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In a sweeping account of India's most turbulent decades, a key media figure recounts the nation's defining moments from 1985 to 1995 in this episode of IndiaToday@50 series.
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00:00Can you give me a minute? Just to bite my throat.
00:13Let me just think.
00:18Alright, come again. I repeat the question.
00:21India today set the standard with world-class journalism done by the best in the world.
00:27And that reflected in many ways.
00:30People used to say, what you're saying is wrong because what we've read in India today is different.
00:35And India today does not get it wrong.
00:38You had to fight and defend the story against everybody else.
00:42Because we would shoot down everything.
00:45It required a lot of guts. It required a huge amount of courage and conviction.
00:49We were writing the first draft of history.
00:51A decade ahead would witness the nation fractured into multiple rebellions.
00:56And it was great for news.
01:00So there were many things happening in the country.
01:02This was also a very difficult time in terms of internal security.
01:06Kashmir Valley was at its worst.
01:09Assam, alpha violence was at its peak.
01:13And Operation Blue Star did not bring peace to Punjab.
01:17The assassination of Mrs. Gandhi was directly a result of the assault on the Har Mandir Sahib, on the Golden Temple.
01:26But following that, the anti-Sikh riots took place in Delhi, which were absolutely horrendous.
01:35Delhi was on fire.
01:39I do remember houses burning.
01:41And there were lots of massacres. Lots of massacres.
01:45mobs came on trucks.
01:51And they knew where the Sikhs were living.
01:53And they went for them.
01:55And they were led by people.
01:57The usual cry with them was,
01:59They will take the blood from the blood.
02:02It alienated an entire community.
02:05And that led to even a greater intervention by the centre.
02:11Only for this reason that Punjab needed peace.
02:14When he decided to go in for a compromise with the centre.
02:18And at that time, it was considered to be in the best interest of the state.
02:30You know, after Mr. Gandhi's death, Rajiv Gandhi, he was chosen by President Zahir Singh,
02:36put his imprint on his succession.
02:40He was chosen as Prime Minister.
02:43That I will bear true faith and allegiance.
02:47To the constitution of India.
02:49To the constitution of India.
02:51As by law established.
02:53As by law established.
02:55Rajiv was a family man.
02:57He had no ambitions of joining politics.
03:00He was very happy flying Indian Airlines.
03:04And he was the obvious choice.
03:06I mean, there was nobody else.
03:08We asked that question.
03:09Is he fit to be Prime Minister?
03:11And then there was an election which took place before that.
03:17Rajiv Gandhi who came in with the biggest mandate anybody had ever had in Indian politics.
03:23I remember Arun coming back one day and telling us that he'd gone to a reunion in doing school and his photograph was being taken.
03:35Arun was on the floor on the grass because there wasn't space to stand.
03:40And Rajiv told him, finally I have the media at my feet.
03:45And Arun came back and written that story to us.
03:50Oh, look.
03:51I have the press on his knees.
03:54I said only in school.
03:56And then everybody laughed.
03:57We weren't friends, but we knew each other.
04:00I remember we did an interview with him when we asked him, what is it like to be a difference between a pilot and being a Prime Minister?
04:08He said, when I'm a pilot, when I move a lever, I know exactly what is going to happen.
04:13But as a Prime Minister, when I move a lever, I don't know what's going to happen.
04:17People said, okay, huge mandate, change is going to come.
04:23It was a reason for hope that a new generation had come in.
04:28The computer age was coming.
04:30He's going to modernize India.
04:34Rajiv liberalized technology imports into India.
04:39So in a way, while he did not bring out major reforms like removing licenses or removing MRTP,
04:46he did bring out a mindset change towards a modernization and an open economy model.
04:55Rajiv always said that we'd been left behind, so-called, by the Industrial Revolution,
04:59that we mustn't let the electronics revolution beat us out.
05:02And he put his emphasis on that.
05:05Rajiv Gandhi went to Washington and was well-received.
