How Modi’s Kashi Vishwanath corridor is laying the ground for another Babri incident
In early March, just days before the prime minister Narendra Modi arrived in Varanasi to lay the foundation stone for the Kashi Vishwanath corridor project, a few local residents were caught in an act of subterfuge. The residents were attempting to bury a small statue of Nandi—a bull-form that ancient Hindu scripture proclaims guards the entry to the Hindu deity Shiva’s abode—near the north wall of the Gyanvapi mosque, a centuries-old structure that shares a boundary wall with the famed Kashi Vishwanath temple. The temple, the focal point of the corridor project, is a site of tremendous importance for devotees of its deity, Shiva. The actions of the locals, those in Varanasi were quick to note, were reminiscent of the insidious beginnings of the Babri Masjid-Ram Janmabhoomi dispute, when in December 1949, in the dead of night, an idol of the deity Ram was illegally smuggled into the Babri Masjid.
The burying of the Nandi idol is the latest in a long history of attempts to indicate a Hindu historicity to the site at which the Gyanvapi mosque stands—and only one of the many disturbing resemblances to the events that preceded the demolition of Babri Masjid. SM Yaseen, the general secretary of the Anjuman Intizamiya Masjid, or AIM, a committee that oversees the mosque, described this as “nazeba harkat”—an indecent act. “Their mistake was that they did this at 4.30 in the afternoon,” he said. “They were caught red handed.”
On 26 April, the prime minister filed his nomination for the ongoing Lok Sabha elections from Varanasi, or Kashi as it often called. The Kashi Vishwanath corridor is Modi’s pet project in the constituency. It is estimated to cost Rs 600 crore, seeks to create a wide pathway from three prominent ghats of the river Ganga to the Kashi Vishwanath temple, easing access for devotees visiting it.
Since early 2018, when reports first emerged that the Uttar Pradesh government had set the corridor project in motion, the state has cleared 45,000 square feet of land surrounding the temple, demolishing about 300 homes and displacing 600 families in the process. The area was earlier characterised by serpentine lanes lined with older structures that had become fused with new ones, with shops on the lower floors, and homes above. Standing in their place now is a flattened plateau of land and the Kashi Vishwanath temple. Next to it, visible in obvious relief, is the Gyanvapi mosque.
The day after he laid the foundation stone for the project, Modi posted a video on Twitter, which depicted a digital rendering of the government’s vision for the corridor—now renamed the Vishwanath dham. The video showed a large open complex around the Kashi Vishwanath temple—instead of the crowded lanes—complete with a performance space, a heritage library, shops for devotees, offices for the temple workers, and a “mandir chowk.” Through the video, the Gyanvapi mosque remains visible but is unmarked—in discernible contrast to all other structures on the corridor, each of which is individually labelled. HCP, a design and planning firm based in Gujarat, is credited with the plan.
For decades now, the Hindu Right has staked claim to the Gyanvapi mosque site, but its plans to take it over have not seen fruition. The Kashi Vishwanath corridor, however, has provided Hindu groups a golden opportunity to revive their efforts. Many in Varanasi see the project as the BJP’s attempt to strengthen its foothold among Shaivites across the nation, and further, to instigate a takeover of the mosque site, and stoke communal tensions in the area to its political benefit.
“Earlier the mosque was covered on all sides, and was not that visible,” Sudhanshu Tiwari, the librarian at the Vishwanath Sanskrit Library, located half a kilometre away, said. Now that the area around it is clear, he continued, “it’ll start to become visible.” Though the administration has not officially stated its view on the Gyanvapi mosque, all signs indicate that with the corridor project, the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Sangh Parivar are laying the ground for an incident that will mirror the demolition of the Babri Masjid.
The Kashi Vishwanath temple is currently administered by the government, but it was earlier managed by mahants, or chief priests. Rajendra Tiwari was the last serving mahant before the government divested him of the responsibility in 1983. Tiwari is opposed to the construction of the corridor. “You could have helped the devotees without ruining the character of Kashi,” he said, explaining that the usual footfall could have been accounted for without clearing such a large area. According to Tiwari, the past decade has seen a “five-fold, ten-fold” increase in the number of Shiv bhakts arriving from south India to visit the temple. Achal Gaud, who heads the economics department at the Banaras Hindu University, also indicated that the influx of devotees to the temple had increased in recent years. Gaud claimed that about a hundred buses-full of devotees arrive in Varansi to visit the temple every day. News reports put the population of Muslims in Varanasi at about three lakh—the largest demographic group in the constituency.
