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Title: Meaning of Ayodhya
campaign
Author: Virendra Parekh
Publication: The Weekend
Observer
Date: December 4, 1999.
It is tempting to approach
December 6 this year against the backdrop of Kalyan Singh's revolt against
the BJP leadership. If the BJP has shelved the temple and other Hindutva
issues for political reasons, Kalyan Singh is trying to revive them for
similar reasons.
On December 6, we may
see Kalyan Singh launching a new party and possibly a Rath Yatra in support
of the temple, with BJP ranged against it.
We see a millenium, which
opened with the wanton destruction of Hindu temples at the hands of Mahmud
Ghazni, closing with a powerful movement to reconstruct a magnificent temple
at the Ram Janmabhoomi.
For this is not a simple
property dispute, which a civil court can resolve by examining rival claims.
The movement for restoration of the Ram Janmabhoomi temple involves fundamental
issues like the nature of the Indian society, interpretation of Indian
history and the nature and role of the Indian state. Indeed, the present
dormant state of the issue should be utilised as an opportunity to address
these issues in a dispassionate manner.
It speaks volumes about
the present intellectual climate and correlation of forces in our society
and polity that the proposal to build a Ram temple at Ayodhya had to sidelined,
with common consent, as a divisive issue.
The proposed temple in
Ayodhya is aimed at reintegrating the Ram Janmabhoomi into the living Hindu
tradition. At the same time, it is also an invitation for Muslim Indians
to reintegrate themselves into the society and culture, from which their
forefathers were cut off by fanatical rulers.
For it is an undeniable
fact that over 95 per cent of Muslim Indians are descendants of Hindu ancestors,
whom Babur and his lieutenant Mir Baki sought to insult, browbeat and humiliate
by putting up a mosque at one of their most sacred places. They need not
give up Islam. Conscious non-opposition to the temple would go a long way
in bringing them closer to their parent society. It is thus an exercise
in national integration.
However, that may precisely
be the reason why Muslim leaders and secularists oppose it so vehemently
and vociferously. However, there is another broader and deeper sense,
in which the Ayodhya is a national integration movement. Essentially, it
is an attempt by the Indian society to regain and reassert its identity.
However, this has never been easy for a variety of reasons.
The Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri
Masjid dispute also brought into sharp focus the critical issue of the
nature of the Indian state as nothing else had done since Independence
and partition. The controversy between the Hindu Rashtra versus the secular
state is nothing new. It has been with us since the early '20s, when some
political thinkers began search for a definition of Indian nationalism,
which could transcend the Hindu-Muslim divide.
India has been a battleground
for two civilisations (Hindu and Islamic) for over a 1,000 years and three
(Hindu, Muslim and Western) for over two centuries. None of them has won
a decisive or durable victory to compel the other two to assimilate themselves
fully into it. So the battle continues.
This civilisational conflict
is at the root of the crisis of identity that Indian intellectuals have
been facing since the beginning of the freedom struggle in the last quarter
of the nineteenth century.
To be sure, early leaders
of the Indian renaissance (like Dayanand Saraswati, Swami Vivekanand, Maharshi
Aurobindo Ghosh) never had any doubts about the nature of Indian nationalism.
For them, India was Hindu and Hindu was India. This view of Indianness
was, however, played down by the national leadership during the Independence
movement with the rise of Muslim separatism and its encouragement and exploitation
by the British rulers.
Gandhiji sought to achieve
Hindu-Muslim amity on the basis of the essential unity of the two religions
and Nehru, on the basis of a common fight against feudalism. As Girilal
Jain perceptively observed, they failed to produce the desirable results
because they sought to bypass the stalemated conflict of civilisations.
In 1947, the Hindus could
have resolved this conflict by declaring India as a Hindu Rashtra. But
they were too traumatised by the partition and Gandhiji's assassination
to do so.
The vacuum was filled
Nehru, his mental and spiritual progeny, and his family who continued to
rule the roost in the post-independence period.
The most important opponents
of the Hindu society are not Islamic communal leaders, but the English
educated, self-alienated, denationalised, Left-leaning elite that noisily
proclaims its "secularism".
It is these people who
have imposed anti-Hindu policies on the Hindus, who have kept Hinduism
down in its land of birth, and prevented it from proudly raising its head
after a 1,000 years of subjugation and oppression.
As Koenraad Elst says,
the worst torment for the Hindu society is not separatist movements by
minorities in some parts of the country or the few privileges enjoyed by
non-Hindus, but the mental slavery and the sense of inferiority which Leftist
intellectuals through power positions in media and education and their
direct influence on public debate keep on inflicting on the Hindu mind.
The destruction of the
Babri masjid was a strong reaction of the Hindus to the secularist regime
created by the Nehruvian elite. That is the significance of December 6.
As a symbolic act, it was beyond compare.
However, while symbols
have their value, they can never be a substitute for what they symbolise.
The challenges before the Hindu society are daunting and will not go away
by mere symbolic gestures, however heroic.
If the Ayodhya movement
is not to degenerate into a campaign for a brick structure, its leaders
should seek to educate the people on the basic issues and challenges facing
Hindu society.
To begin with, Hindu
intellectuals' should challenge the description of India, vacated by the
Britishers and picked up by deal rulers, as a museum of a large number
of communities divided along every conceivable line. They should contest
the Leftist distortion of Indian history by tracing every distortion to
its root and rewrite history on rational and scientific lines. They should
show that Indian nationalism can be rooted only in Hindu civilisation,
without which it can have neither meaning nor content. This is no more
'communal' or 'fascist' than the fact that Arab nationalism is underscored
by Islam and even Christian Arabs accept it.
Secondly, the demand
for restoration of Ram Janmabhoomi temple should be presented in the wider
context of Islamic injunctions on iconoclasm and wilful destruction of
thousands of temples by Muslim rulers in pursuance of those injunctions.
In fact, all closed creeds like Islam, Christianity and communism should
be examined critically by subjecting them to the test of rationalism, humanism
and universalism and be shown to all for what they are: ideologies of power
seeking dominance by making tall and false claims. The post-demolition
period has seen some progress in all these directions. Secularism has lost
its halo. Siding with Hinduism is no longer a taboo even in the English
press, though it is not yet fashionable. But there is a long way to go.
The struggle for the
goal of a Hindu Rashtra involves education and mobilisation of the people
through sustained efforts. So long as such mobilisation continues, we need
not worry about the delay in the actual construction of the temple. In
the past, kings used to build great temples to comemmorate a great victory.
In the present case, let the construction of the temple await the arrival
of an avowedly Hindu Government at the Centre' it can then herald the dawn
of a new era.
