A Plot for the Ram Mandir

Anil Persaud opined that a medieval mosque, where prayers have stopped in Ayodhya is a Hindu temple in modern India. Here lies a conundrum in the history of political independence of India. A feeling of unease and incompleteness an anxiety that something is not right that rears its head again and again. 70 odd years of political independence and partition has not settled the question of demographic diversity of being Hindu or Muslim and the sense of divide that the populaces are attuned and chosen to sync with. Around the time India was busy familiarizing itself with the new found status of being a nation- state, an idol was sneaked into the Babri Masjid in the mid-night. The stroke of the midnight, tryst with the destiny and founding of the new republic, free from the clutches of the colonial rule had a ghostly companion and illegitimate half-brother and with time the ghost and the ‘brother’ had shown more tenacity and resilience than the vaunted fabric of the modern secular republic, a nation state. There is a plot, a code and sub text that is written within the nationalist thesis of India.

In mid 1980’s a political movement in the garb of a social movement, namely Ram Janm Bhoomi Andolan offered a solution to the ghostly companion to political independence through proposing a Ram temple where the mosque stood and in order to do so collected ‘shilas’ from various corners and brought them to Ayodhya. The modern Ram Temple interrogates the modern temples of Nehru’s modern India, it considers its imposter. Ram Mandir the proverbial trojan horse for the ‘modern temples’ of Nehru’s India was channeled into arbitration through law and courts. In early 1990s, the mosque was razed down by the kar sevaks who have assembled there defying court orders in which this issue was implicated. Those who were present at Ayodhya on that fateful day report with a sense of bewilderment that the slogans that were raised that day were more about Pakistan than about Ram, fail to see the movement as part of a social rearrangement, reclaim land and territory and consciousness of a particular history, where Pakistan plays a bigger role than Ram. Even today it is at the altar of the Supreme Court, while efforts to find a solution outside the court have its own ups and downs moments.

Mid 1980’s brought a new axis of connect apart from the existing administrative and political to the Indian setting through technology and satellite and tv. Both the great epics Mahabharat and Ramyana were serialised and brought to the citizen-consumer for consumption inside the home. However, their social and political effects outside the home were different. In Delhi there is a ruin of the Indraprastha empire and inside its precincts there is a mogul/ Muslim well, it seems Hindus do not want well or well-being. Ramayana is a different deal. Ayodhya had a Babri Masjid and Delhi is the seat of Muslim Mogul empire, while Ayodhya is the place of Lord Ram where his birth, his empire and his return is coterminous. The medieval mogul rule taints delhi. Ayodhya is pure imagination to dethrone Delhi as seat of power. The cast is already cut out and carved, only inference, line and meanings could be drawn from these and they have been continuously drawn. The recipe from Sita’s Rasoi is not Muglai, it is a mandir.

Colonialism affects the colonised, even after the political edifice vanishes and the ‘free’ are suppose to find a way of living together through negotiation of differences, since all populaces differ and contain/harbor differences within them. The issue of Babri Masjid and Ram Temple is about how Hindus and Muslims will live in what is clearly, numerically a dominant Hindu populace. The proposal to construct a Ram Mandir intends to take the medieval Muslim brick out from the history of this region and in its place install a consciousness of  history that Hindus have settled with. It offers to replace the brick with a shila in the process trading the medievalness for ancient and construct a modern Hindu temple at Ayodhya where earlier a mosque stood. The invoked ritualism is stark. The dispute then is about the history, past if you prefer and its consciousness; its center the fact of Muslim rule in the medieval period, before colonialism set it. The anti-colonial struggle required that the occupying power, British were seen as foreign and coming from outside and ,if, this logic of anti-colonialism is extended into past, it would inevitably see Muslim as an outside power. For this form of preferred version of history, until there is a Ram temple constructed at Ayodhya the Hindu decolonisation is incomplete. Partition accompanied independence and the division of territory and population this south asian region witnessed is not enough.

Before India attained its political independence, the cow protection movement articulated the anti-colonial struggle in its socio-religious demographic mode, where the division between Hindus and Muslims resonated. If the untouchables and dalits would skin the cow and vanish from the social millieu, then beef for export consumption and cow protection for domestic consumption would neatly pan out and in fact earn revenue for India apart from acting as nodes for connecting with the world. The presence of Muslims witnesses differentiated articulations. When the demand is not for a ram temple, cow protection movement serves to remind Hindu India of Muslim presence within Hindu territory.

