Dr MN Parasuraman asks many uncomfortable but important questions, and answers a few.
When I was requested to write on the Ram Temple at Ayodhya in the light of the
Praan Pratishtha event that took place there on Monday, I accepted the challenge
with a lot of trepidation. It was not because it was a religious issue: I have studied
five religions in reasonable depth and I am critical of some things in all of them and
reverential towards some things in all. It was not because it was a controversial
issue. Although I believe in civility and in insulating human relations from certain
conflicts and arguments, I do, quite openly, hold strong views on a few controversial
matters. It had more to do with the fact that my own stand on the issue, as well as
my views on the Hindu Right, began at a point of schizophrenia in my early teens
and I have moved towards a critical position only gradually, starting in 1992 after
the demolition of the Babri Masjid and gathering pace only after 2005, after I read
Siddharth Varadarajan’s and Rana Ayub’s documentation of the atrocities against
Muslims in Gujarat in 2002.
Although I haven’t seen the need to change my legal identity, since 2020, I have self-
identified as a Buddhist more than anything else. But this has not impacted my deep
love of Hindu mythology and festivals and my deep bhakti towards Hindu Gods,
ingrained in me from childhood –with one exception –Rama.
I got my Hindu mythology in bedtime installments over my childhood years
(reinforced by reading Amar Chitra Katha and English editions of mythological
tales) from my mother and even when, as a child below seven years of age, Amma
narrated the Ramayana to me, there were things that wouldn’t permit me to accept
Rama as an ethical being, still less a god or a hero. His sly murder of Vali and his
treatment of Sita apart, even his going on a vanavaas to help his father fulfill a rash
promise seemed to me a case of overdoing filial obedience. (I can’t accept my
mythical namesake, Parasurama, for the same reason)! Later, I became acquainted
with the killing of Shambuka (a Shudra) merely for doing tapass and that sealed
Rama’s image in my mind in a negative light. (To be fair, I have been told that the
Shambuka episode does not figure in the Valmiki Ramayana).
In my teens, my father, who, with his astounding general knowledge and deep
awareness of current affairs, was my oracle on political matters, convinced me of
certain things. I shall mention them below along with supporting/ qualifying/
modifying/negating facts and thoughts that I encountered later. The later
knowledge shall be given in italics.
Babur was a foreign invader. He had nothing but contempt for India. The only
good things in India, according to the Baburnama, were large masses of gold
and silver and abundant, cheap labour.
(I checked Annette Susannah
Beveridge’s translation of the Baburnama and found this to be true, but the
writer Amitav Ghosh faults the translation).
The Mughal Empire was not an Indian empire. The court language was
Persian till the very end in 1857. The overwhelming majority revenue
officials or mansabdars were people of Central Asian origin. There were no
Indian Muslims among them.
How does one define belonging? Tricky
question!
Although there was no evidence to show that Rama was born at Ayodhya or
that Rama existed, circumstantial evidence pointed heavily at the Babri
Masjid having been built over the demolished remains of a Rama Temple.
After all, otherwise, why would Babur take the trouble to build a masjid at an
obscure spot as far as his fledgling empire was concerned?
Interestingly, the final Supreme Court verdict on Ayodhya also gave more
credence to circumstantial evidence (not the hypothetical question posed by my
father but the likelihood that Guru Nanak visited Ayodhya not too long before
Babur’s inavasion. Professor BB Lal of the Archaeological Survey of India, who
led three phases of excavations at the site, did not mention the existence of a
temple in any report. He started talking about it from faraway Britain only in
1991, when he saw the Ram Janmabhoomi Movement gaining traction under
LK Advani.
In an interview given to a YouTube channel, Professor Ali Nadeem Razavi of the
History Department of Aligarh Muslim University, who was a court appointed
observer at the 2003 excavations, said that there were Buddhist and Shaivaite
icons at the site, bones of animals butchered and cooked for food inside
residential structures under the site and even an qalaati or open mosque (with
half walls except on the direction of the Qibla and a mihrab in that direction)
under the foundation of the Babri Masjid. Professor Razavi and the other
observers on the team repeatedly called for these facts to be recorded but they
were disregarded completely and evidence that could have possibly belied the
Ram Temple hypothesis was ignored or destroyed.
