On the Verdict…

The Verdict

So the verdict is out and is all over the place. For whatever it’s worth, here it is in brief:

Ruling on the 60-year-old title suits over the disputed Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid site in Ayodhya, the Lucknow bench of the Allahabad High Court today upheld the Hindus’ right to the area under the central dome of the demolished Masjid, where the idols of Ram and other deities are installed, and dismissed the ownership claim of the Sunni Central Board of Waqf… Justices Khan and Agarwal accepted that Muslims had certain rights and ordered division of the disputed site in three equal parts between Hindus, Muslims and the Nirmohi Akhara of Ayodhya.

And the expected reactions have ensued from the expected quarters. Which is what I shall try to examine in this post.

In recognizing that Hindus have the right over the area under the central dome, the Allahabad High Court’s judgement is eminently sensible. However, dividing the site into three equal parts is, as Subramanian Swamy says, is a tad contradictory in light of the court’s dismissal of the Sunni Wakf Board’s title claim suit. Be it as that maybe, Hindus across the nation are jubliant as they see in this judgement both a vindication of history and a fruition of their decades’-long struggle, which included many lost their lives.

The judgement then is–for lack of a better word–fractured in the sense that it’s hard to discern the reason why one third of the site was apportioned to Sunni Wakf Board. Understandably, given the volatile nature of the case, the reasoning behind this verdict could be based on a “formula that pleases all.” However–irrespective of where my personal sentiments lie–the dispute was about the entire site and not just the place where Ram Lalla is installed. It’s not as if Babar destroyed just the Sanctum Sanctorum of the Ram temple. For now, let’s leave it to the wisdom of the honourable court and move on to the aftermath of the judgement.

Media Manipulation

The most obvious place to begin is with the responses from the secular camp.

If you recall, these worthies were at the forefront of the we-want-the-verdict-yesterday! campaign and raked up an anticipation overdrive so severe that it appeared like there was some heavy sexual tension between their channels and the verdict. And their reaction after, looked like the verdict had inflicted an equally severe blow of KLPD (don’t ask me to expand that). If I was a conspiracy theorist, I could argue that the media had actually anticipated the verdict to be in favour of their Chosen Ones given the current dispensation at the nation’s helm but I’m not a conspiracy theorist. Actually there’s a simpler explanation as to why the media is behaving like it was denied the orgasm that it had fantasized about achieving till yesterday. For that, let’s rewind a bit.

I shall quote extensively from the indubitable Koenraad Elst:

. until 1989 there had been no question about the site’s history. All the written sources, whether Hindu, Muslim or European, were in agreement about the pre-existence of a Rama temple at the site. “Rama’s birthplace is marked by a mosque, erected by the Moghul emperor Babar in 1528 on the site of an earlier temple”, according to the 1989 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, entry “Ayodhya”. Neither was there any document contradicting this scenario: no account of a forest chopped down to make way for the mosque (already unlikely in the centre of an ancient town), no sales contract of real estate to the mosque’s builder, nothing of the kind. By contrast, there was testimony after testimony of Hindus bewailing and Muslims boasting of the replacement of the temple with a mosque; and of Hindus under Muslim rule coming as close as possible to the site in order to celebrate Rama’s birthday every year in April, in continuation of the practice at the time when the temple stood.

And if authors of testimonies may be unreliable, there was also the archaeological evidence: in the 1970s, a team of the Archaeological Survey of India led by Prof. B.B. Lal dug out some trenches just outside the mosque and found rows of pillar-bases which must have supported a larger building predating the mosque. Moreover, in the mosque itself, small black pillars with Hindu sculptures had been incorporated, a traditional practice in mosques built in forcible replacement of infidel temples to flaunt the victory of Islam over Paganism.

The only remaining question about the site was its status in the period 1192-1528. In 1192 and the subsequent years, practically all the Hindu temples and Buddhist monasteries in North India were demolished by Mohammed Ghori and his Turkish invaders. It is impossible that the medieval temple at the site could have survived until 1528.

