 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. It is now 20 years since the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya by Hindutva extremists. To discuss the continuing social, cultural and political impact of that traumatic event and the events that preceded and followed it, we have with us today Sukumar Murlidaran, veteran journalist. Welcome to NewsClick, Sukumar. The Babri Masjid demolition has left a permanent scar on the multicultural fabric of our nation and on our secular polity. Has India become decisively or at least more sharply communalized than before? Yeah, well, when you say a permanent scar, I would not use that word. It was a very deep scar, no doubt about it, it is a very traumatic event. These things can be healed, provided that the nation states institutional mechanism kicks in and does what is necessary and what is warranted, what is mandated by the Constitution to correct these abuses. Unfortunately, that has not happened, so the scar has remained and the scar, if anything, has got deeper. And corrective now will be a much more tumultuous kind of event than would have been the case earlier. We should understand that Babri Masjid, when it occurred, was a decisive blow against pluralism, against the multiplicity of perceptions of our history, of multiplicity of perceptions about our identity, which in a way reflected the true situation on the ground because this is a very diverse country and if we want to hang together as a country, we have to respect that diversity. But unfortunately, this was the precise opposite, saying that we want a single unitary point of view about how we look at our history. We want a single unitary pantheon of nationalist heroes, including stretching us far back as mythology. And we will have corresponding to that clearly identified set of villains who we will identify as our enemies. So, this obviously is not something that very large sections of this country can share in. And there was a coercive effort to impose this vision and the demonstration at Ayodhya was a kind of climactic act in that drama. So, in the context of trying to heal these wounds, what lessons do you think India has learned or not learned since the demolition? Well, in the immediate aftermath, you and I were old enough to remember what a deeply traumatic moment it was. There was a sense of national urgency that this has gone too far and we have to deal with it in one way or the other. And political parties united, except for the authors of the demolition who remained isolated. The others united to kind of present broad based kind of consensus that we should correct this wrong and ensure that it does not happen. Now, there were several tracks on which that could have been pursued. Firstly, the demolition itself, they should have been accountability established for that, who was responsible for it. And then, of course, the demolition was not an isolated event. It came after a long cycle of mobilization with overt acts of violence against religious minorities. And it was followed also by a long sequence of riots in which Bombay, as Mumbai was known then, was one of the worst affected cities. And that was again a Bombay being a city then that so many of India, so much of India identified with. It was very symbolic that the very heart of the nation is being torn apart. So, that moment should have been utilized and that the processes of accountability to hold those responsible guilty under the process of the law without it appearing as political vendetta. No, because there was a clear cut legal provisions under which they could be charged. And also for the riots that proceeded and followed. Unfortunately, none of this happened. Then the political deals were struck and opportunism prevailed. And the principles of our constitution were entirely forgotten. Which is why 20 years after the event, we still can't say that we are immune to a further Exactly, that is precisely my question that since the demolition and its aftermath, the riots in Bombay, there have been many other such incidents coming leading up to today where the administrative actions required have been seen to be lacking. And what is otherwise normally presumed to be the last resort, which is the Indian judicial system has also been unable to show itself capable of dealing impartially with such disputes and resolving them. And in fact, even the High Court judgment, which is the current operational judgment on the Ayodhya dispute still has resorted to arguments relying on faith and belief, rather than on an impartial judicial accounting of the system. Exactly, and what is most alarming about the higher judgment of the Lucknow bench of the Lahabad High Court is that it was a three way, there were three judgments, three separate judgments by a three judge bench. You know, it's sometimes very awkward to say these things, but there was a clear ghettoization of the mind of the judicial approach there. Because the one judge who was from the minority community had a very different perception of the whole thing. He said that this whole controversy is cooked up. He identified clearly that 1949 was an act of trespass, that the process by which the mosque was commandeered by local communal forces and the idols were inserted there was an act of trespass. And that original illegality created that entire political turmoil that followed. And in 1986 also he identified when the doors were opened by order of magistrate. The matter is the title suit pending in a higher judicial bench and there was clear political directive involved in the magistrate ordering that the gates be opened for Hindu worshippers. So these are identified, but then he said that you know, but we can't push this case too much. And he I think quoted something from the theory of evolution about the fittest surviving and so on and so forth and said, you know, let's back off and just allow this majoritarian point of view to prevail. But that is not a judicial accounting in a sense. So that judgment is entirely void of judicial logic. That's right, on either side, on any side in fact. The minority judge had more of the judicial prudence than his judgment, the other prude didn't have quite much of it. So this is what is alarming about it because under the pressure of circumstances with the coercive kind of political environment that prevails, even the judiciary, which is an institution that we all have learned to respect, and which has in several of its determinations shown itself to be worthy of that respect. In this case, it just couldn't do what is right. So fortunately, the Supreme Court has set aside the judgment, used a very strong word, said that it's a perverse judgment. But then how far the Supreme Court is actually going to correct the situation. We don't know. In fact, don't you feel a sense of deja vu in watching what is happening in Hyderabad