WHATEVER is happening on the Ayodhya front? Jayendra Saraswati, the Shankaracharya of Kanchi has once again become hyper-active in his quest for a negotiated out-of-court settlement of the Ayodhya issue. A formula attributed to him concedes a temple in place of the demolished mosque in lieu of the VHP abandoning its claims regarding Kashi and Mathura and agreeing to the construction of a mosque at a distance of 10 km from where the Babri Masjid stood till 6 December 1992. In the guise of a neutral solution, this is nothing but an abject surrender to the VHP’s demand. The idea is to appease the VHP and coerce the Muslim community and the secular opinion of the country into a forced ‘solution’ by using the Kashi-Mathura threat as a blackmail.
The moves being made by the Shankaracharya clearly enjoy wide-ranging political backing. The list of leaders who attended the recent commemoration in the capital of the fiftieth anniversary of his anointment reads like a virtual who’s who of Indian politics. Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Congress President Sonia Gandhi, former Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao, former President R Venkataraman, and senior BJP ministers Murli Manohar Joshi and Jaswant Singh were all there to listen to the Shankaracharya’s appeal for a politics guided by religiosity. Vajpayee, on his part, called upon political parties to stay away from the Ayodhya controversy and let religious leaders work out a solution.
That’s quite interesting. Will the BJP make a beginning in this direction by tendering an apology for using the Ayodhya issue as its biggest political agenda and scrapping its existing commitment to the construction of a temple in place of the demolished Babri Masjid? Will Vajpayee himself stop reiterating his ‘personal’ preference for a temple?
While visiting Washington, Advani too said that the best way to reach a solution was through talks even as leaders of the RSS and VHP are periodically demanding a central legislation to guarantee the construction of a temple. Earlier, Advani had also endorsed this view at the time of the VHP’s February Dharam Sansad in Delhi. For these high priests of hypocrisy, matters of faith are not open to judicial scrutiny but amenable to legislative action.
Meanwhile, as instructed by the Allahabad High Court, the Archaeological Survey of India has for the last three months been engaged in an intensive digging operation around the ‘disputed’ site. The ASI is however yet to stumble into any material which could even remotely be dressed up as a proof of a temple predating the mosque. In fact, eminent historians Irfan Habib and Suraj Bhan are of the opinion that if anything, the excavation may yield some evidence of another mosque predating the demolished one.
Does not all this sound a bit like the Bush-Blair hunt for those fictitious Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq? Just as Bush and Blair invoked the bogey of WMDs to ravage Iraq, Advani and his men used the entirely imaginary Ram Janmabhoomi claim to subvert the Constitution and destroy the Babri Masjid. The biggest mass movement in BJP’s view of history has now been proved to have been based on utterly false propaganda and a criminally manipulated mobilization of Hindu religious feelings. The Ayodhya campaign would stand out as the most damning exposure of the BJP’s theory and practice of cultural nationalism: nation-building on the basis of systematic falsification and brute force. Meanwhile five co-accused of the Babri Masjid demolition case have for the first time admitted that the demolition was carried out at the behest of Advani. The statement was however not recorded on the plea that only five of the 49 accused were present in the court.
Various wings of the Sangh Parivar are deliberately harping on different tunes so that the country could once again be caught unaware on the issue of Ayodhya. Behind the curtain of carefully cultivated confusion, the BJP and other affiliates of the Sangh Parivar are fashioning a second offensive on Ayodhya to secure their long-standing demand for a temple in place of the now demolished Babri Masjid.
Principles of democracy and justice would demand a restoration of the mosque on the disputed site. If Muslim organizations and other secular forces have been prepared to explore other solutions, it only reflected their magnanimity but the Sangh Parivar has treated it to be a sign of weakness of the secular resistance in the country. The Sangh is well aware that its campaign for a temple has lost its steam (and sting too) and it has now become clearer than ever that the entire issue was whipped up by the saffron brigade as a means of usurping political power.
Now is therefore the time to call the Sangh’s bluff and carry the battle back into the Sangh camp. ASI excavation may not have yielded any proof of a temple, but the memory of the frenzied demolition of the Masjid is still as clear as daylight. If the solution has to come through talks, the talks must be held in an environment that is completely transparent and democratic. And whether the solution comes now through talks or is decreed by the court, the country must make sure that no temple is allowed to be built in place of the demolished mosque. Equally important is to save Parliament from being pushed into plumbing the depths of Ayodhya. What could not be ‘discovered’ through excavation shall not be built through legislation.
-- Political Commentator