Sonia questioned Rajiv on Shah Bano case, he said he was trying to deal with it fairly

New Delhi, Nov 10 (PTI): Congress leader Sonia Gandhi questioned her husband and then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi on the Shah Bano case, pointing out that newspapers were accusing him of sacrificing Muslim women's interests, asking him why he was letting this happen.

Rajiv Gandhi replied that he was trying to deal with a complicated situation fairly and asked wouldn't he defend women's rights.

The conversation is part of Sonia Gandhi's memoir, “Belonging: A Journey Of Love”, which hit the stands on Tuesday.

The RSS dreamed of a “Hindu nation” that would replace constitutional ideals of equality, pluralism and secularism with second-class citizenship for Muslims, Christians and other religious minorities in India. Their supremacist beliefs became the political agenda of the BJP, Sonia Gandhi says in the book.

The first occasion on his watch to inflame Hindu-Muslim animosities had arisen in 1985 with a legal case concerning the rights of a Muslim divorcee, she notes.

“A very poor woman, Shah Bano, had gone to court seeking maintenance for herself and her children from the husband who had remarried and thrown her out of their home.

“The court ruled in her favour and ordered a small maintenance to be paid – a simple enough solution, on the face of it, but the judgment was contested by her husband on grounds of Muslim Personal Law,” she recalls.

The argument for making laws applicable to all citizens without distinction of religious collision with the right fundamental affiliation came into head-on collision with the fundamental right to freedom of religion, which included the legal guarantees given in the early years of Independence to the country's minorities that their personal laws would be protected, she says.

“I was agitated by the issue – by what I read about it in newspaper and magazine articles. Many well-known women activists, including Muslim women, had spoken out in favour of Shah Bano's right to maintenance.

“I argued with him (Rajiv Gandhi) and questioned him: ‘The papers are accusing you of sacrificing Muslim women's interests. What's going on? Why are you letting this happen?'

“He replied that he was trying to deal fairly with a complicated situation. 'Wouldn't I defend women's rights – don't you know me?' he said in a slightly irritated tone. He explained that he was seeking a way to address the problem of Shah Bano and other women like her without putting in jeopardy the entire edifice of Muslim Personal Law,” Sonia Gandhi recounts.

The compromise Rajiv Gandhi accepted did in fact strike a balance between religious beliefs and gender justice, and it also gave Muslim women a more fair and reasonable portion than the pitiful monthly amount of Rs 179.2 awarded by the court to Shah Bano, she argues.

But the legal amendment that overturned the court's decision was a political step that was widely criticised, she says.

The BJP predictably accused the government of indulging in “vote-bank politics”, while progressive liberal opinion viewed the decision as a capitulation to the conservative elements of Muslim society, she says.

However, in 200I, after seven changes of government, the Supreme Court upheld Rajiv's stand in the 1986 “Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce)” Act, she points out.

Sonia Gandhi also talks about the Ram Janmabhoomi issue in the book.

“A sixteenth-century mosque in Ayodhya had long been the epicentre of a dispute between Hindus and Muslims. Sections of the Hindu community believed that Emperor Babar, the founder of the Mughal dynasty, in order to establish the dominance of Islam, had built the mosque over an ancient temple at the site believed to be the spot of Lord Rama's nativity,” she says.

The tale of Rama, the Ramayana, is one that over many centuries has reached every part of India and far beyond, across Asia, she notes.

“Rama is widely worshipped as a deity and has an emotional resonance particularly in northern India. In 1984, the BJP leadership together with their sister organisation, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), initiated a movement to establish a temple in Ayodhya; the Ram Janmabhumi Andolan was launched.

“Skirmishes between the two major communities had occurred in the past, but clashes now became the order of the day," she says.

Processions would wind through areas most often inhabited by the Muslim minority, offensive slogans would be chanted, and violence would follow, she says.

“Loss of human life and destruction of property would further polarise relations between Hindus and Muslims.

“The Ayodhya issue came to the boil soon after the Shah Bano decision of 1985. Earlier, in 1949, idols of Lord Rama and his consort, Sita, had been placed inside the mosque. Worship was allowed thereafter, but the gates of the mosque remained locked under a court stay order, in the interests of maintaining communal peace,” she points out.

That didn't prevent further manoeuvres from continuing. In February 1986, the district court of Faizabad suddenly altered the status quo and ordered the unlocking of the gates, she recalls.

With suspicious speed, within an hour of the court's ruling, the gates of the mosque were opened, letting in a crowd of worshippers, Sonia Gandhi says.

“The effect was electric: A long-simmering but dormant conflict had been reignited. The BJP had at last in its hands the weapon they had long been seeking. Rajiv's aim had been to find a negotiated solution that would be legal and acceptable to all parties involved in the dispute: to let the temple be built without disturbing the mosque,” she says.

The BJP-RSS wanted nothing less than the destruction of the mosque, she says.

“One fait accompli was followed by another. The VHP had been vigorously mobilising its followers, collecting funds and building materials for the temple: 25,000 bricks made from the earth of each village, sanctified locally with Puja ceremonies. Spurred by its success in raising the communal temperature, it declared in 1989 a ‘shilanyas’, a foundation stone-laying ceremony for the envisaged construction,” Sonia Gandhi recounts in the book.

Following long negotiations with the government, the BJP and the VHP had given an undertaking to N D Tiwari, the then chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, and the home minister, Buta Singh, that they'd hold the shilamyas on an adjacent site, outside the disputed area; they wouldn't use the occasion to ignite an agitation or attempt to begin construction of the temple, she says.

They signed a document to that effect – but when they came to it, in a sly volte-face, they conducted the ceremony, not on the designated spot, but on another, where, it was made clear, the temple when built would inevitably replace the mosque, she says.

“This had its inescapable consequences, in continuing bitterness and bloodshed between communities, and the eventual destruction of the four-hundred-year-old mosque in 1992.

“Rajiv's attempt to revive Mahatma Gandhi's alternative conception of a Ram Rajya, with its core ideals of virtue, morality and justice, fell on deaf ears. RSS propaganda prevailed, and its poisonous consequences have been seen in the country through the past three decades, to the serious endangerment of our country's social fabric,” she says. PTI ASK ARI APL

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