How December 6 Continues to Shape India's Violence and Memory

Another December 6 has passed. And as it returns each year, a familiar question rises with it: should we remember it, or should we let it slip into oblivion? Among secular-minded people and among Muslims, one encounters a real conflict. Should a nightmare, which December 6 was, be recalled at all ? And why? What does such an act of remembering yield? Does it not only deepen bitterness? Does it not add yet another layer of despair to the lives of Muslims? Would it not be more prudent to forget it like a bad dream and turn instead to matters that appear more immediate, more worldly, more urgent in daily lives? This ambiguity about December 6 is not false. It is honest.

Should we remain captives of the past? Do we wish to live only as a society imprisoned in memory? And above all, how healthy is it to keep alive a memory that again and again reminds us only of our helplessness and our defeat? Does it not manufacture a victimhood, which we carry forward through the act of repeated remembrance? After all, what is December 6 if it is not the date of the defeat of secularism? And for Muslims, it is the day that reminds them that when violence is inflicted upon them, the state agencies often act in tandem with organised mobs, sometimes covertly and on many occasions brazenly. For secular Hindus and non-Muslims, it stands for defeat and powerlessness; for Muslims, it stands for violent injustice. These two emotions are inseparably bound to December 6.

A sizeable section of the Hindu society has long argued that the demolition of the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992 was part of a campaign to correct a historical wrong, that it was not an act directed against the Muslims living in India in our times. But memory tells us that it was a lie from the very beginning. On the same day the mosque was pulled down, large-scale violence was unleashed against Muslims in Ayodhya and Faizabad. More than twenty Muslims were killed. Hundreds of houses and shops were vandalised and destroyed. Dozens of mosques and graveyards were damaged. At the same time, organised violence against Muslims erupted in Mumbai as well, claiming nearly nine hundred lives and leaving many more injured. Thousands of homes and shops were devastated. Countless Muslims were forced to abandon their neighbourhoods, often forever. To this day, the report on this violence has not been fully released; action remains a distant promise.

December 6 is not merely a date. It is a significant station in a long – indeed, decades-long – campaign of anti-Muslim hostility. Those who recall L. K. Advani’s ‘Rath Yatra’ know that it was, in truth, nothing less than a campaign of hatred and violence directed at Muslims. Through that journey, vast sections of India’s Hindus were taught to hate Muslims. It is impossible to detach 6 December from that hatred. And that hatred has not diminished; it has deepened and spread in the Hindu society. Can anyone honestly claim that this growing hatred has no relationship with 6 December?

Is 6 December the date of closure – or is it only one important point in a century-long campaign of anti-Muslim hatred and violence which is ongoing? How can we remember December 6 while detaching from this hatred, and assume the date forgotten? How do we avert our eyes from the violence against Muslims that has continued, day after day, since that day? If we forget December 6, will this campaign of hatred and violence come to an end?

A familiar argument is offered: what good does it do Muslims to keep reopening this old wound? How does it help them move forward? But those who raise this question must interrogate themselves instead. After 1992, Muslims have been subjected to a continuous cycle of violence, where every wound inflicted yesterday is rendered ‘old’ by a fresh wound today. Which of these wounds, then, should they be advised to ignore? Or is it to be said that because Muslims remembered their old wound, new wounds had to be inflicted in retaliation?

The Gujarat 2002 and Muzaffarnagar 2013 incidents are deep wounds in themselves. Even if we leave them aside, we know that there is scarcely any space left; trains, buses, roads, markets, schools, and colleges, where Muslims can feel entirely safe. ‘Mob lynching’ has become almost exclusively a punishment reserved for Muslims. Ikhlaq, Pehlu Khan, Junaid – and the hundreds of others whose murders are no longer even seen as extraordinary. Are their wounds confined only to their families, or have all the Muslims of India been wounded through the violence inflicted upon them? Should we tell Muslims that these are merely individual deaths, that violence against them should not be transformed into a collective trauma? Should we tell ourselves that these killings do not demonstrate that Muslims are unsafe in India precisely because they are Muslims?

Why this relentless, serial violence against Muslims? Is this violence a Hindu response to the refusal of the Muslims to forget December 6? Is the prime minister of India continuously abusing, vilifying Muslims and turning Hindus against Muslims because they keep talking about December 6?

December 6 could have been only a date in a calendar if there were no November 9, 2019, no January 22, 2022 or no November 25, 2025. Each of these dates bears a living relationship to December 6. Who, then, is keeping December 6 alive?

And there is another question that must be faced. Is December 6 only a Muslim concern? Does it hold no meaning for Hindus? Does this date not warn us that a fictitious historical wound can be carved within the psyche of a vast population? That the very temperament or nature of a people can be altered – that they can be filled with hatred and violence through a long, systematic campaign? That if they are not vigilant about their prejudices, those prejudices can be weaponised to turn them into criminals? After all, those who participated in the demolition of 6 December were criminals – were they not? Did the Supreme Court not itself describe the demolition of the Babri Masjid as a crime? Why do we call them 'Dharm Yoddhas'?

December 6 is, in truth, the story of the success of a campaign that sought to actively criminalise a large section of Hindus. For Muslims, it is only one among countless dates that mark the memory of violence and injustice organised by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) under the watch of the state. If Hindus pause to reflect, this date should remind them that they were turned into instruments of a politics of memory. That idiocy, hatred and violence define them, and this is because they themselves did not recognise December 6 as a day of injustice when they were intoxicated with hatred and stripped not only of their reason, but of their humanity as well.

Apoorvanand teaches Hindi at Delhi University.

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