In 30 Seconds
Story
Between the chariot’s arrest and the domes’ fall stands the autumn of 1990, when the state of Uttar Pradesh, for the only time in the dispute’s modern history, met the movement’s advance with the full force of its police, and the firing that resulted made one politician the shield of one community and the villain of another for the rest of his long career. The events of October 30 and November 2, 1990, at Ayodhya, and the choice of chief minister Mulayam Singh Yadav that produced them, are the pivot decade’s pivot, and this article states them with the register the batch demands, official findings and contested claims each under its own flag.
The confrontation was announced in advance by both sides. The VHP had proclaimed kar seva, sacred labour at the site, for October 30, the volunteers converging by the tens of thousands despite the sealing of the town, and Mulayam Singh Yadav, chief minister since December 1989 at the head of a Janata Dal government dependent on the Muslim and backward coalition Mandal season had consolidated, staked his authority on the structure’s protection, his assurance entering the era’s quotation books, that not even a bird would be able to cross into the disputed precinct. The state deployed accordingly, curfew, cordons, and the paramilitary in depth, and on October 30 the crowds broke through the town’s perimeter regardless, kar sevaks reaching and briefly mounting the structure itself, planting flags on the domes before being cleared, and the police opened fire in the day’s repeated confrontations. On November 2 came the deadlier engagement, a column of kar sevaks pressing down the lane from Hanuman Garhi toward the site meeting police fire at close quarters, and the era’s most contested arithmetic was written in that lane.
The count must be given as the record holds it, in two columns. The official figures across the two days ran to around sixteen or seventeen dead, the government of the day and subsequent official statements holding to that range. The movement’s own count ran far higher, the VHP and its affiliates asserting hundreds killed, with claims of bodies removed by the sackful and consigned to the Sarayu, figures repeated at the era’s platforms and never substantiated to any inquiry’s standard, and the scholarship’s position, which this series adopts, is that the official count is the documented floor, the movement’s count an instrument of mobilisation, and the truth, as with the century’s other contested firings, buried between them with the certainty that men died at the state’s hand at a holy town’s edge. The photographs of the season, the ash yatras carrying the cremains of the fallen kar sevaks through the towns of the north, did the political work regardless of arithmetic, the martyrs’ processions seeding the mobilisation whose harvest came two years later.
Mulayam’s choice made him, simultaneously, two figures who share one biography. To the state’s Muslims, and to the secular argument generally, he became the one chief minister who had met the wave with the constitution in his hand, the defender whose firing, he said in later interviews, had been a painful necessity to protect the mosque and the law, adding on occasion that more force would have been used had more been needed, and the community’s electoral consolidation behind him, the making of the Samajwadi vote this series’ next batch describes, dates precisely from that autumn, as does the epithet his enemies coined and his strategists banked, Maulana Mulayam. To the movement and its public he became the era’s tyrant, the man who fired on Ram’s devotees in Ram’s own city, a charge renewed at every election for three decades, and his own later career added the coda his critics savoured and his defenders explained as coalition politics, the expressions of regret for the deaths in later years balanced against the original defence, the file, like the man, refusing simplification.
The season’s institutional aftermath completed the stage setting. The BJP’s withdrawal had already toppled VP Singh in Delhi by November’s vote, Mulayam’s government survived on Congress support into 1991 and then fell to the same partner’s calculation, and the state election of mid 1991, fought in the firing’s shadow, delivered Uttar Pradesh to the BJP outright for the first time, Kalyan Singh, the batch’s ninth article, taking the oath with the movement’s mandate and the site’s custody in the same hand. The state that had defended the structure in 1990 would preside over its destruction in 1992, and the UP Files turns now to that day.
