dawn.com
by Jawed Naqvi
Monday, 11 Oct, 2010
Congress Party President Sonia Gandhi (R) speaks with her son Rahul Gandhi as they sit in the stands during the Commonwealth Games at The Major Dhyan Chand National Stadium in New Delhi, India. The young Congress scion, Rahul Gandhi, was in the news last week for equating the Hindu fascist Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) with the bigoted Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), which stands proscribed as a terrorist organisation. Miffed by the observation, the RSS and its affiliates asked Rahul to have his head examined. SIMI is yet to respond. Maybe Rahul Gandhi needs to clean up his ideological filters but I would leave the head examining to the RSS and SIMI, for they need it more than anyone I know, writes Jawed Naqvi – AFP Photo
A few days ago I undertook a forbidding journey to the massively guarded rubble of the Babri Mosque – possibly more impregnable than the American Green Zone in Baghdad – to try and understand my instinctive disagreement with Rahul Gandhi when he so easily dismissed rightwing Hindu and Muslim groups as being equally threatening to India’s secular and democratic fabric.
The young Congress scion was in the news last week for equating the Hindu fascist Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) with the bigoted Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), which stands proscribed as a terrorist organisation. Miffed by the observation, the RSS and its affiliates asked Rahul to have his head examined. SIMI is yet to respond. Maybe Rahul Gandhi needs to clean up his ideological filters but I would leave the head examining to the RSS and SIMI, for they need it more than anyone I know.
What is wrong with Rahul Gandhi equating the RSS and SIMI and calling them both fundamentalist groups? First of all, ideally, it ought to come from a party that is perceived credibly as uninvolved in India’s pervasive politics of communal polarisation.
Rahul Gandhi’s Congress party lost the credentials during his father’s 1984-89 rule, when that debonair and urbane gentleman helped rake up the mediaeval Ayodhya controversy to woo votes. Counter-measures to please Muslims by changing their divorce law to keep the community socially regressive at their own request showcased the flip side of the Congress party’s communal equation. That tendency hasn’t waned, it has only become more institutionalised.
Fundamentalism is not a term that can be applied to regressive or rightwing Hindu groups because Hinduism as such has no fundamental precepts in the sense that Judeo-Christian religions have. There is no single book that guides Hinduism and the Ram temple project in Ayodhya was more of a recent effort to “semitise” Hinduism than to pander to the country’s diverse religious needs. The word Hindu itself is relatively recent and did not exist in the Vedic or post Vedic period until about a thousand years ago, the precise date being in dispute.
But there was a religion that Buddhism and to a lesser extent Jainism revolted against. One of its names was Arya Dharma. The word Hindu was applied by foreigners to describe people from the Sindhu river and beyond. Agar aa’n Turk-e-Shirazi, bedast aarad dil e mara/ Be khaal e Hindu yash bakhsham Samarqand o Bukhara ra. The word Hindu was applied by Persia’s Hafiz to describe the alluring dark mole on the cheek of a Turkish boy of Shiraz. Prof Kailash Nath Kaul, Kamala Nehru’s brother, told me years ago that Hindu was used to describe dark coloured people of the Indian subcontinent.
A majority of Indians be they Hindu or Muslim, Sikh or Christian, see themselves in terms of their caste in spite of religious strictures against doing so. “Kaun jaat hau, manaee?” (What’ your caste man?) The standard question is not considered rude in Indian villages even if the urban rulers may offer strong opinions on whether or not there should be a caste-based census in India. The Ayodhya movement was an attempt to not only semitise what is passed off by a minority of its vocal and militant practitioners as Hinduism but also to paper over the caste fault lines that more effectively define Indian society.
The ironclad security and impregnable barricades in Ayodhya are protecting not the idols of Ram and Sita alone after they were placed in the sanctum sanctorum of the Babri mosque in 1949 and later moved to the top of the rubble it turned into in December 1992 but to sustain a social engineering that could define India’s future.
I have been to Ayodhya a few times, both before and after the demolition of the Babri mosque there in December 1992. The security bandobast was never lax. As late as 1991 just before the mosque’s destruction, I had to take off my leather belt and surrender my pen, my camera and the leather wallet to enter the mosque’s precincts. Yet this did not seem quite enough to stall those that were determined to destroy the 16th century building – which they did in 1992. After its demolition the security was beefed up and it included paramilitary sharp shooters. A meandering fence of metal rods guided the devotees to the spot near the functioning temple. All this to protect a heap of rubble that used to be a mosque, and a new, makeshift temple.
This time around I counted five serious security checks with scanners and body searches, including a rare assiduous groping of the private parts. This last act of precaution is not part of the security drill even at the prime minister’s house in Delhi or any of the Indian airports where protection is otherwise considered foolproof. In other words the Ayodhya mosque-turned-shrine has become by far the most protected place in India and possibly anywhere in the world. Because I am taller than the average Indian male and sport a beard, I had more than my fair share of probing questions about my origins. After a walking in line through a barbed wire cage and completing my ‘darshan’ of the idols of Ram I picked up two CDs about the demolition of the mosque for a throwaway price of 20 rupees each but haven’t got around to seeing them. There has been no publicly available footage of the actual demolition of the mosque barring some shots of men climbing atop the domes and digging them with pickaxes. Nirmala Deshpande, the late social activist and Gandhian, told me conspiratorially that the Babri mosque was actually blown up with dynamite and that the government had evidence of it.
To me it is immaterial how the mosque was destroyed. I believe that a mosque would have been built there had there been none in order to destroy it because that was what the political class needed at the time. It was the quarrel between Hindus and Muslims, the separation and consolidation of ‘vote-banks’ that they wanted, not the mosque or the land on which it stood. The tycoon Mukesh Ambani can tell you how easy it is to appropriate land from a Muslim waqf council as he has done to build a magnificent house for himself on the Mumbai sea-face. The obscure mosque was not a significant structure even if it was a beautiful piece of architecture. So many mosques and temples are destroyed everywhere in India and elsewhere to pave the way for this or that project. Several temples have been drowned by the reservoir of the Narmada dam. No one noticed.
Does Rahul Gandhi see how the attempt to semitise an old system of beliefs into a new religion, with a text of precepts and with its own Mecca is under way. The concept of Satan was missing in the young religion of Hinduism so the hunt is on. Is Ravana the demon king slain by Ram going to fit the bill? Or will they find a community of disbelievers to target, as has been happening in Pakistan? When the poet Fahmida Riyaz said “Tum bilkul hum jaise nikle, ab tak kahaa’n chhupe thay bhai….?” (You’ve turned out to be exactly like us (in Pakistan), where have been hiding all these days brother….? she was raising similar questions.
The traditional greeting of Ram Ram, or Jai Ramji ki is sought to be replaced by an aggressive Jai Shri Ram, not very different from the changed phrase to bid farewell in Pakistan has given way to Allah Haafiz instead of more culturally rooted Khuda Haafiz. These are the changes that are waiting to shake India from its moorings. In 2004 Rahul Gandhi described the Bharatiya Janata Party as a joke. Now he is calling its parent body the RSS a fundamentalist group as bad as SIMI. The RSS cannot be equated with SIMI, which is a non-state actor. The RSS is more akin to the Jamaat-i-Islami of Pakistan under Ziaul Haq. It is part of the state structure. Whether it is a joke or a serious threat will depend not on how the courts decide the fate of the Babri mosque-Ram Janmabhoomi row, but how seriously the state is willing to rescue itself from the dispute which will not end with the resolution of the Ayodhya standoff.
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