Blind Rage in Ayodhya and Poona
And why I detest bigotry and organized religion
Once, I was religious.
Once upon a time, I was religious. When I returned to India, we lived with my maternal grandparents. I became friends with a lady who lived down the street. We called her Krishna Aunty because she had a huge statue of Lord Krishna in her living room. I’d help her dress the statue every evening.
Then, I went to school in Nainital, and the only Brother who tried converting us to Christianity was a Brother from Kerala. The Irishmen never interfered with our religion, or lack of it.
My engineering college woke me up.
When I was a few months shy of my seventeenth birthday, I entered engineering college and immersed myself in five years of crazy experiences and exploration. I read Carlos Castaneda, ‘The Devils of Loudon,’ ‘The Doors of Perception,’ books on the occult, and flirted with black magic.
I returned to religion, briefly.
When I returned to Delhi, I flirted with religion again and became a devotee of Shiva. Even though I am an atheist/animist today, I consider Rudra-Shiva to be the most fascinating and mysterious god in the Vedic-Hindu pantheon.
Then, a series of incidents happened, turning me away from organized religion, pushing me to a path of agnosticism, hard-core atheism, and finally arriving at animist atheism. Contradictions fill me because, even though I do not believe in organized religion, I visit Sikh gurudwaras, but more of that later.
Mayhem in Pune
Shall we move to the first incident, which happened in Poona (now Pune) when I was twenty-eight years old, during sales training? But allow me to share some information on the kinds of hotels we stayed in and how we travelled. I was in the ‘sales rep’ part of my training, but because our bosses considered us ‘spoiled MBA brats,’ they allowed us to claim the allowance they accorded to sales officers. Poona is a major town, so my daily allowance was 2.5 USD, covering my hotel, food, and local transportation expenses. The company policy allowed us to charge first-class train fare between towns, without submitting proof. So, we travelled second-class, claimed first class, and survived on the differential!
My hotel in Poona’s crowded wholesale market area cost me 2.0 USD per night, so, were it not for the differential between the first- and second-class fares, I would have starved. I always thought this was a sneaky way the company optimized costs because, instead of giving us a decent allowance, they condemned us to travel second class. The logic my boss gave me was specious. “Everyone will travel second class,” he said. “So why give people a good allowance?” Specious logic at its best.
One morning, I left my hotel room and picked my way through the narrow lanes to where my supervisor was waiting for me. We were to travel to the neighboring town of Pimpri in Poona’s hinterland. As I approached his scooter, I heard a loud noise behind me and, to my absolute horror, saw a mob charging toward us. The men carried iron rods, bricks, stones, and other stuff, which, if it landed on your head, would do permanent damage. Blind rage suffused their faces until, Ayodhya, a few years later, this was the most terrifying sight I had seen in my life. A mob of possibly 100 people ran toward us and was about 50 meters away.
Akolkar, run, I yelled.
“Akolkar, run,” I remember yelling. I also remember he kicked his scooter into gear and took off, leaving me to run after him before I could jump on the back seat. We completed our work, and Akolkar dropped me back to our meeting point in the evening. Without even a goodbye, he took off, leaving me to sneak my way through the lanes to get to my hotel. The authorities had imposed shoot-on-sight orders, and I had only two small packets of biscuits. My hotel’s management had shut the restaurant and room service. But I managed to sneak my keys from the abandoned reception desk and escaped into my room.
I spent the next three days in my hotel room, nibbling at the biscuits and drinking water from the bathroom tap. Years later, I wondered how I did not end up with diarrhea. To pass the time, I’d walk around my hotel room, lie on the bed and watch the ceiling fan, look out of the window at the family in the opposite building, and play “British Steel” by Judas Priest. That was the last time I listened to the album!
Then, my biscuits ran out, shoot-at-sight orders were in place, and after the pain of little mice gnawing at my insides became too much to bear, I decided to chance my luck and sneak out. I encountered four police officers at separate exits, each of whom stuck a rifle in my face, and, when the prospect of starvation stared me in the face, a fifth policeman took pity on me and let me out of the area. I was like a caged animal who had found its freedom.
A few months later, I discovered the cause of the problem. A Hindu trader had a dispute with his Muslim neighbor, and to spite the Muslims, he threw cow dung on a Ganesh statue in the marketplace. People assumed that the Muslim community had desecrated the idol, leading to a riot.
