Pratap Bhanu Mehta is correct when he says that the pran pratishtha at Ayodhya on January 22 is a “watershed moment” ( ‘January 22’, IE, January 21). The moment is surely a turning point in India’s history – an important milestone in the decolonisation of India. Mehta, however, adds, “The pran pratishtha, following the foundation stone of Ayodhya, marks the consecration of Hinduism as a political religion, pure and simple.”
This part of Mehta’s statement is half-true, bordering on sophistry. If the rebuilding of the temple at Ram Janmabhoomi in Ayodhya is a political statement, so was its demolition by an Islamic invader and the opposition to its reconstruction, spanning over seven decades after independence.
The Babri structure was never a place of worship— it was raised to humiliate the vanquished Hindus after razing a temple that was especially reverent to them. Arnold Toynbee, one of the great historians of the past century, while delivering the Azad Memorial Lecture in February 1960, said, “In the course of the first Russian occupation of Warsaw (1614-1915), the Russians had built an Eastern Orthodox Christian Cathedral on this central spot in the city that had been the capital of the once independent Roman Catholic Christian country, Poland. The Russians had done this to give the Poles a continuous ocular demonstration that the Russians were now their masters. After the re-establishment of Poland’s independence in 1918, the Poles pulled this cathedral down. The demolition had been completed just before the date of my visit. I do not greatly blame the Polish Government for having pulled down that Russian Church. The purpose for which the Russians had built it had been not religious but political, and the purpose had also been intentionally offensive.”
Referring to mosques at Kashi, Mathura and Ayodhya, Toynbee said, “Aurangzeb’s purpose in building those three Mosques was the same intentionally offensive political purpose that moved the Russians to build their Orthodox Cathedral in the city centre at Warsaw. Those three mosques were intended to signify that an Islamic Government was reigning supreme, even over Hinduism’s holiest of holy places.”
Mehta talks about Gandhi, “who rejected the logic of retaliation”. Gandhi ji was asked how to deal with a situation when a mosque is forcibly built on someone else’s land. He dealt with the vexed issue in ‘Young India’ on February 5, 1925. Here are excerpts of Gandhi ji’s response,
“The question of mosques built on another’s land without his permission is incredibly simple. If A is in possession of his land and someone comes to build some things on it, be it even a mosque, A has the right at the first opportunity of pulling down the structure. Any building of the shape of a mosque is not a mosque. A building to be a mosque must be duly consecrated. A building put up on another’s land without his permission is a pure robbery. Robbery cannot be consecrated… If A has not the will or the capacity to destroy the building miscalled mosque, he has the right of going to a law court to have the building pulled down/Law-courts are forbidden to convinced non-co-operators but not to those who require such conviction.”
Post-independence, the Ram Janmabhoomi movement was neither a Hindu-Muslim problem nor a political issue. In fact, it was an effort by civil society in a free India to obliterate a symbol of colonisation and reclaim Shri Ram’s birthplace. The cast of the high voltage drama played out in Ayodhya during 1949-50 was a smorgasbord of characters belonging to divergent backgrounds and disparate professions. K K K Nair and Guru Datt Singh were bureaucrats with Nair belonging to the coveted ICS. Ramchandra Paramhans and Digvijay Singh were mahants and Hindu Mahasabha leaders. Abhiram Das was a naga vairagi. Baba Raghav Das was a local Congress MLA, a Gandhian of impeccable credentials. Bhagwan Sahai, the chief secretary of the province, Premier Govind Ballabh Pant, a well-respected freedom fighter, and Purshottam Das Tandon, another freedom fighter, to name a few were all silent supporters of the bloodless revolution in Ayodhya.
Even at that time, there were a few die-hard communists (read left-liberals) and colonial remnants who were alarmed by what was happening in Ayodhya – as they are now. Such people are victims of the “Stockholm Syndrome”, wallowing in the psyche of servitude and reminiscing about the times when the locals could be trampled upon in the name of rules and regulations imposed by an oppressive regime. The then Prime Minister, Jawahar Lal Nehru, provided support and leadership to such desperate elements. As a result, the temple reconstruction was delayed by over seven decades and this delay cost the country immensely in terms of human lives, destruction of private and public property and the global perception of India.
Nehru’s antipathy was not limited to Somnath or the Shri Rām temple in Ayodhya; it extended to all Hindu temples as such. Delivering his inaugural address at a seminar on architecture in Delhi in 1959, he said: “Some of the temples of the South, however, repel me in spite of their beauty. I just can’t stand them. Why? I do not know. I cannot explain that, but they are oppressive, they suppress my spirit. They do not allow me to rise, they keep me down…”. Those who are inspired by the “Nehruvian consensus” are obviously the ones who opposed the Janmabhoomi movement; and now find it difficult to reconcile to the reconstruction of the Ram temple in Ayodhya.
Logically, the debate on the issue should have ended on November 9, 2019, when a five-member constitutional bench of the Supreme Court in a unanimous verdict put paid to all the arguments that had been used to denigrate the Ram Janmabhoomi movement. But old habits die hard. The colonised minds outlive the colonisers.
Balbir Punj is the author of the recently published, ‘Tryst with Ayodhya – Decolonisation of India’
Nehru’s antipathy was not limited to Somnath or the Shri Rām temple in Ayodhya; it extended to all Hindu temples as such
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04.02.2024
Pratap Bhanu Mehta is correct when he says that the pran pratishtha at Ayodhya on January 22 is a “watershed moment” ( ‘January 22’, IE, January 21). The moment is surely a turning point in India’s history – an important milestone in the decolonisation of India. Mehta, however, adds, “The pran pratishtha, following the foundation stone of Ayodhya, marks the consecration of Hinduism as a political religion, pure and simple.”
This part of Mehta’s statement is half-true, bordering on sophistry. If the rebuilding of the temple at Ram Janmabhoomi in Ayodhya is a political statement, so was its demolition by an Islamic invader and the opposition to its reconstruction, spanning over seven decades after independence.
The Babri structure was never a place of worship— it was raised to humiliate the vanquished Hindus after razing a temple that was especially reverent to them. Arnold Toynbee, one of the great historians of the past century, while delivering the Azad Memorial Lecture in February 1960, said, “In the course of the first Russian occupation of Warsaw (1614-1915), the Russians had built an Eastern Orthodox Christian Cathedral on this central spot in the city that had been the capital of the once independent Roman Catholic Christian country, Poland. The Russians had done this to give the Poles a continuous ocular demonstration that the Russians were now their masters. After the re-establishment of Poland’s independence in 1918, the Poles pulled this........
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