Dharma Sansads: India
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A backgrounder
As in 2022
Chandrima Banerjee & Rajesh Sharma, May 4, 2022: The Times of India
Why did Dharma Sansads start?
The origin of Dharma Sansads as we have come to know of now, lie in the Ayodhya dispute though there may have been other such gatherings earlier.
But a longer line of history goes back to the 1981 Meenakshipuram conversions — about 200 Dalit families at the Tamil Nadu village converted to Islam in February that year. In a month, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) set up a Kendriya Marg Darshak Mandal or Central Guiding Council of Hindu religious leaders with no political background, journalist and writer Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay wrote in his book, The Demolition and the Verdict .
The Council had 39 members, political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot wrote in The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India .
The VHP expanded the Council and that bigger congregation became the first Dharma Sansad, “a name carefully chosen to make it appear a truly representative religious body (on a) par with the Indian Parliament,” Mukhopadhyay wrote.
It brought together all Hindu sects and said the purpose was to uplift Hindu society. At this point, the Sansad was a religious body. The first actual meeting of the body would take place two years later.
By 1983, the VHP had “ taken charge” of the Ayodhya dispute and announced many countrywide processions in the form of rath yatras and kalash yatras, none of which really took off or mobilised any support. The gates of the Babri Masjid had been locked since 1951 (and would remain so till 1985). But in January 1984, people stormed into the inner compound anyway and hoisted a Hanuman flag.
By this time, the VHP Council had grown to have 200 members, Jaffrelot wrote, and had become a Sadhu Sansad. That Sadhu Sansad became a Dharma Sansad. The first meeting was on April 7 and 8 in 1984, organised in Delhi at Vigyan Bhawan. Thousands attended. It “unanimously resolved to ‘liberate’ the birthplace of Ram through a peaceful mass movement,” BJP veteran and former deputy Prime Minister LK Advani wrote in his biography My Country, My Life .
Why the VHP and not the R S S?
Because this was a time when the R S S was trying to silo the political, social and religious arms of its operations and VHP was to be the purely religious wing.
The VHP had been trying to entrench that position since its formation in 1964. A precursor to the Dharma Sansads, it had organised a “World Hindu Conference” inviting religious leaders across Hindu sects twice before the Sansad — in 1966 and in 1979.
The 1966 conference was inaugurated by the governor of Uttar Pradesh, Bishwanath Das, who said that the “imperative need of our times is to revive the greater influence of Hindu culture.” The 1979 conference was opened by the Dalai Lama, who, according to VHP, said, “Someone may feel my presence in this Sammelan (is) awkward. But when seen liberally, it is not impertinent. Because, the Hindus and adherents of all those Bharat-originated religions are participating in this Sammelan. The Buddhism evolved in Tibet is, in fact, a Bharatiya religion originally propounded by Lord Buddha himself.”
But while it seemed to have sporadic sanction from different quarters, the mass mobilisation the VHP wanted did not come about (though the VHP claims about a lakh attended its 1979 conference).
That is what had set the first Dharma Sansad of 1984 apart. Its “resolution” about Ayodhya gave the Hindutva groups a single rallying point.
What did Dharma Sansads do after that?
The next Dharma Sansad came just the following year, in 1985. Held at Udupi in Karnataka, it decided that if the lock on the Ayodhya structure was not removed by the next Shivratri, VHP would announce a countrywide movement demanding it.
The next Dharma Sansad, in 1989, came up with a “model design” of a Ram Mandir at Ayodhya, demanded “use of force for prevention of cow slaughter” and a ban on conversion of Hindus, and resolved that the political leadership of the country should be handed to those “who are competent to decide the policies on the basis of sublime values of Hindu dharma and culture”.
It was the one after that, in 1991, that turned even more political. This one, organised in Delhi, decided to ask people to “use their vote power with discretion” and the President to impose President's Rule in UP to hand over the disputed Ayodhya site to the Ramjanmabhoomi Nyas. And it directly invoked the “country-wide Muslim plan of Hindu annihilation” conspiracy theory. This template has remained unchanged.
The fifth Dharma Sansad, organised in Delhi in October 1992, laid the ground for the Babri Masjid demolition in December. “It was decided to begin continuous Kar Seva for the construction of Shriram Mandir at Ayodhya from 6 December, 1992,” the VHP says. “As a result of non-stop Kar Seva (that) began on 6 December 1992, the structure that was built 468 years back was reduced to dust on that very day,” it adds.
The next one was organised across the country over a few months instead of at one venue at one time. And after a relatively toned down 1996 Dharma Sansad, in which the Ganga river became the primary agenda (though MF Hussain’s depiction of Hindu deities also featured), Ayodhya was back on the table as the driving force behind these congregations.
The last Dharma Sansad organised by the VHP was in February 2019. R S S chief Mohan Bhagwat said Ram Temple would be built, but after the 2019 Lok Sabha election. In October that year, the Supreme Court concluded hearings in the case and cleared the way for construction of a Ram Temple.
Why are Dharma Sansads back in the news?
With the resolution of the Ayodhya dispute the way R S S had wanted, the VHP appeared to have taken a step back on these congregations. But other groups came in to fill its place. With that, questions of legitimacy started cropping up within groups of those who said they want to uphold Hindu values.
In 2019, the Shankaracharya (religious head) of Dwarka Sharada Peeth (one of the four primary mutths set up by Adi Shankaracharya) organised a Dharma Sansad and said its seers would march to Ayodhya and place foundation stones at what was then a disputed site. R S S immediately shot back by saying that only congregations organised by VHP were the “ original” Dharma Sansads.
That didn’t deter other outfits. In December 2021, a three-day Hindu conclave at Haridwar saw a flurry of Hindutva religious leaders call for violence against Muslims. The organiser was Yati Narsinghanand, head of the Dasna Temple in Ghaziabad who has gained prominence with hate speech directed against Muslims.
Within days, at another Dharma Sansad in Raipur, another Hindu religious leader, Kalicharan Maharaj, abused Gandhi and hailed Nathuram Godse for having assassinated him. This one was organised by an NGO called Neelkanth Seva Samiti and the Doodhadhari Math.
Since then, a series of Dharma Sansads have been announced one after the other — in Aligarh, Delhi, Una (Himachal Pradesh), Roorkee and even in the Taj Mahal. The common thread running through the ones that have taken place is that of allegations of hate speech and Hindutva assertion. A religious leader from Ayodhya, for instance, declared he would install a Shiva idol in the Taj Mahal on May 5.
