A couple of months before the Congress officially refused to attend the consecration ceremony of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya on January 22, the party’s Madhya Pradesh chief ministerial candidate Kamal Nath told The Indian Express in November that Rajiv Gandhi was the one to get the locks of the Babri Masjid opened in the mid-1980s. This sounded like pandering to Hindus and revealed the inability of the party to speak in one voice on the Ram temple question. However, this confusion isn’t new.

The Congress has spoken in different voices on the matter ever since a Ram Lalla idol was surreptitiously placed inside the Babri Masjid on the night of December 22-23, 1949. That night, a person named Abhiram Das quietly went inside the mosque just before the shift of the guards was about to change and placed the idol there. District Magistrate K K K Nair sent a much-delayed message to the UP Chief Secretary and received the reply that the status quo should be maintained and the idol should not be removed.

It was Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru who in 1950 pressured the state government led by Govind Ballabh Pant of the Congress to remove the idol. Yet, the Congress was unable to speak in one voice. The Congress MLA from Faizabad was Baba Raghav Das, an ascetic handpicked by the CM who defeated socialist Acharya Narendra Dev in an Assembly by-election in 1948. Das threatened to resign from the Assembly and the party if the idol was removed, Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay writes in his 2021 book The Demolition And The Verdict.

Nair argued against the removal of the idol and said he should be replaced by another officer if the government wanted it removed. His opinion was accepted and the Masjid was attached and placed under the control of the municipal board, with the idol still inside. Even as Nehru expressed concern, Sardar Patel, Mukhopadhyay mentions in his book, wrote to Pant saying that “any unilateral action based on it must be an attitude of aggression or coercion will not be tolerated”. This, too, meant the idol would stay. The decision also got judicial sanction later. While Nair was removed as DM, his wife Shakuntala Nair fought and won the 1952 Lok Sabha election from Gonda in UP on a Hindu Mahasabha ticket.

Nehru chose not to visit Ayodhya in 1950 and wrote to Pant on April 17 of that year that he did not visit so as not “to come in conflict with my old colleagues and (because) I feel terribly uncomfortable there, because I find that communalism has invaded the minds and hearts of those who were the pillars of the Congress in the past”. Mukhopadhyay quotes him saying in the letter, “It is a creeping paralysis and the patient does not even realise this.”

After the Ram Lalla idol acquired a nature of permanence, the euphoria died out for some decades, till the early 1980s saw the revival of the Ram Temple movement. Significantly, it wasn’t a BJP leader who took the initiative. It was Congress leader and former UP minister Dau Dayal Khanna who was the first politician to write to then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in May 1983 demanding the restoration of Ayodhya, Kashi, and Mathura to Hindus. Union Minister Kamlapati Tripathi, a Congress veteran from UP, cautioned Khanna that he was playing with gunpowder and destroying the Congress policy of Hindu-Muslim unity.

Former Organiser editor Seshadri Chari, one of the few people who in 1982 attended the RSS’s first meeting in Mumbai to make the Ram Janmabhoomi agitation a national issue, recalls, “I distinctly remember that Morapant Pingle ji, the first RSS man to think of transforming the agitation into a national issue, named two politicians who could support it — Dau Dayal Khanna and Dr Karan Singh. The BJP was very small and too much into Atal ji’s Gandhian socialism motto to be able to do anything at the time.”

But Khanna wasn’t alone. Veteran Congressman and former interim Prime Minister Gulzarilal Nanda founded the Shri Ram Janmotsav Samiti on Ram Navami in 1983. RSS leaders also attended the feast he held on that occasion.

Vinay Sitapati writes in his 2020 book Jugalbandi: The BJP Before Modi that Khanna was the key speaker at a Hindu Sammelan organised by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) in Muzaffarnagar in west UP in 1983. Nanda was also present and so was Prof Rajendra Singh (Rajju Bhaiya) of the RSS. In 1984, the VHP constituted a committee to “liberate” the Ram Janmabhoomi. Mahant Avaidyanath of Gorakhpur, the predecessor of Yogi Adityanath, was its head and Khanna its general secretary. The committee launched a yatra from Sitamarhi in Bihar to Ayodhya, carrying idols of Ram and Sita.

Karan Singh, too, made many cultural overtures at this time. He made the Virat Hindu Sabha (VHS), which had RSS people as part of it. A large gathering in Delhi that he addressed as part of the VHS in October 1981 saw the active involvement of Ashok Singhal of the VHP too, writes Mukhopadhyay.

The Rajiv years

Rajiv Gandhi’s tenure as PM, following the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984, was also replete with conflicting signals from the Congress government.

Soon after using the Congress’s parliamentary majority to reverse the Shah Bano judgment that ensured alimony to the divorced woman due to pressure from orthodox Muslim opinion, Rajiv got the locks of the Babri Masjid opened just after a Faizabad court ordered it. He did so to reach out to Hindus. His government then banned Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, making India the first country to ban the book. In 1987, state broadcaster Doordarshan ran a 78-episode serial Ramayana made by Ramanand Sagar. It became a major draw among viewers. Sitapati writes that Rajiv also made Arun Govil who played the role of Ram in the serial campaign for the Congress.

It was only in 1989 that the BJP officially supported the Ram Janmabhoomi movement through the Palampur resolution. Rajiv Gandhi responded by allowing the VHP to hold a foundation ceremony (shilanyas) for the Ram Temple.

However, the Congress’s pandering to the Ram Temple sentiment had limits because of its Muslim vote bank in north India since independence. The BJP under L K Advani had no such restrictions. In 1990, Advani wrested the advantage through his Rath Yatra from Somnath in Gujarat to Ayodhya. It was Lalu Prasad as chief minister of Bihar who got Advani arrested in Samastipur, thus endearing himself to Muslims of the state. Mulayam Singh Yadav was in power in UP when the police fired on kar sevaks on October 30, 1990, to prevent them from storming the mosque. This made Yadav the favourite of Muslims.

The demolition of the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992, in the presence of BJP leaders — who maintained that they failed to control the mob — made conservative Hindus in north India shift to the BJP. Neither the state police under the Kalyan Singh-led BJP government nor the CRPF reporting to the P V Narasimha Rao government at the Centre could prevent the mosque from being demolished.

Falling between two stools and getting wiped out from UP and Bihar, the Congress, in need of Muslim votes, took a sharply “secular” turn to do business with regional parties as the coalition era dawned in the 1990s — only for it to be disrupted by Narendra Modi in 2014.