The WRATH OF RAMA : A Fight Over a Mosque on Ground Holy to Hindus Has Reignited India’s Ancient Feud

NARIYAL BABA SHOWED UP WITH A COCONUT on his head. It’s the same one that’s been balanced there for the past six months or so, thanks, he explains, to the power of his god, Lord Rama. And that coconut is going to stay there until Lord Rama gets his temple back, Baba insists, dancing a little jig in the afternoon sun to prove that his coconut does, indeed, defy gravity.

Uma Bharati, a member of the Indian Parliament, stood nearby. Her head was shaved, and she wore a sari of saffron orange, the holiest of hues to the Hindus. Hindus worship their hair almost as much as their gods, but for Bharati, shaving her head was a small sacrifice. It was, after all, her protest on behalf of her god, Lord Rama. It’s a ritual she began last October, and she plans to continue until Rama gets his temple back.

But this was just the beginning.

Before the sun had set that hot spring day last month, a half million or so other Hindus had gathered for more than six hours in the sprawling downtown New Delhi park known as the Boat Club. Naked sadhus, or holy men, smoked ganja from ancient chillum pipes. Bearded saints, their foreheads streaked with the bright white bars of high-caste Brahmans, hoisted spears, swords, tridents and daggers and wailed slogans for their god, Lord Rama. Students plastered their bodies with buttons, bands and stickers bearing the holy Hindu symbol of “Om” and the words “Long Live Lord Rama.” Policemen, on hand to control the largest crowd assembled in New Delhi since India’s independence in 1947, often forgot themselves, joining in the chanting and pausing to touch the feet of a passing saint.

At the center of the park, a 20-foot-high stage was dwarfed by two towering, hand-painted billboards. One depicted a two-story-high, smiling, blue Lord Rama clutching his bow and arrows. On the other billboard was a rendering of an imposing golden temple that millions of devotees have vowed to build for Rama at the place of his birth despite what might seem an insurmountable obstacle: The large, concrete Babri Mosque, regarded as holy by India’s 100 million Muslims, occupies the very same spot. And it is the singular vision of removing that mosque to make way for Lord Rama--known familiarly as “Ram”--that has driven so many followers not simply to this massive rally but, in earlier demonstrations, to their deaths.

“Those Ram devotees who sacrificed their lives have washed this temple with their blood,” Uma Bharati shouted from the stage. “Everyone except us wants the mosque to remain there so that religious harmony remains strong. If this is so, we would like a temple to Hanuman (Hinduism’s monkey god) to be built at Mecca and Medina (the birthplace and tomb site, respectively, of the Islamic prophet Mohammed in Saudi Arabia). How good the atmosphere would then be with Mohammed on one side and Hanuman on the other.

“Talk of religious harmony reminds me of biology experiments,” Bharati continued in her fiery soprano. “Experiments are performed on rats, frogs and rabbits. Not on lions. Similarly, for experimenting with religious harmony, why select only Hindus? Please tell the world before leaving this Boat Club that we Hindus are not frogs, rats or rabbits. Now, we are lions.”

Surrounded by the low-rise, pink sandstone modernity of India’s 60-year-old capital, the stage that day resounded with the call, from saint after saint and pundit after politician, for all Hindus to reach back thousands of years to find their identity and meaning in the ancient demigod Lord Rama. That call is the battle cry of a Hindu revivalist wave that is ripping apart the world’s largest secular democracy, where religious freedom, guaranteed in India’s constitution, frequently has been accompanied by religious tension.

“All that we want,” screamed Ashok Singhal, the graying and fanatical driving force behind the Rama temple crusade, “is to build a temple there at Lord Rama’s birthplace.”

The problem is that the Babri Mosque has been there for 463 years. And “there” is a bit of a problem, too. No one can prove that Lord Rama ever existed, let alone where he was born. The giant blue god-king is largely a poet’s creation, a demigod portrayed as the personification of good in an ancient epic written 2,000 years ago and rewritten so many times in so many different cultures that even his staunchest devotees concede that they don’t know exactly when Lord Rama was born. Some say it was 2,500 years ago. Others say it was more like 900,000. But all of them are certain where he was born. It was, they say, in the town of Ayodhya, 400 miles east of New Delhi, right on the spot where the Babri Mosque now stands. Hindu devotees are convinced that the mosque was erected by invading Islamic Mogul hordes only after they demolished an ancient Rama birthplace temple as a symbol of conquest. Now, five centuries later, the mosque, a hated reminder for Hindus of abuse and degradation, has been revived as the key symbol for Hindu nationalists committed to undoing centuries of submission to foreign powers.

