Is
Babri Masjid / Ram Janma bhoomi issue a historical wound of our nation that has
not healed? A reflection by a psychologist
The
year was 1993. Babri masjid (mosque) had just been brought down in Ayodhya a few
months ago and was being discussed threadbare everywhere. I had joined Tihar
jail as a psychologist for an NGO to work with psychological problems faced by the
prisoners.
Tihar
jail, for those who may not know has a population of about 12,000 inmates. Each
jail is divided into multiple wards of around 200-300 prisoners each and each
ward is run by a ‘munshi’ and each jail has a ‘chakkar munshi’ who supervises
the ‘munshi’ of each ward.
The
‘chakkar munshi’ would often tell me about those who would ask for counseling, ‘doctor
saab who understands dil ki bat (doctor with whom you can share your inner
feelings).’ One day he came with a prisoner named Usman (name changed). Usman
would scream during his sleep and wake up everyone around him. He was 24 years
old, tall and good looking and hailed from Faizabad, Uttar Pradesh. Initially,
he was reluctant to talk but after sometime opened up as in his words he began
to feel safe with me. He shared with me having attempted suicide feeling shameful
about not able to control his nightmares and being made fun of by fellow
prisoners.
He
told me that he has nightmares about the roof of Babri masjid falling down with
a huge thud and he getting buried under it. “I went to see the structure after
a few days it was destroyed and wept at the site with my family. My friend who
lives near the mosque saw it being brought down and told me everything in great
detail,” he said. “Every Muslim in my village and nearby villages was affected
with trauma,” he added.
In
the next meeting, Usman brought some more prisoners who he said had been
affected like him. I suggested they do some trauma reducing exercises and the psychiatrist
suggested they take some medicines. They seemed to have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
In
Usman’s group, there was a boy named Omar (name changed) from Srinagar, Kashmir.
One day Usman shared that Omar had destroyed several temples in Kashmir during
the purge against Hindus in 1989 and even killed some Kashmiri pandits much
before the Babri masjid was destroyed.
“Why
did you do that?” I asked Omar.
“To
create an Islamic Kashmir,” he replied.
What
happened next took me by surprise. Usman got up and asked him to leave the
group saying, “This is not ‘insaniyat’ (humanity).”
Then
he told me, “It is wrong to destroy any place of worship.” The other prisoners
nodded their heads in agreement. The discussion turned towards how is the
prison, inmates pray side by side and there has never been any issue.
In
a later meeting Usman said what was helping him to reduce his nightmares was
not medicines or exercises but sharing with his Hindu friends in the ward and realizing
that Hindus had faced a similar trauma over centuries at the hands of Muslims. He
pointed out to the man who helped him with this. His name was Prabhat (name changed).
Prabhat came to the group at his insistence and shared his story.
“On
the night of 6th December, 1992 when the Babri masjid fell the atmosphere in
the jail was unusually tense. Prisoners assembled in small groups and talked in
hushed tones. “I had never seen such an atmosphere in the jail,” he said. “Suspicion
and distrust was marked in the eyes of everyone. Then some of us in the ward decided
to hold a joint meeting. First the Muslims talked of their pain at the mosque
being razed down. After listening to them some of the Hindu inmates talked of the
pain they carry over their temples being destroyed. The Sikhs shared stories
they had heard from their grandparents about how the Sikh Gurus were tortured
and martyred for their faith. We thought there would be arguments and maybe even
fights but there were none. It was as if hearing others’ trauma, we realized how
universal it is.”
Prabhat
then added saying that the discussion helped the Muslim inmates to realize that
their pain was contextual and what happened on 6th December wasn’t due
to revenge or malice but a centuries old anger that had burst forth. One of
them said in the group, “If one mosque caused so much pain to us Muslims, we should
also understand how much pain our Hindu brothers would be carrying over the
centuries.” Then Prabhat said, “There has been so much violence and rioting
over this issue outside but inside the prison there is peace.”
