To accept that the spectacle about to be staged in Ayodhya can be extricated from politics is to sanctify the falsification of our living memory.
There is no ritual that can sanitise the genesis of the temple that will be consecrated in Ayodhya on 22 January. It exists because the house of worship of another religious community was razed by a mob of militant Hindus.
Those who condone this savagery as belated reversal of the destruction in the 16th century of a Hindu liturgical structure by Mir Baqi—who raised the Babri mosque on its site as a tribute to Babur—are perhaps too benighted to appreciate that they are applauding the very barbarism they decry in the Mughals.
But what of those who are sufficiently enlightened to distinguish religion from the republic—which is greater and grander than the sum of its parts—and pledge their allegiance to the latter while maintaining that the former is a private matter?
Their submission to the hysteria of this moment is sorrowful to behold.
So many who have marks on their backs for defending Indian pluralism from the depredations of this government have, over the past week, castigated the leadership of the Congress party for rejecting the “invitation” to attend the consecration of the temple in Ayodhya. Congress, some argued, squandered a rare opening to reconcile its debilitating contradictions and overhaul itself into a coherent opposition force. Its leadership, others said, injured the party by failing to appreciate the “mood” of the people, pushed it naively into a trap laid by the BJP, and made it even more vulnerable to the accusation that it is hostile to the Hindu majority. “Wouldn’t it be better to join the celebrations with the vast Hindu majority while at the same time criticising Modi/BJP/RSS for politicising it?” Shekhar Gupta asked in his widely read column.
Here’s the trouble with this line of reasoning: to accept that the spectacle about to be staged in Ayodhya can be extricated from politics is to sanctify the falsification of our living memory. The inauguration of the temple to Ram in Ayodhya is not a religious event to which politicians have been invited out of courtesy; it is the culmination of the most consequential political agitation to remake India into a Hindu state to which politicians of all persuasions are being summoned to perform a legitimating role.
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Refusal to legitimise Hindutva chauvinism
To be present in Ayodhya is not to honour Ram. It is to acclaim the coronation of Hindutva as the religion of the Indian state, to become a signatory to a declaration of Hindu supremacy, to make a cross-party show of solidarity with one religious community and repudiation of all others, and to sacralise victimhood that—if not resisted—may devour India to feed itself.
Even if none of this occurred to the leadership of the Congress party—even if the motivations of Sonia Gandhi, Mallikarjun Kharge, and Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury were more pedestrian—they have succeeded in playing a redemptive role by choosing to absent themselves.
The fate that awaits Congress at the next election is unlikely to be altered by its leadership’s decision on Ayodhya: the party is not going to decimate the BJP even if Sonia Gandhi and Mallikarjun Kharge turn up at the temple draped in saffron and bearing lavish oblations for Ram.
The importance of their action will become apparent much later. When this period passes, when its heroes lose their lustre and its cheerleaders are covered in shame, all those being upbraided today for their disobedience will be commended for striking a gallant note of dissent.
But what if we never recover from this moment—what if India surrenders meekly to the erection of a formally communitarian state that is explicitly partisan? Then the generations who survey this squalid era for anything resembling decency will find reasons to feel hopeful.
India’s oldest political party, having compromised for profit, found its nerve. It was perhaps too late, but it’s still something that it refused to legitimise with its presence a political pageant celebrating the triumph of vindictive religious chauvinism over the world’s most audacious experiment in secular democracy.
Kapil Komireddi is the author of ‘Malevolent Republic: A Short History of the New India’. Follow him on Telegram and Twitter. The views expressed above are personal.
(Edited by Prashant)