So goes the basic plot of the modern world’s most confounding and compelling cosmic real estate story, a real-life epic that blurs myth and reality, faith and history, religion and politics. The tale would be a charming one had not so many people been stabbed, beaten, shot or burned to death for their belief in it. And it often would be a humorous one were it not for the strength of the Hindu fundamentalist wave now emerging as a powerful regional force, fueled by the faith of 750 million Indian Hindus. The Rama temple issue has brought down two national governments in India in the past two years, and, as the country prepares to go to the polls again tomorrow, Thursday and next Sunday, the memorial to Rama and the crumbling mosque standing in its way clearly have emerged as the pre-eminent grass-roots issue of the campaign.

Traditionally, during the nine parliamentary elections that India has held since declaring itself an independent nation 44 years ago, the tens of millions of Muslims who opted to remain in India rather than migrate to the newly created Islamic state of Pakistan have voted as a formidable political bloc. Bolstered by affirmative-action policies--sponsored by Mohandas K. Gandhi, India’s leader in the fight for independence from the British, and written into the constitution--India’s Muslims have prospered, many even more so than India’s overwhelming Hindu majority. Hindu fundamentalists believe that Muslims have gained too many concessions, and they also worry that the faster-growing Muslim population will outstrip them numerically in a century or so--a possibility that demographers consider remote. Although more than 80% of Indians call themselves Hindus, they have yet to emerge as a united political force because they are so deeply divided along linguistic, regional and, especially, ancient caste lines.

The advent of Islamic fundamentalism in Iran in the late 1970s spread quickly to India and exacerbated the mounting resentment, mistrust and tension between India’s Muslims and Hindus. It was against that backdrop of Muslim unity and growing Islamic fundamentalism that the Hindu revivalists in 1984 drafted a battle plan to use Lord Rama and his temple as vehicles toward Hindu supremacy.

Now the cosmic fanaticism nourished by the temple’s religious backers in the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, or World Hindu Council, has transformed itself into a radical political zeal, which has been a windfall for the 11-year-old Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People’s Party). The party, whose parliamentary representation grew from two seats in 1984 to 88 seats (of a total 554) two years ago, is hoping that it can ride the blue demigod’s coattails to power, creating the first Hindu fundamentalist government in world history. So great has been the response, particularly in vote-rich northern India, that several political analysts have speculated that after next week’s elections the Indian People’s Party, now India’s third biggest, could emerge as the largest party in Parliament.

Few can articulate the mystic fervor of the cause that has electrified India’s Hindus better than Ashok Singhal, general secretary of the World Hindu Council. The 65-year-old Singhal has chosen never to marry, testimony to his commitment to Hindu supremacy, a cause for which he has worked full time since 1942.

A few days after his organization’s huge downtown Rama rally, Singhal sat in his modest office on the ground floor of a monkey-god temple under construction in the modern, residential New Delhi neighborhood of Ram Krishna Puram. He was flanked by two foot-high desktop pennants bearing the symbol of Om, an ancient Sanskrit sound chanted during many Hindu yogic meditations that roughly means “the universe and everything in it.” For convenience, most Westerners translate it simply as God . In the corner, Singhal kept a clump of holy peacock feathers; behind him, a silver wall clock bore the 12 symbols of the zodiac in place of the usual numbers. And everywhere there were posters, wood carvings and stickers of the planned $10-million birthplace temple for Lord Rama.

Singhal’s organization, backed by massive funding from Hindus throughout Asia, Europe and North America, has identified more than 3,000 Hindu temples or shrines that were demolished throughout India during the three centuries that the invading Moguls ruled and proselytized much of the country. But, he explains, the current crusade is simply for three temples, each at a spot where Muslim conquerors are believed to have torn down temples marking the birthplaces of Hindu gods and replaced them with mosques.

