Suryakumar Yadav turns to the Vijay Hazare Trophy in a decisive bid to rediscover form ahead of India's T20 World Cup 2026 title defence. With the ICC T20 World Cup 2026 looming large, India T20I captain Suryakumar Yadav has chosen a familiar yet significant path to rediscover his lost rhythm
The second exile: Kaifi Azmi’s warning against a fractured republic
December 6, 1992, did not just mark the physical demolition of a mosque: it saw the shattering of the promise India had made to itself that faith would never be weaponised for politics and that plurality would be acknowledged as the nation's deepest inheritance.
The devastating scale of this rupture was understood by the poet Kaifi Azmi with the clarity of a seer and the wrenching anguish of a patriot. His poem, Doosra Banbaas (The Second Exile), emerged as one of the earliest and sharpest literary indictments of the violence unleashed in Ayodhya.
Yet, it is more than just a political critique. It is a primal lament for the India that went into exile that day – an India of fraternal coexistence, moral courage and syncretic belonging.
Azmi wields irony like a surgeon's scalpel. His grief is not abstract: it is embodied in the betrayal of neighbours, the cruelty of the mobs and the hypocrisy of compatriots.
In a searing couplet, he strips away the cultural self-righteousness often worn as virtue.
Violence committed by those claiming civility is not merely violence – it is dishonesty made manifest. The claim to purity only amplifies the depth of the deception.
The poem reaches its devastating climax when Azmi reimagines the national tragedy through the eyes of the revered figure whose honour the destruction of the Babri Masjid was intended to restore.
The exile he speaks of is not the poet's alone. It is Ram, the witness, who turns away. Azmi conjures not the triumphant Ram of political sloganeering, but a weary, wounded Ram who finds his own capital city unrecognisable.
The exile, this time, is chosen – for what remains is a city drenched not in devotion, but in blood.
Azmi's warning resonates with undiminished force today because exile is never merely geographical. It is emotional, ethical and civilisational.
A nation enters exile when it loses its sense of justice. A society enters exile when it forgets how to recognise its members as human first. A people enter exile when memory is replaced by triumphal amnesia.
Three decades on, Doosra Banbaas cuts like freshly sharpened truth. Its power lies not only in its condemnation of hatred but in its profound mourning for the loss of a gentler India, a braver India, an India so sure of its own spiritual heritage that it never needed to fear the faith of another.
Poetry cannot rebuild demolished structures, but it has the singular power to rebuild conscience. And conscience, once awakened, is the only scaffolding strong enough to hold up a fractured republic.
If December 6 is to carry a meaning beyond perpetual grief, it must become a yearly, collective reckoning – a harsh reminder that a nation cannot afford the luxury of forgetting what hatred, cloaked in piety, once did in its name.
Azmi's Ram walked away in sorrow. It is for us, the citizens of this Republic, to walk back – towards justice, towards memory, towards an India that refuses to live in a permanent exile from its own moral imagination.
Hasnain Naqvi is a former member of the history faculty at St. Xavier's College, Mumbai.
Source: Scroll
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Suryakumar Yadav turns to the Vijay Hazare Trophy in a decisive bid to rediscover form ahead of India's T20 World Cup 2026 title defence. With the ICC T20 World Cup 2026 looming large, India T20I captain Suryakumar Yadav has chosen a familiar yet significant path to rediscover his lost rhythm
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