When Doordarshan’s Ram reached
Ayodhya
Jawhar Sircar
(5th April, 2020. Times of
India)
It is more than just
interesting that Narendra Modi’s government has decided to telecast the two
great epics of India once again after three long decades, just when it was
assured a mammoth captive locked in audience. Let us delve a little deeper into
the connection between these two record-breaking serials of Doordarshan and the
rise of communal politics in India. This will also help those who are still
struggling to understand how the Modi comet appeared in 2014 and completely
blazed out all traces of 67 long years of secularism practised by the Indian republic,
sometimes quite sincerely and rather patchily in others. At the same time, this
little historical excursion would tell us not to apportion so much credit to a
single person or his cohorts, even if their narcissism so demands.
Let us zoom without further
ado to the exact year, 1989, when the latest model of Ram emerged victorious
from the television screen before the freshly charged Hindu masses. 1989 is
also when the infant Bharathiya Janata Party (BJP) began its first public
country-wide demonstration of communal fury and aggressive Hindu politics
started rocking the box office of Indian politics. We see that from this date,
it took undisguised Hindu extremism, represented by Narendra Modi, exactly 25
years to capture power. It may also be worthwhile to introspect why the left
liberals lost the battle so hopelessly, when they had a full quarter of a
century to devise an effective response. And, what is more intriguing is that
reasonably secular governments had held sway during almost the entire period.
The Congress party ruled or led the ruling coalition for over 16 of these 25
years and a not-so-virulent Vajpayee for 6 years, a squeamish but secular VP
Singh for a full year. In other words, the present deadly uncontrollable virus
of communalism actually grew and prospered during secular rule, through
recurrent riots, the post-Babri barbarity and Gujarat-type pogroms, which our
colonial administration had tutored us to treat as ‘law and order’ problems.
But to reach 1989, we
need to go over the incubation period that started in 1986, when Rajiv Gandhi’s
Congress that had shattered electoral records to win the Lok Sabha elections of
November 1984, had already begun to display panic once the Bofors gun deal
controversy appeared. This is when Rajiv passed the retrograde Muslim Women
(Protection on Divorce) Act, to appease Muslim hard liners. His Act nullified
the orders of the High Court and Supreme Court in the Shah Bano case declaring
that divorced Muslim women must be maintained by their ex-husbands. The ‘secular’
Congress’s reversion of this order is among the many irritants that rankle
Hindus, which the BJP soon capitalised. In late 1986, Rajiv Gandhi’s minister
in charge of information and broadcasting, Ajit Kumar Panja, approved the
commissioning of a religious serial, Ramayan, on state-controlled television,
Doordarshan. Why the age-old policy of the secular state not to glorify one
religion was violated remains a mystery that I could not unravel even as the
CEO of Prasar Bharati that supervises Doordarshan. Not everything is noted in
the files. The Ramayan serial started telecasting from January 1987 and went on
till July 1988 and we all know how wildly popular it was among the people. In
playing to the gallery, the television version of this epic and the next one,
Mahabharat, that followed it from October 1988 to July 1990, did not or could
not reflect India’s argumentative and intensely tolerant culture. As we know,
popular television serials harp more on emotions and reduce everything to
‘lowest common cultural denominators’.
What is more remarkable
is the behavioural transformation of the common, non-communal Hindu, once the
magic of this new wonder called colour TV actually brought Ram, Sita, Lakshman
and Hanuman to real life. The television metamorphosed distant bookish
characters, whose tales were confined earlier to monotonous recitals by pundits
and old people, into vibrant, real-life, close-to-touch ‘deities’. My
submission is that Doordarshan inadvertently helped the Sangh parivar ride the
new wave of popular religious enthusiasm, as we may note from the dates we
shall see soon.
Though the impact of the
televised epics on the growth of Hindu politics has engaged the attention of
foreign academics like Christophe Jaffrelot, Barbara Stoler Miller, James
Hegarty, David Ludden, Victoria Farmer and Philip Lutgendorf, Indian scholars
have hardly studied this nexus. One could locate just two exceptions who hinted
at or examined the relation between this decision of the secular Congress and
the outburst of communalism in India. New York based Arvind Rajagopal’s
Politics after Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in
India (2001) is, indeed, welcome and comes close to the magisterial overview of
Richard Hoggart’s Mass Media in a Mass Society: Myth and Reality (2004). Fewer
Indian academics, mostly left liberal, took the trouble to attempt any detailed
empirical analysis to prove, or disprove, the links between the Ramayana serial
and the Rama-Janambhoomi demand. The Mahabharat serial has somehow managed to
draw a little more attention and we have an Indian researcher like Ananda Mitra
publishing his Television & Popular. Culture in India – Study of
Mahabharat, as early as in 1993. James Hegarty of Cardiff is, however, more
explicit in observing how Doordarshan’s Mahabharat offered “televised darshan
of deities” and describes the atmosphere generated as “politically chilling”.
As a Sanskrit scholar specialising in this epic, Hegarty feels that the TV
serial offered “no room for ‘the other’ at all…. and it explicitly excludes all
those who do not subscribe to its historical vision” (“The Plurality of the
Sanskrit Mahabharata and of the Mahabharata Story” in DN Jha, 2013: 179).
