AYODHYA : Against the Grind

History is an enterprise, to deny the dead their own stories. Obviously, it is an exercise; we are supposed to believe to ‘recover’ their story and life-worlds. The scientific fact of their ‘death’ is a problematic historians must overcome somehow. This is supposed to be achieved by an alliance with the core scientific value-objectivity. In this interpretation objectivity comes across as an ensemble of episteme and practices geared to (re)-cover the subjectivity of the dead past. No wonder, history is replete with the professional qualifier—history is objective, it is an account of ‘as it was’—in an attempt to suppress the role played by its authors. In this historical process, the dead come alive, as they are (re)-covered with an objective account, in the present. This fresh coating and layering of past is a cumulative exercise, under the aegis of history. Notwithstanding, the existence of established institutions, their norms and regulative practices combined with material and ideological underpinnings necessary in their own ways, history continues to be written by human beings in flesh and blood.

I would like to argue that binary tension and opposition about the Ayodhya issue despite their immersion in asymmetrical location, justifies and legitimises its presence and explains its continuity. In this process, displacement along the organized hierarchies is not going to help matters. In this essay I am principally concerned with the resilience shown by the Ayodhya issue by skirting away solutions and its reasons thereof. The beauty of the Ayodhya issue lies in its survival despite being pitted against the grind. Resilience directs the solutions into a blind alley. It assumes prominence when one takes into account the fact that the dispute involves questions related with historical consciousness and political imagination. Perhaps, proponents of political Hinduism were aware that history couldn’t subsume myths without revealing its own tortuous and tenuous relationship with myth. Moreover proponents of political Hinduism were aware that nation is reinventing imagination.

The zeal to record and date events undergrids and structures the historical project of having a history. This project spurred by the overarching and dictating presence of having a sense of history is organized and constructed around secular hierarchies. At the top lies the scientific-technological construction or the values espoused by this exercise. Patient mapping of observations are treated as core data enjoying the status of ‘facts’, which in turn constitute the objective, scientific truth. This is followed by institutions producing and dealing with generation and regulation of facts. A set of norms and attendant practices surround and participate in their arbitration about internal disputes. Finally, there is the domain of the political and the social where masses are accommodated. Freedom unleashed by the modernity also permits individuals to consume and potentially be the producers of reason all the while chiselled and chastened by the layers of secular hierarchies for maintenance and sustenance of a legitimate order. Reason acts as a transmission belt straddling these layers.

The Babri-Ramjanmbhoomi dispute is undoubtedly the most acute and persistent problem in India after independence and has defied solutions time and again and thrown normal life and modern order out of gear. Starting as an obscure event in 1950’s, when even local populace were unaware about this site, it picked up momentum in 1980’s and since then hijacked the national imagination with sanity kept as hostage. In this process the role played by VHP-BJP-RSS has been well documented. Having failed to register any sizeable presence in the modern political process in successive elections BJP took up this issue in earnest and the results are there for everyone to see. This ‘success’ story for BJP has been achieved and sustained by introducing historical consciousness in the dominant Hindu religion to manufacture a political majority in order to capture power to rule and then define India.

After the demolition of Babri Masjid on 6^th December 1992 the dynamics and undercurrents set in motion has run roughshod with the secular hierarchies. This issue has demonstrated remarkable resilience in face of myriad challenges and skirted solutions against all odds. So much so that doubts has been raised in many quarters about resilience of India. The old dictum, ‘public memory is short’ has been belied more than once by the Ayodhya issue. The recent submission of report by Archaeological Survey of India to Supreme Court is one recent addition in the build up around this dispute. How can we explain the resilience and importance attached to this issue? What are the machinations and currents implicated therein? Why are no solutions visible on the horizon? On one side we have proponents of political Hinduism (PPH) and Secularists, Humanists and Muslims (SHM) occupy the other when the communities embroiled in this controversy are Hindus and Muslims respectively. Do the answers tilt the compass in the direction of ‘vested’ interests of politicians and the political process? Or it is the modern avatar of political Hinduism and its various proponents who are holding and hiding all the cards? In spite of the currency that the last two questions enjoy as answers in certain segments, it betrays analysis without providing any insinuation about the answers we are looking for.

