Babri Was Demolished By Hindus Like Us & We Are Consumers of Hate

We like the sound of Muslim skulls crunched under foot. Or silenced into vegetarianism and oblivion.

Picture: Altered by Aroop Mishra/The Quint

Now that the Supreme Court has cleared the last legal hurdle for the Babri demolition case to be heard, I have to remind myself of the obvious. That the fissile material stemming from its demolition isn’t about `them’ – some hoary category of Hindus out there, it’s actually about us. You and me. And the politics we have bought into as consumers in a market economy that was birthed precisely one year before the demolition of the Babri mosque.

The shiny new middle-class India, born in 1991, when our markets opened up to free trade for the first time. And set us on a course where we decided what burgers we ate and shoes we wore, and also what politics to consume. We, the Mc Burger eating, Nike loving middle class. As soon as we were given a free market, we became what we had perhaps wanted all along. To be majoritarian, Hindu and intolerant. Consumers in a market-place of identity politics. So politicians increasingly fed us what they realized we wanted.

Fundamentalists are People Like Us

Before we tell ourselves that it was a cabal of crazy people that barged through the police barricades on December the 6th 1992 in Ayodhya and brought the mosque down, we have to reckon with who we really were and still are. The vicariousness with which we consumed and in fact created the the politics of that day. Since the demolition, we have lied to ourselves and said that we were fed up of the Congress party and of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s politics of appeasement. But that is a convenient blindness we can no longer afford. We have got to look at the choices we made to create a consumer culture that blew the mosque to smitherens and is living off that polarized space ever since.

Consider this: there was a distinct shift rightward and religion-ward (read Hinduism only) in our consumption of cinema at the same time as the demolition. In 1994, two years after Babri, there was the big blockbuster hit - Hum Aapke Hain Kaun, and a spate of other films that valorised ‘The Great Indian Wedding’. Expensive, elaborate, and a celebration of new money and traditional Hindu identities. In which the lead characters were women whose life-long dream was to get married to the right man. The girl in branded clothes and shoes that was also the branded, made-to-order good Hindu wife. The slew of Karan Johar hits with “loving your family” as its central theme, catered to a large non-resident Indian or NRI market that went in tandem with the VHP’s rise. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad or World Hindu Council that asked Hindus from all over the world to contribute to the construction of the Ram temple at Ayodhya.

New Millennium of Great Hindu Past

By the 2000s, images of the great undivided happy Hindu family fused with a mythified Hindu past. It was then served up to local consumers who looked up to their NRI brethren to lead the way. A certain brand of NRIs that is. The right-wing Hindu displaced by the partition and trying to be more conventional than the conventional. The educated-but-illiberal, rich consumer, who had no idea that the myths being served up by the rising Hindu right were far away from any actual history.

It did not matter to them that historians had repeatedly said that Mughals like Babur were neither liberal or illiberal. That every king – Hindu, Muslim or Buddhist mixed religion with politics because secularism didn’t exist.

The Hindu right picked and froze a distorted version of history that was written in the 1930s by people like Jadunath Sarkar who, in turn, relied heavily on one or two colonial bigots for source material. It served their idelogues and their new consumers just fine.

Minorities Can wait

9/11 gave this an even greater push, making it almost mandatory to curse Muslims and use the M word interchangeably with terror in middle class drawing rooms like the ones I grew up in. Did I roll my eyes at irate and bigoted uncles? Yes. Did I abandon family that continually said – `but what’s wrong with building a mandir?’ No, I did not and could not abandon my entire family and most were right-wing. My great Indian middle-class family. Consisting of people who claimed Muslims were intolerant. However, they always refused to answer the following: how come every religious conflagration in India from the Partition onwards is Hindus versus someone…Hindus versus Muslim, Hindus versus Sikh, Hindus versus Christian and yet Hindus are tolerant? The question elicited the classic middle-class denial that was now the norm.

Alongside this blind-sightedness was the consumption of all things Hindu. Festivals got bigger and fatter. Offices linked annual bonuses to Diwali. Annual discount sales on juicers and washing machines and flat screen TVs were linked to Diwali. Not Eid, or Christmas, of course.

You might say this is about numbers. Majority. Money. And I will say you are exactly right. We live in the times of majoritarianism. Numbers. Money. Minorites can wait. To die. Or be lynched. Or be told that they can worship anywhere, not just in mosques. Their myths, their stories, their identity is too small to count. The numbers game is against them and if they don’t like it they can go to Pakistan. Or better still, if they are from Assam, they can try and find links that date their lineage to before the Indo-Pak war over the creation of Bangladesh in 1971. If they arrived in India after 1971, they are illegal immigrants, cannot get Aadhaar cards and are shortly to be deported, if BJP President Amit Shah’s claims have anything to do with it.

We the Consumers of Hate

We like the sound of Muslim skulls crunched under foot. Or silenced into vegetarianism and oblivion. We hold onto the partition as if it happened yesterday. Babri is only a new form of hate that we have grown and nurtured with money from abroad and money from closer home. If we liked it another way, we would have been different kinds of consumers. Our biggest selling industry wouldn’t be weddings. We wouldn’t all aspire to be new-age feudal maharajas, weighed down by buckets of jewellery and heads-full of hate. We would reject outright the atmosphere around us and the politics it has created.

But we put up with it. We feed it and invite the spokespersons of myths and factories of hate to our TV studios each night. They have built their careers and formidable political fortunes on our attentive eyes and ears. We the consumers of hate. We the people that are ruled by numbers. Absolute. Majoritarian. Children of Babri.

(Revati Laul is a Delhi based journalist and film-maker and the author of `The Anatomy of Hate,’ forthcoming from Context/Westland in November 2018. This is an opinion piece. Views expressed in the article are that of the author’s own. The Quint does not advocate nor is responsible for them.)