From Babri to Mumbai and Beyond: India’s Journey Into Darkness

1992 was an age of incoherence in India. A succession of weak, fractious, inept, and short-lived governments had pushed the country to the brink of bankruptcy and chaos. A fledgling Congress Party-led coalition under the leadership of Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao was struggling to consolidate its position in Parliament and the administration, and to restore economic stability through a slew of reforms. 

There were raging insurgencies in multiple theaters across India, the worst of these in Punjab, where a total of 3,883 people lost their lives in 1992 to a Sikh separatist movement before it was defeated, abruptly and comprehensively, the following year. In the northern state of Jammu and Kashmir, Islamist separatist terrorism backed by Pakistan resulted in 1,909 fatalities; multiple insurgencies in India’s Northeast saw 492 killed. Another 788 persons were killed in a widening Naxalite (left-wing extremist) rebellion along India’s eastern board, spanning large areas from Andhra Pradesh to Bihar. The combined toll of all such violence was 7,072 fatalities in 1992 (all data from the South Asia Terrorism Portal). 

To the distant observer it might have seemed that much of India was aflame – and possibly ready for “balkanization.”

Outside Jammu and Kashmir, however, there was little evidence of Islamist terrorist mobilization, despite the strident polarizing campaigns of the Sangh Parivar, a complex network – both formal and informal – of political and social institutions linked to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (which includes the present ruling Bharatiya Janata Party). The Sangh Parivar demonstrated across the country over the Babri Masjid, a 1529 mosque constructed over Hindu structures in Ayodhya believed by the devout to be the birthplace of the Hindu deity Ram. The dispute had lingered in court for over a century, with a case first filed in 1885. In 1949, when an idol of Lord Ram “mysteriously” appeared in the mosque, the then-Jawaharlal Nehru government locked the mosque, declaring the site a “contested area.”

In 1984, Hindutva groupings led by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP, the World Hindu Council) formed a committee to build a temple at the site of the Babri Masjid, with BJP leader Lal Krishna Advani chosen to head the campaign. But for the next two years, they floundered, finding little traction among the masses or at the ballot box. In the wake of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination, the Congress Party won over 80 percent of the 514 seats in Parliament, with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) reduced to just two at the 1984 elections. 

Then, in 1986, a local court in Uttar Pradesh ordered that the locks be removed from the Masjid, and Hindus be allowed to worship there. The government, then headed by Jawaharlal Nehru’s grandson Rajiv Gandhi, chose not to appeal the decision. The locks were opened, perhaps in the misguided belief that this would help the ruling Congress Party consolidate the “Hindu vote bank.”

It was a colossal miscalculation. 

The VHP intensified its campaign for a temple where the Masjid stood, and the issue became the BJP’s principal poll platform in the 1989 elections. As Hindutva sentiments raged and communal tensions spiraled across the country, the BJP corralled an unprecedented 85 seats (and another three in by-elections thereafter) in Parliament. The premature elections of 1991 saw the BJP surge to 120 seats. The dramatic electoral successes ensured that this pattern of cynical exploitation of religious symbols and sentiments would be the party’s principal tool of political mobilization for decades to come. 

L.K. Advani’s “Toyota Rath Yatra,” described as the “Chariot of Fire” by one publication because of the trail of communal riots it left in its wake, followed soon after. Simultaneously, a Ram Shila Pujan movement electrified support across the country. Bricks with “Shri Ram” molded on them were consecrated in hundreds of thousands of towns and villages across India, and then transported, each with a small financial contribution, in processions to Ayodhya, giving millions of Hindus a sense of having vicariously participated in the building of the proposed temple.

From this point on, competitive communalism, pride, hate, and schadenfreude congealed into an unstoppable juggernaut, culminating in the demolition of the Babri Masjid two years later in early December 1992. 

Riots and terrorism followed quickly, with India’s deadliest Islamist terrorist attack – the March 12, 1993, serial bombings across Mumbai that killed 257 and injured over 1,400 – claimed as a direct response to the bloody riots that took at least 900 lives in the city in December 1992 and January 1993. The serial blasts were executed by a prominent criminal gang – the D-Company headed by Dawood Ibrahim – but with explosives and directions emanating from Pakistan, where the principal perpetrators fled. Dawood Ibrahim continues to live in Pakistan to this day, even after being designated an international terrorist by the United Nations and the United States, among others.

In the aftermath of the Babri Masjid demolition, Pakistan found widening opportunities to mobilize, arm, train, and task Indian Islamist extremists across India to engage in a succession of terrorist operations outside the already inflamed theater in Jammu and Kashmir. With men, materials, and ideologies moving easily across the border, there was a rapid mushrooming of Islamist extremist groupings, many of which engaged in no more than a few attacks before their leaderships slipped just as easily across into welcoming safe havens in Pakistan. 