Those who want to construct a ram temple at Ayodhya do so with the recognition that modern secular republic is terminally ill and hence they want to take the nation directly into an intensive care unit and perform a surgery. Surgically remove from the body politic and its history the medieval Muslim past and present and reconfigure its present and future. In this sense this demand and requirement is modern. This twisted psyche believes that the elements or the arteries of the Muslim past and history can and should be identified, demarcated and if possible removed or reconstructed. The demand for a temple at Ayodhya also is a reflection of the ‘success’ and 'secularity' of institutions of learning and governance in India. 

The numbers matter in a democracy and a skewed sense of numbers has gripped the Hindu psyche and they are forever obsessed with the birth and numbers of Muslims. If partition had not occurred, then today the combined Muslim population of Bangladesh and Pakistan indeed would be siezable to tilt the balance that is so decidedly in favour of Hindus in India. However, this impulse predates partition and has a longer history which fails to factor facts and come to term with the contemporary and the real. At times this psyche wants to dig the graves and reclaim more land for the nation or send people back to Pakistan. The deficits of the Hindu de colonisation are skewed. Brahat(Akhand) Bharat is its spatial fusion of the ancient past and future. Muslim population and medieval rule the foci and partition of India its blotched experience, where the outcome met failure but also success. Their consciousnesses of numbers are anchored in pre partition British India, before political independence from colonial rule; it remembers Medieval Muslim Rule as a fact for today. It works with lists, demarcation and violence. Babri Masjid is one among many other places of worship or local authority/deity that are brought together by a list that it identifies as disputed and contested sites. Hindus apparently are willing to make a singular example out of Ayodhya, if this place is voluntarily offered to them for the construction of ram temple, then Hindus may forsake or prune the list. A space they have already forcibly occupied.

This proposal to settle in these terms alters the priority assigned to the economic and political aspects as compared to the socio-religious relations of a society and understanding of anti-colonial struggle and movement. However, it would be naïve to deny the significance of the economic and political overtones of this proposed arrangement, when it is clear that Muslims are worse off and in an electoral democracy with reduced numbers after partition their political position is weak and would be weakened further more with their present numbers. Real modern progress and development and its allures have not been able to take us away from the heavy and deep matters of history and the particular form of the Hindu consciousness of a political history for this region. Ram Mandir continues to circle the modern democratic republic, threatens to break down its order and has a knack of taking center stage. Till Hindu decolonisation is complete and the land has been reclaimed properly for a modern Hindu polity there would be a demand for construction for a Ram Temple. The promise acts as a threat. The facts of demographic variation in terms of religious affiliation has to pay their dividends in terms of economic and political power, it must also install its version of political history of the region in India. This demand sits uneasily with the constitution India has adopted and threatens law and order, that’s where the spin of being a social righteous movement fits.

Ayodhya is central to the continuous and ongoing project of hindu colonisation or decolonising the muslims from this part of the region and for that it works impulsively in fits. It also has two corollaries which are more directly related to state and its activities. One of them is related with naming and renaming places with an 'official' name. Within this strand there is an concerted attempt and undeniable urge to deny the very fact of muslim existence in the past, and their rightful place in present. Historical importance of a place, significance a place has for a specific community, and how they historically came into being and assumed prominence are addressed through naming and renaming by a simple dictum : Hindu and hindu sounding names for the place.

The second corollary has to do with the changing role of the state. Redistribution of resources within its territory has gradually receded and a regulatory role is preferred. While the state recedes from one of its role, hitherto considered central, its role as dispensing security solidifies. The security arm in order to get a firmer grip over its subjects and their allegiance apart from looking beyond its borders, begins to look within its territory for enemies. While seeking more resources and salience, state intensifies its search for enemies 'within'. Here Muslims, their presence within territories is handy. State, as it were, deepens within its territory, feeding on the insecurities it has generated by relinquishing(thinning) its role of being the primary agent for redistribution. This adjustment and shift is also the moment to capture state power and its apparatus for coating it with other currents and undercurrents of social configurations. Harnessing the state and its apparatus for pursuing Hindu colonisation commences.