On December 6, 1992, a Hindu mob razed the 16th Century Babri Mosque in Ayodhya—striking the largest-ever blow to post-Independence India’s secularism. They claimed that the Mosque was built by a general of Babur, the first ruler of the Mughal dynasty, on the exact location where the Hindu god, Lord Ram, was believed to be born. Despite the opprobrium generated by the act, and the bloody riots that were sparked in its aftermath, the demolition gained legal legitimacy in 2019 with the Supreme Court of India handing over the disputed site to the Hindu claimants, and allowing the construction of a Hindu temple under the supervision of the government.
Thirty years later, Hindu nationalists across the country are stronger than ever before. Over the last few months, there have been concerted efforts by Hindu nationalists to challenge the status of mosques across the country by asserting that they were all originally temples destroyed by Muslim rulers. From internationally-famed UNESCO world heritage sites like the Taj Mahal in Agra and the Qutub Minar in Delhi to the relatively lesser-known Gyanvapi Mosque in Banaras, a seemingly concerted campaign against historical sites has intensified with majoritarian groups claiming all of these to be “Hindu structures.”
Whether it was during the demolition of the Babri Mosque three decades ago, or the recent temple-mosque rows that have emerged as the playgrounds of a culture war in India, the role of the British colonial state in creating these disputes more than a century ago has been completely forgotten in mainstream narratives.
The construction of the disputes
Predictably, the media coverage of the disputes in both India and the West has been preoccupied with the legal, archaeological and historical “facts” surrounding the disputes; the coverage has paid scant attention to how the disputes came to be, or how the “bare facts” of these disputes were constructed in the first place. This has meant a complete erasure of the role played by the British colonial state in constructing these communal disputes between Hindus and Muslims in India in a bid to legitimise imperial rule.
Postcolonial scholarship on South Asia has widely acknowledged how the bureaucratised and politicised categories of “Hindu” and “Muslim” as two distinct and inherently exclusive groups were created by the British through repeated documentation and enumeration in the census. Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, groups which differed from one another ritualistically, regionally and linguistically, were grouped together on the basis of religion in the census. Thus, turning amorphous and context-based self-identification categories were turned into the rigidly politicised religious identities of Hindu and Muslim. Furthermore, local conflicts and contests which had existed between different communities were straitjacketed into the binary of Hindu-Muslim disputes in colonial records, which enjoy the sanctity of “official archives” even in post-colonial India.
Indian historian Gyanendra Pandey has argued that the sacred sites of Hindus and Muslims, with their overt display of the “irrationality” and “excessive religiosity” of the “Orient,” served as an important metaphor for the colonial state to represent the “Other”. Therefore, colonial records are replete with incidents of “Hindu-Muslim disputes” over such holy sites. In his book The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India, Pandey has show how the colonial state routinely “looked for” the sacred site in local disputes in order to fit them into their mega narrative about Hindu-Muslim antagonism in India. For example, let us look at the case of the Gyanvapi mosque built on the ruins of the Vishwanath temple, a grand 16th century Hindu shrine in the city of Banaras in Uttar Pradesh, which was partially destroyed in 1669 on the orders of Aurangzeb, the sixth Mughal emperor. The religious character of the 17th century mosque is now under fresh legal and political scrutiny, with Hindu nationalist groups demanding the access to pray at a shrine behind the mosque and in some places within the complex.
In his book, Pandey has explained how an 1809 riot in the city of Banaras, arguably the holiest of India’s many pilgrimage sites, was written into colonial records, and then decontextualised completely to explain the history of Hindu-Muslim hostility throughout India. According to Pandey, in the first instance when the riot finds mention in British records, there are said to be 28 casualties in the riot, and the site of the outbreak is said to be the Lat Bhairava temple, which lay outside the city. However, over time, the colonial records inflate the casualty toll to several hundred. The site of the outbreak becomes the Gyanvapi mosque – or ‘Aurangzeb’s mosque,’ as the British would sometimes refer to it – where the grand 16th century temple once stood. It is no surprise that after the British documentation of “Aurangzeb’s mosque” as the site of one of the allegedly deadliest riots of India, it became the centre of bitter legal disputes between Hindu and Muslim groups.
