How Bad Advice Led Rajiv Gandhi To Make Mistakes in Handling the Babri Masjid Issue

Next only to Shah Bano in the denigration of the former PM is the shadow of the Babri Masjid issue. In October 1985, Arun Nehru was made minister of state for internal security. This was widely seen as evidence of his huge political clout. India Today of 31 October 1985 described him as ‘the fastest rising star in the firmament of Rajiv Gandhi’s government’.

After the resignation of Narayan Datt Tiwari as chief minister of Uttar Pradesh on his being elevated to the Union cabinet, Arun Nehru personally picked and promoted the relatively unknown Vir Bahadur Singh as the state’s chief minister in September 1985. There was, said India Today (31 October 1985), an ‘awed realization’ of Arun Nehru’s hold over party affairs. For his part, Arun Nehru believed that the best route to winning the Hindu vote was by opening the locks that had been placed in December 1949 on the gates leading to the Babri Masjid. This sixteenth-century mosque had become the focus of a localized dispute over ownership rights dating back to the mid-nineteenth century, based on the claim that the mosque had been built on the birthplace of Lord Ram – Ram Janmabhoomi. At the time (1985), this local dispute had no national reverberations despite the gates being locked up thirty-five long years earlier. But Arun Nehru, with his local roots, having studied at a Lucknow school and college in proximity to Ayodhya, had an awareness of the potential of this issue that barely registered, to begin with, on Rajiv Gandhi’s consciousness.

The new chief minister visited Ayodhya in December 1985 and stirred up a hornets’ nest by ordering that all files relating to the closure of the gates be reviewed. Meanwhile, a case was filed by a private party before the sessions judge, Faizabad, to reopen the locks. The gravamen of his plea was that the locks had been placed in December 1949 by executive rather than judicial order. The sessions judge scheduled an immediate hearing; after the local police and district magistrate testified they did not apprehend a law and order problem if the locks were opened, the sessions judge ordered their reopening. Within minutes of the order being passed in Faizabad, the locks at Ayodhya, closed for over thirty-five years, were broken open and, in what appeared to be an orchestrated move, huge numbers of Hindu devotees poured into the masjid premises. Clearly, the administration was in cohorts with the district sessions court.

The judgment was quickly challenged by a private Muslim party before the Uttar Pradesh High Court, and the state government impleaded itself into the court proceedings. For the saffron forces, wilting in the penumbra after their massive defeat in the 1984 elections, this was the opportunity to stir the communal cauldron to make a political comeback.

It has since been held by most public opinion that it was at the PM’s behest that the locks were opened, whereas RG maintained that he was completely in the dark about this conspiracy to open the locks and learnt about it only after it was an accomplished fact. There has always been intense speculation as to how such a momentous change in the status quo could have been undertaken without his knowledge and explicit sanction. Commentators reasoned then – and their argument continues till today, nearly four decades later – that Rajiv Gandhi, having got the Muslim vote in his kitty through the Shah Bano matter, had now decided to also grab the Hindu vote bank by opening the locks at Ayodhya. RG always maintained that he had no prior information about what Arun Nehru was up to, and this is confirmed by Wajahat Habibullah in his My Years with Rajiv: Triumph and Tragedy (Westland, New Delhi, 2020).

There was no executive order by which the PM could reverse the order to open the locks since it was a judicial order. Huge communal tension would have built up had he gone to the High Court. In any case, a petition against the sessions judge’s order had already been filed in the High Court and was soon followed by the Sunni Waqf Board and the government of Uttar Pradesh impleading themselves as affected parties. But going to the courts is invariably a time-consuming business.

So the PM ordered an internal party enquiry into the respective roles of Arun Nehru and M.L. Fotedar in the imbroglio. The enquiry exonerated Fotedar but pinned the responsibility on Arun Nehru. Accordingly, Arun Nehru was first sidelined and then dropped summarily from the Council of Ministers in October 1986. For him to fall so precipitately within a year of being hailed as the power behind Rajiv Gandhi’s throne was punishment enough. Indeed, he had had a heart attack at Dachigam in Kashmir in April 1986 and the first sign that all was not well between him and his cousin was that the PM pointedly declined to go to his bedside and sent just his physician instead. (There was also Arun Nehru’s nefarious interference in the Bofors matter, touched upon in the next section on Bofors, and further elaborated in the companion volume.)

Once the immediate kerfuffle was over, it seemed through most of the succeeding two and a half years (mid-1986 to end 1988) that the political turbulence over Babri Masjid-Ram Janmabhoomi simmered rather than boiled over. It was only once V.P. Singh’s National Front emerged as a strong contender for the 1989 elections that its partner, the BJP, stoked the dispute into a national matter. By 1989, it was evident that the issue was going to play a major role in determining the outcome at the hustings.

At this point R.K. Dhawan was brought into the PMO. Also, Sheila Dikshit was appointed minister of state for parliamentary affairs, with an office in the PMO and became the channel through which partisan party considerations began flowing into decision-making. Moreover, the firewall provided by Gopi Arora was absent as he had been shifted out of the PMO in late 1987. The political advisers were brought in because it was believed that it was their absence from the scene over the past four years that was the precise reason for the growing dissidence in the party and Rajiv Gandhi’s tumbling image in the media and public opinion. As Suneet had warned us, with Dhawan’s entry, things really changed. Once decision-making in policy got entangled with party and electoral considerations, the PM’s standing only deteriorated further.

The most egregious example was the shilanyas (ground-breaking and foundation stone-laying ceremony) at the Ram Janmabhoomi site in the middle of the election at the behest of the Dhawan–Fotedar duo; it did nothing to attract the hard Hindu vote to the PM but definitively alienated Muslim and left-liberal opinion. While the PM’s own commitment to not allow the demolition of the mosque remained firm and consistent, the shilanyas he arranged amounted to imitation of the saffron forces and appeasement of the majority community. He stepped on to the ground prepared by the Opposition and the rationale of his action (saving the mosque but promising a grand temple) was lost on those who wanted the mosque gone and even on those who desperately wanted the mosque saved. It was a classic case of being hoist by his own petard – and the persons fundamentally responsible for this were the ‘politicos’ inducted into the PMO in early 1989 to allegedly lend political heft to the PM.

Yet, at the end of the day, only Rajiv Gandhi was responsible for accepting irresponsible advice that was anathema to his moral principles and enduring belief in secularism. Because he imitated the Opposition instead of confronting them, all his many positive initiatives were lost in the electoral tornado that blew across the country. It was the only time I saw him looking shaken and jaded, his normal self-confidence and smiling demeanour having deserted him. He knew he was fighting a losing battle.

What conclusion does one draw from this sad tale? Had Rajiv Gandhi stuck to his basic values and fought the 1989 elections on his secular convictions and his many constructive nation-building initiatives, such as Panchayati Raj, and not allowed himself to be led to fighting the elections on turf prepared by his opponents, he might have prevailed. Of course, he would have lost his commanding lead of 1984 but would probably have emerged in end 1989 with a majority, however slight. By allowing himself to be misled by Dhawan & Co – for which, of course, he had only himself to blame – he allowed calumny to triumph over constructive nation-building. He also opened the door to the majoritarianism and authoritarianism now being inflicted on the nation.

Perhaps neither hubris nor assassination would have overwhelmed him had he not had such a large and assured parliamentary majority on becoming prime minister. A humbler victory in 1984 may have made him more cautious and circumspect, and more obliged to consult sidelined party veterans. But that was not how it turned out – and he eventually paid with his life. 

Excerpted from Memoirs of a Maverick by Mani Shankar Aiyar, with permission from Juggernaut.