In addition to Ayodhya, the Hindu revivalists have targeted a mosque that stands on the spot where Hindus believe Lord Krishna, an incarnation of Vishnu the creator, first appeared on Earth in Mathura, 100 miles south of New Delhi. The other condemned mosque is in Varanasi in eastern India, on the spot where Lord Siva, Hinduism’s god of destruction, is thought to have first appeared. In Hindu mythology, Krishna and Siva are much holier than Rama, who technically isn’t even a full-fledged god, and archeological evidence supporting the revivalists’ claims is far stronger at Mathura and Varanasi than at Ayodhya. But their selection of Rama’s birthplace was a stroke of political genius, a brilliant use of emotional symbolism to mobilize India’s long-dormant Hindu masses.

Rama is an “everyman” deity, so much a part of village life that peasants greet each other with the words Ram, Ram , instead of hello . Rama worship first emerged in the 18th Century among Indians searching for a symbol of pride during British colonial rule; the demigod, whose largely mythical role is not unlike that of King Arthur to the English, continues to fill the bill. Retired New Delhi industrialist V. H. Dalmia, president of the World Hindu Council, confirmed that it was the enormous popular appeal of Lord Rama that made his birthplace such an effective focus for the temple crusades. “When we had to choose one, we thought, ‘What will appeal? What is the religious sentiment? What is the religious susceptibility?’ ” Dalmia says. “So we decided on the Ram temple. It is a continuation of the ancient battle, the Ramayana”--the epic poem in which Rama was first mentioned.

But Singhal is far less pragmatic and far more spiritual in his explanation of the crusade. His discourse, in fact, might strike an outsider as somewhat interplanetary.

“The history of this country starts from Ram,” Singhal says in his usual conversational shout. “Ramayana goes back, I think, thousands and thousands of years, although I can’t give the actual date when Rama was born. Now, Siva, it is very difficult for you to envisage what Siva actually means to Hindus. Actually, you find in this country, the entire country, they believe in some unforeseen powers at work. It is behind the creation. And there have been masters in this country who have realized these unforeseen powers and come face to face with God. And these realized souls have started shooting back and forth through this country.

“There are some unforeseen forces. There is a spirit behind the plan of the universe, behind the creation. Therefore, in this country, we believe Ram exists everywhere, but more so where there is a temple. When people go to the temple, they think they’re going to the place of Ram himself. You can call it superstition. People call it superstition. There are certain paths leading to this realization of God. There are some rituals. But these rituals are very important in the path of realization of God. And, in this country, people came to believe that even Rama and Krishna were the unforeseen force of God himself in human form. It is very difficult to understand this phenomenon.”

WHAT WAS NOT SO DIFFICULT TO DIVINE, HOWEVER, were the forces at work on Oct. 30, 1990, at the epicenter of Singhal’s engineered Hindu wave in Ayodhya, where Singhal’s ramblings took on a far more human and horrible form. On that day the passion behind this crusade exploded into public view for the first time since it began. The Ram bakhts-- devotees of Lord Rama--very nearly tore apart the Babri Mosque, brick by brick, with their bare hands.

The heavy iron gate around the mosque, bolted with a six-inch-thick padlock, could barely hold the crush of humanity. Tens of thousands of people pushed against it, sadhus, saints and simple worshipers. The Babri Mosque sits just 50 feet beyond the barricades erected 42 years ago when the last battle for the Rama temple erupted.

The holy men in Singhal’s organization selected October 30 because they believed that it was the most astrologically auspicious date to begin kar seva, the sacred task of “religious construction” of the new Rama birthplace temple. The World Hindu Council’s extraordinarily well-organized and effective effort had burst onto the political landscape exactly one year before, in October, 1989, when thousands of followers marched into Ayodhya carrying sacred bricks on their heads. The bricks, meant for the new temple, had been baked in rural kilns throughout India, blessed by Hindu saints and then brought by foot from village to town to city and, finally, to Ayodhya, where a religious ceremony was held to lay a ceremonial foundation stone.

