Ayodhya- An Historical
Watershed
AYODHYA: A HISTORICAL
WATERSHED 1992 will doubtless go down in Indian history as the
year of Ayodhya. This is so not so much because recent events
there have pushed into background all the other issues such as
economic reforms and reservations for the 'other backward castes'
as because they have released forces which will have a decisive
influence in shaping the future of India. These forces are not
new; they have been at work for two centuries. Indeed, they were
not even wholly bottled up. But they had not been unleashed
earlier as they have been now. It is tryly extraordinary that the
demolition of a nondescript structure by faceless men no
organization owns up should have shaken so vast a country as
India. But no one can possibly deny that it has. These forces in
themselves are not destructive even if they have led to some
violence and blood-letting. They are essen-tially beneficent. They
shall seek to heal the splits in the Indian personality so that it
is restored to health and vigour. Implicit in the above is the
proposition that while India did not cease to be India either
under Muslim or British rule despite all the trials and
tribulations, she was not fully Mother India. And she was not
fully Mother India not because she was called upon to digest
external inputs, which is her nature to assimilate, but because
she was not free to throw out what she could not possibly digest
in the normal and natural course. this lack of freedom to reject
what cannot be assimilated is the essence of foreign conquest and
rule. The meaning of Ayodhya is that India has regained, to a
larger extent than hitherto, the capacity to behave and act as a
normal living organism. She has taken another big step towards
self-affirmation. All truth, as Lenin said, is partisan. So is
mine. I do not pretend to be above the battle, or, to rephrase Pt.
Nehru, I am not neutral against myself. But partisan truth is not
demagogy and patently false propaganda, which is what advocates of
'composite culture' have engaged in. Two points need to be noted
in this regard. First, no living culture is ever wholy autonomous;
for no culture is an airtight sealed box; Indian culture, in
particular, has been known for its catholocity and willingness to
give as well as take. It withdrew into a shell when it felt
gravely threatened and became rigid; but that is under- standable;
indeed, the surprise, if any, is that Indian culture survived the
Islamic and Western onslaught at all. Secondly, a culture, if it
is not swallowed up by an incoming one, whether by way of
proselytization or conquest or both, as the Egyptians and Iranians
were by Islam, or if it is not destroyed as the Aztec was by the
Portuguese and Spaniards, must seek to recover; even Indians in
Latin America have not given up the effort. Surely, since no one
can possibly suggest that Indian culture was either swallowed up
or destroyed; it is only natural that it should seek to recover
its genuine self. Surely, this is neither an anti-Islamic nor
anti-Western activity. Pt. Nehru almost never used the phrase
'composite culture'. His was a more organic view of culture and
civilization. He believed in, and spoke of, cultural synthesis
which, if at all, could take place only within the old
civilizational framework since Islam did not fianlly triumph. Pt.
Nehru also wrote and spoke of the spirit of India asserting itself
again and again. Surely, that spirit could not be a composite
affair. In the Maulana Azad memorail lecture he also spoke of
different cultures being products of different environments and he
specifically contrasted tropical India with the deserts of Arabia.
He even said that a Hindu-Muslim culture synthesis had not been
completed when other factors intervened. Apparantly he was
referring to the British Raj. This should also dispell the
impression that the Nehru era was a continuation of alien rule
intended to frustrate the process of Indianization of India. This
charge is not limited to his detractors. It is made by his
admirers as well, though, of course, indirectly and unknowingly.
They pit secularism against Hinduism which is plainly absurd.
Hindus do not need the imported concept of secularism in order to
be able to show respect towards other faiths. That comes naturally
to them. For theirs is an inclusive faith which provides for every
form of religious experience and belief; there can be no heresy or
kufr in Hinduism. For Nehru, secularism, both as a personal
philosophy and state policy, was an expression of India's
cultural- civilizational personality and not its negation and
repudiation. Secularism suited India's requirements as he saw
them. For instance, it provided an additional legitimizing
principle for reform movements among Hindus beginning with the
Brahmo Samaj in the early part of the nineteenth century. It met
the aspirations of the Westernized and modernizing intelligentsia.
Before independence, it denied legitimacy to Muslim separatism in
the eyes of Hindus, Westernized or traditionalist. If it did not
help forge an instrument capable of resisting effectively the
Muslim League's demand for partition, the alternative platform of
men such as Veer Savarkar did not avail either. After partition,
it served the same purpose of denying legitimacy to moves to
consolidate Muslims as a separate communalist political force. Pt.