as we speak with the dispute over a recent or fairly recent Hindu temple come up in the precincts around the Charminar. And you've got the same old arguments being raked up as to how ancient this Hindu temple was and whether it has come up now or then. And still there is no firm administrative action. And one is still waiting to see whether any judicial action will be taken to resolve this dispute and in what way it will happen. Yes, precisely. I mean, that's the most alarming development because the Charminar is as far as I can understand protected monument and there should be very strict rules about any kind of construction activity in its near vicinity. And to see that this has come up without anybody noticing it. And the Hindu has done a great public service by highlighting this issue at this stage. We have to also look back at 1949 and Ayodhya being one among many such acts of territorial conquest, so to speak. Because it was a very fraught environment and partition had just happened. There was large scale violence. Both sides were inflicting horrific violence on the other. And there was a deep sense of ill feeling towards the other. So Ayodhya, there had been a dispute brewing for a long time, but that was purely local. Now by that intrusion of the idols there, that local dispute became, in a sense, identified with the identity of the nation coming to being. So in some senses, suppressing that other identity became a way of asserting the new identity of the Indian nation. Now this has continued and if you consider the correspondence at that time between, say, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and the Home Minister Sardar Malabhai Patel, Mr. Nehru does point out that even in the vicinity of Delhi, there have been several such cases of mosques being kind of converted through ritual introduction of Hindu icons and Hindu symbols and that this is the most unsatisfactory situation. It has to be reversed. He makes that very clear statement. So this is, in a sense, continuing still even after 60 years. Well, the lesson of this is that this assertion of national identity by opposition and by antagonism towards another is still continuing and with potentially very, very dangerous consequences. Let me ask you a slightly wider ranging question. In matters relating to so-called religious or community sensitivities in India, there is clearly an increasing resort to pressure tactics, sometimes violence in order to push a particular communitarian vision or perspective on issues to push a de facto even if not a legal argument. Whether it is monuments, biographies, novels, paintings, what have you, there is an insistence on pushing one communitarian vision even at the cost of public order through violence etc. Given this increasing trend and given weaknesses of the administrative as well as judicial system in tackling this, how does the modern secular Indian state and Indian society evolve to deal with these challenges? Well, this is obviously a very, very difficult question to address and we are touching at the very heart of how we identify smaller identities and how these are allowed to allow their own domains in which they have primacy, but in some senses are willingly subject to the larger identity of the nation, which is a compound of multiple such identities arrived at through a process of consensus rather than coercion. Now, there could be coercion which induces one small community to give up its language, its observances, its ritual practices and submerge it in the larger, for instance, what is called the Sanskritization process. In some senses it was voluntary, in some senses it was driven by aspiration, in some senses it was coerced. Partly coerced as well. So at some point in India's history, I think a lot of these smaller identities got the feeling that they were getting an unfair deal. You know, if you look at the cultural production of say 30 or 40 years back, you had cultural productions like the Muslim Social, which was a very important genre in our film about the Muslim community and their own internal debates and how they're dealing with challenges of modernization and reckoning with how to preserve the best of that tradition without being bound by all that is regressive in it, you won't find that kind of cultural productions anymore. Now they're more and more focused on what they view as fundamentals and that applies for variety of communities. Now the Nadar community in Tamil Nad is on the war path because of some paragraph in history textbook which says that they were migrants in the late 16th century to what is now Southern Kerala. Now the point is that the current identities, linguistic identities are being read back into history whereas these are all modern creations and artifacts very much of modernization and there's no need to make your current claims, your current entitlements to whatever is the national product and whatever is the other rights guaranteed by the states make it subject to some kind of primeval or primordial identity. We are all equal citizens. Now that is the reality that somehow we are not able to get everybody to accept because the state is unable to live up to that guarantee of equality before the law. And in the middle of all this lack of equality before the law demands an equal recognition of evidence, of history, of fact-based solutions and that seems to be regressing in the face of communitarian pressures, emotional pressures and ideological pushes of one kind. Even if you accept that the reading of history that's reading of facts that the reading of evidence can be different depending on your point of view you have to accept that we should have discourse based on equality at this time and that the doors are open for everybody to come and place their viewpoint without resorting to this kind of political coercion or threat of violence. Now unfortunately that environment is not yet established. Now that essentially is a failure of the Indian state in the sense of its inability to live up to constitutional premises, constitutional guarantees. So it's very easier said than done but I think a lot of it is also a function of rising inequality, the failure of the media for instance to fairly represent diverse viewpoints and now you have increasing dependence on the what's called the market philosophy which has principles of exclusion. So possibly we're moving the reverse direction rather than allowing more and more voices to come into the national debate what we found over the last 20 years despite all the appearances of growing diversity of the media and so on is that the discourse is becoming more and more exclusive. Thank you Sukumar. I think we've raised a lot more issues than we perhaps intended to when we started this discussion. I hope you'll have a chance to come back to some of these issues again fairly soon. Thank you once again.