05:09There was a good feeling at that time.
05:11So India was on a good pace at that time.
05:16The Indian economy started growing.
05:18New entrepreneurs came up.
05:20There was Dirubai Ambani.
05:22He was a rag to riches story.
05:24He built industries.
05:26He built, you know, the whole nylon business, the textile,
05:30and then, of course, then into petrochemical.
05:32He did a series of public issues of debentures and shares, which in a way launched India's stock market.
05:44There were others like him, but he was by far the biggest and the most prominent of them all.
05:50He was also the most controversial because of his business methods.
05:53We did the stories on him as a success.
05:56We did a story of him under pressure.
05:58It was a churn that was taking place, and it led to lots of stories.
06:04Certainly the first two years were the camelot years of Rajiv Gandhi.
06:07Everything he did seemed like the best thing to do, and after that, everything he did was wrong.
06:14He had kind of messed it up.
06:16He took on too many enemies.
06:18He took wrong stands.
06:20His two biggest blunders have defined Indian politics since.
06:24He responded to the Shah Bano judgment.
06:26It was a simple enough thing.
06:28A woman wanted alimony.
06:29Supreme Court said give it to her.
06:31But he panicked.
06:33He erred in interfering there and changing the law.
06:37He simply didn't quite understand the interplay between judiciary, society, Muslims, personal law,
06:49and what you can do and what you cannot do.
06:53The Shah Bano was a disastrous decision.
06:56That made the Hindus very angry.
06:59And once he began hearing that Congress was losing its Hindu base,
07:04then he made other mistakes with the unlocking of the doors at Ayodhya, the Shri Lanyas,
07:10and that's how the BJP wrote.
07:20I don't think he understood.
07:21None of us understood what the implications would be.
07:24I mean, none of us are really religious zealots in the sense.
07:28Eventually, it was the wrong choices he made that caught up with him.
07:33Around the same time, a story broke in the Swiss newspapers.
07:40Bribes had been taken in the purchase of a Bofors gun.
07:43And we began covering this intensely.
07:47And we did one of the iconic interviews there with General Sundarji, who was the army chief at that time.
07:56And in the interview, he said that the government did not take my recommendation to cancel the Bofors contract,
08:02which was explosive.
08:04And then, of course, more came out about the financial dealings.
08:08He told us why Arun Singh, who was then defence minister later on, had resigned.
08:13Because Arun Singh had ordered a probe into Bofors.
08:18They were questioning two Swedish Bofors people.
08:23Rajiv Gandhi was then in Moscow.
08:25He heard about this probe.
08:27He came back, took all the papers away from the defence ministry,
08:30and gave them to the JPC, where it virtually got buried, saying that Rajiv actually interfered in the probe.
08:38He kept trying to deny it in some way that he was involved in it or whatever.
08:43I wrote the accompanying intro piece to it and showed it to Arun.
08:48And I told Arun, I don't know, I said, look, it looks like we're going to get this story.
08:53So Arun said, really? We want to go with it, right?
08:56I said, yeah. And he looked around his room and he says, see all this?
09:02He said, publish it, you know, that this may all be gone, right?
09:06We published it.
09:10The O4 story was obviously a straight, direct attack on Rajiv Gandhi.
09:15Yes, there was some kind of a fear that, okay, some reaction will come from the government.
09:22We went ahead with the story in any way.
09:24And the magazine did several stories on that.
09:26It was ultimately a cover story that India Today ran, which was the nail in Rajiv's political coffin.
09:33Rajiv Gandhi lost the government on the Bofors thing.
09:36From being like the biggest majority anybody's ever got to completely falling apart.
09:42VP Singh resigned from defence ministry in making this into a huge political issue against Rajiv Gandhi.
09:49After Rajiv Gandhi's government fell, there was VP Singh and Arun Nehru, who was his close friend, who went with VP Singh.
