Far from destroying communal harmony, the temple would substantially calm the roiled waters of inter-religious strife in India.
From
his 1919 backing for a revivalist campaign for the survival of the
Caliphate in Turkey, to the close of his life, when he insisted on
handing over a vast sum of money to the very Pakistan that was at war
with India, Mahatma Gandhi was true to his saintly nature in turning the
other cheek and much more at every blow received. Who but the Mahatma
would advise the British people to open the doors of their houses to
Hitler, or tell the Jews that it was best that they calmly accept what
the Nazis had in mind for them, as by doing so, they would “transform
hatred into love”? Many Jews did indeed accept their fates without
protest, but the hatred that was so manifest in Nazi minds for the
Jewish people only seemed to grow with each sacrifice of several hundred
thousand of some of the most gifted individuals on the planet. And so
it proved with communal relations in India. Rather than flock to the
Congress Party and abandoning the Muslim League, more and more Muslims
joined the Muslim League. With every effort at appeasement by the
Congress leadership, it was M.A. Jinnah who became stronger and more
determined on Partition. Eventually, despite his superlative inner
qualities, the Mahatma failed to keep India united. Appeasement of the
fringe failed to extinguish that exclusivist tendency, and instead,
empowered it to a level where a small but intransigent segment of the
Muslim community set the direction and the pace of events involving the
community as a whole. Much as has been taking place in India since
Jawaharlal Nehru and his successors (including A.B. Vajpayee) turned the
concept of secularism upside down by enforcing a discriminatory set of
edicts on Hindus, even while retaining such British-era atrocities as
state control of temples.
In the present era, where evening
entertainment is increasingly composed of watching talk shows on
television, we see those who insist on purdah and on triple talaq, and
who mourn the fact that the Wahhabi version of Sharia law has not yet
become mandatory in India, get presented not as the pallbearers, but as
the torch carriers of secularism. This despite the reality of the
tactics of Nehruvian secularists having failed in their decades-long
mission of seeking to keep India united. 2004-2014 was a period when
India was ruled by Sonia Gandhi, who was a zealous enthusiast of
Nehruvian secularism. This columnist predicted several times that such
zeal on her part would lead not to a dimming of communal flames in
India, but in their vigorous perpetuation, and so it has proved. Despite
this, however, every day some “opinion maker” or the other insists on
continuing with the very policies that have over nearly a century
severely damaged the societal fabric of the subcontinent of India.
Through newspaper opeds, television
appearances and interventions in the courts, Nehru-model secularists
decry efforts at building a temple dedicated to Lord Ram at the site of
his birth. They even debunk any notion of his existence, despite
multiple historical proofs to the contrary. For them—in effect—the
history of India began around a millennium ago, while what came before
that was simply myth and legend. Fear that the courts may decree that a
Ram Temple be constructed at the site where the Babri Masjid stood till
1992, has alarmed them, as in their view, such a temple would bring the
“death of secularism” in our country. They are wrong. It is they who
have, by slow degrees, been choking to death genuine secularism in
India, by justifying and adding on to practices and decrees that are
suffused with a discriminatory intent. Far from destroying communal
harmony, such a temple would substantially calm the roiled waters of
inter-religious strife in India. A similar act of divinely inspired
grace and accommodation on the part of the Muslim community in India in
the matter of handing over the original sites of the birthplace of Lord
Krishna at Mathura and where the Kashi Viswanath temple stood (before it
was destroyed) would diminish to vanishing point any latent impulses at
communal hatred on the part of the Hindus of India. But for that to
happen, the Muslim community will need to take back the veto that has
long been exercised over their decisions by the small minority of
Wahhabis within their midst, who oppose any act of grace and
beneficence, any deed of mercy and compassion, and who constantly seek
to poison inter-religious harmony in India, of course in the name of
secularism.
Where in the priceless tenets made
available to humanity by the Prophet Muhammad has it been said that it
is an act of piety to erect a mosque atop the smashed edifice of a
temple? Indeed, a case may be made that offering prayers within a
structure built atop desecrated idols is a certain pathway to hell in
the afterlife. Gestures of conciliation and reconciliation are what keep
the peace in societies. An act of such surpassing nobility as handing
over the Ayodhya, Mathura and Varanasi sites by Muslim brothers and
sisters to the Hindu community, and subsequently building mosques
elsewhere that would rival the finest in the world, would strengthen
secularism in the country in a way such that it would be impossible for
Hindu exclusivists (and there are indeed such) to any more gain
traction. Once the Ram and Krishna places of birth and the original site
of the Kashi Viswanath temple be restored to their former glory and
significance, any effort (very often ISI-funded) by Hindu groups to seek
to alter the status quo in respect of any other existing mosque should
be met with police bullets.
Those seeking to put off to eternity the
building of a Ram Temple at Ayodhya are wrong in their assumptions. Far
from damaging secularism, such a temple would strengthen its roots and
ensure communal harmony based on the reality of a common ethnic and
cultural DNA between Indian and Indian, no matter the faith each
subscribes to.
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