The temple as a triumph over memory

Rajesh Ramachandran

ON a bitterly cold January morning, one woke up to loud sloganeering in the working-class locality in the extended neighbourhood. The slogan was ‘Jai Shri Ram’ and a small group was moving from house to house informing people of the Ram Lalla idol consecration ceremony at the new temple in Ayodhya on January 22. And it occurred to me that I had not been invited. Was it on account of my being labelled either a Macaulayputra or, more correctly, Churchillputra, who abhors anything Indian or Hindu, or being a Gandhian pacifist who refuses to wake up to militant Hindu nationalism?

India always craves for a strong leader who can redraw international maps, annex new territory and play one superpower off against another.

Well, Macaulayputra, Gandhian nationalists and Hindu revivalists — in simplistic or often derogatory terms — are the three competing streams of contemporary Indian political practice and thought in which the third variety has beaten the others. The building of the Ram temple in Ayodhya is the mark of conquest of the Hindu revivalists. For a former British colony, nationalism remains India’s prime political sentiment that overrides caste, regional and linguistic divisions. The victory of the Hindu revivalists has been their success in projecting themselves as monopolistic claimants to Indian nationalism, conveniently turning it into a religio-political project as the other two streams of political practice lost steam.

The first ones to be defeated were the Gandhian nationalists. Till Gandhian nationalism held sway, the Hindu right-wing revivalists could not even become a mainstream political party. In fact, when the Bharatiya Janata Party was founded, it claimed Gandhian socialism as its guiding principle in an attempt to appropriate the living organic symbol of Indian nationalism. Meanwhile, the inheritors of Gandhian nationalism in the Congress made a mockery of it by turning Hindu-Muslim unity and amity into appeasement of regressive Islamist clerics, who would not stop even at religious secessionism.

The Congress’ hypocrisy in banning Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and reversing the Shah Bano verdict, and of course its old tie-up with the remnants of Jinnah’s Muslim League, legitimised communal politics as a valid means in pursuit of political power. If Islam can be used to gain votes, why not Hinduism? Worse was the role of the pseudo-intellectuals of the new Indian Left, who went out of their way to justify pre-modern Islamist regression. Every attempt was made by the Indian Left, which claims to be the voice of post-modern democracy, to legitimise Islamist religious separatism and the ethnic cleansing of Hindus in the Kashmir valley.

The two-nation theory was not Macaulay’s invention but more of Churchill’s passion. Yet, these post-modernists among the academia, writers and politicians painted themselves as a group that refused to accept the idea of India as a place where Hindus and Muslims could live together. When Western literature prize winners and West-endorsed academics ignored the plight of victims of religious secessionism or held joint meetings with secessionists seeking a religious division of the country, the term Macaulayputra stuck as their two-nation colonial agenda was getting explicit.

Further, in this process, the Indian Left derided nationalism as a chauvinistic enterprise. It unabashedly promoted caste and linguistic divisions as an antidote to a strong centrist party. The fear of an Indira Gandhi-like leader re-emerging to make India count against Western hegemony was palpable among the new Indian Left, which largely comprised Western-educated/oriented academics, writers and journalists. The launch issue of a national magazine claimed that 70 per cent of the Kashmiris wanted to secede, though the survey still remains a mystery. It was in this 1990s’ milieu that the Hindu right emerged as a force to reckon with to counter this new Left and the legatees of the old Congress, who had become pall-bearers of Gandhian nationalism.

Even now, Rahul Gandhi believes that the caste census can defeat Hindu nationalism, not realising that the 40 per cent or so reservation that he seeks for the OBCs can first be implemented within his own party while electing Chief Ministers, office-bearers or distributing tickets. In fact, it was this hypocritical use of caste and communal identities by dynasts that shaped the Hindu identity for which Lord Ram became the myth and metaphor. To counter it, the new Left ploughed medieval history to prove Babur right, forgetting that this was exactly what the BJP wanted to usurp nationalism as a political platform.

How can the Hindu masses term an invader right in building a mosque in the most revered holy town of the Hindus? There isn’t a single Hindu household that does not revere Ram either in literature or prayers or rituals. The disdain of the Western-oriented intellectuals towards the Hindu masses culminated in a disconnect that resulted in the Ram temple becoming the symbol of a Hindu revivalist society, shaped by the RSS’s agenda. The Jana Sangh was a minor player in Indian politics when it merged with the Swatantra Party, the Indian National Congress (Organisation), the Lok Dal and the Socialists to form the Janata Party to take on Indira Gandhi in 1977. As late as 1989, despite the Bofors campaign, the BJP was far behind the Congress and the Janata Dal.

However, it is fallacious to attribute the rise of the BJP entirely to the Ram temple movement that actually culminated in the destruction of the Babri Masjid in 1992, with no closure for the criminality of the act of demolition. The Advani era got over not long after the masjid was brought down. The Modi era began when a newly built bridge collapsed on the eve of the Delhi Commonwealth Games of 2010, inviting global derision over lack of preparation and graft charges.

India always craves for a strong leader who can redraw international maps, annex new territory and play one superpower off against another.

Instead, the temple offers a victory over the fear of the Hindu masses of becoming second-class citizens in the comity of nations. The temple inauguration, while being a triumph over medieval memory, is also an easy substitute for a war against the Himalayan aggressors — a sort of a metaphor for Hindu assertion.

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