The Gyanvapi mosque is not an outlier. The conflict over the Babri mosque in Ayodhya was also written into colonial records in the nineteenth century, in a way that straitjacketed the local dispute into the narrative of pan-Indian Hindu-Muslim antagonism. Historians have argued that the temple-mosque controversy—which had not even been widely known in Ayodhya until the 19th century — came to define the history of Ayodhya after it was “constructed” by the colonial state.
The state as the ultimate arbiter
Despite the polarising character of the temple-mosque disputes in India, they have united people across the board in their belief that there is an objective and scientific truth about these disputed sites that can be retrieved using the modern tools of archaeology, history and law. Such a view obscures the fact that these disputes have been a result of these modern tools employed by the colonial state in the first place.
This is not to say that in the pre-colonial era, there existed no acrimony between different groups co-existing in India. However, for every local conflict, there were local mechanisms through which they could be addressed. With the emergence of the colonial and the modern nation-state and their ideas of history, law and archaeology, these contested stories were settled with a hitherto unnecessary sense of finality. Local and mythological contests acquired the character of legal disputes to be settled by armies of historians, judges, politicians, bureaucrats and godmen, thereby making every small town and city stand as a proxy for the nation. The local and mythological contests that groups had dealt with for millennia became “national disputes.”
The complicity of laws
The fiction of legal and constitutional neutrality in post-Independence India has not been undermined by the fact that laws and the Constitution itself are routinely flipped around to justify completely opposing ideas. The idea that the legal system is the most apt arbiter of social conflicts remains unexamined, despite the excessive evidence of laws being creatively manipulated to achieve majoritarian goals.
For example, at the time when the Ram Temple Movement was at its peak in 1991, and the Babri Masjid was still standing, the Congress government brought in The Places of Worship (Special Provisions) Act of 1991, when required that any place of worship maintain the religious status which it held on 15 August, 1946—the day of Indian Independence”
Hindu parties recently approached Indian courts to allow for prayer and worship of their deities inside the Gyanvapi mosque, and the courts have come up with ingenious legal
justifications to circumvent the Act. For example, earlier this year, the apex court of India observed that while changing the religious character of a place of worship may be prohibited under the act, ‘finding the nature of the religious place’ was not. Similarly, interpreting the Act earlier this year, the Varanasi District Court said that the determination of religious character of a place of worship is ‘a matter of evidence,’ and therefore, arguably not prohibited by the Act. Meanwhile, Hindu nationalists have already been pushing the central government to re-examine the Act itself.
While the Constitution and its legal framework are often seen as a bulwark against majoritarianism in India, scholar Hilal Ahmed has argued that the dichotomy between the
Constitution and majoritarianism is rapidly becoming redundant in contemporary India. This, he argues, is because Hindu nationalists are increasingly employing legal technicalities to articulate their political and ideological demands. From the revocation of Article 370, which gave certain special privileges to Jammu and Kashmir, to the passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019, which gives citizenship to all non-Muslim persecuted religious groups from India’s neighbouring countries, Hindu nationalists have consistently employed what Ahmed refers to as ‘Hindutva constitutionalism’ to achieve their ideological goals.
Thirty years after the demolition of the Babri masjid, the chances of another mob-led demolition of a mosque in India are slim. Instead, the unending demands of building temple
over mosques will be defended constitutionally and legally. To see how the Constitution and the legal apparatus will increasingly be used to achieve Hindutva goals, one has to begin by understanding that the seemingly neutral and objective laws were put in place by an oppressive colonial state, for whom creating communal disharmony was an active state policy. To find solutions within the same colonial structures is both unimaginative and demonstrably counter-productive.