There is a well-thought-out, fully evolved and hardly concealed plan to deprive India of the heritage that has let it survive tempestuous interventions and retain its pluralist fabric. But then the people are bigger than state power as well as any partial social base.
Six December 1992. The fateful day that brought home the image of the end of the world, at least the end of the nation as we had known it. What else would befall the nation whose very survival now faced a question mark, was the thought that haunted us, reared as we were on the notion of secularism that almost coincided with atheism and of the separation of state and religion. Clouds turned darker when bomb blasts in Bombay (now Mumbai) in March 1993 ripped apart the last and the slimmest hope of pulling together. An edifice of an idea and an ideal built over a lifetime came crashing down.
A few weeks later, a glimmer of hope began to show up when news started filtering in from small towns and remote localities that Hindus and Muslims there had got together to rebuild the mosques and temples that had been destroyed or damaged and had resolved to ensure that no outsider could enter their locality to create communal tension. After the Bombay incidents, riots had begun to subside and social peace remained in place in the absence of large-scale riots over the next decade, until 2002 in Gujarat where the state administration’s abetment has been a living memory.
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