10:08The election slogan at that time was,
10:10the election slogan at that time was,
10:11Har gali mein chor hai, Rajiv Gandhi chor hai.
10:17Which actually caught on and a kind of coalition government emerged.
10:21The next big era was actually coalition governments coming into place with VP Singh coming to power.
10:36And then of course the biggest turmoil that was happening, VP Singh triggers the Mandal movement,
10:40which is the biggest social upheaval that has happened in terms of moving away from Hindu religion as a unified
10:46into a major caste battle that is going on between upper caste and all reservations for other backward classes.
10:53The government has made a decision in a government.
10:58The government's previous work,
11:01we had to put a place in government in the government,
11:03and in the public sector.
11:07The government's own way to deal with it,
11:12and that's where another big mini revolution took place in India,
11:18revolution took place in India. He started introducing the Mandal Commission.
11:22Upper caste which were dominating India was suddenly being challenged by the other
11:27castes in India. And that was a movement which actually changed India in many ways.
11:32B.P. Singh actually implemented the reservation because his government, who he thought would
11:51fall and therefore he wanted that support.
11:56I ask you, the youth of India, not to entertain these fears. Your interest is uppermost in
12:03my mind. I ask you for trust and patience. I ask you to join me in building a better future.
12:26I still remember that image of Rajiv Goswami in flames. And I think that, again, encapsulated
12:35the violence that was unleashed by the Mandal agitation.
12:40B.P. Singh changed Indian politics in many ways and brought caste back openly into the equation
12:48of politics.
12:49I am not a villain in the Muslims. I am not a villain in the backward class. I am not a villain
12:57in the scheduled caste. They have very good feelings for me. Where am I a villain for?
13:02Majority I am not. And because upper caste thinks their world is a nation and their world is all.
13:11And therefore anybody who is good or bad, that's the end of the world.
13:15In Kashmir, in 1986, Congress made a pact with Faruk Abdullah, in which they decided to join
13:23together. And February of 1987, the election took place. Rigged. Completely rigged. I travelled
13:32throughout this thing with Prashant Panjiam, a photographer. We actually took photographs
13:37in the middle of the night of BSF trucks and what have you, actually taking ballot boxes out
13:42of polling stations. And they were fixing the election over there. And I went to Faruk Abdullah
13:48the next day. And I told him, what are you doing? You're going to ruin Kashmir.
13:54Is the chief minister of the state responsible for every election that is fought? Or is the
13:59chief election commissioner responsible for elections? Did anyone of them who say that the
14:03election was rigged, go to the court? My candidates lost the election. We accepted wherever we lost.
14:13Kashmir election was a watershed moment. We saw many defeated candidates, complete moderates,
14:21switch from the ballot to the bullet with guns provided by Pakistan. Yasin Malik engineered a kidnapping
14:31that changed the face of Kashmir. I was just reporting what I saw. And sources
14:37in the IB actually told me that I was on the heartless and I should be very careful.
14:41And so I was advised not to go there for my own safety, what have you. And then I said that,
14:47look, we're going to keep covering the stories. I picked on a really gutsy young reporter
14:52about the name of Harinder Vaweja, we used to call her Shami.
14:56You know, at that time, India today was the only place to work in. I was thrown into the midst
15:04of Kashmir's very violent insurgency. Soon after, Rubaya Said was kidnapped. She was the daughter of
15:14Mufti Mohammed Said, who was B.P. Singh's home minister. The J.K.R.F. kidnapped Rubaya. And the demand was,
15:24Rubaya can be returned in exchange for four or five militants who were in jail.
15:30Mufti Mohammed Said responded as a father. He forgot that he was the home minister of the country.
15:36Because the government actually went ahead and released the militants and met the demands of the J.K.L.F.,
15:46people just poured out onto the streets. I've seen processions stretching over miles, you know, militants openly
15:57waving their Kalashnikovs in the air. And at that time, people thought, Azadi's around them.
16:05Azadi's around the corner. Until 88, 89, Pakistan had not been able to make any tear in roads into Kashmir.