The government at the time, led by former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, had struck a compromise deal with Singhal’s crusaders. Rama’s devotees laid the foundation 192 feet away from the mosque, in an undisputed lot beneath a holy neem tree, using bricks from Hindus throughout the world, several of them marked “America,” “West Germany,” “Caribbean” and “Canada.” An inscription adds that bricks of solid gold and silver also were donated that day. Now little more than a 10-foot-square earthen hole in the ground, the foundation has become a brick shrine to Singhal’s movement, adorned with Rama idols and sacred inscriptions and filled with rupee coins flung into it by visiting devotees.

Gandhi’s concessions to the Hindu revivalists, the alternative site among them, so incited the well-organized Muslim minority--about 50 million voters cast ballots largely as a bloc--that, in November, 1989, Gandhi’s ruling Congress-I Party was defeated for only the second time in the history of independent India. But as the compromise enraged the Muslims, it emboldened the Hindu revivalists. The alternative site no longer was enough. It was the mosque itself--or nothing.

Facing this resurgence of religious conflict was Gandhi’s replacement at the helm of the Indian nation, Prime Minister Vishwanath Pratap Singh. No single party had emerged when Gandhi was voted out, so Singh formed a majority by securing the backing of two of the most impossible of political bedfellows--the Indian Communists, who have been struggling to eradicate the nation’s religious and caste divisions, and the fundamentalist Indian People’s Party. Singh walked a tightrope between the two powerful political forces. But when the Indian People’s Party came out in support of an all-out peaceful assault on the mosque last October 30, Singh drew the line. What was to follow on that day so angered the party that it withdrew its support and brought Singh’s government crashing down within a week.

That Singh was determined to block the demolition of Babri Mosque was all too clear. He and his chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, the state that includes Ayodhya, had ordered the arrest of no less than 100,000 followers en route to the mosque, many of them on foot. The jails overflowed, so police used schoolyards. Tens of thousands of heavily armed paramilitary troops were deployed, and every road leading to Ayodhya was sealed by monolithic concrete barricades. Machine-gun nests were erected all around the mosque complex.

And still Singh’s forces couldn’t stop the devotees of the big blue god-king.

The huge iron gate gave way at six minutes after noon that day, under a blazing sun. The police, all of them Hindus, had removed the padlock, stepped aside and, for the next 10 minutes, stood and watched as the passions of centuries were unleashed. A single paramilitary Border Security Force officer tried to stop the crowd. He fired tear-gas canisters directly into the rampaging mob. One canister blasted off the face of a wailing sadhu. But still the crowd kept coming.

They tore through barbed-wire barricades, erected nearly half a century ago, as if they were paper ribbon. And, finally, bleeding and screaming, “ Jai Shri Ram! “--”Long Live Lord Rama”--the devotees began tearing out the bricks of the mosque, one by one, with their fingers. They mounted the mosque dome and planted a saffron-colored pennant. They rang a temple bell.

Security reinforcements arrived, and the followers were beaten away with sticks. But their victory was sealed. The Babri Mosque finally had been desecrated.

For days and weeks, bloodshed washed the Indian landscape. Scores of sadhus and saints were gunned down by paramilitary forces in subsequent assaults on the mosque. Mobs of rejoicing Hindus in villages and towns for hundreds of miles around systematically trashed Muslim neighborhoods, killing 250 and beating and stabbing others while shrieking, “Long Live Lord Rama.” Muslims retaliated with knives.

As far away as Hyderabad, a Muslim stronghold more than 1,000 miles south of Ayodhya, more than 100 died in just two days of religious carnage: After their Friday prayers, Muslims massacred Hindus. Then the Hindus took revenge. Inspired by speeches by local revivalist leaders offering bounties for dead Muslims, mobs beat, stabbed and burned women, children and entire families in their homes. At Osmania General Hospital, emergency-room physician Dr. Anand Dayal shook his head in the midst of the panic and said, “This is the worst kind of religious violence since independence. They are professionally polished, knowing where the organs are and how to cut them to make our job difficult.” And Hyderabad’s police commissioner, M. V. Bhaskara Rao, pointed to the north as he blamed the “unseen forces” that had ignited this urban powder keg.

“This fundamentalism--be it Hindu fundamentalism or Islamic fundamentalism--has come to stay,” Rao said as violence raged in his city. “It will take a long time for these people to throw it away. Today, you have a rallying point. Before, it was nebulous. It’s an emotional issue, a religious issue, an economic issue with political overtones. And now, they’ve managed to permeate it down to the grass-roots level.”