Nehru's emphasis on secularism has to be viewed not only in
relation to the Muslim problem which survived partition, but it
has also to be seen in the context of his plea for science and
India's need to get rid of the heavy and deadening burden of
rituals and superstitions, products of periods of grave weakness
and hostile environment when nothing nobler than survival was
possible. Seen in this perspective, the ideologies of socialism
and secularism have served as mine sweepers. They have cleared the
field of dead conventions sufficiently to make it possible for new
builders to move in. Sheikh Abdullah exaggerated when he charged
Pt. Nehru with Machiavellian- ism, but he was not too wide off the
mark when he wrote in Aatish-e-Chinar that Nehru was "a great
admirer of the past heritage and the Hindu spirit of India.. He
considered himself as an instrument of rebuilding India with its
ancient spirit". The trouble is that self-styled Nehruites
and other secularists are not able to recognize that India is no
longer the convalescent she was not only when Gandhiji launched
his first mass movement but also when she achieved independence
with Pt. Nehru as the first prime minister. The two leaders have
helped nurse her back to health as have their critics in different
ways. That is the implication of my observation that the energies
now unleashed have been at work for two centuries. Only on a
superficial view, resulting from a lack of appreciation of the
history of modern India, beginning with Raja Rammohan Roy in the
early 19th century, can the rise of Ramjanakbhoomi issue to its
present prominence be said to be the result of a series of
'accidents': the sudden appearance of the Ramlalla idol in the
structure in 1949 and the opening of the gate under the Faizabad
magistrate's orders in 1986 being the most important. As in all
such cases, these developments have helped bring out and reinforce
something that was already growing - the 200-year-old movement for
self- renewal and self- affirmation by Hindus. If this was not so,
the 'accidents' in question would have petered out. Similarly,
while it cannot be denied that the RSS, the VHP, and the BJP have
played a major role in mobilizing support for the cause of the
temple, it should also be noted that they could not have achieved
the success they have if the general atmosphere was not propitious
and the time not ripe. Indeed, not to speak of Gandhiji who
aroused and mobilized Hindus as no one had before him, fought the
Christian missionary assault and successfully resisted the British
imperialist designs to divide harijans from Hindu society, it
would be unfair to deny Nehru's and Indira Gandhi's contribu-
tions to the Hindu resurgence that we witness today. A
civilizational revival, it may be pointed out, is a gradual,
complex, and many-sided affair. Again, only on the basis of a
superficial view is it possible to see developments in India in
isolation from developments in the larger world. Nehru's
worldview, for instance, was deeply influenced by the socialist
theories sweeping Europe in the wake of the First WW and the
Soviet revolution in 1917. By the same token, this worldview,
which has dominated our thinking for well over six decades, could
not but become irrelevant in view of the collapse of communist
regimes in eastern Europe, and the disarray in the Soviet Union
itself. This cannot be seriously disputed even on rational
grounds. Intensification of the search for identity in India today
is part of a similar development all over the world, especially in
view of the collapse of communist 'universalism'. But if it is a
mere coincidence that Ramjanabhoomi issue has gathered support
precisely in this period of the disintegration of Soviet power
abroad and the decline of the Nehruvian consensus at home, it is
an interesting one. At the conscious level, the BJP, among
political formations, has chosen to be an instrument of India's
cultural and civilizational recovery and reaffirmation. As such,
it is natural that it will figure prominently in the reshaping of
India in the coming years and decades. But others too will play
their parts in the gigantic enterprise. VP Singh, for instance,
has already rendered yeoman service to the cause by undermining
the social coalition which has dominated the country's politics
for most of the period since independence. When a master idea
seizes the mind, as socialism did in the twenties, and as Hindutva
has done now, it must usher in radical change. In the twenties and
the decades that followed before and after independence,
conservative forces were not strong enough to resist the socialist
idea. Similarly, conservative forces are not strong enough today
to defeat the Hindutva ideal. There is a difference, though, for a
while the socialist ideal related primarily to economic
reorganization and was elitist in its approach by virtue of being
a Western import, Hindutva seeks, above all, to unleash the
energies of a whole people which foreign rule froze or drove
underground. When a historic change of this magnitude takes place,
intellectual confusion is generally unavoidable. The human mind,
as a rule, trails behind events; it is not capable of anticipating
them. But it should be possible to cut through the mass of
confusion and get to the heart of the matter. The heart of the
matter is that if India's vast spiritual (psychic in modern
parlance) energies, largely dormant for centuries, had to be
tapped, Hindus had to be aroused; they could be aroused only by
the use of a powerful symbol; that symbol could only be Ram, as
was evident in the twenties when the Mahatma moved millions by his
talk of Ramrajya; once the symbol takes hold of the popular mind,
as Ram did in the twenties and as it has done now, opposition to
it generally adds to its appeal. An element of subjectivity and
voluntarism, typical of a modern Western- ized mind, has got
introduced in the previous paragraph because that is the way I
also think. In reality, the time spirit (Mahakala) unfolds itself
under its own auspices, at its own momentum, as it were; we can
either cooperate with it, or resist it at our peril. Historians
can continue to debate whether a temple, in fact, existed at the
site of Babri Masjid in Ayodhya; whether it was , in fact, a Ram
temple; whether it was destroyed; or whether it had collapsed on
its own. Similarly, moralists and secularists can go on arguing
that it is not right to replace one place of worship by another,
especially as long as the foregoing issues have not been resolved.
But this is not how history moves and civilizational issues are
settled. Pertinent is the fact that for no other site have Hindus
fought so bitterly for so long with such steadfastness as over
Ramjanambhoomi in Ayodhya. There is no rational explanation for
this and it is futile to look for one. All that is open to us is
to grasp the fact and power of the mystery. In all cultures and
societies under great stress flows an invisible undercurrent. It
does not always break surface. But when it does, it transforms the
scene. This is how events in Ayodhya should be seen. The Patal
Ganga, of which all Indians must have heard, has broken surface
there. Human beings have doubtless played a part in this
surfacing. But witness the remarkable fact that we do not know
and, in fact, do not care who installed the Ramlalla idol in the
Babri structure and who demolished the structure on 6 December
1992. While almost everyone else is looking for scapegoats, to me
it seems that every known actor is playing his or her allotted
role in the vast drama that is being enacted. We are, as it were,
witnessing the enactment of a modern version of Valmiki's
Ramayana. (by Late Shri Giri Lal Jain)
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