When it comes to the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, nothing matters to the Left. Not the tide of evidence, the weight of history or even the stamp of the Supreme Court. The Left will never stop linking the consecration of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya to Hindu supremacism.
The latest to yoke the symbol of Hindu ethos to the calumny of communalism is Karnataka senior Congress leader BK Hariprasad who says “there is no history of demolishing one religious place to construct another. Let me be clear, this (consecration ceremony) is not a religious programme. Don’t exaggerate it. In Karnataka, the government must take all precautions…in Gujarat Kar Sewaks were burnt alive in Godhra. They are attempting to replicate the incident in Karnataka.”
Hariprasad’s attempt to malign Ram bhakts is matched only by the paranoia of Asaduddin Owaisi, the chief of the sectarian All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM). As the self-appointed grandee of all Indian Muslims, Owaisi has darkly intoned, “Youngsters, I am telling you, we have lost our mosque and you are seeing what is being done there. Youngsters, don’t you feel any pain in your hearts?… The place where we sat, and recited Quran-e-Kareem for 500 years is not in our hands today. Youngsters, don’t you see that a conspiracy is taking place regarding three-four more mosques, in which the Sunhari Mosque of Delhi is also there? These forces want to drive you out of here. Want to finish you off.”
Hariprasad and Owaisi’s ominous fulminations are in line with many others on the Left. Political scientist Pratap Bhanu Mehta once put it, the consecration of the Ram temple is an act of “brute majoritarianism subordinating others”.
But this is an unsubstantiated claim.
The construction of the Ram Mandir is not the denouement of a project to build a Hindu Rashtra, but as once LK Advani, the progenitor of the BJP’s Ram temple agitation, said, the beginning of an “integral part of the historical process of Hindu self-renewal and self-affirmation”.
This article will establish that what is being sought to be renewed is not, by any stretch of the imagination, an ‘othering’ or ‘majoritarian’ way of being. Much like after the completion of the construction of the Somnath temple in 1951, even the Hinduism actualized today through the construction of the Ram temple remains very much in sync with the syncretism that is at its civilizational core.
First, it is easy to overlook that the construction of the Ram temple has been complemented by the Indian state with a grant of land measuring five acres to the Muslim community to build a grand mosque.
This compensation is an acknowledgement of the wrong committed upon Muslims. No state machinery with a revanchist predilection would ever acquiesce in any gesture that seeks to make amends for a wrong done to the supposed other.
In Spain, many mosques in the Al-Andalus—the name given to the medieval Muslim-ruled region of the Iberian Peninsula— were destroyed or reclaimed and reconverted into churches and cathedrals. Did Spain’s rulers ever compensate their Muslim minorities by building alternative places of worship? Even the Turks did not compensate their Christian citizens when they converted the church of Santa Sophia into a mosque.
The Indian state has even made the donations for construction of the mosque tax-free. In fact, Hindus have been shouldering a significant share of the costs for constructing a mosque in Ayodhya through donations.
This is not to say that the temptation to exact revenge doesn’t exist.
Indeed, awakened Hindus know that the construction of mosques over centuries under Muslim conquest, either through demolitions of temples or building structures over their ruins, was an insult and more than that an act of effacement—an attempt to erase any trace of an ancient Hindu civilization, to erase an idea. The idea of a universalist Hindu epitomized by Ram.
Many among the Left ask what is the guarantee that there will not be another Babri Masjid-like demolition.
They will point out that for all the outrage it expressed over the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, the judicial system also failed to punish the vandals behind the ‘egregious violation’. While this is truly an appalling omission, the Supreme Court, in its judgment on the Ayodhya Ram Janmabhoomi title dispute, has reminded the executive that it has an obligation towards ensuring that a repeat of a Babri Masjid-like demolition at other contested sites never happens. The Supreme Court did this by invoking the instrumentality of a law passed by Parliament in 1991. The law freezes the character of religious buildings as they existed on August 15, 1947.
It is true that as you read this article the Places of Worship Act, 1991, is being challenged in the Supreme Court on the grounds that it places an illegal and arbitrary restriction on the rights of communities to reclaim places of worship that have either been demolished or were converted before 1947.
Some view the legal challenges of a piece with majoritarian vengefulness that led to the destruction of the Babri Masjid. While this opinion is held by one section, it must also be noted that those associated with the Ayodhya movement have themselves urged caution.
And this is a second important fact that cannot be overlooked.
As Hindu groups have moved court seeking to reclaim the Gyanvapi Mosque site in Kashi, RSS Chief Mohan Bhagwat chimed in with some much-needed advice, “One should not raise a new issue every day. Why escalate fights? On Gyanvapi, our faith has been there for generations. What we are doing is fine. But why look for a Shivling in every mosque?…We participated in the Ram Janmabhoomi movement contrary to our nature, due to historical reasons and the needs of the time. We completed that task. We do not want to launch any other movement.”
Bhagwat’s comments here are a reminder that confronting the past need not translate into an exercise in vengefully dispossessing the Muslims of today who cannot be held guilty for the crimes of invaders from the past. The sage exhortation is very much in step with the Upanishadic credo Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam—the world is one family.
Third, even LK Advani, the original BJP mascot of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, had expressed regret on behalf of all Hindus when the Babri Masjid was demolished. This was a signal not just to his party, but all other Hindus that such acts are not in consonance with Hindu Dharma. Advani said, “I could not share the sense of elation that some leaders of the movement exhibited. It was the saddest day of my life…I have seldom felt as dejected and downcast as I felt that day…We in the BJP had all along declared that our goal was to construct the Ram Temple after respectfully relocating the mosque structure, and that we would like to achieve this either by due process of law or through an amicable settlement between the communities. However, as it turned out, we could not live by our word.”
Four, the BJP has also chosen to discard its, famous or infamous, Palampur resolution of 1989 that seemed to advocate the adoption of extra-judicial means to resolve the Ram Janmabhoomi dispute. Under Modi, the BJP painfully reiterated that it would wait for the Supreme Court to adjudicate the claim. Why would the party have done so if, as Owaisi claims, it aims to dispossess Muslims?
Fifth, since the Ram Janmabhoomi verdict, the Modi government has been on a virtual overdrive to win the confidence of the Muslim community. In Modi’s ‘Amrit Kaal’, Muslims have benefitted from several welfare schemes, too many to list here. At times, they’ve cornered a lion’s share of resources much beyond their numbers.
Finally, the Left has deliberately invoked the “fallibility” of the Supreme Court thesis to imply that the verdict itself was an “act of judicial barbarism”.
This is a mischievous, if not slanderous, imputation. Owaisi forgets that the Indian state has often been guilty of minority-ism. The Indian state, especially courts, have with impunity trampled upon the religious freedoms and practices of Hindus much beyond those of any other community. History is replete with such examples.
The Left is free to disregard these arguments. But if it opts to do so it will be risking its credibility at the altar of political expediency.
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