Ayodhya Consensus: 'Ram Saved Us, Ram Saved Democracy'

Ramadhar Yadav, a daily wage worker, from Ayodhya, is jubilant over the Bhartiya Janata Party's humiliating defeat in the Faizabad Lok Sabha seat. Lord Ram has finally heard his plea, there is justice after all, Yadav said. 

The cattle owner left his fate in the hands of his divine namesake, Ayodhya’s crown prince lord Ram, after local politicians, district officials, and even Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath remained unperturbed over his relentless complaint on fair compensation and rehabilitation.  

Ramadhar’s family of ten members including two brothers, became homeless overnight after their ancestral family house in the Ahirana mohalla was demolished in a city-wide drive for the construction of the Ram temple complex in December 2022. He neither received the meagre compensation nor an alternate accommodation, as his house was built on government land.

“Hum Ayodhyawasi Ram ke hain. Woh hamari takleef dekh raha tha. Bhagwan Ram ne BJP ko dand diya hai, hamnethodi na kuch kiya hai, (it is not us, who have done anything, but lord Ram himself has punished the BJP),” he said, about veteran BJP candidate Lallu Singh’s loss from Faizabad parliamentary constituency to Samajwadi Party's Awadesh Prasad. 

Singh’s defeat by a margin of over 54,000 votes within six months of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s star-studded inaugural ceremony has caused major embarrassment to the BJP and a blow to its divisive Hindutva politics. Modi and BJP leaders promised free travel arrangements to voters in Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Telangana, Rajasthan, and Chhattisgarh if they made BJP candidates victorious. But back in Ayodhya, residents like Ramadhar have been living in distress with no place to stay or work. 

Ramadhar couldn’t even find a place close to renting around his neighbourhood and was forced to leave and live in Faizabad 7 km away from Ayodhya. The Ram Janmabhoomi trust and the district collector have acquired a majority of the land in the temple’s periphery and opened homestays, and B&Bs in the large houses, shooting up real estate prices in the town.

The six-month-long drive for road widening, infrastructure development, and beautification saw the demolition of 2200 shops, 800 houses, 30 temples, 9 mosques, and 6 Mazars. Only a few received compensation as a majority of the land on which the structures were built was government or nazul land. 

The state government also forcefully acquired all the land parcels in the 15 km radius of Ayodhya town from marginal farmers at throw-away prices and sold it to corporates in the private sector at higher rates for constructing hotels, luxury apartments, and residential townships, said Ashok Verma, former Samajwadi Party President overseeing the Faizabad constituency. “The compensation was so low that farmers could not buy land anywhere near Ayodhya. They too have been displaced. The resultant displacement coupled with unemployment and inflation, has led to a lot of anger in Ayodhya,” he said. 

In the run-up to the election, SP candidate Awadesh Prasad centered his campaign around the demolition drive and justice for locals. Two-time BJP MP Lallu Singh, on the other hand, spoke about the party’s role in the Ram temple’s construction and asked voters to re-elect the party with an overwhelming majority so that it could amend the Constitution. 

The narrative of changes in the constitution purportedly to end reservations in education and public sector jobs, strengthened the opposition INDI alliance’s campaign to “save the constitution and democracy.” They united the backward castes and Dalit communities against the BJP.

BJP’s loss in Ayodhya is its own doing, says Ramadhar’s younger brother Santosh Yadav. The political leaders shirked their responsibility and refused to meet distressed locals. “They made all of us helpless. We were all waiting for an opportunity to kick BJP out, and it came at the time of voting,” he said. 

Yadav brothers voted for SP candidate Awadhesh Prasad. Akhilesh Yadav was the only high-level politician who met the locals and assured them of looking into their complaints, they said.

The election results in Faizabad are the reaction of lakhs of people simmering with discontent against the BJP government at the state and the centre for their ill-treatment in the guise of religious duty, locals said.  Millions of devotees, VIP dignitaries, India’s President, political leaders, Bollywood stars, business people, and celebrities arrive daily in Ayodhya to see the idol of Ram Lalla and the opulent temple which is the costliest to be ever constructed. 

But the Ram temple was a non-issue this election, inflation and unemployment were, says Suman Gupta, senior journalist at Janmorcha Daily. “BJP forcefully tried to impose Ram temple agenda as its campaign pitch and failed miserably. The temple issue worked in its favour, till the time the agitation movement was alive. Once the construction resumed, people wanted to move on with their lives,” she said.  

BJP not only lost the Faizabad seat but all five constituencies-- Amethi, Sultanpur, Barabanki, Basti, and Ambedkar Nagar -- under the jurisdiction of the Ayodhya Circle. Even the neighbouring seats in Sant Kabirnagar, Ghosi, Jaunpur, and Macchlishahr, witnessed the rout of BJP. In Shravasti, BJP's Saket Misra, son of Nripendra Misra, former Principal Secretary in the Prime Minister’s Office and chairman of the Ayodhya Ram Temple trust, was also defeated. 

