India’s Dharam Sansads: How the Youth Have Been Radicalised Since 1980s

An excerpt from a book traces the events that led to the formation of a Dharam Sansad by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad.

The recent controversy over statements made in Dharam Sansads in Haridwar and Raipur has turned the spotlight on these religious congregations. The following excerpt from Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay’s new book, The Demolition and The Verdict: Ayodhya and the Project to Reconfigure India, traces events that led to the formation of Dharam Sansad by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP). The book has been published by Speaking Tiger.

“Despite gains (in the early 1980s) in introducing religio-cultural nationalism as a modern idea necessary to ward off challenges India faced, the leaders of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the VHP were hamstrung by the absence of weighty Hindu saints in their fold. This deficiency was realised more acutely after the Meenakshipuram (religious conversion) incident (in February 1981), and the VHP decided to make amends immediately. Within a month, the VHP constituted a Kendriya Marg Darshak Mandal (Central Guiding Council) in March 1981. This body consisted of religious leaders from various Hindu sects and was handed the brief of advising the VHP leadership on matters relating to ‘Hindu philosophical thought and code of conduct’. These saints with no prior political affiliation were drawn to the VHP-linked set-up because of the ‘threat’ to Hinduism from ‘Islamic’ money.

A Carefully Chosen Name

The Kendriya Marg Darshak Mandal was the VHP’s link to religious leaders and assumed importance in the next few years. These leaders in the Mandal enlisted other religious patrons, and in 1982, constituted yet another body. This bigger assembly was given the name of Dharam Sansad, a name carefully chosen to make it appear as a truly representative religious body at par with the Indian Parliament.

The Dharam Sansad was positioned as the apex Hindu institution, a general body of sorts, while the Kendriya Marg Darshak Mandal acted as the executive committee, deciding on issues between Sansad meetings.

Yet, there was no ambiguity that while the VHP allowed itself to be ‘guided’ by the priesthood, its office-bearers were the actual decision-takers. Prior to every meeting of these bodies, senior members were intimated by the VHP brass regarding ‘decisions’ they had to ‘take’ and they did the needful to get these endorsed.

The January 1984 Event 

From 1950-51 onwards, local residents (in Ayodhya), especially those connected with the akharas and court cases, observed Ram Prakat Utsav, the celebration to mark Ram’s appearance, every year. The date was chosen on the basis of the Hindu lunar calendar to mark the December night in 1949 when the idol was installed. In the initial years, there was considerable enthusiasm but as time passed, it became a ritual or a routine event.

On 4 January 1984, however, the day was commemorated with greater gusto. People went inside the inner compound of the disputed property even though only the priest was permitted by the old court order.

Unknown numbers of men also climbed atop the central dome and hoisted the Hanuman Pataka or the flag of Hanuman. As in December 1949, the news spread like wildfire and on getting to know about this, ‘massive crowds’ began gathering outside the shrine. Several prominent mahants of Ayodhya, too, arrived and performed a yagna inside the sanctum sanctorum.

For the first time after December 1949, so many religious leaders had gathered inside the Babri Masjid to conduct a religious ritual. News of this reached RSS leaders and they unsuccessfully tried to co-opt the local organiser of the event, a retired Air Force official.

The RSS’s endeavour was aimed at assessing if the issue had the potential to be converted to a major rallying point. The Hindu community that the RSS and its affiliates had tried to raise as an electoral constituency for several decades after independence now appeared to be integrating into a single block. The RSS leadership hoped that while the process had been initiated by the Ekatmata Yatra, the Ram temple agitation would ensure its permanence.

The Three Arguments Behind Ram Temple Demand

Consequently, before the Dharam Sansad met for two days in Delhi during 7-8 April 1984 at the government-owned Vigyan Bhavan, there was a buzz of excitement that the temple demand would be included in the charter and a definite timeline for an agitation would be announced. The moot point was if the campaign would provoke violence or remain restricted to being another exercise in ‘knitting’ Hindu society, like the Ekatmata Yatra. The meeting was attended by nearly one thousand religious leaders from various Hindu sects.

The meeting adopted a resolution ‘unanimously’ calling for ‘restoration’ of the three religious sites, first featured in the August 1949 Hindu Mahasabha resolution: Varanasi, Ayodhya and Mathura. The Dharam Sansad, however, decided to initially take up the demand for constructing the Ram temple after ‘shifting’ the mosque.

It is worthwhile to recall that the idea to get Muslims of Ayodhya to hand over the shrine to Hindus was first made in the immediate aftermath of the forcible installation of the Ram Lalla idol in December 1949.

The three arguments for reinforcing the demand for the Ram temple, which had done the rounds in the years preceding 1949, were resurrected. Several new generations of Indians who had never heard of these arguments were impressed. The three points were: Lord Ram was born at the precise spot where the disputed shrine was located, that an ancient temple stood at the site for several centuries and was greatly venerated by Hindus, and, finally, that Babur ordered the construction of the mosque after demolishing this temple. The juxtaposition, in various speeches made at the Dharam Sansad, was between Ram, the ideal king or ‘Maryada Purushottam’, literally meaning ‘the man who is supreme in honour’, the trait of a perfect man, as against the god of an ‘alien’ religion whose punya bhoomi, or Holy Land, was located in another country.

Why Was Ayodhya Prioritised?

The second contention of the VHP was that the Ramjanmabhoomi was one of the foremost Hindu pilgrimage centres while the Babri Masjid was a ramshackle and obscure mosque over which Muslims had no control for decades. The final comparison that people were asked to make was between Ram and Babur. While the former was projected as a righteous Hindu deity, the latter was depicted as an invader king who built a mosque in place of a temple to assert religious hegemony.

Similar juxtapositions were easy to frame for Varanasi as well as Mathura, and with more substantive ‘proof’. So, why were Ayodhya and the Ram temple prioritized by the VHP and not the other two?

I had put this question to (Onkar) Bhave during my conversation. He explained that the shrines in Varanasi and Mathura were located in heavily populated localities and Muslims were also in physical occupation of the mosques in both places. In contrast, the shrine in Ayodhya was situated in a desolate spot with little human habitation. Moreover, Muslims had already lost de facto possession and the shrine was already a functional temple – it was just that devotees needed to be allowed entry.

Furthermore, Ram was presented not just as a deity but as a ‘unique symbol, the unequalled symbol of oneness, of our integration, as well as of our aspiration to live the higher values. As Maryada Purushottam, Sri Ram has represented for thousands of years the ideal of conduct, just as Ram Rajya has always represented the ideal of governance’. This notion of Lord Ram provided the cultural nationalistic ideology with a religious basis."

(The above is an excerpt from Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay’s The Demolition and The Verdict: Ayodhya and the Project to Reconfigure India. Blurbs, paragraph breaks and subheadings have been introduced by The Quint for the ease of readers.)