But, in the hours immediately following the first successful assault on the 16th-Century Babri Mosque, Singhal, lying in his bed at the Lord Rama Hospital in Ayodhya, smiled as he described the importance of what had happened that day.

“The significance is that the Hindus cannot be taken for granted in this country anymore,” Singhal said, his head bandaged from a police-baton blow. “Their voice will be heard in this country. This pseudo-secularism of Muslim appeasement has exploded in this country today, and it will explode further. . . . Now neither the politicians nor the administration can give the Muslims any assurance or guarantee of security. Their security now will depend only upon their relations with the Hindus.”

WHEN MIR BAQI, A LIEUTENANT of Emperor Babur, ordered construction of the Babri Mosque at Ayodhya 463 years ago, the three-domed structure was intended as a shrine to Babur, the first of the Mogul conquerors to strike east from their throne in Kabul, now the capital of Afghanistan. Inscriptions carved into the mosque, which endure today, proclaim, “By the command of Emperor Babur, whose justice is an edifice reaching up to the very height of the heavens, the good-hearted Mir Baqi built this alighting place of angels. . . .”

There is, however, no mention of any Ram temple destroyed to make way for the mosque. In fact, there is no historical record whatsoever to support the claim of the Hindu politicians and saints that there ever was a temple to Rama on that spot. Historians and archeologists have filled thousands of pages of Indian newspapers and magazines debating the issue as the controversy mushroomed in recent years. Ironically, it was a handful of British archeologists and anthropologists, working for the colonial regime that ruled India’s Hindus for 150 years, who first popularized the theory that such a temple had existed. That Babur, by far the gentlest of Mogul emperors and known for his deep respect for Hinduism, left no sign of a temple is taken as additional evidence that none existed. The only concrete evidence of a previous temple at the site are a dozen or so pillars buried beneath the mosque that are distinctly non-Islamic in design--but not necessarily Hindu, either.

This is not the case at the sites of the other two mosques targeted by Singhal’s movement. The historical record clearly states that, in the 1600s, Mogul Emperor Aurangzeb, a descendant of Babur so evil that he murdered his brothers and jailed his father and sister to take the throne, ordered the demolition of the birthplace temples of Krishna and Siva and outlawed Hindu-god worship. In the Lord Krishna birthplace temple in Mathura, archeologists uncovered the original, centuries-old Krishna shrine in the basement of the mosque during a 1960s excavation, and Hindu pilgrims today walk through the mosque to get to it.

The evidence is even more dramatic--and the legend more mystic--at the site of Siva’s birthplace temple in Varanasi, one of India’s holiest cities and a frequent tourist destination on the banks of the sacred Ganges. There, Aurangzeb’s generals intentionally left standing an entire wall and the main gate of the previous Siva temple. They built it into the huge Jama Masjid Mosque now standing on the spot as a reminder of the Hindu defeat and of the blood that was spilled there to destroy Siva’s Vishwanath Temple in 1669--”to show the arrogance and superiority of having conquered the Hindu race,” according to Somnath Vyas, keeper of the legends at Siva’s birthplace.

Vyas is the latest in an unbroken string of Hindu holy men who have spent their days sitting on a slab of sandstone just a few feet from the mosque wall. The slab rests beside a giant stone Nandi, a sacred statue of a bull that once guarded the ruined temple, and a large hole in the ground, named the Well of Knowledge.

Here Vyas, a frail man with graying hair and a lined face, imparts the legends and history of Siva’s birthplace. In fact, Vyas says, Siva’s temple was destroyed not just once, but twice. The first time was in the year 1111, when the raiding Pathan king, Qutabuddin Aibak, demolished a temple dating well before Christ.

“But in 1555, there was a big drought in our state. There was no rain. The local pandit (Hindu scholar) went to the ruling Moguls and said, ‘If I do yaghya (special prayers) here, there will be rain. But I will want, in return, the temple again built here.’ The rajah said, ‘If you do this, you certainly will get your temple.’ The yaghya was done, there was a very good rain that lasted 11 months, and Emperor Akbar, a gentler ruler than those who followed, said, ‘Now, build your temple there.’ ”

A century later, after Aurangzeb became emperor, here, according to Vyas, is what happened:

“Aurangzeb was a blind follower of Islam. He thought if he destroyed these temples, the Hindus, too, would lie in ruin. He sent his strongest general, Kala Pahar, to Varanasi to do the deed. The local people called him Black Mountain, for he stood six feet tall, very black in color, and rode a black horse.