BJP fared abysmally in its choice of candidates and caste equation, in the entire Purvanchal and Awadh region, giving an advantage to the SP and the larger INDI alliance, Gupta said. The party’s landslide victory in Uttar Pradesh in 2014 and 2019 was the result of its social engineering, which cornered the Bahujan Samaj Party’s vote base and doubled its share of the Dalit vote, an analysis of post-poll surveys shows. This time, Akhilesh Yadav’s experiment with the PDA equation by giving tickets to the candidates from Pichda, Dalit, and Alpasankhyak (OBC, Dalit, and Minority) sections clicked right.

Faizabad’s approximately 20 lakh voters are divided into 4 lakh OBC votes, 6.5 lakh SC votes, 3.5 lakh Muslim votes, and nearly 6 lakh votes from the General category. SP sealed the nomination of Awadhesh Prasad, a popular and approachable grassroots Dalit leader from the Pasi community, for the general seat in the Faizabad constituency almost a year in advance. The nine-time MLA won 554,289 votes, a majority of which were from the SC, OBC, Muslim, and Hindu votes, SP workers said. 

The OBC and Dalit voters were influential in BJP’s rise in UP and the same voters are influential in pulling BJP down, Gupta said adding that those disenchanted by BJP and BSP’s politics have returned to the fold of SP. “Instead of mandir politics, this election became a fight between forward vs backward candidates.” 

BJP’s dimmed victory in the 2024 Loksabha election is eerily comparable to the 1989 elections when Congress lost its sheen as the single-largest party. With the Hindutva frenzy at its peak and the weight of debacles like the Shah Bano verdict and demand for opening the doors of the Ram temple, Congress attempted to make the temple its political plank. PM Rajiv Gandhi launched his election campaign from Faizabad and turned the coats of secular politics on its head, instead promising voters to establish Rama Rajya. The party lost its seat in Faizabad and also its majority status, winning only half the seats than the earlier record.

The 1989 results changed the trajectory of the country’s political landscape forever. BJP’s defeat in Ayodhya holds a similar probability. As veteran BBC journalist Mark Tully said once, Ayodhya showed that mixing religion and politics is playing with fire. 

The people of Ayodhya, at the epicentre of the bellicose Ram Janmabhoomi movement, reject communal politics, says Dinesh Sharma, two-time SP MLA Ayodhya. The century-long conflict has disturbed the sanctity of their town, dented the fragile economy, and destroyed the fabric of syncretic culture. 

Ordinary people are not prone to strife. Ram’s ideals of inclusiveness are not just a part of an epic here, it is a way of life, author Valay Singh reminisced. Ayodhya has a glorious past as a site of confluence of different traditions, sects, and religions, which was tragically turned into ground zero of communal conflict for political gains. 

During the 1989 campaign, Sharma spoke of preserving this shared culture, and inter-faith harmony that was held hostage by the communal tension by visiting karsevaks from RSS, VHP, and Bajrang Dal. He won the Ayodhya assembly seat in 1989 alongside the Communist Party of India’s Mitrasen Yadav as a member of parliament. “Ayodhyawasis, the native inhabitants are not communal, Ayodhyawadis, who have made the town focus of its hostile politics are,” Sharma pointed out. 

The Ram wave engulfed Ayodhya that year. The firing on karsevaks in 1990 and the demolition of Babri mosque in 1992, led to BJP’s resurgence in Ayodhya, UP, and New Delhi. BJP’s Vinay Katiyar - founder of Bajrang Dal and an accused in the Babri Masjid demolition case - won the Faizabad seat three times from 1991 to 1999. 

Once the Dalit face of BJP’s Hindutva politics, Katiyar now finds himself aloof, pushed to the sidelines like most old-timers of the temple agitation movement. He was reluctant to speak on the election results but told Outlook that he was shocked by the verdict in Ayodhya. “Yeh haar sahi nahi hai (the defeat is not right),” he said.

Katiyar said he came to Ayodhya as a Rambhakt (devotee) and lived in the town as a Rambhakt. “First and foremost, I am a Ram devotee and then an elected representative. In my election campaign, I never made an issue out of Ram temple. I would simply tell the voters, make me win and I will work for people,” he said. 

While the people of Ayodhya like the rest of the country rejoiced at the temple’s construction, Katiyar said it was not appropriate for the BJP to use the temple for seeking votes. The betrayal has caused heavy damage to the BJP.

“Mandir ke saath dagabazi nahi ho sakti,” he said adding that it was not the BJP that made the temple, but the Ram Bhakts all over the country. 

Ramadhar, an ardent devotee, crosses the path of the temple’s large complex daily but has not stepped inside to worship. “Jab tak humko Ayodhya mein ghar wapas nahi milta tab tak darshan karne mandir nahi jayenge,” (I’ve told lord Ram that I will come to pray to you only when you give me my house back in Ayodhya.) 

He is now awaiting on SP leader Akhilesh Yadav’s promise to deliver accommodation and adequate compensation in lieu of their demolished property. 

Ramadhar is certain that SP’s victory over BJP which snatched their homes and income sources, was lord Ram’s divine intervention which came to the rescue of Ayodhyawasis. 

Lord Ram has saved Ayodhya. Perhaps Ram also saved democracy.