Mayhem in Ayodhya
Let’s move to 1990 CE. But before that, let’s travel to the past. Sometime around 1528 CE, one of Babur’s generals built a mosque in Ayodhya, calling it the Babri Masjid. Everything was cool until the middle of the 19th century, when people began believing that Vishnu’s avatar, Ram, was born at the very spot that the old general had built the mosque. Rumbles continued but were controllable until Rajiv Gandhi ‘opened the keys’ to the masjid. The Congress had decimated the BJP in the polls, but this incident gave them the perfect opportunity to fight back. They based their plank on ‘Hindu pride,’ correcting an ancient wrong, Hindu insecurity, creating a victim complex, and normalizing violence.
LK Advani rode his chariot to Ayodhya in 1990 but pulled back at the last moment. He repeated his chariot journey in 1992. Ayodhya lies in Uttar Pradesh, and Uttar Pradesh was my sales territory. I remember talking to over one hundred people, each of whom told me that, if Advani pulled back a second time, they would not spare his life. I was in Ayodhya a week before the demolition. It was my fourth or fifth visit to the town, and people’s blind faith unsettled me. A priest pointed to a bed behind a curtain, telling me that Ram was born on that very spot. I bit my tongue hard, quelling my critical question.
Then, I was back in Ayodhya two weeks after the demolition, leaving a panicky wife back in Delhi. By this time, Ayodhya was peaceful. Those who wished to create riots had returned to their homes to wreak vengeance on Muslims who had no part in the construction of the Babri Masjid. Their faith was their crime.
I could identify every Muslim house in Ayodhya by its charred door and walls. Then, my sales rep and I walked up the hill. The masjid had vanished, leaving only stones on the ground. We walked up barefoot, security guards checking us every ten steps. Then, my sales rep poked me in my back with his pen and whispered into my ear.
“Boss,” he whispered in Hindi, “Chant jai Shri Ram, or the crowd will think you are a Muslim and kill you.”
I looked around at the crowd chanting “Jai Shri Ram,” eyes blank save for a maniacal fervor. No one can convince me that Muslims alone are guilty of violence and terrorism.
The hypnotized, blind, unseeing eyes filled with maniacal fervor and hatred were much more terrifying than the sight of the mob charging in my direction.
Wither, humanity?
Some believe that social media’s spread is bringing us closer to the society in ‘We’ or ‘Brave New World’ than to the one in ‘1984’. I believe we combine elements of all these dystopian stories in our society.
“I love Big Brother. “Jai Shri Ram” as a war cry. What is the difference? Jessica Ardern now labels free speech a ‘weapon of war,’ and Macron also dislikes it. Will they ban books soon and control our thinking?
If we can justify genocide based on the dubious writings in a 3,000-year-old book, and if we allow politicians, priests, social media tycoons, AI giants, and other crooks to occupy our minds, we must not whine.
The problem is that those who have allowed others to colonize their minds and reduce their morals to rubble in the name of religion often create mayhem in the name of god, whatever god may be.
Bertrand Russell famously said, “Most people would rather die than think, and most do.’ I concur with Bertrand Russell. An unquestioning belief in politicians, priests, and social media posts turns our brains to mush, leaving us open to manipulation and causing us to rise in blind rage at the slightest provocation that disturbs our uneasy equilibrium.
A trainer once told me that our greatest freedom lies between the stimulus and response: our freedom to choose. Have many of us surrendered our freedom?
I have read about the destruction of the mosque at Ayodhya and was not aware of additional religious hatred in Poona. Any sort of religious hate is so horrible and not ever religious in the traditional fundamental sense. As my India friend asks me, if there is only one true God and only one true religion, why are there so many religions? And the mob with bricks and steel pipes running after you and your friend taking off on their scooter before you can jump on the back. And $2.50 cents daily expense account as a sales rep, $2.00 for lodging. Amazing how you got through all that. The future does not look bright if too many people believe crooked politicians. One has to create their own self-knowledge and self-sufficiency and help others to create their own. Not easy at all but one has to do the best they can. Thanks for this post. It is excellent to keep in mind but not worry too much about. One must carry on the best they can in an unfriendly world where there are still good people.