“But when the Black Mountain came to destroy Siva’s temple here, there was resistance--tens of thousands of saints and sadhus surrounded the temple and refused to budge. For 10 days it was a great fight. The army came with swords and lances, and the sadhus fought with their hands. Finally, Black Mountain ordered two big guns to be brought by barge from a fort to the north, and with those cannons, they broke the temple. Between 10,000 and 12,000 persons were killed, Muslims and Hindus alike. “But as the temple fell to the guns, the temple priest escaped. He took with him the power of the temple, a large, solid emerald Siva lingam (stone phallus), and he jumped into this well. Two days later, the priest’s body washed up on the Mother Ganges a few miles downriver, but the emerald lingam never reappeared.

“And that’s why hundreds of thousands of Hindus are coming here every month to worship at this Well of Knowledge. There is no temple on this spot anymore, so they worship only at the well.”

The temple site at Ayodhya hasn’t a legend as rich or a history as long. It has only a far more recent--and cynical--history of legal and physical conflict. Ram’s birthplace was selected as the test case over the others, says physics professor Murli Manohar Joshi, president of the Indian People’s Party, because “there is a long history there.

“You see, it’s not a question of a mosque versus temple,” Joshi says. “It is a question of a structure that was constructed over a national monument. Suppose, and I would be excused if I would be using this parallelism, that if Hitler would have been victorious in the Second World War and there would have been a statue of Hitler in Trafalgar Square, and in 1990 the Britishers would have been liberated from Hitler’s yoke, what would they have done to that statue of Hitler? What the Poles did to the cathedral built by Russians. They removed it.

“The issue of Ram temple is the issue of reviving India’s self-respect and India’s internal energy. It is to give India its identity. No nation without its moorings, without its identity, can unleash any amount of energy for its development.

“It’s not a question of now deciding the place of birth of Ram. It’s by tradition. It’s a question of belief. It is a question of conscience, of faith.”

Indeed, so is much of Joshi’s explanation, including his characterization of the “long history” of the Rama temple movement. It was only in 1949 that the controversy emerged for the first time with any real zeal. Just after midnight on Dec. 23, 1949, reports reached the local police of a commotion at the Babri Mosque. Thousands of Hindu holy men and saints had gathered to worship the miracle--the sudden appearance of an idol of Lord Rama in the inner sanctum of the mosque. “Our God has reclaimed his birthplace!” they shouted, and, according to legend, a Muslim guard at the mosque saw Ram appear in a blinding flash of light that night.

The police report reads differently. Constable Mata Prasad declared in his official statement that 50 to 60 Hindus had broken into the mosque and “established therein an idol of (Lord Rama) on the outer and inner walls.”

Then came a flurry of criminal and civil actions by both religious communities. The case, erupting just two years after India became an independent state amid Hindu-Muslim bloodshed that accompanied the British partition of the subcontinent, took on immediate and powerful national dimensions. Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru ordered that under no circumstances should the mosque ever be turned over to the Hindus, and the courts set about the work of finding a compromise.

The last ruling came on March 3, 1951--a supposedly final, official word that, in fact, set the status quo that would endure peacefully until 1984.

In effect, the mosque was closed to both communities under the 1951 court order. The Muslims stopped praying there, and most of them all but forgot that the shrine even existed until their political leaders mobilized them decades later to fight the Hindu revivalists. Hindu pilgrims also were banned from the site. Up went the barbed wire and the police guard that remain there today.

There was, however, one small provision in the final court order that lends this disputed, sacred site its most enduring, mystical air. Since the Rama idol had, indeed, appeared--whether by the hand of man or god--the court permitted a small group of priests to occupy a six-foot-square area at the mosque’s main entrance. And so it is that, during every moment of every day, every year since 1951, shaved-headed priests and bearded holy men have sat on that spot in shifts, cross-legged, in a never-ending chorus of clanging cymbals, banging drums and chants of praise to their god, Lord Rama.

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