The Babri Masjid was demolished by a crazed mob in broad daylight in 1992. Article 370 was abrogated at night by a secretive government in 2019. That said, there are some striking similarities between these two events, occurring 27 years apart. Both were justified as righting historical wrongs; both were triumphantly acclaimed by the Sangh Parivar and their supporters; both were quietly mourned by those affirming the constitutional values on which this Republic was founded.
When the Babri Masjid was demolished, I was living in New Delhi, in the home of Dharma Kumar, Professor of Economic History at the Delhi School of Economics. Her many students and friends — some active in public life today — will remember Dharma both for her personal charm and for her intellectual courage. She was a classical liberal, equally opposed to the extremities of the Marxist left as well as of the Hindutva right.
Dharma had grown up in Mumbai in the last years of the Raj, where she had sometimes attended Mahatma Gandhi’s prayer meetings on Juhu beach. Now, seeing his ideals violated in a nation which claimed him as its founder, she set out to publicly defend them. She drafted a statement, which she had inserted as an advertisement on the front page of the most widely circulated newspaper in India. The statement read: “If you are a Hindu, read on. Do you believe that the demolition of the Babri Masjid restored Hindu pride, enhanced national honour, strengthened India? If so, consider the possibility that the act debased Hindu culture, shamed the nation across the world, increased the tensions between all communities and so weakened India”.
Designed by an artist friend of Dharma’s, the statement was printed on white type against a black background. Alongside appeared the names of 19 signatories. They included the scientist MS Swaminathan, the writer Vikram Seth, the former RBI Governor, IG Patel, the curator, Pupul Jayakar, the former Solicitor General, Ashok Desai, and the former Chief of Army Staff, K Sundarji. Although Dharma thought up and paid for the ad, and canvassed each signature, she did not — out of both propriety and modesty — put her own name on it.
Notably, the list of brave, civic-minded Indians who signed Dharma’s appeal began with six widely admired industrialists. These were Bharat Ram, RP Goenka, Lalit Thapar, Nanubhai B Amin, Raj Thiagarajan, and Desh Bandhu Gupta. That they signed this statement made it far more credible for the readers of the paper in which it appeared. It could not now be dismised as the malignant handiwork of misguided jholawalas.
When I heard of the abrogation of Article 370, my mind went back to December 1992. The silencing of the millions of people in whose name this constitutional change was allegedly being enacted seemed — since it was done by a government and not a mob — an even greater violation of the republic’s ideals. As I lay awake at night, I remembered Professor Dharma Kumar and what she had done. I was now in my sixties, as she had been in 1992. I had the same sort of position in our intellectual life as she had then. I, too, had a wide spectrum of influential friends in other professions.
My first thought was to emulate my teacher, to draft a statement appealing to my fellow citizens to abjure crude triumphalism, alerting them to the moral and political consequences of this awful act. This statement might have said: “If you are a patriotic Indian, read on. Do you believe that the abrogation of Article 370 overnight and without deliberation enhanced national honour and strengthened India? If so, consider the possibility that the act undermined the Constitution, degraded our democratic ethos, and increased rather than decreased tensions between Kashmir and the rest of India”.
Had I drafted this statement, I could have raised the money to pay for it to be printed in the leading newspaper of the day. Would I have had Dharma’s success in getting people of comparable stature to sign? The writers and artists would have been easy work. But which contemporary analogues of Lalit Thapar or RP Goenka would have joined in?