The corridor project fits neatly into the central government’s attempts to please its Hindu base by supporting overhauls of prominent religious sites. The illegal installation of the Ram idol in Babri Masjid gave impetus to the BJP stalwart LK Advani’s Ram Rath Yatra, which culminated in thousands of karsevaks—religious volunteers—descending upon the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya to demolish the mosque. In a clear parallel, Modi has been fanning the pitch for a renewed focus on Shiva shrines.
In a speech he made in Tamil Nadu’s Coimbatore district, in February 2017, Modi said, “From Kashi to Coimbatore, Lord Shiva is everywhere,” before unveiling a 112-foot tall statue of the diety. In Varanasi this year, the prime minister reiterated his commitment to Shiva and his bhakts—devotees. On 8 March, when he laid the foundation stone for the corridor, Modi claimed during his speech that the project had freed Shiva from the clutches of the surrounding buildings. He described the event as a “liberation day” for the diety. He added that for centuries, “enemies had their sight on this site … many a time, it has been attacked.”
On the ground, the distance between the mosque and the temple is less than ten metres—the two share a boundary wall and access to the two sites is often through common gates. The mosque compound is spread over three plots, Yaseen said: numbers 9130, 8263, and 8276, all owned by the Sunni Waqf Board. The mosque stands on plot 9130, and the other two plots form the surrounding area.
In 1993, not long after Hindutvadi karsevaks demolished the Babri Masjid, the AIM requested the district administration to take over the plot 8276, and to ensure that the Gyanvapi mosque is protected. The third plot, 8263, adjoins the temple, and on it stands the shared boundary wall, termed the Chattadwar Chabutra. Abdul Bateen, the imam of the mosque and the mufti for Varanasi, said that prayers have been offered at the mosque since its construction.
Much like the history of the Babri Masjid site, Hindu groups have long claimed rights to the land on which the Gyanvapi mosque stands. In 1936, after disputes with the Hindu residents of the area, Muslims from the region filed a suit in civil court in Benares—as Varanasi was then called—over a dispute concerning their right to pray at the mosque site. In 1937, the court held that the Muslim devotees would have the rights to offer prayers and perform other religious acts in the mosque and the courtyard; to celebrate urs—the death anniversary of a Sufi saint—in the mosque once a year; and to offer prayers at some other specific sites that contain graves.
In 1991, the PV Narasimha Rao government passed the Places of Worship (Special Provisions) Act, which states that all religious sites would be maintained as they were on 15 August 1947. The act also stated that, barring the Babri Masjid site in Ayodhya, all judicial disputes over places of worship that were pending on the day of Independence would be considered void. Despite this law, the same year, the late Somnath Vyas, who was affiliated to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, filed a case in a Varanasi civil court, on behalf of the “Swayambhu Lord Vishwanath”—Lord Shiva. Vyas made the AIM a party to the case, in which he demanded that the mosque site be handed over to the Kashi Vishwanath temple.
In 1998, the court passed an order summoning witnesses to verify whether the mosque stood at the spot next to the temple on 15 August 1947. The AIM then approached the Allahabad high court seeking a stay on the civil court’s hearing. Yaseen noted that the AIM opposed the civil court’s decision to entertain the case because it went against the 1991 act, which indicated that only disputes arising after 1947 could be heard. He added that the 1937 order by the Benares court proved that the mosque stood in that spot before 1947. Besides, he continued, Sangh Parivar groups themselves had long claimed that the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb had constructed the mosque in the 17th century—not unlike the claims surrounding the Babri Masjid—and any dispute regarding its existence would contradict their claim. The AIM’s plea remained pending before the court for several years. In 2018, the high court issued a stay on the civil court’s proceedings. Meanwhile, the case had passed on within Vyas’s family. His grandson Shailendra Vyas is reportedly taking the legal battle forward.
In 1995, Shiv Kumar Shukla, a local leader who then had ties to the RSS-affiliate the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, approached a civil court demanding permission to conduct a jal abhishek—a ritualistic showering of water—at the Shringar Gauri shrine on the temple site. The shrine is a small spot on a wall in the temple premises, and has long been the site of rituals on one day during the Navratri. According to Yaseen, that same year, the VHP’s former head Ashok Singhal and the BJP leader Uma Bharti also arrived in Varanasi, to lend their support and to initiate a tradition of showering the Shringar Gauri spot with water. The civil court, however, did not grant Shukla’s plea, and only allowed the continuation of the annual puja.
The former mahant Rajendra Tiwari recounted an incident that took place in the early 2000s. SK Pandey, “the executive head of the the temple picked up a shivlinga from the mandir, and threw it into the Gyanvapi compound,” Tiwari said, ostensibly an attempt to instigate tensions. Before this result could be achieved, Fateh Bahadur, who was the district magistrate at the time, intervened and the temple executive was removed from his post.
