AYODHYA: THE ONWARD MARCH OF HINDU NATIONALISM (original) (raw)
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The long-standing contest over a 1500 square yard plot of land, situated in the city of Ayodhya, located in the district of Faizabad in the state of Uttar Pradesh in north India, has become a site where religious groups, pilgrims, lawyers, and even gods are battling to establish their claims of rightful ownership. The issue has been simmering in independent India since its birth in 1947 and arose well before that time. The courts have been called upon time and again to adjudicate on this fraught issue, where their decisions are not only defining the parameters of the right to freedom of religion, but are implicated in the very construction of faith and belief. In this article, I examine how the right to freedom of religion has emerged in law, focusing on the 125-year-old property dispute in Ayodhya. I discuss how the reasoning of the 2010 Allahabad High Court judgement partly resulted in reproducing and reinforcing Hindu majoritarianism through its interpretation of the right to freedom of religion and the broader implications of the decision on the meaning and definition of secularism in Indian constitutional discourse. I also underscore how the law and judicial discourse has played a central role in enabling the Hindu Right, a right wing political and ideological movement intent on establishing India as a Hindu State and a key player in the Ayodhya dispute, to successfully pursue its agenda through the right to freedom of religion.
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The Rise of Hindu Nationalism in India: The Case Study of Ahmedabad in the 1980s
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. . Cambridge University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Modern Asian Studies. The massacre of Muslims in Ahmedabad and throughout Gujarat in February 2002 demonstrated the challenge of Hindu nationalism to India's democracy and secularism. There is increasing evidence to suggest that government officials openly aided the killings of the Muslim minority by members of militant Hindu organisations.' The Gujarat government's intervention did little to stop the carnage. The communalism that was witnessed in 2002 had its roots in the mid-198os. Since then, militant Hindu nationalism and recurring communal violence arose in Ahmedabad and throughout Gujarat.2 This study aims to shed light on the rise and nature of communalism since the mid-198os. The rise of communalism in Gujarat was unexpected. Before the mid-1980s there was little evidence of enduring or even newly developing Hindu-Muslim strife in the politics of Gujarat. Although there had been major communal riots in Ahmedabad in 1969, Hindu-Muslim tension in the 1970s and early 198os had been insignificant. The ethnic conflicts of the 1980s had primarily been about reservations policy and the status of the backward castes. The large-scale riots that occurred in Ahmedabad in 1985 began as caste riots over Acknowledgement: I am very grateful to Rajnarayan Chandavarkar and Fredrik Galtung for their comments on earlier drafts. sporadic communal riots transpired in the city and in other parts of Gujarat. oo26-749X/05/$7.50+ $o. 10 861 862 ORNIT SHANI reservations but turned into communal violence. These riots marked the beginnings of the shift from several decades of Congress dominance to the triumph of the Hindu nationalist BharatiyaJanata Party (BJP) in Gujarat as well as in Indian national politics.3 The rise of Hindu nationalism since the 198os has commonly been understood as a sectarian conflict between Hindus and Muslims, driven by religious and cultural differences, or determined by class conflicts or instrumental manipulations of the masses by political elites.4 This analysis of the Ahmedabad riots of 1985 indicates that the growth of Hindu nationalism since the 1980s can be more readily understood by realising that its spur does not lie in Hindu-Muslim antagonism. What appears as a religious conflict between Hindus and Muslims is, in fact, an expression of growing tensions among Hindus. It was largely driven by the way in which diverse groups of Hindus experienced caste and changes in the caste regime. The processes underlying the Ahmedabad riots of 1985 throw light on the origins of the communalization of the state and the society. The conduct of the state during the riots of 1985, as well as the views expressed in its inquiry of the events, reveals the dynamics by which the state's communalized practices developed and consolidated. The Ahmedabad riots of 1985 erupted over the decision of the Gujarat state government to increase the reserved quota for Socially and Educationally Backward Castes/Classes (SEBC) candidates in educational and governmental institutions from io% to 28%. However, very soon, conflict between forward and backward caste Hindus over social and economic reforms for the benefit of the lower and 3 In 1987 the BJP won the elections for Ahmedabad Municipality. In the 199g Assembly elections the party increased its seats in Gujarat from 1 1 in 1985 to 67, and by 1995 it swept the assembly elections in the state, securing 122 seats out of 182. In both the 1998 and 1999 elections the BJP retained its dominant position. See TOI, (eds), Ethnic Challenges to the Modern Nation State (Macmillan, London, 2000), pp. 268-76. HINDU NATIONALISM IN INDIA 863 backward castes transmogrified into communal violence between Hindus and Muslims. This occurred despite the fact that there was no prior religious dispute between the two communities and religion was not a category qualifying a person for reservation of places in educational and governmental institutions. The local Muslim community had no part in the reservation dispute, but an all-Hindu consolidation against Muslims emerged from a conflict among Hindus, and Muslims became its main victims.
The Ayodhya verdict is a cornerstone of the Hindu Rashtra
The Caravan, 2019
Maps of the Hindu Rashtra typically depict the Indian subcontinent drenched in a uniform saffron. Some see a lofty vision of unity in that colouring, but I see the violent and painful erasures of buildings, cultures and people that such uniformity would require. On 6 December 1992, a Hindu mob enacted one such purge by ripping apart a historical monument, a rare sixteenth-century mosque, brick by brick. This year, what the mob began extrajudicially, the Supreme Court finished through judicial opinion...