My year of birth coincides with the demolition of the Babri Masjid. However, I came to know about the dispute sometime around 1999-2000 when Muslims of my locality hoisted black flags on their roofs and ceilings on December 6 (the day on which Babri Masjid was demolished in 1992). I asked my elder brother why they hoisted black flags on their rooftop and he recounted the whole episode. To be honest, he narrated less of an ‘episode’ and more of an ‘ordeal’.
Eighteen years after my brother’s narration of the incident, when I try to recollect how I felt at that time, two things cropped up in my mind:
1. Hindus and Muslims would fight for Mandir and Masjid.
2. The black flag was a mark to show anger and protest.
Although it was an innocent observation of a nine-year-old child, I had put into my subconscious that there are two ‘religious entities’ in India which can argue, fight and even demolish their places of worship. Fortunately, or should I say, unfortunately, I started reading newspapers at a very early age. My father is a journalist. So, every morning, I used to (and still) see a lot of newspapers. During the 1999 cricket world cup, I started leafing through them. If I remember right, I formally had a craving for newspapers in 2001. Urdu newspapers have given more space to minority news, often with articles which are laced with ‘victimhood’.
I still remember that day when abbu took English dictation and one of the words was ‘right’. I wrote it as ‘riot’. He asked me whether I knew what the word I had written meant. I simply said, “Abbu, this word is all over the English newspapers.” It was just after the Gujarat riots in which 254 Hindus and 790 Muslims were killed.
Gujarat riots had created a panic like situation. A sense of insecurity among the middle-class Muslims like us started emanating. Living in the state capital of Bihar, Patna, we were comparatively or apparently safer. Rabri Devi, the wife of one of the most popular Indian politicians, was the chief minister of Bihar then. It was the right moment for Lalu to invoke his ‘secular’ credentials. Interestingly, Lalu’s move of arresting Lal Krishna Advani on October 23, 1990, from Samastipur started doing rounds. (Advani had set out on a Rath Yatra on September 25, 1990, from Gujarat’s Somnath to campaign for a Ram temple at the disputed site in Ayodhya.)
Lalu might have lost ground among a large section of Biharis for corruption charges but for Muslims, he still was ‘bad amongst the worst’. In a recent interview to NDTV’s Manish Kumar, he said, “I saw reports and visuals of people celebrating the demolition of the Babri Masjid as Shaurya (Gallantry) Diwas. For me, Dec 6, 1992, was the saddest day. If making a promise to the Supreme Court and then violating it is gallantry, then it was a new definition.”
Around 2004-05 Nitish Kumar emerged as a secular and cleaner leader. Fed up with Lalu’s alleged involvement in corruption, people of Bihar turned towards Nitish Kumar and elected him the chief minister of Bihar in 2005. To avoid any dent in his governance, he kept a close eye on those elements who could cause communal tensions. He tightened his noose around all alliance partners, including the BJP, in a way that they never tried to communalise the environment. That was the period when Muslims of Bihar lived happily. Police were deployed at sensitive places during festivals. Riots or riot like situations were dealt with stringently.
Moving on to the general election of 2014, when I was going to cast my first vote, middle-class Indian Muslims found themselves on the horns of a dilemma. On one hand there was a so-called ‘secular’ party under whose watch encounters, demolitions, riots, marginalisation happened and on the other hand, there was a party dreaming to come to power with its hardcore majoritarian ideology. The latter was also laced with venomous speeches and vile abuses. At that very moment, I saw a lot of learned people from my community turning their back from politics. They used to say, “We don’t care who comes to power, all are the same.”
From an eight-year-old to a 26-year-old, I witnessed a lot of awful, provocative and offensive statements against the minority community. I can’t even recollect all of them. Read this statement of RSS general secretary, Bhaiyyaji Joshi, that he made recently on 11 March: “It is certain that the Ram temple will be constructed at that place and nothing else can be built there, this is also decided.” To put this into perspective, let’s suppose a renowned Muslim leader makes a remark that Babri Masjid will be constructed at that place and ‘nothing else’. Put your hands on your chest and think for a moment about how you would feel.
With riots, encounters, demolition and the worse of them all – the label of ‘anti-national’, I often ponder on this couplet:
Matti ki mohabbat me ham aashufta-saron ne (For the love of this land, we passionate people.)
Woh qarz chukaae hain jo waajib bhi nahi the (We have paid more than what was necessary.)
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