Babur and his Masjid.....................

 

 

I have recently concluded reading Babur nama a journal written by the emperor himself and this coincides with 20^th anniversary of the demolition of a masjid he is said to have constructed. Just as his victory over Ibrahim lodhi changed the course of Indian history , Babur may not have known that history will be redefined nearly 400 years after his rule because of this Masjid.

Babur, as I understood from his book was no saint to be revered and to the best of my understanding no Muslim ever does so. The book is majorly an account of an emperor’s conquests who happened to be a Muslim. He had several contradictions in his personality, on one hand he has written to have immense faith in God while on the other hand he drank wine, consumed opium and maajun (tobacco) and killed recklessly in wars. The most interesting side of his personality was his infatuation for a teenage boy for whom he composed poetry too.  Despite these attributes, Dilip Hiro, the translator of Babur nama maintains that Babur was a man of conscience. His relentless pursuit of power did not lead him to abandon certain core principles. Going by this assumption, I wonder if Babur would have ordered this Masjid to be constructed at a place of utmost spiritual significance to Hindus.

The period between 1989 to 1992 was a defining phase of my life in Aligarh which was already a communally sensitive District. 1989 was  bloodier  than  1992 when the Masjid was actually pulled down. This year, killing of 16 kar sevaks attempting to scale the disputed dome by Mulayam singh administration flamed Hindu sentiments beyond control followed by large scale violence. Hatred between the two communities climbed its apex , inflammatory pamphlets were distributed, hate graffiti were written on walls. even though the city was under curfew and tense, there was no major incident till a  local newspaper printed false news of  77 Hindu patients  massacred at the AMU hospital, this report was followed by Gomti train being stopped on the outskirts of Aligarh and killing of 11 Muslims and a bearded train guard who was a Hindu.

Worst came when it was rumored that one particular night a Hindu mob with infamous PAC force would attack our locality. More than our lives we despaired to protect women, children and the older ones. An escape route was worked out for them which would take them to a larger house behind our colony.  As the night approached, tension mounted and  it appeared as if this was the end. Older ones and women sat in prayers while younger ones took to the roofs and then around 8 PM there was huge noise of shouting and  heavy firing all around. This continued for nearly half an hour without actually knowing what was happening. Nothing really happened, no mob came but years later during Gujarat riots, I could feel what an ex Congress MP, Mr. Ahsan Jafri must have gone through to save his family before losing his life to the mob.

I felt disoriented during these few years, felt immensely sick watching women grinding red chilies to powder for self-defense and my father making a train reservation  with a fake name. He had to travel to attend my brother in law in Allahabad who had suffered a stroke. I decided to travel with him and it was a tense journey all through with calls like "बाबर की सन्तानों भारत छोड़ो" , "मुसलमानों के दो ही स्थान ......पाकिस्तान या क़ब्रिस्तान" written on walls as the train jorneyed.

The feeling of being disowned by one’s motherland is the same as being orphaned. My love for the country can be understood through a simple example, during my growing years as a cricket crazy kid, I begged Allah during  Namaz for India’s victory in test matches. In the 1978 series with Pakistan I wept and didn’t eat a few meals after India lost two successive test matches.

We were a small group of activists led by a fatherly figure who was also a professor at AMU trying to bring the two factions of Babri committee on one platform and to convince them to barter Masjid with a university or a hospital at least. We believed that this disputed Masjid had no religious significance to the Muslims and more importantly, ideologically should not be constructed on a disputed place. We had rationally foreseen that the crescendo at which Hindu sentiments were taken to  would not pacify at anything less than the demolition of this structure. This group however, underperformed and it became literally impossible to educate our own people who were under illusion that the world would turn upside down if Masjid was damaged.  Our  campaign could not succeed beyond a few hundred signatures and the climax was as cruel as we knew.

20 years later, even though the memories still haunt we have moved on, the pioneers of Ayodhya movement, the BJP has lost its credibility on the issue and  I still fantasize that the two communities will sit together and Muslims will  exchange the disputed land with an academic institution much needed by our community. But this is a fantasy of a person very much in love with his country who prays for its victory in cricket matches specially if they are against Pakistan……………..