Where God was Born: Ramajanmbhoomi and Babri Masjid

Speaker: Dr. Ila Nagar (OSU Department of Near Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures)

The Ramajanmbhoomi–Babri Masjid dispute is a decades-long conflict over a holy site in Ayodhya, India, where the Babri Masjid mosque stood from the sixteenth century until the Hindu right demolished it in 1992. It was demolished after years of propaganda around the unsubstantiated pretext that the site was also the exact birthplace of the revered Hindu god Ram. Despite lack of evidence, subsequent court rulings cited Hindu “faith” and “belief” that paved the way for construction of a Ram temple at the site. In 2020, India’s largest political party, Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP), marked an important victory for the Hindu right when its leader, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, laid a silver brick in the foundation for the new Ramajanmbhoomi temple. This talk examines the role that propagandist language use played in this victory of the Hindu right. I aim to answer two questions: How can language use about a group of people by those who hold power over them disenfranchise such groups and empower the perpetrators to discriminate against them? What is the degree of judicial harm that harmful speech can cause?

This talk shows how propaganda is essential to understanding how the Hindu right continues to gain and wield influence across India. I draw from slogans, speeches, parliamentary debates, judicial documents, and media interviews made over the past century to show how BJP uses language and imagery relating to Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. I claim that BJP maneuvered language to created “faith” and “belief” that confirmed the exact physical space where lord Ram was born was exactly where Babri Masjid stood. Once this “faith” and “belief” was created violent physical action in the 1990s and judicial action in 2010 and 2019 turned things in favor of the Hindu right. This work builds on Tirrell’s analysis of language use in Rwanda where Tutsi and Hutu incited unspeakable violence on each other, and it was abetted by “action-engendering force of speech” (2012, 187). My work traces a trajectory of language use which reinforces the connection between language, ideology, and propagandist speech (as discussed in Beaver and Stanley, forthcoming) and shows how language use creates legislative and judicial changes in India. These changes will sideline Indian Muslims in ways that are profound, long lasting, and near impossible to change for decades to come.