The thought of making my wife and two-year-old son go through that experience sent a jolt of fear up my spine. I had traveled in the unreserved compartments of Indian Railway trains as a youth. This meant either we had to stay a night in Ahmedabad on January 3, or we had to get on the Ahmedabad-Bombay train on January 3 without a reservation. Since this is a day journey and there are seats available, you can continue your journey to Ahmedabad.” What a terrible mistake I had made! Not only did we lose a day in Jodhpur, but our connecting train for Bombay was also on January 4, a day later. The train conductor checked our first-class tickets from Jodhpur to Ahmedabad.
We were to catch a connecting train from Ahmedabad to Bombay at 9 PM arriving early the next day in Bombay. We boarded the train from Jodhpur to Ahmedabad around 4 PM. On January 3, 1993, Arati, Arjun, and I bade farewell to my in-laws to go see my parents in Bombay. Although Jodhpur was not affected, we kept hearing news of the communal riots in other parts of India. We celebrated Arjun’s second birthday in Jodhpur with much fanfare. In mid-December 1992, my wife, Arati, and Arjun went to Kolkata and then to Jodhpur, where my in-laws lived. My parents in Bombay had not seen Arjun so we decided to make our first trip to India before his second birthday. My in-laws came to us from India to provide physical and moral support. Two years earlier, our first child, Arjun, was born in Maryland on December 31, 1990. The worst affected cities were Bombay, Surat, Ahmedabad, Kanpur, Delhi, and Bhopal. The demolition resulted in inter-communal riots between Hindus and Muslims all over the country. About 150,000 of their volunteers overwhelmed security forces and tore down the mosque.
On December 6, 1992, the Hindu Nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) organized a rally at the Babri Masjid site. Muslims in India, number about 195 million, making it the third-ranked country in the world for its Muslim population.
India’s population is 80% Hindu, 14% Muslim. Both Hindus and Muslims used the site for religious purposes for four centuries, not always in peace and harmony. Nationalist Hindus believe that the Mughals demolished a temple of Rama and built Babri Masjid at the site. In 1528, following the Mughal conquest of the region, a mosque was built in Ayodhya called “Babri Masjid” after the Mughal emperor, Babur. Image: Noukei314, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia CommonsĪyodhya in Uttar Pradesh, India, is believed to be the birthplace of the Hindu deity Rama.
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