Whatever the facts may be, if 800 million (late 1980s count) Hindus believed
that Rama was born at the very spot where the Babri Masjid stood, it was
churlish of Muslims not to agree to the relocation of the masjid and therefore,
Hindus were justified in using force to wipe out this sign of our humiliation.
The Supreme Court has come down heavily on the demolition of the Babri
Masjid calling it a crime whose perpetrators must be tried and punished, but it
has also given weightage to the fact that millions of Hindus believe that once
disputed site to be Rama’s birthplace.
Coupled with this seemingly unassailable history handed down by my father, there
was a miasma of toxic Islamophobia. Till the aftermath of the demolition of the
Masjid and the riots that followed, particularly the anti-Muslim pogrom in Mumbai, I
accepted all this.
The mayhem of December 1992 and January 1993 shook me out of my blind
intellectual servitude to my father. Some important and uncomfortable questions
popped up in my mind and refused to go away. Was this kind of slaughter of
innocents and discord really justified in the name of any healing of historical
wounds? Why were Hindus who were not enthusiastic about Rama sharing the price
being paid? And what connection did the innocent, butchered Muslims of Mumbai
have with Babur? And lastly, did those who gained substantially from all this
slaughter and discord bear even a small part of the price?
Uncannily, thirty years later, these are the very questions that remain unanswered
and the space and freedom to pose them is being wiped out of existence. The
demolition of the Babri Masjid and its aftermath may be three decade-old history, a
metaphoric atom bomb of that time, but the metaphoric radioactive fallout is not
going away in a hurry and that is the scariest thing about today’s India. Some kind of
mass lobotomy seems to have taken place and people are unwilling to consider the
dangers of the state not just espousing one religion (and thereby putting paid to an
important founding principle of the Republic) but espousing a particularly toxic,
belligerent, aggressively majoritarian mutant of the same, that threatens to wipe out
the more ancient and gentle forms of Hinduism, more intimately rooted in the ethos
of our land.
It is not religion as religion, religion as spirituality, religion as an ethical compass or
even religion as ways of living. It is religion as politics, religion as coercion and
exclusion and religion that identifies less in terms of its own features than in terms
of hatred for the Other. The Other is the innocent modern day Indian Muslim who is
called to account for what – by the Right Wing’s own account –a foreign invader did
half a millennium ago. In the words of Shankaracharya Avimukteswaranand
Saraswati of Jyotish Peeth in Joshimath, Uttaranchal, it is the religion of “Rajnaitik”
or political Hindus, not of Sanaatani Hindus, or people for whom Hinduism is a way
of day-to-day living, not to be mixed with politics.
I have had numerous arguments in the past with my many Hindu Right wing friends
and ex-friends (I am still enough of a Hindu to have personal friends among political
– ideological adversaries. Here again, my mother set an example. She would bathe,
apply chandan on her forehead and read the Ramayana on every evening of the
Kataka month, roughly equivalent to the period of the sign Cancer. But immediately
after her reading, she would smilingly come and listen to my condemnation of Rama.
I treasure that brand of Hinduism, whose exponents were secure and didn’t need to
take away the breathing space of others in order to ensure their own). And I have
noticed a curious obliteration of time and space in their arguments.
I have had numerous arguments in the past with my many Hindu Right wing friends
and ex-friends (I am still enough of a Hindu to have personal friends among political
– ideological adversaries. Here again, my mother set an example. She would bathe,
apply chandan on her forehead and read the Ramayana on every evening of the
Kataka month, roughly equivalent to the period of the sign Cancer. But immediately
after her reading, she would smilingly come and listen to my condemnation of Rama.
I treasure that brand of Hinduism, whose exponents were secure and didn’t need to
take away the breathing space of others in order to ensure their own). And I have
noticed a curious obliteration of time and space in their arguments.
I have had numerous arguments in the past with my many Hindu Right wing friends
and ex-friends (I am still enough of a Hindu to have personal friends among political
– ideological adversaries. Here again, my mother set an example. She would bathe,
apply chandan on her forehead and read the Ramayana on every evening of the
Kataka month, roughly equivalent to the period of the sign Cancer. But immediately
after her reading, she would smilingly come and listen to my condemnation of Rama.
I treasure that brand of Hinduism, whose exponents were secure and didn’t need to
take away the breathing space of others in order to ensure their own). And I have
noticed a curious obliteration of time and space in their arguments.
