258. identity
Confrontations between groups of Hindus and Muslims shortly preceded the
British takeover of that part of India in 1856 and again followed the great anti-
British revolt of 1857. About a century later, in 1949, soon after the British had “quit
India” and the subcontinent had suffered a bloody partition into the sister states
India and Pakistan, an image of Rama suddenly appeared inside the precincts of the
mosque. Heralded as a miracle by some and as a hoax by others, this event led to a
long moratorium in which the mosque/temple was closed to worship, by court
order. When judges opened the doors again in 1986, the struggle intensified, this
time primarily under the pressure of a massive campaign waged by the Vishwa
Hindu Parishad (VHP, or World Hindu Council), a group with close ties to the
major instrument of Hindu nationalism in India today, the Bharatiya Janata Party
(BJP).
The BJP depicted itself to voters across India and to expatriates around the world
as the one force capable of rescuing India from the long-ruling Congress Party’s
policies of socialism, unbalanced secularism, slavish submission to the demands of
minorities, and general corruption. The BJP portrayed itself as the superior party
on two fronts. First, it was clean and efficient—a claim that enjoyed somewhat
greater credence before the BJP actually acceded to rule in several states. Second, it
was a party with a central agenda, and an agenda about a center. That center was
Hinduness (hindutva), a concept it borrowed from Hindu groups who had been ac-
tive since the early decades of this century. The BJP filled out the concept by giv-
ing it a physical focus: it held up Ayodhya as the symbolic center of Hindu life. Ay-
odhya was depicted as the ideal city, the city where the god Rama had watched over
his golden-age kingdom (ram rajya). As the divine exemplar of sovereignty, Rama
himself was to be India’s ruler again, with the BJP (and implicitly sister groups such
as the VHP) as his chief instruments of power.
The problem as the BJP saw it was that Ayodhya, once a truly sacred center, had
been defiled. Its most massive building was now a mosque, a structure representa-
tive of a polity and religion that the BJP and VHP depicted as belonging to an in-
vader—politically Mughal, religiously Muslim. The mosque must go if India was
to recover the sacred core of its identity. A new temple marking Rama’s birthplace
would supplant it. Several times in the 1980s and early 1990s the VHP and BJP mo-
bilized the paraphernalia of pilgrimage to create that sense of center. In a VHP
“temple-chariot journey” (rath yatra) that raced through much of India in 1985,
trucks replaced the traditional wooden temple carts as conveyances for images of
Rama and his consort Sita, who were shown behind bars. Their jailers were the twin
forces of antireligious secularity and undue Muslim power over India, and the gods