Babri Masjid anniversary: A few more things were demolished that day

mangaloretoday.com

Ayodhya, Dec 6: Kar sevaks walked on foot since private vehicles were not allowed to move towards Ayodhya. They marched in rows of hundreds and thousands day and night.

The deafening noises drowned all hopes of debate. The saffron tide had a nation swaying on its crests.

Barabanki is a couple of hours’ drive from Ayodhya, 100 km on the historic Grand Trunk Road. In the government files, it’s a Muslim-majority highly sensitive city. But that’s administrative jargon bereft of ground realities.

 

In the cobbled bylanes of the city, peace dozes off on loose bamboo cots basking in the sun. It never had a religion of its own.

Renowned local sufi saint Haji Waris Ali Shah’s shrine even has Brahmin priests dressed in yellow robes to help murids (devotees) offer ziarat (worship). A skull cap, a salaam or ’Jai Ram’ are not enough to know one’s religion here.
 
Having lived here for the first two decades of my largely idle life here, I can say with some authority that religion has never run deep here; it is shallow and more precisely fluidic.
 
In November 1992, however, the town started changing its countenance.

Sure it did not happen overnight, but it was difficult for a 15-year-old, which I was then, to fathom those undercurrents.

The markets suddenly became overcrowded and the streets dusty. There were frequent complaints from my mother that there wasn’t enough milk or vegetables in the market. And I wondered where so much of the supplies disappeared.

Saffron flags sprung up on most buildings. I pleaded with my father to allow me to unfurl one which a man in ochre clothes had given me one day when I was on my way to school. I folded it neatly and hid it in my schoolbag. I considered my father a tyrant when he asked me a bit sternly to dispose of the flag immediately.

I did not tell him of the other trophies I had collected from odd men distributing them in streets: lockets, badges, rings, wristbands and short kurtas with Lord Ram motifs on them.

 

Long after the local Ramlila got over (my friends and I had full-blast night-outs throughout the nine-day affair in November), tableaux showing Lord Ram chained in a mosque were taken out in processions. Suddenly, people looked more devout than ever: they had tilaks on their foreheads, wore saffron cloths and greeted one another with a slightly louder "Jai Shree Ram" which sounded more than just mutual greeting. 

Evenings were the most interesting. Soon after dusk, people climbed on their rooftops and beat utensils. My next-door neighbour and best buddy Shadab sat with me on our common roof and we would watch that impromptu philharmonic orchestra performance with interest.  

We both cut a sorry figure in our larger friends’ circle. We were not allowed to beat the kitchenware and all our friends on the neighbouring rooftops who were part of the utensil-beating brigade cocked a snook at us for our plight.

My two-and-a-half-kilometre-long city is rounded by the Grand Trunk Road and one of its bypasses on its two sides. Just across GT Road is my school, a dilapidated 60-year-old government structure with no boundary walls.

In fact, each time the school authorities would erect one, students demolished it quickly before the cement could firm. How else were they supposed to play truant? 

Sensing danger in the wake of massive mobilisation of kar sevaks towards Ayodhya, the district administration had ordered closure of all schools a week in advance.

But we still went to school every day. Because it was very interesting to be there and watch the unending traffic on the road.

 

 

We sat just outside the unmanned school, saluting camouflaged armoured vehicles of the security forces and indulging in impromptu competitions of eloquence to read out names of foreign media houses on their slow-moving huge and colourful OB vans that passed us.
 
Kar sevaks walked on foot since private vehicles were not allowed to move towards Ayodhya. They marched in rows of hundreds and thousands day and night. 
 
And we had discovered a curious game of ours. We, a handful of schoolboys, would shout "Jai Shree Ram" at them and when they shouted back in a deafening roar, our school walls reverberated with their voice for many moments following this. Shadab loved doing this.
 
December 6, 1992, was a Friday. At noon, I was waiting outside a nearby mosque where Shadab had gone to offer namaz to start our daily escapades, when my father came in a huff, held my hand and took me back home.

Without an explanation, we were locked inside throughout the day. And the next day and on many more, even when I saw Shadab and our glances met despite our best efforts to avoid that, we didn’t talk to each other and quietly took our separate ways.
 
We did not what had happened then.
 
I realised it later. My city had changed. Our world had changed.