Others endured longer, creating alliances with entrenched terrorist groups operating from Pakistan and Bangladesh. Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, emir of Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Jamaat ud Dawa, declared that Kashmir was the “gateway to capture India.” Joint operations between these groups and local formations became the norm for several years. 

Islamist terrorist activities outside Jammu and Kashmir escalated after the Gujarat riots of 2002, which left 1,054 dead according to official accounts, and peaked between 2005 and 2008, and then fell abruptly after the November 26, 2008, attack in Mumbai, as intelligence and enforcement agencies effectively targeted the leadership and cadres of the principal facilitator and major perpetrator of joint operations – the Indian Mujahideen. At the same time, Pakistan came under increasing international – particularly U.S. – pressure in the aftermath of the 2008 Mumbai attack, which left 175 dead, including 26 foreigners, among them, crucially, six Americans.

The Islamist terrorist attacks were grist for the Hindutva mill, helping demonize the entire Muslim community, feeding fear and frenzy in a growing radical fringe. That, in turn, led to the emergence of a number of “shadow armies” and provoked a flirtation with reflexive Hindutva terrorism among some of these. 

A far more important outcome, however, was the slow steamroll of the BJP’s electoral consolidation. In the 1996 elections, the BJP cornered 161 seats and emerged as the largest party in a hung Parliament. The government it formed failed to secure adequate outside support, and 13 days later, fell without facing a vote of confidence. Another two short-lived governments struggled for survival, until the general elections of 1998, which returned 182 seats to the BJP, still 91 short of a majority. However, support from other groups, particularly the Telegu Desam Party, allowed the formation of a BJP-led National Democratic Alliance Government, with Atal Behari Vajpayee as prime minister, and L.K. Advani as home minister and, later, deputy prime minister.

For all the hatred and violence they had provoked, it is important to recognize that the BJP leadership at this stage represented the relatively “moderate” faction within the party. While Hindutva remained both an electoral and rhetorical plank, the movement was allowed to simmer, rather than to boil over, as the extremist faction would have preferred, into a demand for the destruction of another two mosques – one at Varanasi and another at Mathura – that were also built over prominent Hindu structures. Indeed, the more hot-headed among the BJP at this juncture spoke of “not three but 3,000” mosques slated, in their minds, for destruction. 

Hubris and an ill-conceived “India Shining” campaign, however, intervened, resulting in the BJP’s loss of power for a decade after 2004. Whatever its other failings, the intervening Congress government made steady gains against Islamist terrorism (as well as the multiplicity of insurgencies in the country). From a peak of 5,504 terrorism/insurgency-linked fatalities in 2001, the number dropped to 837 by 2012, after a near-continuous decline commencing in 2002. Islamist terrorism-linked fatalities in Jammu and Kashmir collapsed from a peak of 4,011 in 2001 to 121 in 2012. Outside Jammu and Kashmir, Islamist terrorist fatalities topped out at 362 in 2008, but just two were registered in 2012 – though 2013 saw a transient spike at 31 killed, the number dropped down again to four the next year.

The second term of the Congress government under Manmohan Singh was riddled with scandals, with the prime minister choosing to defend the corrupt in terms of what he described as “coalition dharma” – in other words, the sacrifice of ethical norms in the interests of hanging on to power. The government limped through its last days under the burden of widespread allegations of corruption only to be swept aside by the BJP winning a clear majority – with 282 seats, and its National Democratic Alliance totaling 336 seats – giving the new governing coalition the largest majority since 1984. 

Significantly, the BJP's vote share, at 31 percent, was the lowest for any party winning a majority of seats since independence, but this was no deterrent. In any event, the election of 2019 saw the BJP’s vote share surge to 37.36 percent, the highest for any party since 1989, taking the party to 303 seats, and the NDA coalition to 353 seats, more than the critical two-thirds majority required for constitutional amendments. 

From the hesitation of the earlier generation of the BJP’s leaders to fully accept the controlled chaos they had unleashed, the Hindutva leadership now embraced it wholeheartedly, even as Prime Minister Narendra Modi rapidly engineered the marginalization of the relatively moderate leadership of the past. The visibility and presence of the networks of the core Hindutva institution, the Sangh Parivaar, saw rapid expansion, parallel to that of burgeoning gangs that were not quite acknowledged as a formal part of this complex, but operated with a measure of impunity, underwritten by the Parivaar and the regime.  

Sporadic targeted violence merged powerfully with a politics of polarization, demonizing first Muslims, then a widening array of “anti-nationals.” Armies of trolls intimidated critics and opponents of the regime and its Hindutva project, subjecting dissenters to a range of epithets – at their mildest, “libtards,” “sickulars,” “liberandus,” “presstitutes,” and at the less temperate end of the spectrum, outright abuse, death threats, and, for women, threats of rape and mutilation. 

