What I Saw at Babri

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What I Saw at Babri

- By Jeff Penberthy

 

 

Asianage.com

 

 

Railway minister Lalu Prasad Yadav has called upon the Liberhan

Commission to summon two former Time journalists, Jeff Penberthy and

Anita Pratap, who were eyewitnesses to the demolition of the Babri

Masjid on December 6, 1992, to testify on the role played by BJP

leaders L.K. Advani and Uma Bharti.

 

Jeff Penberthy, who was then Time's bureau chief in New Delhi, writes

from Melbourne — where he now lives — that while "I would have no

objection to sharing the account of what we saw with your honourable

commission, I doubt whether any insights I could offer would justify

a trip from my home in Melbourne."

 

This is his story of December 6, 1992:

 

**

 

Almost simultaneously with the moment that the surging crowd of kar

sevaks breached the wire link fence protecting the Babri Masjid, a

cry went up patrakar murdabad (kill the journalists), and sections of

the crowd who appeared to be from the Bajrang Dal — the youthful Army

of the Monkey God — broke off to attack and pursue the many Indian

and foreign journalists present with iron bars, driving them from the

scene. From memory, I think about 20 were injured.

 

The circumstances in which I — conspicuous as the only foreigner on

the crowded roof of the Manas Bhavan building in front of the mosque —

was spared that ordeal is a slightly amusing sidelight to an

otherwise grim scene. Mr Lalu Prasad Yadav is a little astray in

saying that we were disguised as kar sevaks: that is not so, as I

will later explain.

 

At the time, I was the recently-arrived New Delhi bureau chief for

Time. Anita Pratap was then our Delhi contract correspondent. Anita

had travelled south to observe Mr L.K. Advani's rathyatra as it

progressed towards Ayodhya, and I drove there from Lucknow on the

Friday. (December 6, 1992 was a Sunday). This trip was impeded along

the way by an excited scene at a roadblock, where former Prime

Minister V.P. Singh (on whose watch the 1991 assault on the mosque

occurred) was being taken into protective custody. From memory this

was either by the Uttar Pradesh Provincial Armed Constabulary or

officers of the CRPF — I am no longer sure which.

 

I arrived at the hotel in Faizabad where most foreign journalists

were staying early in the evening. I can no longer recall whether it

was at a group dinner there, or later, that I learned that there was

considerable hostility towards the foreign press as a result of a

Mark Tully BBC broadcast which described the kar sevaks as "zealots"

or "fanatics." In any event, there had been speeches outside the

Masjid condemning the broadcast, and a German television crew, I

believe, had been attacked during the afternoon, suffering some

injuries.

 

I went into Ayodhya that night to take a first (and second last) look

at the 464-year-old Babri Masjid. I soon sensed not all was right. At

a stall near the mosque I was looking at some of the brightly-

coloured metallic plates of Lord Ram to buy for my small son Jun,

then 6, and much taken with the Mahabharata comic books. Back at

Friends Colony West (in New Delhi) he had established a small shrine

in his bedroom. Someone reached over and took the picture from my

hand, and put it back on the stall. Something told me it was time to

leave.

 

Walking back to my car along the dark lane across the fields behind

the Masjid, I found a group of young men following me. They

called: "Hello. Hello. Are you from the BBC?" When I had first

arrived in Delhi to take up the Time posting, our office manager

Deepak Puri had given me some good advice. "Sir," he said, "in India

just give a smile, and people will do anything for you." I stopped

and chatted to them in a friendly way, and they went off. I have

sometimes wondered how that might have gone differently.

 

The next day, December 6, we got to see the destruction of the Babri

Masjid because we had started early. Anita and I took up our

positions on the roof of the Manas Bhavan facing the Masjid at 10 am.

There was a third independent eyewitness there with us too, a man

from India Today (but not a journalist) as we looked over the mosque

compound.

 

Finally, Mr Advani arrived, and began to speak at noon as the vast

crowd gathered. I do not speak Hindi, and remember nothing remarkable

about the snatches of his speech that I was given. In any event,

other things were happening: the crowd of young men cramming the lane

to left of the Masjid shaking the tall chain link fence, which began

to sag. Along with several others, a very powerfully-built sadhu in

saffron robes — who I think was well known, perhaps as a wrestler —

tried to urge them back, and then moved to the circle of men

beginning to protect Mr Advani. In my memory, the BJP leader looked

distressed, and as the first young men with iron bars broke through

the fence and were sprinting towards the mosque, he was pleading into

his microphone "Please don't do this," before he was hustled away.

