Thursday, March 7, 2002
Stop the Ayodhya blackmail
Praful Bidwai
Nothing could be more sordidly undemocratic than appeasing rank communalists through a shady, patently illegal deal of transferring the Ayodhya land. What Ayodhya, and India, needs is not temples or mosques, but hospitals and schools. As the Gujarat pogrom continues under the supervision of the Modi Massacre Machine, and with the Centre’s complicity, the Vajpayee government is appeasing in Ayodhya the very groups of communalists responsible for one of the goriest episodes of mass murder and mayhem in our history. The two developments are closely, organically, related. Gujarat’s religious minorities survive — and barely that — but only in mortal fear, under constant intimidation by Modi’s policemen and Hindutva hooligans, and virtually like prisoners in concentration camps. The focus of the violence has shifted from the cities to small towns and villages, and from personal assaults to systematic attempts to deprive the pogrom’s victims of food and shelter. Relief convoys from Maharashtra have been stopped. And curfew — always unequally enforced — ensures the victims can’t even buy the very minimum they need. As Gujarat high court judges and high police officials cower and hide only because they are Muslims, the State openly discriminates in compensating victims of the carnage. An unambiguous message is ringing out all over India: not just Muslims, Christians and Sikhs, but secularism, indeed our democracy itself, must yield to and acknowledge Hindu primacy: ‘cultural nationalism’ and ‘awakening of the majority’. Fifty-four years after Gandhi’s assassination by Hindutva forces, Golwalkar’ s dream of turning non-Hindus into second-class citizens, and murdering secularism, is coming true under this logic. The same logic is at work in Ayodhya, in the form of ‘negotiations’ to transfer 43 or 67 acres of ‘undisputed’ land to Hindu communal organisations in deference to their ‘sentiments’ (read, manufactured sense of hurt over the temple/mosque). The transfer would manifestly violate the 1993 Act under which the land was taken over for the ‘larger national purpose of maintaining and promoting communal harmony’ so that secular monuments like museums or schools/hospitals could be built after the title suit to the original Babri mosque plot is settled. It is irrelevant that the Ramjanmabhoomi Nyas has tactically agreed to await the court’s verdict (while conducting its bhoomi pujan) in ‘concession’ to the proposed deal. (It certainly hasn’t said it would accept and abide by the verdict.) What matters is that the Act is meant to promote the ‘the creed of secularism’ by rectifying a terrible, hideous, wrong: the Babri mosque’s demolition. In strict, no-nonsense ethics, this would entail restitution, rebuilding the mosque, as Narasimha Rao promised to do. Remarkably, few Muslims want that. Not many secular parties/groups consider it a priority. It is a sign of secular generosity that nobody is agitating for the mosque’s reconstruction. In vengeful contrast, the Hindutva brigade wants to add to the damage it caused in 1992 by building a temple on a site it desecrated. A temple to Ram anywhere near the site would be a monument to intolerance and majoritarian bigotry. We must not allow a handful of self-appointed sadhus to hold the nation to ransom and impose a ‘compromise’ that legitimises intolerance, intimidation and violence. Any tampering with the 67 acres will effectively seal off and surround the land under dispute and snuff out the Muslims’ rights. There is a principled, radical, yet simple, solution. Build a patient-friendly good-quality hospital and a secular school complex on the site. The first should serve as a model for the kind of healthcare that a majority of Indians want and deserve, but don’t get. The school would offer an alternative to the cocktail of hubris, superstition, irrationality and half-lies being doled out in NCERT and madrasa syllabi as ‘education’. Learning there would be about opening the mind, letting the fresh breeze of free ideas in, preparing the student for the university. However, this can only happen if secular forces, including political parties, civil society groups, NGOs, and other similar institutions, launch a counter-campaign on the temple issue, and take it to the ordinary people. This means collecting bricks from every village and basti for the hospital/school. It means putting gut-level issues where they belong: on top of the people’s priority list. It also means confronting the crude, perverse, arguments of Hindutva’s advocates in the streets. This is certain to evoke infinitely greater resonance than the tired, shop-worn, far-from-popular temple agitation. The sants’ chetavani yatra attracted no crowds, enthused nobody. The issue simply failed to impress UP. Secular Indians, especially in organised groups, have far too long condoned Hindutva’s depredations, or not combated them. Some mistakenly assume that this society is less welcoming of modern, liberal, rational ideas than of ‘tradition’, religiosity or superstition. This passivity must yield to active opposition. Judicious legal intervention too must play a part here. Our appeasement-prone government must be stopped — through the courts. But there is no substitute for a mass-level campaign.
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