When religion is misused for political purposes, the results can never be happy for any nation. However, the same can also be said when the institutions and constituents of a nation fail to resolve contentious religious disputes in a just, amicable and expeditious manner. Both are true in the case of the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid issue in Ayodhya, as is testified by India’s painful experience.
The publication of Valay Singh’s book Ayodhya: City of Faith, City of Discord could not have been better timed. On the one hand, Narendra Modi’s government has made a desperate effort to get the Supreme Court to return ‘superfluous’ land around the disputed site, so that entities backed by the Sangh Parivar can start construction of the Ram Temple before the 2019 parliamentary elections. If the apex court accepts the government’s contention, the BJP will surely go all out to solidify its Hindu votebank (especially in Uttar Pradesh, but in other States too) by claiming that it has fulfilled a key poll promise.
On the other hand, as the book shows with well-compiled information, the very fact that the issue has remained unresolved for so many decades after India gained independence (the dispute itself is much older) points to the collective failure of the judiciary, Parliament, political parties and also leaders of Hindu and Muslim communities. We thus see a vicious dialectic at work here. The failure to resolve the issue through trust-promoting negotiation between the communities has given the BJP an opportunity to communalise and politicise it for unconcealed electoral considerations. Its politicisation by one major national party has, in turn, made its cordial resolution difficult.
Many of the salient facts pertaining to the dispute are well-known since they are all in the public domain. Interpretation of these facts, of course, depends on one’s ideological standpoint. As the author states (p. 260), there are essentially three sides: ‘the pro-temple or the BJP side’, ‘the closeted pro-temple side’ (mainly represented by the Congress, according to the author), and the third side, which is articulated by ‘the secular public, communists, socialists’ and others. Singh, an independent Delhi-based journalist, clearly belongs to the third side.
Same story, different sides
The BJP’s aggressive pro-temple politics has undoubtedly posed a threat to communal harmony in India. However, this does not automatically mean that the ‘third side’ is right either in dismissing the legitimacy of Hindu sentiments across India in favour of a Ram temple in Ayodhya or in not questioning the stubborn refusal of Muslim leaders to agree to a compromise solution.
As many Marxist secularists have done in the past, the book at many places belittles or scorns Hindu sentiments, such as when Singh writes: “In a way Ayodhya had been brought to them (most Hindus) only through technology and media exposure.”(p. 234) As if Hindus did not know about the Ramayana epic before Ramanand Sagar’s popular TV serial in the 1980s. Nothing can be further from the truth. Despite all the pluralities associated with them, Ram, Ramayana and Ayodhya have been deeply embedded in the consciousness of Hindus (and not of ‘upper caste’ Hindus only) all across India and for many centuries.
December 6, 1992
While it can never be established that Ram was born at the exact place where the Babri Masjid stood before its demolition by frenzied kar sevaks on December 6, 1992 — and the Supreme Court was right in refusing to go into this question — few can deny that Ayodhya means far more to Hindus than it does to Muslims. Revealingly, the book quotes (p. 143) the muezzin of the Babri Masjid describing it, in a communication to the British authorities in 1858, as ‘Janamsthan Masjid situated in Oudh’.
The demolition of the Babri mosque was, indisputably, a reprehensible anti-secular and anti-Constitutional act. However, for a book on Ayodhya, it avoids going into similar acts of temple-breaking and idol-breaking that took place in many parts of India in the reign of bigoted Muslim rulers. (Even Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, who was no sympathiser of Hindutva ideology, has described such deeds of fanaticism in his book Pakistan or The Partition of India .) Two wrongs don’t make a right. But nor should historians and intellectuals ignore one wrong and only focus on the other.
The way forward
The moot question is: Where does India go from here? What can, even now, lead to a harmonious denouement to the dispute? The book skips this vital question. One thing is clear: No power can now stop construction of a Ram Temple in Ayodhya. The legal part of the dispute itself has now reached almost the last leg. But India would be a loser if the temple came up as a symbol of Hindu triumphalism. The Supreme Court’s Constitution bench was right in stating in its 1994 judgment: “The Hindu community must bear the cross on its chest for the misdeed of the miscreants (who demolished the mosque).” (p. 255)
This means that the Sangh Parivar should express sincere remorse for December 6 even if the apex court (or Parliament) finally decides the matter in favour of Hindus.
On their part, leaders of the Muslim community should give up their claim to the disputed site, it now having become only a property dispute, and support construction of the Ram temple. Finally, all parties should together rebuild the mosque at an agreed site in Ayodhya, and make both the temple and the mosque symbols of communal harmony and national integration.
That would be a fitting tribute to Ayodhya, whose very name means ‘a place without wars’.
Ayodhya: City of Faith, City of Discord ; Valay Singh, Aleph, ₹799.