16:14There came a paradigm shift and we're actually rising.
16:18Azad, Azad, Azad, our country is in our country. We live in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
16:23We live in Afghanistan. We live in Afghanistan. We live in Afghanistan. We live in Afghanistan.
16:27We live in Afghanistan. We live in Islam and we live in Islam.
16:30We live in Islam. We live in Islam.
16:31I wrote a piece that was, again, totally repertorial but intensely critical of the way what had happened in Kashmir.
16:41The movement was increasingly becoming very violent. It was invaded by criminals and thugs.
16:49And they began a lot of brutal murders of innocent people.
16:58I have accompanied the forces on crackdowns. The 90s were when you could hear the sound of gunfire morning and evening.
17:09Often what happens in conflict zones is that, you know, you get caught in the crossfire between the militants and the security forces.
17:20And so we did this story which was on every Kashmiris lips called the Valley of Tears.
17:27People were feeling oppressed. They were feeling subjugated.
17:31They felt they were being denied basic dignity and rights.
17:36There were instances of human rights violations by the men in uniform.
17:42We said that, look, if you've got to make the Kashmiris love, you've got to stop these excesses.
17:50I remember this very young boy in Kashmir. He had gone to his father's grave with his mother.
17:57So this young child crying and telling his mother to remove the tombstone, he thought the weight of the tombstone was preventing his father from coming out.
18:12I followed the Kashmiri Pandit migrants to Jammu when they were forced to flee and leave their homes.
18:22At that point, they had no idea that, you know, they would never be able to come back.
18:39Now, imagine a whole community being erased from a place called home.
18:46You have to understand the media scene in 1990.
18:51I mean, there was nothing else that could compete with India Today.
18:55There was hardly any television.
18:57There were a couple of news magazines which weren't quite what India Today was.
19:01And it had the finest writing.
19:03That's where the role of magazines comes in.
19:06Magazines give you something which you retain in your memory because it's done in such a way.
19:11India Today kept sending people on the spot, right, and report live from there.
19:18We did all the foreign coverage because you wanted to have the smell and the color and the sounds of what is happening there, which newspapers didn't give you, right?
19:28So we had the attitude of, okay, go wherever the story is.
19:34It doesn't matter.
19:36So it's part of our culture to go whenever a big event happens.
19:40When the fall of the Soviet Union and going apart, Shekhar Gupta, I remember, went there.
19:45By 1989-90 Cold War was ending.
19:49And until then, Soviet Union had a big overhang in India on Indian policy, on the Indian mindset.
19:55Now Soviet Union was collapsing.
19:58It was at that time that Bhavan Singh and I made a long trip to the Soviet Union covering this adequately.
20:05There was Taliban in Afghanistan.
20:11Their string of correspondence went out there.
20:15It was actually the most claustrophobic assignment of my entire career.
20:22You had to be covered right up to your wrists.
20:25It was haram, according to the Taliban, for us to make eye contact with men.
20:31I remember one press conference.
20:34Within a few minutes, this guy walked in and, you know, he looked at the wall and he said,
20:38all the women sitting at this table, please get up.
20:41You're not allowed to sit next to men.
20:43Stand at the back of the room and do not ask any questions.
20:49If you ask questions, you will not be allowed to attend the press conference.
20:54You will be thrown out.
20:55So we stood that day like mice.
21:00It was important, actually, for a woman to go there at that time.
21:08Because of the kind of edicts the Taliban was rolling out.
21:16I became like a well-rounded journalist, all thanks to India today.
21:22December 87, I went to Sri Lanka.
21:26Sri Lanka was divided ethnically.
21:28It was rare to find anybody with voice of sanity.
21:34Those with the voice of sanity were all eliminated by LTT.
21:38Of all the organizations that I have sort of interacted with as a journalist, LTT was the most vicious and the most wild.
