How 1500 Dalits converting to Islam in a TN village set the stage for Ram Rath Yatra

In this series, we travel back to the turbulent 1990s to see what impact the Ram Janmabhoomi movement had on south India. We found that Karnataka was as enthusiastic then as it is now about militant Hindutva. But the other states in the region weren't entirely immune to the flames of hate.Four decades ago, an incident in a small village in Tamil Nadu’s Tirunelveli set in motion a range of events that would have a lasting impact on the history and political developments in the country. In February 1981, Meenakshipuram, the village in question, witnessed nearly 1,500 Dalits (around 200 families) convert to Islam, exhausted by the caste oppression from dominant castes. Shortly after the conversions, the village was renamed Rahmat Nagar. The conversions shook not only the state, which was then ruled by the AIADMK, but the entire nation and became an issue of contention in the Parliament. Atal Bihari Vajpayee visited the village along with other important personas from organisations like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), the almost one-year-old Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and the Arya Samaj. .Post the conversions, the state saw the rise of the right-wing organisation Hindu Munnani, under the leadership of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) worker Ramagopalan.The newly formed BJP, which had only two seats in the Parliament in 1984, called for a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) probe into the Rs 40,000 that was raised for the conversions in Meenakshipuram. Meanwhile, the MG Ramachandran led state government in Tamil Nadu set up a committee to probe the issue. The committee submitted its report after four months and suggested putting into place an anti-conversion law. While the law was put on hold after pressure from progressive groups, it remains an early example of the AIADMK’s Hindutva slant. It's a feature that became more pronounced under Jayalalithaa, who not only allied with the BJP at crucial points but also supported core Hindutva issues in TN such as the construction of the Ram Sethu in Dhanushkodi. She was also one of the first non-BJP leaders to come out in open support of the Ram Janmabhoomi project of the Sangh.Shortly after the Meenakshipuram conversions, the BJP called for the CBI investigation even as the Sangh was actively trying to mobilise a united Hindu force to end conversions to Islam. In April 1984, Ashok Singhal, the general secretary of VHP, organised a Dharam Sansad (a religious meet) in Delhi with over 500 sadhus from across the country to discuss the Meenakshipuram conversions. It was at this event that the demand for a Ram temple in Ayodhya was raised for the first time at a national level even though the dispute over the site where the Babri Masjid stood went back to British times. With the success of the mosque demolition, Ashok Singhal would go on to be hailed as the ‘architect’ of the Ram temple movement. Lakshmanan Chinnaiyan, National Convenor of the Dalit Intellectual Collective, however is of the opinion that the Meenakshipuram conversions was a small instigator in the larger scheme of things. Speaking to TNM, he said, "Apart from the political developments in the country, I would say television played an important role in earning the public's support for the Ram temple. This worked in south India as well, even if the people were not largely in want of a temple in Ayodhya. The dispute over the land itself goes back to the time of British rule in the country and it was further triggered by the Shah Bano judgement and the constitution of the Mandal Comission. These two events had angered a significant part of the Hindu population and the Sangh tried to capitalise on this. The Meenakshipuram conversions was a small drop in an already existing ocean."Even though it was an event in Tamil Nadu that added to the strength of the demand for the Ram temple, the state has remained rather disconnected from the demand politically and socially. The Ram Rath Yatra undertaken by the then BJP president LK Advani’s in 1990, to erect a Ram temple at the site of Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, also did not seem to have the desired impact in the state. The yatra did not pass through Tamil Nadu and there was very little communal tension due to the yatra here, unlike in neighbouring Karnataka which saw major bloodshed.However, during Advani's visit to Coimbatore in February 1998, the Islamist group Al Ummah planted bombs in 11 places allegedly to target him. Their plan to target Advani had failed but it killed 58 people and over 200 people were injured. This series of bomb blasts were in retaliation to the riots that broke out in 1997 where Hindu fundamentalist groups like the Hindu Munnani attacked Muslim owned property after a constable was allegedly murdered by Muslim youth over the detention of Al Ummah functionaries. During the riots, 18 Muslims were killed. It is to be noted that the now banned Al Ummah became active after the Babri Masjid demolition in 1992.Read: How Karnataka and a seer from Udupi were at the heart of Ram Janmabhoomi movementAttempts to popularise Ram temple demand in Tamil NaduWhile other states were more enthusiastic, attempts to garner Tamil support in raising the demand for the Ram temple were not completely absent. Leaders in various factions of the Sangh were recruited for this purpose. One such person was Suryanarayana Rao, who was born in Mysuru in 1924 and joined the RSS shortly after graduating from college in Bengaluru in 1946. He quickly