In the Name of God

In September 1990, the president of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Lal Krishna Advani, undertook a cross-country rally to strengthen the movement for building a temple on the site of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya in Northern India, popularly believed to be the birthplace of Lord Ram. Designed to polarise, the rally triggered several bloody riots across the nation, all culminating in the destruction of the mosque two years later at the hands of Hindu activists.

Anand Patwardhan’s canonical documentary In the Name of God traces the frenzy around the rally, which gathered strident support from across the world as it made its way to Ayodhya. Through soundbites from secular leaders, dissenting priests and marginalised commoners, the film identifies the movement as a political ploy channelling upper-caste Hindu angst over the government’s newly introduced reservation measures for backward castes.

Thirty years since In the Name of God has proved to be a remarkable weather vane: the Indian Supreme Court upheld the mosque’s destruction in 2019, allowing the temple to be built and thus opening the floodgates for similar incidents in the future. The optimists in Patwardhan’s film turned out to be mistaken, but the filmmaker’s desperate search for reason in the midst of madness registers as crucial and exemplary at a time when it seems harder to come by.

– Srikanth Srinivasan

Programmed alongside: An Election Diary

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