Delhi: From a roof where she had a clear view of Hindu religious workers breaking the Babri Masjid, Sajeda Momin, a Muslim journalist, saw the demolition of the 16th-century mosque in Ayodhya Uttar Pradesh, over seven hours, thinking that any moment someone would come in and save the monument, which was under the protection of the Supreme Court. 

No one came; neither the central government, then under the Congress Party, nor the state authorities under the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which had brought about the political movement that altered India's secular road. 

Momin, a journalist for 35 years who reported for the Kolkata-based Telegraph at the time, said she felt devastated by the destruction then and once again in 2019 when the Supreme Court ruled the destruction “to be an egregious violation of the rule of law” but still handed the site over to the Hindu plaintiffs to build a temple on the spot where the mosque once stood. 

Around 2,000 people died in the rioting that came after the demolition. But more than three decades later, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the temple in a grand consecration ceremony on 22 January 2024, erasing the line between religion and State, Momin is tapped out of emotions. 

“I have no tears left. Those tears were shed when the Supreme Court gave its judgement. Yes, there is a sadness that my country has reached this point, but the feelings I had as a Muslim, expecting justice, went with the judgment,” she said. “The celebration for the temple, built on the debris of the mosque and blood of many, many people, is just the outcome of the political movement to make India into a Hindu nation.” 

At 12:30 pm today, with popular devotional songs, chants and hymns ringing out and Ayodhya decked out in flowers, Modi led the Hindu rituals for the consecration of the Ram Temple, carried live by the news channels.

Mohan Bhagwat, head of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological centre of the Hindu right that built the Ram Janmabhoomi movement along with the BJP, sat by his side. Hindutva hardliner and chief minister of UP, Yogi Adityanath, stood behind him. Television channels ran tickers like “All roads lead to Ayodhya”, “History in the making at Ayodhya”, and the “World celebrates as Ram Lalla returns.” 

As the BJP develops Ayodhya as a sort of Mecca for Hindus the world over, with Modi inaugurating its first international airport last month, Momin, who started reporting there in 1989, remembers it as a sleepy temple town where locals and pilgrims mostly were not aware or excited about the Hindu idols snuck inside the mosque in 1949.

Three decades on, an airline crew flew into Ayodhya dressed as Hindu deities, and a pilot said, “Jai Shri Ram,” with passengers echoing the chant. People had walked for days to reach Ayodhya before Modi's consecration of the temple. Students were brought on class trips. Film and sports celebrities flew in on private jets.

Weeks before the inauguration, the heads of four main Hindu mutts had objected to Modi performing the duties of a Hindu priest, saying it was a political show that violates Hindu scripture and norms will not attend. But this did not diminish public euphoria.

A public holiday was declared in UP.

Officials estimate 100 private jets descended on 22 January at the Ayodhya airport, Reuters reported. Retailers said gold and gold-plated statues of Lord Ram and temple replicas—priced at between Rs 30,000 and Rs 220,000 rupees—are so popular that they have run out of stock.

The construction of the Ram Temple, which is under the Sri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust, is estimated to cost Rs 1,800 crores (900 crores spent between February 2020 and March 2023). The heavy engineering company Larsen and Toubro, which undertook the construction, said the temple was built to last a thousand years.

On 19 January, we reported on how Muslims felt about the temple, the elaborate celebrations and widespread media coverage 10 years after the BJP came to power, unleashing a wave of Hindu nationalism in which 200 million Indian Muslims have been subjected to growing violence and abuse. 

The Muslims we interviewed said they were scared and anguished, and the restrictions on free speech made it very hard for them to vent their anger, frustration or grief. They said they planned to lie low, stay indoors and avoid travel on the day of the inauguration. 

In this interview, we asked Momin about the day the mosque was destroyed and what she made of the celebration, inauguration, and media coverage. 

While there was widespread coverage of the celebrations and the lead-up to the inauguration, including Modi’s 11-day fast, the media were largely silent about India’s largest minority. 

Momin said that while reporting on BJP’s movement for the Ram Temple in the late eighties and early nineties, she would hear BJP leaders like Uma Bharti and Sadhvi Rithambhara raise slogans with the Islamophobic slur for a circumcised penis: “Jab katua kata jayega, toh Ram Ram chilayega.” Last year, it was the same slur used by a Hindu parliamentarian while verbally attacking a Muslim one in Parliament, and no action was taken against him. 

Momin said the opinions and sentiments had ceased to matter to the media.

“From 2014, Muslims don’t count in the media. Muslims don’t count in anything. Any time Muslim names appear in print or on television, it’s when some crime has been committed,” she said. “The only other time is election stories about which way the Muslims will vote. Otherwise, we don’t exist. So, if we don’t exist, why do you need to ask how we feel.”

