LEAVING THE WEST:

Next week will mark 30 years since the destruction of the Babri Masjid. Torn down by a mob in full public view, the demolition of the mosque, coming on the back of a massive public mobilization organized by the BJP, shook India's secular foundations. For the first time since 1950, the year India became a republic, a party had openly made national politics about religious identity and introduced majoritarianism into the political mainstream. The Babri Masjid demolition was a turning point for the BJP's political fortunes. Once confined to the margins, the party has steadily grown into an establishment juggernaut, winning absolute majorities in both of India's most recent general elections in 2014 and 2019. Under its leader, India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the party has reshaped Indian culture and politics, using its own interpretation of ancient history as a tool to ramp up polarization between Hindus and Muslims.

Much of the dominance of the Hindu right in India's politics today can be traced back to the movement to destroy the Babri Masjid and build a temple for Lord Rama, a key Hindu deity, where it once stood. Many Hindu nationalists maintain that the mosque stood at the exact spot where Lord Rama had been born. This belief had been popular in the area for decades, starting in the late 19th century. After the 1980s, a campaign initiated by political activists gave it new vigor. The claim that the mosque marked the exact spot of Lord Rama's birth was weaponized to foment anti-Muslim sentiment in general. The campaign was driven by organizations under the umbrella of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the mother organization of the Hindu right, founded in 1925. The RSS is now India's largest paramilitary and most powerful civil society organization. Several members of the present government, including Prime Minister Modi, have been schooled by it and gone on to serve as pracharaks, or propagandists, for its ideas.

The RSS has been banned three times in independent India. The first time was in 1948, in the aftermath of the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, the father of the nation. The assassin, Nathuram Godse, had himself been an RSS member. A new and acclaimed biography titled "Gandhi's Assassin" by the Delhi-based journalist Dhirendra K. Jha found no evidence that Godse ever left the organization, though the RSS maintains he had quit the group before he pulled the trigger to kill Gandhi.

The destruction of the Babri Masjid injected momentum into the campaign to turn India into a country for Hindus alone. It set the stage for portraying Islam as a religion and lifestyle alien to India, ignoring the rich history of coexistence and cooperation that have long prevailed on the subcontinent. The year 1992 marked the beginning of a drastically new form politics, aided by powerful private media organizations, which depicts Islam not just as violent but as "foreign" to Indian culture.

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