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MEN OF THE MOMENT Praveen Togadia Ramchandra Das Paramhans Sorabjee: Fall Guy GUEST COLUMNS G.M.Banatwalla Tarun Vijay Prakash Karat

"All is lost. Monks, monks, monks!"
-Reputed to be the last words of Henry VIII

On the morning of Thursday, March 14, Mahant Ramchandra Das Paramhans, chief of the Ram Janmabhoomi Nyas, received a phone call from Rajnath Singh, former Uttar Pradesh chief minister. The mahant , a religious figure who has been in the forefront of the Ayodhya agitation since its inception in 1949, was furious. The previous day's Supreme Court order had prohibited any religious ceremony on the 67.7 acres of land in possession of the Union Government and encompassing the site of the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid and its surroundings.

In the hours since the judicial directive, the mahant had declared his intention to march to the Ram Janmabhoomi complex with his followers and perform a shila daan (offering of a stone), symbolic of commencement of construction. If stopped, the mahant had threatened to swallow poison. Rajnath called Paramhans to try and dissuade him but, instead, got a firing. "Tum sab saale 420 ho," thundered the nonagenarian monk. In Lucknow, Rajnath could only squirm.

ON THE WARPATH: An unrelenting group of Ram bhakts in Ayodhya

The Rajnath-Paramhans communication gap was a metaphor for the increasing distance between the Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led NDA regime and the BJP's core constituency. Over the past week, the renewal of the Ayodhya issue brought this problem into sharp focus.

In a sense, the Supreme Court's clear negation of the VHP's Ayodhya agenda for March 15 bailed out the Government. Vajpayee's ministry was saved from granting or refusing the VHP permission to congregate on 43 acres of undisputed land. A major crisis had been averted it seemed. Yet the aftermath of the court edict found both political opponents and religio-social allies criticising Vajpayee.

The Congress, the Left and allied forces such as the Samajwadi Party found fault with Attorney-General Soli Sorabjee's suo motu statement in the court-which was hearing a petition by a Muslim citizen seeking restraint on the Nyas-that the Government had no objection to symbolic puja on the 43 acres. While the court decreed otherwise, the Government-specifically Sorabjee was left holding the baby.

This was a BJP decision and not an NDA decision, went the clamour. Parliament was duly disrupted. Congress MP S. Jaipal Reddy's comment that Vajpayee's "mask had slipped" and that he was responsible for a "humongous fraud on the nation"-regular parliamentary jabs in established democracies-had the BJP suggesting the prime minister was insulted.

Within the NDA there were dissenting voices from, primarily, the Telugu Desam Party and the Trinamool Congress. To be fair, the controversy did not quite assume life-threatening proportions. As Kharabela Swain, BJP MP from Balasore, put it, "We've met our goals. We managed to tell our supporters that we have not given up on the Ram mandir plank. We have also told them that since we are in the Government, we are bound to uphold the Constitution."

FORCE LEVEL: Ayodhya has been turned into a garrison with 15,000 policemen

On the face of it, Swain's assessment is correct. Below the surface, there's pure turmoil. Already reeling under the impact of electoral defeats in Punjab, Uttaranchal and Uttar Pradesh, the BJP is horribly divided on the Ayodhya issue. The conversion of Ram's city into a "garrison", with 15,000 policemen (one for every four residents), search operations in local temples to "flush out kar sevaks", the complete stoppage of traffic, even bicycles, and the arrest of VHP volunteers as they tried to reach Ayodhya caused a certain bitterness. Even cremations on the Saryu river were interrupted.

There was bathos to accompany pathos. With trains, buses and trucks prevented from coming to Ayodhya, feed for the cows in the city's gaushalas (cowsheds) ran out. At one point, District Magistrate B.P. Mishra had to arrange sprouted gram for the monkeys who inhabit local temples and seminaries. They were starving since there were no pilgrims to feed them.

Admittedly, strong administrative action anywhere in the world is bound to provoke disgruntlement. In Ayodhya, the VHP-Ram Janmabhoomi Nyas combine felt particularly slighted. All this was being done by a BJP-led Government; and the very BJP had in 1988 declared its absolute commitment to the Ayodhya issue, protested wildly when the then Uttar Pradesh chief minister Mulayam Singh Yadav used similar measures to subdue the 1990 kar seva. As a senior VHP functionary put it, "Vajpayee has decided we are a failing bank whose cheque he has cashed."

Paramhans' exclamation that even Mughal and British rule were better than the Ayodhya dispensation of March 2002 reflected this frustration. At one stage it seemed the silver-bearded monk was beyond reason, brushing aside VHP International President Ashok Singhal-who was kept out of Paramhans' room by the mahant's nephew-and deciding he'd been had.

When the Shankaracharya of Kanchi, Jayendra Saraswati, was negotiating a compromise and had spoken to both the VHP and the Muslim Personal Law Board, Paramhans had written a letter to the prime minister-but delivered to Singhal-offering to obey the court's ruling in the title suit relating to the disputed area. The understanding, as per the Shankaracharya's formula, was that 43 acres of nearby land would be handed over to the Nyas for a temple.