In Delhi, 600 km from Ayodhya, a huge public spectacle was underway as markets and residential colonies were blanketed with saffron flags with images of Ram. Workers of the RSS went door to door handing out pamphlets and bumper stickers about the inauguration, urging people to join the celebration by conducting pujas in their local temples, organising screenings of the inauguration, which were telecast live, chanting mantras and lighting diyas in the night. 

After the idols appeared and Hindus started thronging the site in 1949, Jawaharlal Nehru, prime minister and leader of the Congress Party, ordered for the locks to be removed and the mosque to be locked. The idols were never removed.  In 1985, Rajiv Gandhi, Nehru’s grandson, opened the gates of the Babri Masjid to appease Hindus after his government overturned the Supreme Court’s Shah Bano judgment for a Muslim woman to claim maintenance, and he was criticised for appeasing orthodox Muslims. 

After that, L K Advani, the BJP president 30 years ago, organised the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, the political campaign for building the temple at that very site, heralding the darkest period for Hindu-Muslim unity since the Partition. 

Advani, now sidelined by Modi, was expected to but did not attend citing the cold weather.

Momin remembers him up on the elevated platform with the other leaders of the BJP and the Hindu right as the kar sevaks brought down the mosque and celebrated after it was all over. 

None of them were ever held responsible. 

Before attacking the mosque, Momin said the kar sevaks attacked the journalists, taking away their cameras, pens and notepads, and herded them onto the roof of another building while standing guard. From here, close to 100 journalists watched in stunned silence as the police and paramilitary forces melted away, and the destruction went on for hours with no intervention by either the Centre or the state government. 

“This was before mobile phones, so we did not know what was happening in Delhi. Not a single shot was fired into the air. There were no water cannons. It was like Ayodhya had become a separate entity ruled by kar sevaks and the BJP,” she said. 

Momin saw the men clambering to the top of a dome, and before each of the three domes collapsed inwards, she heard a mini explosion. It was quiet on the roof, and the journalists spoke with each other in whispers, but there was a palpable outrage, not only because they were witnessing the destruction of the mosque but a violation of the Supreme Court order for status quo for the disputed site. A Hindu colleague and friend of Momin was crying. 

“I asked her, ‘Why are you crying?’ She said, ‘I can see the end of the secular country I was born into and lived in’. Nobody was shouting, screaming or remonstrating, but there was a sense of outrage,” said Momin. 

“On that day, I felt hurt and rejected. I was being told that India is no longer a country that Muslims can call home. I was being tolerated. I object to this language. Why should I be tolerated in my own country? I should be accepted. I don’t want toleration,” she said. 

Journalists now are different from the ones Momin shared the roof with. 

As Ashma Izzat, a lawyer who spoke with us, said, even the so-called “neutral journalists” were taking photos of the temple and posting them on social media. “It is so shocking,” she said.

Saba Khalid, a mother of two and businesswoman, said, “Journalism has gone for a toss. The judiciary is not untouched. There is no check and balance. An injustice has happened. Where do we go for justice? There is no door left for us to walk on?”

Khalid, whose young sons have faced anti-Muslim hate in school, said, “We feel hopeless and cheated living in this country. We are not even treated like second-class citizens.”

Parveen Talha, the first Muslim woman bureaucrat, said there was “nothing more anti-constitutional, nothing more cruel”.

“You can’t speak out. If you speak out, you are anti-national,” said Talha. “If you don’t like it, go to Pakistan. If you want to live here, you must live like Hindus.” 

After the mosque was demolished and the journalists were finally let go, Momin said the atmosphere was very volatile. The RSS men, civil and welcoming earlier because they wanted their picture or quotes in the newspapers (in the days before television media), were aggressive. The kar sevaks were looking for Muslims. 

Sajeda Momin used the name Sujata Menon, but she was a familiar face in the small temple town and risked recognition. When she and her colleagues found a car and tried going through the back streets she knew, they found checkpoints everywhere. They got out by ferrying an injured kar sevak to the hospital in Faizabad (name changed to Ayodhya in 2018). 

Later, when they returned after filing their stories and saw the bulldozers flattening the rubble at the site, a kar sevak recognised her and told her to leave despite her badge with the Hindu name. 

“On the roof, I was not frightened because I knew nothing was going to happen to me,” she said. “But the menacing way the man looked at me and said, ‘I know who you are’ sent a shiver down my spine. I was most frightened at that time.” 

Momin said she felt unequal as a Muslim for the first time when the Babri Masjid fell. When I asked if she did not feel the same when she had to change her name for this and some prior reporting assignments, Momin said they were two different things. 

“It was more for safety in a volatile crowd. I wasn’t changing my byline. I didn’t see it as a rights issue, said Momin.

“But the Babri Masjid had begun to represent the Muslims of India, so destroying it was symbolic of what could be done to Muslims,” she said. “To make them realise they were second-class citizens. And the lynchings that started after 2014 are the human personification of what they did to the Babri Masjid.”  

(Betwa Sharma is the managing editor of Article 14.)

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