Ayodhya and the Babri Mosque

Ayodhya and the Babri Mosque 03-5-2002 Sharad Bailur
		I am sometimes ashamed of my country. In truth, I say this because India means so much to me. Were that not to be so I would perhaps have been indifferent to what its people regularly do to themselves. One of our biggest banes is our preoccupation with religion. It has perhaps caused nothing but misery to its people throughout the ages. From a mystical, if admittedly thin, understanding of our place in the universe, it developed into a religion with its rituals and its rewards. Over the thousands of years that it has been practised it added first, a patina of myth which later thickened and hardened into a rhinoceros hide of unreasoning belief made horrible by practices like sati, the ostracism of widows, the caste system and such other fossilised and unreasoning attempts to make the lives of people miserable. And all for the benefit of mythological characters who may never have existed. The misfortune is that the Indian has always accepted any religion unhesitatingly. This is the result of the readiness of the people to believe any rubbish that is dished out to them from on high. And ‘on high’ merely means by those who were educated enough to read and write. We have had so many different religions being practised by so many people because we have always looked for short cuts. Short cuts even to the effort necessary for understanding, which in reality calls for mental effort. Who has the will to make that mental effort? As a result, India is the most ritualistic society in the world. To this day it describes its much vaunted secularism as “equal respect to all religions,” knowing all the time that this is another bit of sophistry meant to be talked about loudly because it is comfortable, calls for little understanding and with the knowledge all the time that it can never be put into actual practice. Hinduism evolved as a broad way of life in the subcontinent over four thousand or more years. The Hindu religion or that version of it that is practised in north India believes that in ages past there was a King of Ayodhya called Rama. That Rama was an incarnation of the god Vishnu. That Rama was born in Ayodhya at a particular place. As a result Ayodhya is a place that is fully dedicated to Rama and the temples constructed in his honour over the millennia are testimony to this. Nobody really knows the exact place that Rama was born in or for that matter whether he really ever existed. He is also a literary figure made famous by the Ramcharitramanas of Kalidasa and is the hero of that great epic. In much the same way as the Aryans drifted into the subcontinent from eastern Europe, there were subsequent and later invasions from other groups of people. The Muslim invasions began some time in the last part of the first millennium after Christ. Better organised and better led, the Muslims established their own empires in a land populated by the people of an idolatrous and fossilised faith. Among the many Muslim invasions the most lasting was that of the Mongols or Mughals, their first leader Babur a descendant of Timur or Tamerlane. Since, unlike Hinduism, Islam is a proselytising religion, attempts were made to convert the population to the true faith by persuasion where possible and by force where necessary. And inevitably mosques were built all over India for the true faithful. Vast non-Muslims populations were, over hundreds of years, taxed by successive Muslim empires merely for not being Muslim. The tax was called the Jaziya. It has sanction in the Quran. Among the ways of showcasing Islam to the people was to build, forcibly where possible, mosques in places where temples once stood, the temples having first been destroyed. This was done all over India and it was also done in Ayodhya. A general of Babur’s decided that he would build a mosque in Ayodhya in honour of his master. The mosque was therefore called the Babri Mosque. Over the next three hundred years it was fitfully used by the local Muslim populace and then it gradually fell into disuse as it became a ruin and there was no money to renovate it. That is where matters stood till some idiot of a Hindu fanatic decided that there had been a temple in the place before the mosque had been built some six hundred years before and that the place should be converted back into a temple. He went and placed a few idols in the disused mosque. When the government remained indecisive, mobs went on the rampage in Ayodhya and pulled down the old ruin that had been a mosque. That kicked up the controversy which dogs the nation to this date. It is now fifty years old and shows no signs of abating. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad (or the World Hindu Council) pressured the Government of India to agree that it would come to a decision by a particular date. Like Musharraf claiming Kashmir, the VHP would accept nothing other than the right to build a temple. The “core issue” is that the Government should yield to its demand to build a temple in the place. This incensed the Muslims. They want their mosque rebuilt just where it stood. It does not matter that it had been in ruins for decades before it got pulled down. In essence, it is the classic case of two religions fighting over a piece of land. Hindus regard themselves as “belonging” to the subcontinent. According to them all other religions that originated elsewhere are “foreign.” They therefore arrogate to themselves a sort of super-patriotism, which they deny to those who follow other faiths, especially those who are Muslims. The partition of the subcontinent into Pakistan and India did much to exacerbate this feeling. Some ten days ago, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and its followers decided that it would send teams of volunteers to build the temple, permission or no permission. A number of them went from the state of Gujarat which lies along the western coast to the north of Maharashtra. On their way back, their train was waylaid at a station called Godhra by Muslim fanatics who set fire to the train after having sealed the Hindu volunteers inside. Some fifty plus Hindus died in the conflagration, which set off a chain of events culminating in retaliatory riots all over Gujarat in which hundreds of Muslims were murdered by Hindu mobs. And Muslim fanatics fought Hindus with petrol bombs and acid. It has even had peripheral effect in places as far off as Hyderabad in the south and Lucknow in the north. The army has been called in in Ahmedabad the capital of Gujarat to quell the riots and they have largely succeeded in bringing about an uneasy calm. The essence of the issue is religion and the land on which a religious structure is supposed to have stood. There is only one way to solve the issue in perpetuity. First, do nothing that encourages or even allows religious sentiment to creep into the issue. Second, create something that will discourage any human being or even any living thing going into the place. Many good souls have suggested the creation of a hospital or a garden or a monument to all religions. That will not work for the simple reason that the hospital or garden will inevitably acquire religious overtones and become the subject of a further dispute. The only solution is to make the site of the temple/mosque a nuclear waste dump so that it becomes out of bounds for human use for the next fifty thousand years. We need not bother with what happens to it after that. This drastic measure will also send a condign message to those who fight over land and property in the name of religion. Fight and the place gets converted into a nuclear dump. Do this just once and the message will go home. TOP