21:48The fact that the Tamil Tigers had grown in their strength, Rajiv Gandhi tried to make India at least a sub-regional power.
21:56Or regional power.
21:58By sending the Indian Army in the form of the IPKF or the Indian Peacekeeping Force to Sri Lanka.
22:06We landed up from peacekeeping to peace enforcing.
22:14Now, whether it was a great game that Rajiv Gandhi was playing and a bigger game that the Sri Lankan president was playing.
22:22One doesn't know.
22:24But obviously, these were flawed political and military assumptions that sucked in the IPKF into Sri Lanka.
22:34There was a hostility to the idea of his sending IPKF to Sri Lanka.
22:40However, when they fought, they fought very hard.
22:42And that pushed Prabhakaran back.
22:46Prabhakaran was vengeful.
22:48He was also trying to strike terror in the hearts of other Indian politicians.
22:52And they were not going to forgive Rajiv Gandhi for sending IPKF.
23:00That was the time that you had coalition governments for two years with VP Singh Chandrasekhar coming to power.
23:06And their inability to run the country.
23:10After the VP Singh government fell, India witnessed another brief experiment with the coalition government.
23:17This time led by Chandrasekhar and backed by the Congress.
23:22Predictably, the Chandrasekhar government didn't last long.
23:26And fresh elections were called.
23:28Today, you have come in front of a new government.
23:36How many states will your party win?
23:39Plenty.
23:40As Prime Minister, he had lost contact with the people of this country.
23:46He went back on a learning experience.
23:48And that showed very clearly.
23:49I wouldn't say he was a changed man.
23:51Because in essence, he was always the same Rajiv Gandhi.
23:54Whether he was out of office or in office or before he was in politics.
23:57But in his political instincts, he had sharpened them.
24:00Rajiv!
24:01Gandhi!
24:03I met him on the road in Bihar.
24:05We were at the election time.
24:07Me and Shekhar Gupta were together.
24:08And he was in a chai shop.
24:09And we stopped there.
24:11Had a chat with him.
24:12Suman Doobri was with him.
24:13So it was a fun interaction in terms of what's happening in the election and so forth.
24:20Ten days later, we saw him being assassinated in such a brutal manner.
24:25I will never forget this side.
24:26I'mma Accept.
24:27It was people falling backwards.
24:28My first reaction was somebody set over cracker to disrupt the meeting.
24:34They reached some distance from the distance,
24:36that suddenly a bit of a sport,
24:38and suddenly,
24:39Sri Rajiv's a powerful strength
24:40in the body of the body of the body,
24:41and some of the lakirins were scared.
24:44I'll never forget this sight.
24:46It was people falling backwards.
24:47My first reaction was,
24:48somebody set up a cracker to disrupt the meeting.
24:51By the time I got to this point,
24:53which was about 20 yards ahead,
24:54there were bodies on the ground.
24:56So clearly it was not a cracker.
24:58So I rushed to the stage,
24:59because I thought he'd been taken to the stage.
25:01And I looked for him there.
25:03And I kept asking people,
25:05where is Rajiv?
25:06And one of them just pointed back to the bodies.
25:13When he dies,
25:15and I mean,
25:16I still remember those times.
25:18It still sends,
25:21you know, it still gives me goosebumps.
25:23Those were defining events,
25:25you know, which really changed completely
25:28the course of history.
25:33The death of Rajiv Gandhi, in some senses,
25:36symbolized that India had to change.
25:39Narsama Rao comes as Prime Minister.
25:41I am the Prime Minister of India,
25:41and that brought a huge fresh breeze that impacted India,
25:52because reforms happen.
25:53India was in bad economic shape.
25:55And there was a time when the idea of liberalization came.
25:59We knew that we would have to do a lot of things
26:02to set the economy right.
26:03And Mr. Rao was clearly briefed.
26:05And there's a major economic crisis.
26:07You've got to do things differently.
26:09Narsama Rao brought in Manmohan Singh.
26:11He was a first-rate economist.
