The bhoomi poojan , or ground-breaking ceremony, of the Ram temple in Ayodhya has turned the spotlight on the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), one of the first advocates of the Ramjanmabhoomi movement and a group that has been at the forefront of mobilising popular opinion and leading the legal fight for the issue.
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The formation of the VHP, an amalgamation of sants and akharas and maths of Hindu holy men, may appear to be a natural corollary of the growth of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) and its pursuit of mobilising support for Hindutva, but it was, like the formation of the Jana Sangh in 1951, a well thought-out move. The VHP was formed in 1964, as an affiliate of the RSS, to leverage the influence of Hindu holy men in civil society.
Trigger points
“Three trigger points led to the formation of the VHP, a need to network the diaspora Hindus who needed an organisation to maintain cultural ties, the Niyogi Commission report (a report on religious conversion brought out by the Madhya Pradesh government in the 1960s) and the need to bring Hindu religious leaders together to initiate social reforms, especially against caste discrimination,” said Arun Anand, research director of the RSS-affiliated think tank Vichar Vinimay Kendra.
“The RSS had realised that casteism would hamper Hindu unity and that religious leaders held great sway in civil society in this regard. This was part of the dozens of frontal organisations formed in the 1950s and 1960s by the RSS, to work in specific areas of society for reform and break fragmentation of Hindu society,” added Mr. Anand, who has written three books on the RSS, including the latest, Ramjanmabhoomi: Truth, Evidence, Faith.
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The Ramjanmabhoomi movement was something the Sangh Parivar had been associated with since 1948 when idols of Lord Ram “appeared” inside the Babri Masjid, but the VHP’s first order of business was more about mobilising Hindus around “sacred” geography and Hindu cosmology. These were symbols and issues that Hindus revered or felt strongly about, said Sheshadri Chari, former editor of Organiser, the RSS mouthpiece . “There can be Hindu unity around Shraddha Kendras (devotion points).” This was also the time that M.S. Golwalkar’s cautious approach to political mobilisation was supplanted by Balasaheb Deoras’s more political approach in the RSS.
The first such programme was the ‘Bharat Mata Ganga Mata Yatra’, carrying water from the four corners of the country to Nagpur, where a small reservoir of Gangajal would be mixed in with water from other parts of the country and later released back into the rivers across the country. The Ganga, a point of reverence in Hinduism, was central to this campaign that became the first mass mobilisation undertaken by the VHP.
The VHP’s association with the Ramjanmabhoomi agitation gained prominence under the light of certain events in the 1980s. One of the big triggers was the Meenakshipuram conversions of 1981, where 180 families belonging to lower castes in a village in Tiruneveli in Tamil Nadu converted to Islam. The event triggered unease even in the then Congress-led government at the Centre. A discussion on conversions in Parliament took place with Home Minister and later President of India, Zail Singh, terming it a “a conspiracy of political motivation”.
Political space
This was followed by the Shah Bano law of 1985, which overturned the Supreme Court’s award of maintenance to Shah Bano. Against this background, Sangh organisations argued that Hindus needed to reclaim political and cultural space as Hindus, and challenged the Congress’s definition of concepts such as secularism. They found the situation ripe for pushing the Ramjanmabhoomi movement. Following the Shah Bano decision, the Rajiv Gandhi government ordered the locks on Babri Masjid be removed, allowing Hindu worshippers access to the structure.
The Ram mandir movement was then given a fillip through a campaign of collecting bricks for the construction of a temple. “Kashi and Mathura were places where a mosque and temple were both present, but at the Ramjanmabhoomi, there was only a mosque and hence the brick collecting campaign was launched,” said Mr. Chari. Two committees were formed — the Janmasthan Mukti Sangharsh Samiti and the Ramjanmabhoomi Nyas (which also took care of all the bricks and other paraphernalia being sent to Ayodhya). These committees later evolved into bigger organisations as the movement grew.
The Bajrang Dal, the youth wing of the VHP, was formed during the course of the Ramjanmabhoomi movement. From 1984, the VHP initiated the series of processions called the “Ram-Janaki Rathyatra” in Ayodhya, which ratcheted up communal tensions across the north and central India. The youth wing was then set up to “protect” the yatras but it ended up giving a more muscular, and militant tone to the movement. In the wake of the destruction of Babri Masjid by kar sevaks on December 6, 1992, the Narasimha Rao government banned the Bajrang Dal. The ban was revoked a year later, but there had been repeated calls for a ban on the outfit during the UPA government after cases of attacks on members of the minority communities emerged. A special Cabinet meeting was called in October 2008 by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to consider a ban on the Bajrang Dal, after attacks on churches in Karnataka and Odisha, but nothing came of it.
The Ramjanmabhoomi movement got its biggest push when the BJP decided to back it in its Palampur meet in Himachal Pradesh in 1989.
Not on the same page
The BJP, the political wing of the RSS, and the VHP, the organisation the RSS depended on to penetrate and influence civil society, have often been on separate pages through the years, especially under the VHP’s former working president Praveen Togadia, who has very public differences with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The RSS, however, has maintained its steadfastness in implementing its agenda, and weighed in in favour of Mr. Modi in that face-off. Their faith paid off in the August 5 ground-breaking ceremony. The two single majority governments of Mr. Modi allowed the Sangh Parivar a historic opportunity to push forward with its agenda, be it the temple, the dilution of Article 370 or capture of state institutions.
Now that the temple is going to rise in Ayodhya, what’s next for the VHP? Will it lose its raison d’etre? Or will it create the same social energy in its call for “liberating” Kashi and Mathura?
The answer, say office-bearers who spoke to The Hindu, lies in the first resolution passed by the VHP after its formation in 1964. There’s a Sanskrit term in the resolution, ‘ Na Hindu Patito Bhavet’ (No Hindu is beyond the Pale), that aimed at subverting caste discrimination in favour of a unified Hindu society and resisted conversions to other faiths and dilution of Hindu beliefs. That still remains a goal.
