Leaders of several political parties have been invited to the January 22, 2024 inauguration of the Ram temple being built on the land of the demolished Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. Those invited include Sonia Gandhi and Mallikarjun Kharge from the Congress and Sitaram Yechury of the Communist Party of India (Marxist).
Yechury has declined the invitation, saying religion is a personal choice and should not to be converted into an instrument for political gain. But senior Congress leader Digvijay Singh, who is regarded by many as uncompromisingly anti-communal in his politics, confirmed that Gandhi is considering this invitation “positively”. It was also said that either Gandhi herself would go or a delegation of the party would attend the Ram Mandir consecration ceremony.
Responding to questions over his invitation, Singh said sarcastically that he was not invited. “They will not invite me because they are not inviting the true devotees. Whether it be Murli Manohar Joshi, Lal Krishna Advani or Digvijay Singh, they will not be given the invitation.”
If what Singh is saying has been reported correctly, then the Congress party is going to make another suicidal blunder.
The first was to open the locks of the Babri Masjid in 1986 under the supervision of its state government in Uttar Pradesh. There is a gap of only six years between that decision and the demolition of the Babri Masjid. Actually, it should be said that this was the party’s second blunder. The first, in fact, was made by its state government in 1949 when it ignored the crime committed by ‘unknown persons’ of surreptitiously placing some idols in the Babri Masjid. Rather than taking remedial stepts, the government decided to lock the Babri Masjid and ban the entry of Muslims into it.
It took 37 years to from the locking of 1949 to the unlocking of 1986 but only six years to go from 1986 to the demolition of 1992. One crime led to another. Once again, the Congress, which was in power in New Delhi, felt it had no option but to live with this crime.
Smuggling idols of Hindu gods and goddesses into the Babri Masjid in the middle of the night in 1949 was a crime and the demolition of the Babri Masjid in broad daylight on December 6, 1992, under the protection of the state government and inaction of the Union government was also a crime. Both these acts were declared crimes by the Supreme Court. It is a different matter that the same Supreme Court allowed the proceeds – the land on which the Babri Masjid stood – to be enjoyed by those who were involved in both these crimes.
In 2019, the Supreme Court ordered the government to build a Ram temple on the land that became vacant by obliterating the Babri Masjid through acts of crimes and fraud.
No member of the Supreme Court bench which gave this decision had the courage to take responsibility for the judicial acrobatics this involved. The Ayodhya judgment is one of the rare court decisions in which the judge who wrote the decision did not want his name recorded. This was not humility, this was cowardice. No judge wanted to be remembered as the author of this judgment that turned morality on its head.
After all, the bench itself had concluded (1) that the Babri Masjid had been standing at that site for more than 500 years, (2) that there was no evidence that the mosque was built by demolishing any temple and (3) that Muslims used to worship in it till 1949, when the idols of Hindu gods and goddesses were smuggled into it, which was called a crime. The court was also unambiguous that it was an egregious crime to demolish the masjid on December 6, 1992. Having said all this, the logical decision would have been to order the reconstruction of the criminally demolished mosque at the site where it had stood for centuries. But no, the court decided that since some Hindus had been looking at it with longing for years, this land should be given to them to build a Ram temple.
Leaving aside the court’s deeply flawed legal reasoning, it is worth asking whether any sacred feeling can truly arise on a piece of land acquired through crime, cowardice, and cunning. Surely, it is impossible for the Ram temple which is going to be inaugurated on January 22, 2024 to be free from the memory of the evil human acts that led to its construction. It is certainly not a place that can give a devotee spiritual peace.
The purpose of this Ram temple is neither religious nor spiritual. That much was made clear by the general secretary of the Ram Mandir Trust, in recent comments. Champat Rai said that the date of January 22 is as important as that of August 15, 1947. “This day is also as important as 1971, when about one lakh Pakistani soldiers surrendered before our army. This day is on a par with the day our country reclaimed its right over Kargil in 1999,” Rai said.
It is not difficult to decipher his intent behind the mention of two incidents involving Pakistan and its defeat in battle. But it is Rai’s comparison of January 22 with India’s independence day that bears closer scrutiny.
August 15, 1947 is a day that evokes a feeling of freedom – a freedom achieved without any lies or deception. In the freedom struggle, the fight against the once more powerful Britain was conducted openly. Gandhi and his associates fought their battles with the British face to face. There was no conspiracy, no violence from the Indian side. There was something deeply moral about the victory of August 15, which compelled even the enemy Britain to surrender. This struggle was not driven by hatred. It generated love and compassion. And that is why, all the oppressed people of the world took inspiration from this great battle. In stark contrast to this, the new Ram temple coming up at Ayodhya would not have been possible without deceit, lies, and violence, as well as cowardice.
The demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992. Photo: Sanjay Sharma/INDIAPIX NETWORK
The protector of Ram
It is being announced that the Bharatiya Janata Party has ended Ram’s exile and has brought him back to Ayodhya. An organisation that believes in violence and hatred has declared itself the guardian of Ram. The temple, which is going to be inaugurated on January 22, is of a Ram whose guardian or patron is the BJP and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). If Hindus recognise this temple, it would mean that the BJP or the RSS are going to determine their religion and their religious conduct in the days and years ahead.
This temple would not have been possible without the campaign led by Lal Krishna Advani. He has admitted that the Ramjanmabhoomi campaign was actually a political campaign, and that its purpose was not religious or spiritual at all. Ram was just an instrument for the RSS to capture the minds of Hindus. This is clear from Advani’s confession that he was not fighting for Hinduism. It was to somehow convince the Hindus that only the BJP cared for their Ram and to use that feeling to build their support base. Clearly, the party has succeeded in doing that.
There was violence at every stage of the campaign to demolish the Babri Masjid. The Toyota truck with which Advani started his unholy journey spawned a bloodbath in north India. The blood that was shed in this entire campaign has not been accounted for till date. Who was responsible for that? Not Ram but the BJP, for whom Ram was just a politically expedient name.
This time, too, Ram is only a means. As the main yajman or main hota of this latest Ram temple yagya in Ayodhya, a person has been chosen whose life is made up of false words, false conduct, propagation of hatred and violence. What sacred spirit would this yagya evoke? Whoever participates in this yagya –organised by those for whom Ram is an instrument and presided over by a man who is a pathological liar – legitimises untruth and violence.
It is not possible to separate the land where the temple has been built from the falsehood, deceit, violence and cowardice with which it was eventually acquired. Does any political party now have the courage to say this?
India needs to have a national day of collective repentance. A day of atonement for the sin committed in the name of Ram. Most of all for the Congress party but also for other political parties. After all, without the cowardice of the Congress, this temple could not have been built. The Congress members were right when they claimed that without them this temple would not have been possible. But this is not a matter of pride, but of shame.
The Congress should not forget that the conspiracy to render August 15, 1947 meaningless had started from that very moment. Now, a claim is being made about the parity of January 22, 2024 with August 15, 1947. Can the Congress realise that it was its reluctance to confront communal deceit and violence that has brought the country to this state?
PM Narendra Modi takes part in the bhoomi pujan for the construction of a Ram temple in Ayodhya, August 5, 2020. Photo: PIB
The Congress can repent. It can respond to the invitation by saying that for the party of Gandhi and Nehru, this is a moment of introspection. A moment to solidify its reluctant secularism. It should muster the courage to say that India is still suffering the consequences of not punishing the crimes committed in 1949 and 1992 in the context of the Babri Masjid.
This repentance is also essential for the self-redemption of Hindu society. That it will not repent is a sad truth, but it is also true that this refusal to make a reckoning with its past will only make it look worse.
One of my friends, in sharp contrast to the Congress’s leaders, said that after November 2019, he stopped going to Ayodhya. Before that he used to visit Ayodhya frequently. He used to take holy baths in the Sarayu river, visit Hanuman Garhi and Kanak Bhawan. He narrated an incident of his visit or darshan to Ayodhya. He asked an old sadhu what was sacred in Ayodhya. The sadhu said that firstly, it was Sarayu, which was eternal, and second it was the land of Ayodhya. Everything else is only a claim made by mortals. And these are not claims of devotion towards Ram, but claims of their own ownership of worldly possessions.
When my friend started coming to Ayodhya, the debris of the Babri Masjid was still there. A witness to a planned crime. A crime in which nearly all institutions of the state participated or collaborated. He never ever thought of visiting this so-called Ramjanmabhoomi which was claimed to be the very spot on which the Babri mosque stood. In this debris was a hope that perhaps India would recognise the injustice done on December 6, 1992. But on November 9, 2019, this hope of justice was buried very deep by the Supreme Court. From November 9, 2019 Ayodhya became a symbol of injustice.
My friend said that from that day, Ayodhya disappeared from his mind. It is now a broken idol, a khandit pratima. It is not possible to worship there. It is a symbol of the victory of injustice. There is no relation between injustice and spirituality.
If only the Congress party could express this sentiment. Even if it chooses to remain absent from celebrating the victory of this power without commenting, it would still be neglecting its duty. That duty is to awaken a sense of right and wrong among the people. If my young Hindu friend still holds that awareness in mind, there is no reason why it cannot be stirred in others.
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