I have had numerous arguments in the past with my many Hindu Right wing friends
and ex-friends (I am still enough of a Hindu to have personal friends among political
– ideological adversaries. Here again, my mother set an example. She would bathe,
apply chandan on her forehead and read the Ramayana on every evening of the
Kataka month, roughly equivalent to the period of the sign Cancer. But immediately
after her reading, she would smilingly come and listen to my condemnation of Rama.
I treasure that brand of Hinduism, whose exponents were secure and didn’t need to
take away the breathing space of others in order to ensure their own). And I have
noticed a curious obliteration of time and space in their arguments.
We need to seriously ask ourselves the question whether a national pride founded
on this proneness to getting wounded and the thirst to keep revenging wrongs,
mostly old or imaginary, is going to lay the foundation for a peaceful nation, even if
we take the building of the temple and its state sponsored praana pratishtha to be
unproblematic events.
While I have rightly blamed the Hindu Right for obliterating a sense of history and
geography and getting Hindus worked up over wrongs of the far away and the long
ago, setting them on an aggressive campaign to recover lost glory, I must necessarily
fault the Congress and some of the “secular” parties (notably the one led by former
PM Deve Gowda) for never really being committed to secular values, and protecting
the minorities only to the extent allowed by the exigencies of vote bank politics.
Rajiv Gandhi’s overturning of the Supreme Court judgement in the Shah Bano case in
1986, and then his balancing act of allowing the Shilanyas at the Babri masjid in
1989 exposed this quite glaringly. In the case of the Sikh minority, we witnessed the
systematic encouragement of Khalistani elements till 1984 and then, in the
aftermath of Indira Gandhi’s assassination, the anti-Sikh pogrom of November that
year, that happened with the tacit, if not open approval of the state and set the
template for Gujarat 2002. A hoarding put up by a Congress unit in Madhya Pradesh
on the day of the Praana Pratishtha at Ayodhya shows that repeated election defeats
have not resulted in any ethical introspection. Whatever commitment the Congress
had towards secularism probably died with Gandhi and Nehru. It was also true that
self-styled secular intellectuals would often have glaring double-standards with
regard to Hindu and other fundamentalism.
At a conference at the University of Hyderabad, I have myself witnessed one such
intellectual berate an Urdu-speaking, Muslim woman poet for condemning Rajiv
Gandhi’s 1986 bill superseding the Shah Bano judgement, solely on the grounds that
the Hindu Right also happened to condemn it!
The result of this brand of selective secularism was that it kept giving the Right an
opportunity to feed the fire of hurt Hindu sentiment, never mind whether the hurt
was over real wrongs or imaginary ones. When the tide began to turn in 2013, it was
initially over other issues such as corruption in the UPA governments, but once in
power with a thumping majority, the wishy – washy track record of the Congress in
safeguarding secular values came in handy as a point for the BJP to tell people that it
wasn’t going to fool them with a pretention of any such values. There were a few
noises about “Sabka saath, sabka vikas”, but on the whole the BJP have been very
clear that they were not going to disappoint their core constituency. They gradually
pushed the envelope of side-lining pluralistic values and Hinduising the state so far
that the day is not far off when India may cease to be a secular republic, even de jure.
If matters were to end quietly with the Praan Pratishtha and declaring India a Hindu
state, one could have reconciled oneself to the new normal, but as I hinted earlier,
licking one’s wounds over mostly imaginary historical wrongs and future fears (of
an Islamic dystopia) can be a horribly addictive business, a thirsty god, not to be
appeased with any amount of strife and bloodshed. Even those among us who
consider themselves believing, practicing Hindus need to stand up and insist that we
refuse to get trapped in the endless quest for recovering self- esteem and lost glory
by means of deriding, demeaning and defeating some or the other Other. We need to
work to reinstate the ancient civilizational values of this land, its celebration of
diversity, its willingness to embrace happy, spiritual ecstasies but refusal to
embrace angry, triumphalist, religious hysteria. This, we must do, no matter which
selfish, ruthless, political forces try to manipulate us. And along with these ancient
values, we must also spell out that imbibing the modern is non-negotiable in certain
aspects of life beyond mere technology. And in that modern world, religious identity
cannot be our No. 1 priority.
After all, even the Maryaada Purushottama’s flaw was the victimization of his
dearest one to satisfy someone else’s unjust obsession with rumours relating to the
past. It is not my place to tell anyone not to revere Rama, but as a fellow citizen, I
beg you, don’t copy his biggest mistake.