Politics and exercise of power is not possible without the presence of another contending and conflicting party. Though, it is also true that in this process construction and constitution of the other is simultaneously resorted alongside their physical presence. In this minimalist sense complicity accompanies domination and subjugation and Ayodhya cannot be an exception; irrespective of excuses and pretexts advanced by the apologists. Moreover, complicity regarding the Ayodhya issue is accentuated by the failure to keep this issue off the agenda. It is difficult to believe that it was a tall order considering the fact that those accused of having a vested interest in the Ayodhya dispute occupied a marginal position in the body politic. How can account for this phenomenal rise?  Or alternatively it is a cluster of sanguinity, callousness combined with overzealous investment in organized and existing secular hierarchies by SHM.

To understand these shifts, it is interesting to note how the Ayodhya issue about land acquisition and use has been reconstituted as a fundamental issue about inter-community justice and pride of two religious communities in India. To pursue their claims both the groups use the language of justice and pride to argue their case. One of the characteristic features of this language is that when two different groups use the same vocabulary to argue incompatible claims, disagreements solidify. Incommensurable differences and disagreements do not signal the dead end of politics rather they characterize the most significant site for contestation and domination. At the heart of this issue is the question of appropriation of land. While the proponents of political Hinduism looked at New Delhi through Ayodhya seeking appropriation of nation by demanding coterminous territorial imagination entwining sacred land (Ram temple) with secular land contesting and reversing the modern secular hierarchy; when the SHM looked down at the dispute from New Delhi toward Ayodhya guarding there idea of a nation state and its geographical imagination. The implications were clear; for the proponents of political Hinduism Babri Masjid and then Muslims were impurities in the body politic and hence sought cleansing, even physical extermination. They took their vision to the court of people in the democratic electoral machinery and fused together community power, interest and pride by invoking the dominance in terms of numbers. The demolition of Babri Masjid and the rioting that followed were simply put unfolding of this logic.

By brazenly mixing sense of past with sense of history the PPH has been successful in inaugurating the era of political Hinduism in the democratic polity of India. They claimed that there was a Ram temple where Babri Masjid stood (subsequently razed) and demanded acquisition of land to build a Ram temple on what is euphemistically called the ‘disputed’ site in India. PPH were the first to use Ayodhya as an election issue and reaped the benefits in terms of increasing its followers by leaps and bounds. As a result BJP rose itself, to power first in some states and then finally at the centre. Taken by surprise and caught off guard SHM were forced to react and since then has only reacted to agenda by branding there opponents as regressive and reactionary

Secularists and humanist were sandwiched between two contradictory pulls and pressures. On one hand to resist western opposition and domination in non-west they seek particularity and difference to challenge western homogenisation and universalism. On the other to counter PPH they defend western ideas, institutions and practices against the politics of cultural nationalism. Liberals are notorious for bending over backwards. In India and especially about Ayodhya they bended backwards and forward simultaneously, in the end they were straightened out. PPH has benefited immensely from this swerving and twisting. The canons of ideology of difference and strategic essentialism for postcolonial formations and minority terrains has been deployed by the proponents of political Hinduism, albeit with a slight modification by substituting a majority religion to rein secular modern hierarchy.

As the primary concern revolved around the issue of differential entitlements by the two communities many other significations were subsequently interpolated in the Ayodhya dispute. One of the prominent concerns that have received a lot of attention in this context is the place of religion in society and democratic politics. In spite of large scale of violence and loss of life and property there were no agreements on this issue. What came to the fore is the fact that violence itself is turned into a mode of conducting and pursuing disagreements. After the demolition of Babri Masjid in 1992 questioning their place in India further maligned the sentiments of Muslim community. By then PPH has positioned itself as a dominant player in the political process. The PPH continued its twin strategy of harping on community sentiments on one hand and rational arbitration through inter-community dialogue or institutional mechanism on the other. These were essentially political questions to be addressed by using imagination, negotiation and contestation leading to redistribution of power in the body politic.