rose through the ranks and was responsible for organising the first ever VHP conference in Karnataka’s Udupi district in 1969. In 1970, he was asked to take charge in Tamil Nadu and expand the RSS shakhas in Chennai. It was during Suryanarayana’s tenure in Tamil Nadu that the Meenakshipuram conversions took place. Along with S Gurumurthy, RSS ideologue and the current editor of the Tamil magazine Tughluq, Suryanarayana wrote a white paper on the incident and presented it to the senior BJP leadership, including Vajpayee. Even as Advani’s yatra was gaining momentum in 1990, Suryanarayana was giving speeches across Tamil Nadu, highlighting the need for a Ram temple in Ayodhya and trying to garner the support of Tamil Hindus.In what can be seen as the culmination of Advani’s yatra, the Babri Masjid was demolished in December 1992 by several Hindu kar sevaks. Suryanarayana Rao was proactive in documenting the event along with S Gurumurthy. This white paper would later be adopted by the BJP to counter the official white paper on the matter produced by then Prime Minister Narasimha Rao. The murder accused seer who tried to broker peaceAnother notable persona from Tamil Nadu who was involved in the cause for the Ram temple in Ayodhya was Jayendra Saraswathi, the 69th seer of the Sri Kanchi Kamakoti Peetam. This controversial seer was born in Thanjavur in 1935 and went on to become a junior pontiff of the math in 1954 and its chief in 1994. The seer who mostly stayed away from politics, had stayed away from the Ram temple issue too when it was initiated. However, a decade after the mosque was demolished, he decided to broker peace between Muslims and Hindus and find a solution to the conflict. Even though he did not succeed in his mission, his peace-making attempt put him on the national map. Jayendra would go on to be arrested during the tenure of chief minister Jayalalithaa in 2004 after the murder of Sankararaman, the manager of a temple in Kancheepuram. Along with him, Vijayendra Saraswathi, another seer, was also named the prime accused. Jayendra spent two months in prison before being released. The influence of Dravidian politicsFor the most part, the Tamil people have been emotionally distant from the Ram temple demand, compared to Karnataka and the northern states. This can be attributed to the nature of Dravidian politics in the state that influences public discourse till date. Dravidian ideologue Periyar had analysed the Ramayana in an attempt to demythologise Ram. He often hailed Ravana, the ‘villain’ in Ramayana, as the more honourable character. He also noted that Ravana was Dravidian while Ram was Aryan, and that the epic itself was a metaphor for the imposition of Aryan culture on the Dravidian people. The Dravida Kazhagam even conducted a Ravana Leela in 1974, where effigies of Ram and Sita were burnt as a retort to the Ram Leela staged in north India where effigies of Ravana are burnt. Politically too, Tamil Nadu was often guided by secular Dravidian principles that did not favour building a temple in the same place as a pre-existing mosque. Former Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) chief minister M Karunanidhi had written a strongly worded criticism of kar sevaks assembling at Babri Masjid in the party's mouthpiece Murasoli on December 5, 1992. He said, “They say Ram was born there 20 lakh years ago. Who saw that, I wonder? Now by insisting that this [site of Babri Masjid] is the exact place, how just is it to demolish Islamic history? If you say you want a Ram temple in Ayodhya, we have no quarrel about that. But if you say that to build the temple you will demolish Babri Masjid, we will not agree.” A day after Karunanidhi's criticism appeared in Murasoli, Babri Masjid was demolished. A few years down the line, however, Karunanidhi led his party into a coalition with the BJP.Karunanidhi also introduced the Sedhusamudram Shipping Canal Project, which would facilitate a shipping route between India and Sri Lanka. While the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) led Union government approved this project, BJP's Subramaniam Swamy and Ramagopalan from Hindu Munnani among others in the right wing ecosystem opposed it. The project was opposed under the argument that it would hurt Hindu sentiments because it would mean ‘destroying’ Ramar Sethu, the bridge that was built by Ram to Sri Lanka to rescue his wife Sita. After the project was eventually shelved, Karunanidhi pointedly asked if Ram was a civil engineer and where he had trained to become one. However, not all chief ministers in the state were this vocally opposed to the Ram Temple. All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) supremo and former Chief Minister Jayalalithaa allowed conventions to be held by the Hindu Munnani in the aftermath of RSS's ban. According to Frontline, the former CM also allowed AIADMK cadre to collect signatures in support of the Ram temple in Ayodhya. She also allowed the BJP to hold a “national awakening” meeting in Chennai in which Advani participated. It came as no surprise when Ramagopalan expressed his gratitude to Jayalalithaa for “being with us like god” during a gathering of sadhus to gather support for the temple in 1993. Former AIADMK chief minister Edappadi K Palanisamy stated in 2020 that Jayalalithaa was in favour of the Ram temple as mentioned during her speech at the National Integration Council in 1992. At the same time, he mentioned that Jayalalithaa also wanted a mosque to be constructed in Ayodhya so that there is unity between Hindus and Muslims, which would lead to “national integration and betterment of the country”.