Even as the actual threat of insurgency and terrorism declined, new threats were invented to maintain a larger-than-life bogey of the Islamist threat. When the Islamic State (IS) declared India as part of its imagined Khorasan Province, and al-Qaida announced the formation of al-Qaida in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS), both in 2014, a multitude of well-resourced conferences and hysterical TV talk shows declared that Ghazwat ul Hind, the prophesied Islamic invasion of India, was imminent, and the Islamist hordes were poised to sweep across the borders. There was no strategic assessment of capacities or capabilities; the mere declaration was proof of unprecedented threat. 

A more sober assessment would have acknowledged the fact that al-Qaida had long been lamenting its failure to find a foothold in India despite efforts dating back to at least 1996, prompting its despairing query to the Indian Muslim: “Why is there no storm in your ocean?” That India has seen, between 2014 and the present, a minuscule 111 people traveling to Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan to join IS, out of a population of over 210 million Muslims – perhaps the lowest proportion in the world – has no relevance to this campaign of orchestrated mass paranoia. 

Instead, rare incidents of IS or al-Qaida “inspired” attacks or other acts of terrorism – or, indeed, alleged plots – are exploited to feed the astonishing insecurities of the majority community. There have been just 31 Islamist terrorism-linked fatalities outside Jammu and Kashmir since 2014, of which 22 are in the “terrorist” category, but this has done nothing to temper the rhetoric. Instead, hundreds of purported “sympathizers” have been arrested across the country under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967, for a range of inchoate offenses, including speech and other acts that would certainly fall under constitutional protection. These arrests are projected as evidence of the abiding threat of the “terrifying Mussalman.”

Similarly, even as the Naxalite movement collapsed, both geographically and operationally, a new category was invented of the “Urban Naxal,” “intellectuals” purportedly sympathetic to the Maoist movement in India. Once again, the fact that some Maoist parties are part of the electoral process and any advocacy of Maoism would fall under the protection of free speech remains entirely irrelevant. Such campaigns suffice to keep the mass paranoia going. 

All this is only one element of the Modi government’s and the Hindutva project to create an overwhelming and strangely incoherent “alternate reality.” Mythmaking, rampaging falsification, suppression and doctoring of data – every instrumentality to impose a narrative that could serve the purpose of the capture and retention of power – is projected into a discourse that suppresses the very possibility of nuance. The manipulation and dominance of social media is integral to this project. 

By 2018, Amit Shah, the then-president of the BJP, and now minister of home affairs, boasted, at a convention of the party’s “social media volunteers” in Rajasthan, that the BJP could make any message, “true or fake,” go viral, on the strength of sheer numbers of such “volunteers” and the centralized orchestration of messaging. He added, “It is through social media that we have to form governments at the state and national levels.”

This project has created an astonishing hybrid: “muscular nationalism” and postures of belligerence that are difficult to reconcile with, and increasingly undermine, India’s capacities and capabilities, even as national policies and practices fail to measure up to real national challenges; a majoritarian mass, at once relentlessly aggressive and perpetually terrorized; a nation that aspires to be the teacher of the world, with a collapsing educational system, actively undermined further by the invention of false histories and suspect “sciences”; and overweening pride in a “culture” that the lumpen supporters of Hindutva have little understanding of, and no capacity to participate in. 

The obvious error, of course, is in the inability to distinguish between cultural history and culture. The former comprehends the no doubt extraordinary attainments of a people who lived on this soil hundreds or thousands of years ago; the latter reflects practices and achievements today, which, at very best, are far more modest, and to which the obscurantist Hindutva adherents have made little contribution. 

Crucially, no moderating correctives remain, as institutional autonomy is subverted across the board, and effective political opposition is coopted, suppressed, or simply bought over. A complete breakdown of institutional autonomy and unashamed abandonment of the rule of law is manifest. Various central investigative and enforcement agencies act openly as instrumentalities of the ruling party, as do the police in BJP-ruled states. Members of the superior judiciary have themselves testified to the manipulation of the Supreme Court by “someone from outside,” and the state of the lower judiciary can only be worse. The media has almost entirely been subordinated to the interests of the ruling dispensation, and occasional criticism is met with intimidation by state institutions, by outright thuggery, or by the final option – as in the case of NDTV – of a combination of interventions by enforcement agencies, culminating in an eventual financial takeover. 

There is a clear continuum from the events that led up to the demolition of the Babri Masjid to the looming darkness that confronts India today, and in the foreseeable future. The essence of this darkness is the erosion of institutional integrity, as well as of the very sinews of the state – the destruction of its capabilities at the cutting edge of science and technology, and their underpinnings in education; the loss of domestic industry and manufacturing; India’s progressive economic dependence on, and widening technology gap with, a powerful and predatory neighbor and the consequent loss of the ability to make sovereign and sustainable decisions; crucially, the triumph of dogma and irrationality over critical thinking, and of hate and exclusion over the inclusive constitutional order. 

The BJP and the Sangh Parivar imagine themselves a nationalist force, but history is likely to judge the harm they have done to the Indian nation far greater than the cumulative injury of a long succession of feckless, louche, and corrupt governments that have afflicted India.