Even as the prime minister and ruling party orchestrate unprecedented religious fervour around the construction of the Ram mandir, there seems to be a broad media consensus on the huge public receptivity to the temple building project. That this is something most readers and viewers will want to read about and watch endlessly, that it will bring in the advertising, create jobs and markets. Few journalists, if any, are being judgmental about the government declaring half-day’s holiday to enable people to light lamps for a temple, or about a cabinet minister telling journalists that practically every organisation from the Uttar Pradesh government to the highway, telecom and the railway system is prepared for the demands that the temple will bring.
The business press has been abuzz with stories of spiritual merchandise sales on e-commerce platforms and temple fever driving the travel business. Spiritual tourism as a category has grown by 35% in a year, says one travel company, and is poised to become much bigger. EaseMyTrip has introduced EasyDarshan, even as Ayodhya dominates searches on travel platforms. Reliance Jio is putting in mobile towers, an Adani firm plans to distribute bhog and jalebis to thousands, Uber is introducing electric autos to run in the city.
At the trader end of the commerce boom, there are reports of a kirtan, havan and a rath yatra by Khan Market traders in New Delhi, and thousands of metres of running flags being ordered by another traders’ association to cover the entire Connaught Place area, not to mention more than 100,000 diyas to be lit here. Traders all across the country have joined the party — one is told that even Calcutta, which is not into Jai Shri Ram flags and festoons, is selling a large number of them. There is a tireless search for story angles — Amitabh Bachchan has bought a plot in Ayodhya; lamps will be lit on January 22 at the Davos meet and so on.
From the beginning of this year the Dainik Jagran has been running a full page, sometimes two, every day on the mandir countdown. But the pran pratistha is the culmination of a movement that has unfolded over centuries. So the Dainik Bhaskar has run, over three weeks, a 20-part front-page series called “Main Ayodhya Hun” beginning with the first mention of the town in the Atharva Veda. It dates Ayodhya’s origin to 6673 BC and incorporates mythology as early history. By the fourth episode, you are done with Dashratha, Kaikeyi, Rama, Sita, Ravana and Hanuman and are into what is described as a 450-year Ram janmabhoomi andolan.
From then on, it is narrated, without overtly saying so, as a history of the injustice done since Babur’s senapati destroyed the Ram temple and built the Babri masjid on its ruins. There is a quick leap to 1986 and the unlocking of the masjid, by which time, the series notes, the word secularism had become an irritant for Hindus and a symbol of Muslim appeasement. Each episode has a telling headline: “Ek taale ke bheetar Ayodhya ki aag dabi hui thi” (One padlock had suppressed the fire of Ayodhya). The paper says that the government took less than an hour to implement the order of a Faizabad court to open the locks of the masjid to pacify what it describes as “despondent Hindus”.
Thereafter, the mandir andolan got a major fillip with the telecast of Ramanand Sagar’s Ramayan on Doordarshan and the launching of the shila poojan, wherein a brick made of local soil from each village was wrapped in saffron and despatched for Ayodha and worshipped by hundreds and thousands on the way. In April 1989, the Vishva Hindu Parishad held its Dharma Sansad to announce the Ram mandir shilanyas, by May, there was a Rs 25-crore plan to construct the temple. Meanwhile, the home minister, Buta Singh, had begun talks with parties in the Ram mandir dispute.
In 1988, the Bofors story had broken, V.P. Singh had left the government, and elections were less than a year away. Rajiv Gandhi was advised to do the shilanyas on what was believed to be the temple site. As the paper puts it, the prime minister was convinced that this would help him in the elections. The headline says, “Devraha Baba se milne Vrindavan daure Rajiv Gandhi” (Rajiv Gandhi ran to Vrindavan to meet Devraha Baba). The Babri Masjid Action Committee stepped up its opposition, describing the temple location as contested. But another location in Faizabad was described as uncontested and a shilanyas took place there in November 1989.
According to the Dainik Bhaskar, Rajiv Gandhi began his election campaign from Ayodhya, but when the elections took place it was the Bharatiya Janata Party which took its seat tally from 2 to 85. In 1990, described as the karseva year, the distance between V.P. Singh and Mulayam Singh Yadav is described as having been greater than the distance between the VHP and the Babri Masjid committee. “Mulayam Singh went and sat with the Babri Masjid lobby.” If society in Uttar Pradesh and then in the rest of the country began to be divided between the mandir and masjid, and the communal situation deteriorated in the state, it was entirely on account of Mulayam Singh’s pro-masjid stand, according to the Dainik Bhaskar.
In September 1990, L.K. Advani set out from Somnath for the rath yatra. The rath yatra plan for Gujarat was made by Narendra Modi, who was then in the state BJP, and marked his rise in the national consciousness as a BJP politician. He masterminded the rath yatra’s ‘roop-rekha’, we are told. And, as the first karseva yatra began moving, people worshipped the rath and picked up the earth beneath it to put on their heads. The chronology of the political negotiations continues till the masjid is brought down in December 1992. This newspaper series is potted history, useful for younger readers in the Hindi heartland.
Court cases took over thereafter and the Archaeological Survey of India was asked by the court for whatever evidence it could get of what stood below the masjid. The Dainik Jagran, earlier this month, profiled the Muslim archaeologist who was part of the team which found evidence of a temple’s ruins beneath the masjid — evidence on which the Supreme Court based its 2019 judgment.
The Wire’s newsletter, India Cable, meanwhile offered the nugget that the five Supreme Court judges who had delivered the judgment on the Babri masjid site had posed for a group photograph and celebrated their verdict at the Taj Mansingh hotel, according to the memoirs of the former Chief Justice of India, Ranjan Gogoi. The good judges have now been invited as state guests for the consecration ceremony of the mandir today. The Wire tells you, indignantly, that this is unprecedented.
Sevanti Ninan is a media commentator and was the founder-editor of TheHoot.org
