S Boopathiraj was born in 1992 in Tamil Nadu’s Coimbatore district, hundreds of kilometres away from Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh. In December that year, the 16th-century Babri Masjid was demolished by a Bharatiya Janata Party-led mob, which claimed the structure stood on land where the deity Ram was born. The event led to riots in several states. It also cast a shadow on Pollachi, the town Boopathiraj grew up in.
“In my school, people identified our caste and religion from the locality we lived in,” said Boopathiraj, who is now a postgraduate student of Tamil literature at Pondicherry Central University.
Boopathiraj’s family lived close to a Muslim neighbourhood. They visited the neighbourhood dargah often and his mother spoke Urdu. “I grew up in their homes,” he said. “They were our family. I never once missed nonbu kanji [rice gruel] during Ramzan. It was a festival that we all celebrated.”
But this warmth and trust were absent in his school. Muslim children were seen as different, he said.
A series of bombings in Coimbatore in 1998, hours ahead of BJP leader LK Advani’s election meeting, left 58 people dead and deepened the fault lines. An Islamic fundamentalist group, the Al Umma, was held responsible for the attack. This led to a police crackdown on Muslim neighbourhoods and several community members were jailed, allegedly without any clear charges.
“I could sense the hatred towards Muslims, with people making derogatory references to them,” Boopathiraj said.
In college, his Tamil literature classes focus on Hindu epics, he points out. “We are still taught the Kamba Ramayanam,” he said. This Tamil retelling of the original story revolves around eulogising the heroism of Ram.
The renewed clamour for a Ram temple in Ayodhya, including demands that the BJP-led government at the Centre bring in a law or ordinance for this, ahead of general elections next year has not escaped Boopathiraj. He says the Ayodhya debate has resurfaced on university campuses largely because of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, the student wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.
What are his thoughts on this debate? “What is more important today is not building a temple in Ayodhya but to focus on development of the country,” Boopathiraj said.
This is the fifth part in a series of articles interviewing Indians born in 1992 about the Bharatiya Janata Party’s efforts to bring its plan to build a Ram temple in Ayodhya back to the political centrestage. The first part can be read here, the second here, the third here and the fourth here.