As soon as the Ramayan
serial had created a new, unprecedented bond between the god and common Hindus,
as never before, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) swopped down on the small,
dusty down of Ayodhya. It rode the Ramayan wave to remind all that this
corporal symbol of Ram’s birth needed to be ‘rescued’ from the clutches of
‘Muslim invaders’. The Sangh strategy was to arouse all Hindus by painting them
as victims, not only under Muslim and British rule, but also under the
‘pro-Muslim Congress’. But let us fast forward to the events of 1989, the
landmark year, when a new nine-year old party, the BJP started utilising Ram
right from January. By November, Bhagawan Ram’s instant-delivery blessings
showered them with an incredible number of 85 Lok Sabha seats in that month’s
elections were held — up from a paltry number of 2 seats in 1984.
The VHP opened the
innings by announcing its determination to set up a Ram Mandir at the disputed
site in Ayodhya, come what may. It declared that it would hold its sacred
shilanyas ceremony at the venue in November that very year. The All India Babri
Masjid Action Committee, in turn, started forming ‘defence squads’. But the
Hindu programme was better timed as the Prayag Kumbh Mela was the perfect
occasion to harvest roaring support from the millions gathered, literally
soaked in religion. Even the Sant Sammelan, held alongside in February,
obviously pledged complete assistance. The year-long campaign turned
belligerent and secular forces were completely on their back foot, as they
failed to gauge how much the masses had been mesmerised by the Ramayan serial.
Having kept an antiseptic distance from Hindu epics and purans, left liberals
just could not fathom how a mythical character could re-define politics and
kindle so much Hindu fervour. Doordarshan, incidentally, kept running the
Mahabharat serial throughout 1989 and well into 1990, infusing thereby weekly
shots of holy adrenalin into Hindus. The Sangh parivar’s unique and imaginative
campaign of requesting every Hindu or each group to subscribe to just one brick
for the temple, worked wonders, despite the scorn it received from liberal
secular forces.
Excitement and tension
ran high throughout the year and the two major events of November 1989 were
obviously inter-twined. The Sangh parivar organised its long-awaited Ram Shila
Pujan to demonstrate its serious commitment to building the Ram Mandir, and the
BJP sailed through the Lok Sabha elections that very month — bagging a whooping
number of 85 seats. The party thus emerged as the indispensable ally of Prime
Minister VP Singh whose minority government (December 1989 to November 1990)
depended on this large chunk of BJP seats. We will not get into greater details
of how Singh was arm-twisted by the BJP for this support and how he retaliated
by splitting the Hindu votes, by shrewdly accepting the Mandal Commission
Report in August of 1990. He split the Hindu vote by reserving 27 percent of
seats in education and jobs for ‘Other Backward Castes’ (OBCs).
The cornered BJP
responded by riding once again the Ram-Ayodhya wave. Its President, Lal Krishna
Advani, criss-crossed the country in September-October of 1990 on his war
chariot, the Ram Ratha Yatra. This whipped up the desired passions and mass
hysteria, leading to several police firings, communal riots and left hundreds
dead. But, the BJP had finally managed to shake, quite threateningly, the
monopoly of the secular-democratic narrative that had ruled for the first four
decades after Independence.
Even foreign
commentators realised what was coming next but the new government under
Narasimha Rao, that was almost bankrupt in more than one sense, just looked the
other way. In the USA, noted classicist, Barbara Stoler Miller, devoted much of
her presidential address to the Association of Asian Studies in 1991, more than
a year before the Babri incident, on how the serials of the two epics on
Doordarshan came “with religious intensity, linked with politicized communal
feelings, that has made the Ayodhya situation so compelling. The way militant
Hindus have structured the narrative of Ayodhya’s sacred history and bent the
epic universe to their definition of Indian national identity is a striking
example of how vulnerable the past is to the passions of the moment”(Miller,
1991: 790). There is little point in recalling the destruction of the masjid on
6th December 1992, which led to large scale riots and counter riots and
terrorism, like the serial explosions in Mumbai. These broke down Hindu Muslim
relations in secular India, beyond repair, but Rao’s ‘secular’ Congress
government shamelessly abdicated its responsibilities, while the learned
publications by secular intellectuals proved to be as effective as
pea-shooters. The masses had surely moved away.
We have just raced
through these facts to explain that the Sangh parivar has been on the task of
generating Hindu fervour since then and that communalism did not suddenly burst
on the scene from 2014. We may analyse some other time how the interregnum of a
quarter of a century between 1989 and 2014, was hardly be utilised by secular
parties that had held power for most of the time. The bitter truth is neither
they nor the left intelligentsia, that was outsourced the task of scripting
what was to be taught in educational institutions, could construct any
appropriate response. In fact, the deliberate distancing of the left liberal
forces from religion left the field wide open to the Hindu right, and it
thrived on the secular syllabi of schools and colleges that portrayed Muslims
as brutal invaders. We will close this discussion here, as our present purpose
is to focus on a widely ignored area, the Doordarshan connection. We observe
how the small screen poured out unending streams of piety and also how these
were quickly and effectively converted into venom — for a Narendra Modi to
emerge.
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