What changed in 1989 is again told by Dr. Elst in the same article:

Yet, in 1989, all this evidence was brushed aside by a group of 25 academics from Jawaharlal Nehru University (Delhi), mostly declared Marxists, who issued a statement denying the existence of any evidence for the temple: The Political Abuse of History. Not that they offered any newfound data to support this dramatic reversal of the consensus, all they had to show was some totally contrived reinterpretations of a few of the existing data plus the worn-out slogans against “Hindu communalism”. … Note that they didn’t just settle for a political rejection of any plans to replace the mosque with a temple. They could sensibly have argued that the demolition of the temple happened long ago and could not now be a reason for reversing the event. That exactly had been the verdict given by a British judge in 1886 when ordering a status quo at the site. No, instead they went as far as to base their rejection of a new temple construction on the claim that no demolition had ever taken place because no temple had existed there. This was reckless, for if the political choice for the preservation of the mosque were based on the historical non-existence of the medieval temple at the site, then the eventual discovery of such a temple would justify a contrario the replacement of the mosque with a restored temple. At least in theory, but the Marxists were confident that their opponents would never get the chance to press this point. Under the prevailing power equation, they expected to get away with a plain denial of history rather than a mere insistence on divorcing history from politics.

Note the sentence in bold. What it simply means is that the secular worthies relied on “who you know is more important” than “what you know.” However, their recklessness, as Elst says, proved their undoing in the subsequent years. The first signs showed up here:

Misled by the media into believing that the Hindu claims were pure fantasy, the BMAC office-bearers arrived ill-prepared, expecting a cakewalk over the discredited case of the VHP fanatics. They were speechless when the VHP team presented dozens of documents supporting their case. The BMAC then invited a team of proper historians chaired by Marxist professor R.S. Sharma, who arrived at the next meeting with the demand that they be recognized as “independent scholars” entitled to sit in judgment on the controversy, i.e. to pass a verdict between their BMAC employers and their VHP opponents. The government representative did not grant this hilarious demand. At the next meeting, they declared that they hadn’t studied the evidence yet and needed six more weeks, a strange statement from people who had just led 42 academics in signing a petition confirming once and for all that there was absolutely no evidence at all for a temple. At the meeting scheduled for 24 January 1991, they simply didn’t show up anymore.

What followed is anybody’s guess. Ad hominem attacks, calumny, pamphleteering, labelling…everything except facing the truth that they themselves had claimed they were privy to. However, by then too much was at stake for the secular bandwagon: they had presented themselves as the Defenders of the Babri Masjid Cause to the Muslim leadership. Ever since, the story has been one of falsehoods and labelling and quoting from each other. Anything to deflect criticism away from themselves and to obfuscate historical truths and bury archeological evidence. If the archeological evidence was too strong to refute, well, then impute ulterior motives to the Archeologist/ASI. A classic case is the venom they spewed against Professor B B Lal, which over time, and with repeated assertions became the “truth.” We see this pattern repeated even as we speak. A few years ago, it was Prof Lal, today it is the Allahabad High Court itself! Here are a few samples directly attacking the judiciary:

• Exhibit 1: Siddharth Varadarajan unleashing uncontrollable fury in the People’s Daily of India.
• Exhibit 2: A non-entity named Dhananjay Mahapatra displays bilious humour in How the Lord became a litigant
• Exhibits 3: Mount Road Marx spills lots of red ink in his editorial.
• Exhibits ad nauseam: From the Slimes gutter. Scroll down the page and check the items under Related Coverage.

Yesterday’s, and the continuing media bedwetting over the verdict should be seen in this light: the media made up of an enormous galaxy of journalists, politicians, academics, writers, and intellectuals have a lot to lose and stand to face the wrath of the Muslim leadership if they fail to keep up their charade built on the foundation of falsehood. And so the immediate reaction to the verdict was to insinuate that the verdict gives the shot in the arm for “certain elements” who might use this to inflame communal passions again. Don’t we know who those “certain elements” are? Wink wink. Nudge nudge. Oh and here’s how they add the much-required “balance.”