26:13He knew exactly what the problems were.
26:14And we started a process of reforms.
26:16Narsama Rao brought in Manmohan Singh.
26:20He was a first-rate economist.
26:23He knew exactly what the problems were.
26:26And we started a process of reforms.
26:29All that we have done is we have changed instrumentality.
26:32There is an element of continuity.
26:35But as Panditji himself used to say,
26:37that we live in a dynamic world.
26:38Time doesn't stand still.
26:40Situations change.
26:41And therefore, he said the test of people is,
26:43I think, good leadership is,
26:45that we should be able to change direction
26:47when changes is needed.
26:48And he went about his job quietly.
26:52Dismantling the License Raj.
26:55While Narsama Rao, the prime minister,
26:57didn't talk much about it.
26:59And I believe that's the way the reform happens in India.
27:01Where you don't make a big deal about it,
27:04but you just go and do it.
27:06Slowly, slowly, slowly.
27:08And that's what Mr. Manmohan Singh did.
27:11And they started trusting the market,
27:14instead of dictating how much you should produce,
27:17and what you should produce, and so forth.
27:19So it was a big turning point for India.
27:21And we changed the trajectory of India from a Hindu rate of growth
27:24growth to, you know, 6%, 5% growth rates.
27:28He certainly freed up the energies of the private capital
27:32in the free market.
27:33And you saw the explosion of a middle class
27:36in the beginnings of a consumer society.
27:42Indian entrepreneurs were unleashed in a way.
27:45So it was a great moment.
27:47Of course, it took time for us to develop.
27:49But it was really the lifting of shackles of the Indian economy.
27:53And cricket was completely almost like a teenager gone mad with this money that was going around.
28:01Cricket in the 1990s was messy.
28:04We were very good at home.
28:05We were very shit overseas.
28:06We had decent quality players, but we weren't able to pull it through.
28:10And there's also now much more expectation on the team to be world beaters.
28:13It's almost like they needed a new face.
28:15It came through at the time.
28:17And then the figure of Sachin, he represented a almost post-liberalization India.
28:21He showed you that's how you play cricket.
28:24And he was fundamentally a genius.
28:27And he was an accessible, everyday commonplace,
28:30new boy-next-door kind of genius.
28:32They put him on the cover all the time because literally his career went like that.
28:36It never stopped.
28:39There was another stream of culture,
28:44which reflected new stories and a new way of telling them.
28:49And this was the rise of what was then called parallel cinema.
28:55Exemplified by, of course, the late and great Sean Benegal,
28:59who was then at the peak of his powers when he emerged in the 80s with Angkor.
29:07Cinema had the capability of being much closer to life,
29:12to create things that seemed almost seamlessly to draw from life.
29:18Now, some people who started to believe that were very dissatisfied with the way Indian cinema had developed.
29:25People like Sean were very, very easy to get through to, very accessible, extremely articulate.
29:35I remember writing a long feature called Breaking Out and Breaking Even, asking the questions,
29:41would they make enough money to sustain it?
29:44But bit by bit, they built a huge reputation and a new kind of audience.
29:52It created a nucleus of young players, people like Shabana Azmi, people like Nasiruddin Shah.
30:01And these were faces and the kind of performance in stories that the Indian public simply hadn't seen before.
30:09People were understanding the power of choice.
30:14There was a young, aspirational middle class, and they all wanted much more than they had.
30:20People were understanding the ability that they had to make money in a new economy.
30:26So it was an age of immense aspiration, immense prosperity.
30:33And at the same time, there were these two really regressive, I would say, forces, sort of holding India back.
30:40I'm Javed Ansari. I worked for India Today magazine close to 10 years, just short of 10 years, a very newsy period.
30:51Many say Mandar was brought in to undercut Ram Mandar.
30:55The others argue that the Ram Mandar movement was started to undercut Mandar.
31:00But be that it may, these were these two conflict extremes that happened.
