Ramjanmabhumi: Hinduizing Politics and Militarizing Hindudom 127has always been establishing Hindu Rashtra. Evidently, the innocence,
somaticity, and strength division of labor of these Hindutva forces are by
no means rigidly established, and there has been a lot of intermingling
and interdependence. The Hindutva culture has been very tolerant and
even supportive of ad hoc associations and groups. The borders between
the RSS, the VHP, the BJP, its youth wing (called Bharatiya Janata Yuva
Morcha), the ABVP, the BKS, the BMS, and other Hindutva outfits have
also been very blurred. As an RSS leader put it: "they feel themselves as
part of a wider family sharing common national goals and aspirations,
and bound by fraternal ties."^70 With the conscious and unconscious help of
disparate political entities and the dispassionate civil society in India, the
Sangh Parivar, fantasizing about their Hindu Rashtra with a deviant and
outdated casteist ideology of Hindutva, cooked up a monumental issue
to concretize their dreamy project. By December 1992, the Hindutva ele-
ments managed to create an image both at home and abroad that Indian
politics had been, after all, Hinduized, and the "homogenous Hindudom"
militarized.THE BABRI MASJID-RAMJANMABHUMI
CONTROVERSY
I have chronicled elsewhere a detailed chronology of the Babri Masjid-
Ramjanmabhumi controversy up until the demolition of the mosque on
December 6, 1992.^71 A cursory look at the postdemolition phase of the
Ayodhya movement would show the cunningness of the Hindutva forces
equally clearly. One of the immediate responses of Prime Minister P. V.
Narasimha Rao's government to the demolition was the setting up of the
Liberhan Commission on December 16, 1992, to probe the sequence of
events leading to the demolition. He also imposed a nonserious ban for
two years on the communal organizations: the RSS, VHP, Bajrang Dal,
Jamaat-i-Islami, and Islamic Sevak Sangh (ISS). Besides the UP govern-
ment, they dismissed the BJP-run state governments of MP, Rajasthan, and
HP on December 16,1992, but kept the Congress governments in Maha-
rashtra and Gujarat despite the fact that communal violence ravaged more
homes and humans in these two states.
A presidential reference was made on January 7, 1993, to the Supreme
Court under article 143(A) of the Indian constitution asking the court if a
Hindu temple or any Hindu religious structure had existed at the same
site prior to the construction of the Babri Masjid. Also on January 7, Rao's
government passed the Ayodhya Ordinance of 1993, preserving the status
quo as on January 6,1993, rather than on December 5,1992, the day before
the demolition. The arbitrary date of January 7,1993, helped the inept Rao
government to hide conveniently all its commissions and omissions in the
mosque demolition.