Though members of Muslim intelligentsia put up a brave face on TV channels, talking in politically-correct terms, in private, many accept that they see the verdict as “anti-Muslim”. “The Muslims of India have been told very clearly that they have to live in this country on the terms set by the majority community. From now on we have to live in constant fear,” says a former vice-chancellor of a central university.

But others are a bit more forthcoming. Shabnam Hashmi, well-known social activist who heads Sahmat, says the verdict made her feel like a “second-class citizen”. “We will not stop the struggle against irrationality and hatred but we can no longer promise to hand over a secular, democratic nation to you,” says Hashmi, in her “message to the next generation”.

Yes. Our hearts are supposed to go out. But that’s not all.

Positions, Reactions & Such

The balance is further tilted balanced. The kind of “star-studded” and “eminent” personalities that they invited to the talk shows are very revealing. Apart from the token invitation to folks like Swapan Dasgupta and Ravishankar Prasad, we see names like Digvijay Singh, Rajiv Dhawan, Ramachandra Guha, Yogendra Yadav, Zafaryab Jilani, Javed Akhtar and Owaisi. What ensues on such “talk shows” is anybody’s guess. BJP spokesmen are fair game for secular verbal slaughter.

While Javed Akhtar seemed pretty sensible of the lot, Jilani wants to appeal to the Supreme Court. Which is understandable given who he is. However, the blood-lusty Owaisi is characteristic of the true Islamic mindset at work. Aside, any Hyderabad resident will testify how he/she shivers when this MP unleashes his “might” in the city. The respected lawyer describes the issue in terms of “war and battle.” But then he’s merely one of the more vocal folks in the Muslim leadership, which needs Ayodhya to preserve their hold on the Faithful. And this mindset is unlikely to go away in a hurry.

But what’s the report card on the Hindu side? As always, conciliatory, and more often than not, almost cowardly. We have a Swapan Dasgupta who says Hindus should be “magnanimous.” Specificially, “acknowledgement of ram janamsthan by court must b followed by a gesture of hindu generosity” and “i would support building of a masjid alongside a ram temple that includes the garbagriha.” A lone Javed Akhtar talks about a goodwill handshake. The question then to ask the Muslim leadership is this: hypothetically, had a Mosque been demolished to build a Hindu temple, what’d be the reaction of the Muslim leadership?

However, voices from Hindu quarters that ask for the entire site to be handed over to Hindus are dubbed as “taking maximalist positions,” a euphemism for “extreme positions.”

Conclusion

Lest it be misunderstood, this is not about Hindus versus Muslims as much as it is about a need to develop, preserve, and honour the historical sense. As it is, our kids are being fed toxic history and thousands of Hindus including me were victims of a syllabus calculated to deracinate a proud civilization and philosophy that has much to offer to the world. A syllabus and mindset that has produced the likes of Burqa Dutt, Turdesai, Mount Road Marx, and similar other stars of the secular milky way. A syllabus and mindset that has produced another variety that feels no need for history but prefers instead, to rely on shoddy atheism, the here-and-now mentality, which has spawned vast colonies of urban filth that needs Rama and our culture and traditions as objects of ridicule and means for self-gratification. And all of this on the basis of absolute ignorance.

Most people pontificating on the “idea of India” don’t realize that a truly secular idea can be realized only under Hindu values. The sooner this fact gains widespread currency the better it will be for the future of this ancient nation. Building a Rama temple at Ayodhya is part of the vision for making India not merely a secular state but something beyond and much nobler than that. It will symbolize Ramayana in concrete and give people hope, something that today’s secular India has failed to offer its citizens. Else, we’ll be left with antics such as the following, in the name of fostering secularism and communal harmony:

[Times of India, October 1, 2010]

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