Being the Other: The Muslim in India

by Saeed Naqvi

Those who blamed Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao for having donned soft saffron during the Masjid demolition forget that the pro-Hindu strategy, inaugurated by Indira Gandhi during the Jammu elections in 1983, was patented by the Congress. Her son, Rajiv Gandhi, was no exception. During the Bhagalpur riots in 1989, Bihar’s chief minister, Satyendra Narayan Singh, had removed the superintendent of police in Bhagalpur, Krishna Swaroop Dwivedi, because he had not been able to stop direct police involvement in the carnage that followed. When Rajiv Gandhi visited Bhagalpur he promptly reinstated Dwivedi. Since 1984 his cousin Arun Nehru had taught him a mantra: we must not allow our Hindu support to drift away. Even before the shilanyas, Rajiv Gandhi had done something equally damaging. He kicked off the party’s general election campaign in 1989 from Ayodhya promising ‘Ram Rajya’ in India. Rajiv Gandhi had actually promised to establish a ‘government based on the principles of Lord Ram’. He thought he was stealing the Sangh Parivar’s platform. It was within this framework that he allowed the temple’s bricklaying ceremony to take place. This encouraged Hindu organizations to raise the bar a little higher. ‘This is not the foundation of a temple; this is the foundation of Hindu Rashtra,’ said Ashok Singhal of the VHP.