THE REPUBLICa protected monument and the government had kept it under lock and key
so as to keep both contending parties out of it. Nevertheless, Hindus had
managed to install some images of Rama and Sita in the mosque and thus
claimed that it had been converted into a temple.
In 1986 the lock had been removed and the people had free access to the
place. Rajiv Gandhi sanctioned this as a compensation for a concession
which he had to make to Muslim orthodoxy. A Muslim woman had sued
her former husband for maintenance, the Supreme Court had decided in
her favour on the basis of a general law which obliges husbands to support
their divorced wives so that they do not become a burden on society.
Orthodox Muslims argued that Islamic law regulates this differently and
that the Supreme Court has no business to interfere with it. This
highlighted once more the problem left unresolved by Nehru when he had
not seen to it that a uniform civil code was enacted in India, because he
was afraid of losing the Muslim vote. This was also true for Rajiv Gandhi
who caved in when faced with the protest of the orthodox. He should have
been firm in supporting the decision of the Supreme Court as well as in
keeping the Babri Masjid locked; instead he unlocked it and thus opened
the box of Pandora. The BJP raised the slogan that the temple of Rama
must be resurrected. This implied the destruction of the mosque, but this
point was not stressed initially.
The leadership of the BJP and the RSS-cadres remain imbued with
Sarvarkar’s idea of Hindutva, but they also know that it is difficult to
convey this idea to the people. It was much easier to conjure up Rama, the
more so as the Ramayana had just been the subject of an extremely
popular TV series. Hinduism is a non-congregational religion whose
traditions depend on the family more than on any other institution. In
recent times the family has no longer served this purpose as well as it used
to do. Young people tend to be more influenced by TV than by the prayers
of their parents. The BJP President, Lal Advani, seems to have realised
that; he climbed on to a small truck decorated to look like Rama’s chariot
with a bow in hand which was supposed to represent Rama’s famous
weapon. Thus he led a long march of his followers which was supposed to
end at Ayodhya in October 1990. But before he could reach his aim,
V.P.Singh had him arrested. Since his minority government depended on
the BJP’s toleration, he also sealed his government’s fate in this way.
There was a hidden agenda behind this confrontation. V.P.Singh had
openly favoured the Other Backward Castes (OBC); these included most of
the large peasant castes of northern India which did not qualify as
Scheduled Castes (untouchables) and therefore could not claim reserved
posts in government service. Several years before the Mandal Commission
had recommended such reservations for the OBCs, but its report had been
shelved by the Congress government at that time. V.P.Singh revived these
recommendations. The respective reservations amounted to more than a