Babri to Modi: Decoding Vajpayee’s ‘No Stopping Us’
PM Narendra Modi with RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat in Ayodhya. (Image BJP on X)
Three decades after the Babri Masjid fell, India’s political centre of gravity has shifted decisively—but the 1992 question endures: who really speaks for the ‘silent majority’, and who controls the message?
By NIRENDRA DEV
New Delhi, December 6, 2025 — Paradox is an easy word to use, but seldom easy to explain. On December 6, 1992, as the first dome of the Babri Masjid crashed and tridents glistened in the winter sun, India witnessed a violent assertion long in the making. Rajiv Gandhi’s decision to open the locks—a political sop dressed as secular accommodation—had unleashed forces no party could later restrain. Babri was not a spontaneous collapse.
That message propelled the BJP from the margins to mainstream acceptability. Today, India’s politics is not merely Hindu mobilisation—it is the full-fledged Modi-fication of public life. Narendra Modi is not just Prime Minister; he is the nation’s most influential interpreter of civilisational identity built atop Hindutva foundations.
On November 9, 2019, the Supreme Court effectively rewrote the meaning of December 6th. The disputed site was awarded to Hindus; Muslims were given alternate land. A community historically viewed as outsider, trader, invader—was legally dispossessed of a 16th-century mosque.
But history is never about one guilty party. The BJP forgot—if only briefly—that legitimacy flows from ballots, not mobs. Congress and the Left clung to a secularism that rarely obeyed its own principles. The Rao government lacked both courage and conviction. Left intellectuals encouraged a losing battle even as archaeology undercut their narrative. Pro-Left historians presented expertise they never possessed.
Ayodhya shaped the careers of Advani and Singhal; it even dragged Vajpayee—poet, moderate, statesman—into its vortex. On December 5, 1992, he said openly, “Rokne ka sawal hi nahin.” That sentence captured the moment: political moderation yielding to the irresistible momentum of majoritarian mobilisation.
By 2025, signs of assertion are everywhere—priests inaugurating Parliament, renaming drives, and a monk governing the nation’s largest state. India’s democracy is messy, contradictory, combustible—and moving forward at speed.
Yet coexistence endures. Children share schools, families share festivals, and courts remain the last refuge of trust. The nation hasn’t stopped. It has grown stronger, even if more polarised.
But danger lurks. Bengal’s politics flirts with incendiary rhetoric. Memories of 1992—smoke rising over Ayodhya, torched homes, shattered lives—remain a warning. As one schoolmaster told me in Guwahati: “If this is Ram’s Leela, is it Ram Rajya?”
The question that haunted 1992 still defines 2025.
(This is an opinion piece, and views expressed are those of the author only)
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