As the work for the corridor has accelerated, so has the frequency of incidents related to the Gyanvapi mosque. Not long after the Allahabad high court issued its stay, on 25 October 2018, a government contractor demolished the Chhattadwar Chabutra, the boundary wall on the north side of the mosque site. The incident caused a small flare-up among the local residents. Muslims from the area gathered, and protested the administration’s decision, stating that it would endanger the mosque. “Many people had gathered that night,” Yaseen said. Fearing backlash, he said, “the administration had the wall reconstructed overnight.”
A few weeks later, the AIM and Jitendra Vyas—interestingly, a relative of Somnath Vyas—approached the Supreme Court with concerns regarding the safety of the Gyanvapi mosque. They submitted to the court that the district administration’s action of taking down the boundary wall, though it had been reconstructed, would result in “adverse consequences for peace, harmony and tranquility existing between the two communities for decades.” They asked the court to intervene in the construction of the corridor in order to ensure that mosque remains safe. The bench, comprising the judges Arun Mishra and Vineet Saran, refused their request. Saran asked the petitioners to inquire with the district administration regarding its plans for the area surrounding the mosque. The court told the petitioners that Varnasi was “peaceful,” and asked them to “not disturb it with this kind of litigation.” Mishra told the petitioners that their worries were unfounded, but said that they could approach the bench again if they felt the mosque was under threat.
Meanwhile, the corridor project and the ongoing demolition of structures surrounding the mosque site has begun to pose other threats to its security as well. Rajendra, the former mahant, said that the area has been under heavy security since the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992. “There were riots every year,” he said. The site is heavily policed—the mosque is currently guarded by various paramilitary forces, including personnel from the Central Reserve Police Force, the Black Cat commandos, the Provincial Armed Constabulary and a bomb-disposal team. The team securing the mosque also includes over two thousand police personnel, three inspectors, an IPS officer and a magistrate.
Currrently, the security personnel use the Carmichael Library as an encampment. The library is an old Varanasi insitution located close to the Kashi Vishwanath temple, which was an important site during the Quit India movement of 1942. Early this year, the district administration ordered that the structure be demolished to make way for the Kashi Vishwanath corridor. Security personnel had opposed this order, stating that without a place to stay, they would be unable to ensure the security of the mosque.
In early March, after locals attempted to bury a Nandi bull idol in the rubble surrounding the mosque, Yaseen wrote to the district administration, asking for a stay on the demolition of the library. He said that if the library were removed, the security personnel would have to be dislodged. This, he said, would pose a great threat to the security of the mosque, especially during Lok Sabha elections, when political campaigning is at a fever pitch. At Yaseen’s request, the district magistrate Shailendra Singh postponed the demolition of the library, but only until the end of the election period.
The present situation’s parallels to the events leading up to the demolition of the Babri Masjid are impossible to ignore—the overt attempt to place an idol within the mosque premises, the presence of security officials, and the increased control afforded to the district administration that is helmed by a Hindu nationalist state leadership. Rajendra noted that with the increasing flux of visitors, the temple had recently begun leaving its doors open to devotees for 24 hours, not unlike 1991, when local Ayodhya residents began conducting round-the-clock prayers at the Babri Masjid site. When asked whether the demolition had made the Gyanvapi mosque a target, Sudhanshu, the librarian, conceded that the “chances of this being true are seventy percent.” Yaseen noted that when the prime minister came to lay the foundation stone, his rally extended beyond the temple premises and into the masjid compound—although the AIM had not been informed of this. Bateen, the imam of the mosque, said that a “Babri-like happening could take place.”
“Once the Supreme Court delivers its verdict on the Babri Masjid issue, the government will have no room to do politics over it,” Rajendra said. “Inke paas Ram nahi rahenge … yeh berozgaar ho jayenge”—They will no longer have Ram, they will become jobless. With the corridor, he continued, “they have a platform to create new work for themselves.”
When viewed in context of the history of the Hindu fight to take over the Gyanvapi mosque, it is not a stretch to believe that the aim of the Kashi Vishwanath corridor is to ensure the constant presence of a great volume of Hindu devotees in the region. “What is the meaning of clearing this entire area? You want to collect 5 lakh people,” Rajendra said. When lakhs of Hindus collect in the area, he added, “its environment will change.” “Masjid ke vidhwans mein, mukaami log nahi shareek honge,” Yaseen said—our Hindu neighbours will not participate in the destruction of the masjid. “Jo aayenge baahar se aayenge”—those who do will come from outside.