Seeing
the look of surprise on my face one of them made a statement, “Jail ek aisi
jagah hai jahan log ek doosre ke mooh se khana khate hain.” (jail is the only place
where people eat from each other’s mouths,
in other words it’s a place which destroys all the barriers between people).
I
realized that these sessions had affected me profoundly. I learnt how a heart
to heart talk can lead to forgiveness, understanding and peace building. The
prisoners had expressed a profound maturity that had defused a situation that
could have turned volatile but also shown to me that the path to peace was dialogue
around collective grief.
I
also realized how deeply this issue resides in the psyche of both Hindus and Muslims
and also Sikhs. Thinking over what Usman had said, I tried to imagine how it
would have been for Hindus to go through something similar to Usman centuries
ago and how they must have felt all those emotions that Usman described. Of
incessant crying and feeling of humiliation. This was over a single mosque. What
about the impact of thousands of temples that were broken down all over India
in the narratives of Hindus, I wondered? Why does no one talk about it?
I
had understood there would not be any easy answers to my questions. Psychological
trauma, I knew from different studies, never dies but is passed on from
generation to generation.
How
would a Hindu man in medieval times have felt when he witnessed his temple crumbling
to a rubble in front of his eyes? How, for example, he would have felt seeing
the Somnath temple being brought down by an army or the Kashi Vishwanath temple
being destroyed?
These
temples were considered the soul of Hinduism and the life of society revolved around
it. As the news would have travelled to other regions of India, did it affect other
people too?
No
psychologists or historians were willing to discuss this topic telling me, “Let
bygones be bygones.” Some colleagues even suggested I would be called communal for
bringing up this issue.
My
explanation that psychological trauma grows as a seed in silence and fights for
space when excluded and suppression of narratives by
perpetrators, didn’t cut much ice with the intellectuals I talked to. It was, as
I was to learn, a taboo topic.
Now
we know that historical injustices exist in societies as a raw wound that
hasn’t healed. But still they don’t get talked about for being politically
incorrect in India. But if we can understand today why native American Indians
weep at the site of the wounded knee or black men raise their fists in anger at
the point of no return for slaves in Africa, can we not extend it nearer home
to ourselves?
Should we not look
at the issue from a psychological lens where a race, a people holding a faith
faced an attack on their most treasured symbols and it stayed suppressed for centuries?
How would it have been if the Vatican or Kaba were to meet a similar fate like Kashi
Vishwanath temple or Somnath temple? Doesn’t such an issue need healing touch for an entire
society and not just a few? Even if it is symbolic, by acknowledging an
injustice it will bring peace to many.
Today the Ram Janma
bhoomi issue lies entangled in a legal, moral and political quagmire from which
it seems difficult to escape. Political leaders face charges while intellectuals,
the larger community still remains silent about the issue while taking recourse
behind law, history and archeology. Law must take its course and no one is
above it. But it is perhaps important that we now, more than ever, go beyond to
see what this issue psychologically means to Hindus as one that attacked identity
of a people and the subjugation and the humiliation that resulted.
Usman, Prabhat and
Omar taught me two lessons. One was that the Ram janma bhoomi - Babri masjid issue
was of unresolved grief of a society over their identity. The other is that
till Hindus remain stuck in denial and don’t acknowledge their trauma to the
world, it will remain shrouded in denial of what Will Durant described as one
of the worst genocides in history of mankind.
Today we know
that multigenerational transmission of trauma is an integral part of human history
and is transmitted in words, writing, body language and even in silence. Bruno Bettelheim,
the psychologist once famously said, “What cannot be
talked about can also not be put to rest. And if it’s not, the wounds continue
to fester from generation to generation.” Should we not
take heed of that for peace of our future generations?
In my novel ‘The
infidel next door’ I have tried to describe this wound that still haunts the two
communities and makes peace difficult. One publisher told me that Indian society
is not yet ready for such a book.
But I often
wonder, that in the same way that a group of inmates in Tihar showed how sharing
one’s grief along with historical understanding of wrongs can bring peace and reconciliation
in the present, can we not come together as people for dialogue, forgiveness and
healing?
