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Introduction
Beginning from the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992 to the victory of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Hindu fundamentalist party, in the May 1996 election of India indicates the gradual rise of Hindu fundamentalism and India's failure to uphold its constitutional principle of "secularism" by separating religion from politics. Since India's independence secularism has been threatened many times as the recurrence of communal violence has been frequent in the country. The myth of secularism was shattered on 6 December 1992 when the government of India was unable to prevent militant Hindus from demolishing the Babri Masjid. The demolition of the mosque plunged India into the worst outbreak of communal violence with 1700 dead and 5000 injured.1
The failure of the government in preventing the Hindu militants from demolishing the mosque, has raised serious questions about the promise of the Indian government for guaranteeing the fundamental rights to freedom of religion to all citizens, i.e. Sarva dharma Samabhav (let all religions prosper).2 Was this failure intentional or the result of miscalculation? Was it a mere political strategy not to give equal and due respect to all religions and faiths in reality? Could the Rao government have saved the mosque? The purpose of this paper is to analyze the tragedy of the Babri Masjid and, in the light of the analysis, to find out the answers to the above questions in the larger context of Indian Politics. This paper argues that the failure was not the result of wrong calculation but was very much deliberate. The outcome of the tragedy was well expected from the past history of the Indian politics.
The Tragedy
The Babri Masjid was built in Ayodhya, a small town in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh (UP), in 1528 during the reign of Zahiruddin Mohammad Babur, the founder of Mughal dynasty in India-hence the name of the masjid. The Vishawa Hindu Parishad (VHP) in general and the BJP which represents the ideology of Hindu fundamentalism, in particular, propagated that the mosque was constructed in the same spot where their God Rama was born. they placed an image of Ram in the middle of the mosque in 1948. Afraid of riots, in 1949 the government locked the gates of the...