The SHM sought to counter the claims of PPH by seeking the avenue of appeal in the judicial branch of government, surrendering its political role for rational mediation doled out by institutions. Ayodhya issue is a problem no one wants to deal with in India, except of course PPH as for them it is the proverbial Trojan horse. It was an unwilling Supreme Court who received the case and then after sitting over the issue for some time the court directed and authorized the Archaeological Survey of India to conduct excavations to find out whether a temple existed at the site. The premier official agency with expertise in excavations in India has submitted its report and found traces of a temple after concluding their operation. The claims and counter-claims combined with charges of conspiracy followed the submission of report by the Archaeological survey of India, as has been the trend with other episodes related with the Ayodhya issue. Now the PPH has a backing of historical fact of existence of a Ram Temple. Irrespective of the contestations about the existence of temple, who is going to ask how is it important and why? How is the question of inter-community justice related with this finding?

Are we supposed to conduct the affairs of our life, society and polity according to historical, rational, objective facts and till they are doled out, by institutions wait in anticipation of such judgements? Are there any neutral objective facts constituting the truth? What is the relationship between truth and political vision of a just society? Contestation and negotiation is part of the institutional practices. However, neither are they exclusive property of institutions nor do they exhaust the potential of contestation and negotiation. Segregation and transference of contestation and negotiation to be the exclusive prerogative of institutions does nothing more than reinscribing secular hierarchies over social problems. The manner in which debate and contestations have been conducted and arguments have been positioned these issues has been criminally overlooked in the interlocking progression of the dynamics around the Ayodhya issue.

Ayodhya issue had been mired by two tendentious moves by the SHM. The first set of moves involve evasive action when it comes to giving response to the issue and second leaves behind secular hierarchy in its wake masked as response and solution. Consequently, the power relations have changed as PPH had moved from a marginal position to the dominant one and SHM occupies the marginal one. In the operation of this dynamics the asymmetrical power relations between the PPH and SHM has been reversed. Simultaneously, the issue has been displaced from the political domain of contestation and negotiation to rational arbitration by Supreme Court and then to a dispute about historical facts. The shift in power relations has been off set by the accompanying displacement along the secular hierarchy providing resilience to the Ayodhya issue.

The inventory of proposed solutions typically reveals the same pattern. Most of the solutions are characterized by their refusal to treat the Ayodhya issue as contestation between two communities for land acquisition and use. As the events unfolded the issue of inter-community justice and pride of the communities has been inextricably woven around the issue. The proposed solutions sidetrack the issues involved. Moreover, they suggest national secular institutions (Museum, Library or other Public utility Services) to be built at the disputed site. Some of them want religious monuments by involving two more religions (Christianity and Sikhism) to build a monument dedicated to their idea of secular institutions. Solutions to problems are marked by two different and yet related transitions. One of them consists in a movement from the current state of affairs toward the desired state of affairs. In the case of Ayodhya these two situations are contested. The second alternative bridges the gap through transformation of both the problem and the solution. The way Ayodhya dispute has been approached and appropriated such possibilities are far-fetched, if not altogether impossible.

Muslims and Christians bury their dead; they have a sense of history. These representational practices reveal a tendency to concretise and give material form to the absences of their ancestors. Ayodhya opens/digs up history and forecloses modern representational practices and settlement in or by time. Unlike myths, death is real in history. Ayodhya issue is a metamorphosis. Nothing can be done about this as it has already turned into a graveyard, first for the secularists and humanists and then for the proponents of political Hinduism.

 

P.S. : Written 22 years back and presented as such without edits or revisions, was a M.Phil Student, then, and it was difficult not to get drawn in this issue and rehearse what I was only begining to process as part of disciplinary learning. Events and episodes like Ayodhya are of the kind that fall between what can be rationally processed and those that often lie beyond what one can fathom and grasp.