31:05And Indian society went through a lot, a lot of conflict.
31:08That's why they call it Mandar Mandar.
31:11On the one hand, the rise of socialist forces and their symbol, which was reservations,
31:16and the rise of right-wing Hindutva, with its symbol being the Babi Masjid.
31:22That's when the BJP came back to life.
31:24We saw Advani gaining followers.
31:29You know, he's speaking a lot on this subject.
31:31How important this was to the Hindus and what have you.
31:33You know, you're making a Hindu voter die.
31:36I'm not making a Hindu voter die.
31:39I'm making a patriotic voter die.
31:43Mr. Advani started his Rathi Atra on this Hindutva platform.
31:49Then the whole Mandir movement started,
31:52where they wanted to take the bricks and build a new temple.
31:56He started building for the future.
32:09Pan-India exposure of Advani happened for the first time,
32:12traveling from south to north to east.
32:15It was to connect with the people to grab the power.
32:18Mr. Advani's Rathi Atra traveled across the country.
32:24He gathered a lot of momentum, a lot of support in favor of the Ramadan movement.
32:32My approach used to be purely political.
32:35In fact, I remember when I used to say,
32:37people say that this is Ramkarath,
32:40it's not Ramkarath,
32:41it's Toyota,
32:42it's one of them.
32:45So why do I say that?
32:48Why are you saying that?
32:49Why are you trying to undermine the impact of it which is being felt?
32:56He's heading a movement that could alter the face of Italy at one point.
32:59And as I said, there is a divide coming and it's going to grow.
33:03And we said that in that story that it's going to explode into a huge movement.
33:08And yet today I didn't finish.
33:09It clearly pointed to the fact that there is a real and present danger to the mosque
33:15and it will in all probability be demolished.
33:19And this message was conveyed to Prime Minister Narasimha Rao.
33:23This is going to happen.
33:24These guys are up to mischief.
33:25The plans have been made.
33:26No one is stopping them.
33:28The Prime Minister kept reassuring everybody that this will not happen.
33:32But much to everybody's horror, it did happen.
33:35In there I put an SOP in place that if something like that happened, all the political bureau will assemble in the office.
34:01We sent six reporters on the job.
34:05All the photographers we get.
34:07We made them tie headbands and travel over there.
34:11The whole crowd gathered.
34:13They've been coming.
34:13These Karsevaks have been coming.
34:15They've been armed with pickaxes and tools and what have you.
34:18There's even a stage.
34:19And I got a call saying that,
34:24And I got a call saying that it's happening.
34:54In December 1992, that's the day the Babri Masjids was brought down dome by dome by dome.
35:10I said, let's call it national shame. I don't said stronger title. He said stronger title. And I don't came up with that title. It was nation's shame.
35:19It was a shame because it was violating every law and order tenet of India. And it kind of galvanized the rest of India too in terms of this Hindutva movement.
35:33Soon after the demolition of the Babri Masjid, you had the riots in Bombay, which were also a reaction to what happened in Ayodhya.
35:45Then you had the blasts in Mumbai in 1993.
35:50And it was the first major act of terrorism that had taken place at any major city in India at that time.
36:00Bombs had been placed at multiple locations and they were going off one after the other. The death toll was high.
36:06The death toll was high.
36:07We had no idea at that time of people like Dawud Ibrahim and, you know, the Pakistan connection.
36:16That was the first time that people realized that this network existed.
36:29The seeds of the India that we are now were really sown in that decade.
36:35We would see echoes of it in the next decade.
36:38The decade of war and then the subsequent terror attacks that happened across the country and changed us forever.
37:08When the war will continue to happen,
37:10it's a very high point that people could get involved in the fight and get involved in the last decade.
37:11And that was the biggest threat of war and then it was a nice day for the future.
37:20It's been a nice day for the future.
37:23The hope has happened during this week.
37:26It's been a night long.
37:28It's been a long day after the fight.
37:32We were able to take another time to go through.
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