 

One thing that I have never seen published is that just before the

fence went down, a man in a suit jacket waded into the crowd below us

and fired a pistol held high above his head — like a signal. I know

of no one else who saw this, although I mentioned it to Anita at the

time — but things were beginning to happen everywhere just then. The

cry "patrakar murdabad" had gone up, and gangs were seeking out the

journalists.

 

In the mosque compound below me, the Voice of America's Peter

Heinlein was felled by a blow to the head from an iron bar, and his

friend Ed Gargan of the New York Times rushed in to assist him. A

rock had disabled the camera of Sipa photographer Dieter Ludwig, on

assignment for Time, and he wisely hightailed it. Chris Kremmer of

the Australian Broadcasting Corporation fled down the lane behind the

mosque towards the river, passing formations of the PAC, whom he said

later were sitting in the fields "looking terrified."

 

A woman freelance photographer representing Newsweek rushed into the

outskirts of Faizabad, where she said she was sheltered by a Muslim

family who rolled her in a carpet. Stefan Wagstyl of the Financial

Times hid in a hutment.

 

The reason I was spared any of this, I believe, was because of

cricket. Earlier, on the roof, the suspicious young Bajrang Dal men

around me asked the usual questions. "Who are you? Where do you come

from?" (Australia). They

 

frisked me several times for a camera, made me chant Jai Shri Ram and

wear one of their red bandanas for a while. But India is India, the

wait was long, and the talk soon turned to cricket. And I immediately

ingratiated myself by having picked up early on the potential of an

emerging young Indian batsman named Sachin Tendhulkar, the new Don

Bradman. I was made — and immediately labelled Allan Border, to whom

I bear a slight physical resemblance (this story was told in the

Publisher's Letter in Time's December 31 Ayodhya cover edition).

 

Below me, many journalists had been herded into a protected compound

behind the Sita Rasoi Temple, adjacent to the mosque: the distinctive

pate of venerable Delhi photographer Baldev, and handsome Rakesh

Kumar among them. On the roof of that temple, as the old mosque

crumbled, senior officers of the PAC, and their wives, were lounging

under shamiana, like senators and their consorts watching a Roman

spectacle.

 

There were roughly 300,000 people at Ayodhya. As the demolition went

on, thousands of saffron-clad women sat in neat rows on the plain

behind chanting hymns from the Bhagvad Gita. Silhouetted behind them,

pilgrims made their way up the Kuber Tila, a high knoll, to make

votive offerings to an idol under a makeshift canopy. The lilting

Song of the Blessed One, with its key line rising and ebbing... O

Man, do not take rest... washed over the kar sevaks on their

demolition business.

 

Ms Uma Bharti was there. Still new to India, I did not know much

about her at the time, only that she was called the "sexy sadhu." But

from a distant sound stage on the plain her voice shouted, again and

again, over the loudspeakers: "See the power of the Hindus!" (in

translation). The end of meekness, and subjugation." I asked Anita

how she felt. She said: "Ashamed."

 

I only left the Manas Bhavan roof once, in mid-afternoon — down

crowded stairs aromatic with ripe paan juice spittings — to see

injured kar sevaks being treated in a temple opposite. Then I walked

up the lane to look into the dusty cauldron of the collapsing domes.

On the road an agitated middle-aged man rushed up and shouted in my

face: "Are you a Hindu?," and kept it up as a crowd gathered. Once

again, good luck and cricket saved me. A young man also down from the

roof recognised "Allan Border," and hustled me back to the shelter of

the Manas Bhavan building.

 

At about 4 pm, rumours swept the rooftop that Central troops were

arriving in Faizabad, and the pace of work below intensified to

frenzy. The burly priest who had initially tried to stop the crowd at

the collapsing link fence now seemed to be directing things — both

rescue efforts for injured, and parts of the destruction! The third

and last dome crumbled sadly sometime between 5 pm and 6 pm. By then,

a huge red orb was sinking behind the Kuber Tila and the Faizabad

skyline, from which columns of black smoke were already rising.

 

We heard later that at 7 Race Course Road the cautious, elderly Prime

Minister, P.V. Narasimha Rao, had been taking an afternoon nap when

the demolition started, and that aides had been reluctant to wake

him. His credo in life, as I once reported, was finestre lente, to

hasten slowly. For a month, the subcontinent was plunged into another

communal bloodbath, which took around 1,500 lives, with worse

aftershocks to follow, in Mumbai and elsewhere.

 

I left India, and Time magazine, to return home to Australia in June

1995. I think this encapsulates most of what I can remember of

Ayodhya — or could offer the Liberhan Commission. I doubt if it would

take their deliberations any further.

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