by Jawed Naqvi
Dawn, 07 Dec, 2009
It was Bertrand Russell who muttered in mock exasperation: ‘O God, if there be a God, bless my soul, if there be a soul.’ Suppose there was no God, only soul. Or suppose there was neither God, nor soul. Would any of that have made a difference to Russell’s anti-Victorian precepts, which he prescribed impishly in Marriage and Morals?
Counterfactual imagination is not a waste of time. Walter de la Mare had used the method to create a memorable poem for school children. ‘If I were lord of Tartary, myself and me alone…’ If! Remember? In my experience, a counterfactual peep into the past often helps (among other things) clinch useful brownie points against widespread cretinism that passes for Hindutva historiography.
When I visited the Babri mosque a few months before its demolition on Dec 6, 1992, it was already functioning as a Hindu temple. Rajiv Gandhi who got the locked up precincts opened made this possible. He thus tried to appease Hindu obscurantism while balancing it with his pandering of Muslim mediaevalists via the notorious Shahbano divorce case.
Under the middle dome of the obscure 16th century structure stood a pujari with an idol of Lord Ram in his avatar as a toddler, ensconced prominently on a perch for devotees to circumambulate around.
My leather belt and wallet had to be surrendered before they let me into the sanctum sanctorum – leather being considered unholy and polluting by Brahmins. The self-styled organisers who worked in tandem with a posse of policemen took my camera away. No evidence was to be taken out of the goings on within. An obscure court order was cited to back up the procedure.
There was a pleasant surprise, however. On the southern wall inside the mosque someone had left huge charcoal sketches of Indian martyrs Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev, signed off with their famous chant: Inquilab Zindabad. Hindutva activists evidently did not have the courage to erase the memory of one of India’s most celebrated atheists. I wondered if the sketches had anything to do with the fact that the district of Faizabad, close to where Ayodhya is located, was once a stronghold of communist partisans.
A tobacco-chewing policeman with a 303 rifle, stood idly under the southern dome. He claimed to know the entire history by heart of what many believe is the birthplace of Ram. I engaged him in his native Awadhi dialect. When was Ram born here? I probed. ‘Kahat hain ki nau laakh saal hoi gaye haye hain,’ he replied, mouth slanted upward to prevent the copious drool of masticated tobacco spilling over. (They say Ram was born nine hundred thousand years ago.) Where exactly was he born? I persisted. ‘Jahaan pujariji khadey huye hai’n, wahi ke jaano chaar paanch phoot yahar wahar.’ (He was born near the spot where the pujari is standing, give or take four or five feet.) Engineers working on cruise missiles can learn a lesson in precision here.
The pseudo-accuracy with which details are recounted from pre-history is a feature of Hindutva historiography. Ben Kinglsey might love the role of Mughal emperor Shahjehan he is playing in a new movie on the builder of Taj Mahal. But Hindutva historiographer P.N. Oak has already claimed the fabled monument to be a Hindu shrine. Should Kingsley change the script?
In a book by Sadashiv Golwalkar, revered as a great guru by RSS activists, who include at least one former prime minister of India if not two, the North Pole was claimed to have been located on the border of today’s Bihar and Orissa before it shifted to its current position by a geological process! I imagine that was one way to cast the fairer-skinned Indians rather than the darker ones as the original inhabitants of the subcontinent.
Secular historians have punched holes in the mythology of Ayodhya as the actual, as opposed to imagined, birthplace of Ram. Far from there being scientific evidence of Lord Ram’s historically verifiable presence there, the present day Ayodhya, according to a several historical indications, stands on the ruins of a Buddhist centre called Saket. Dalit-Buddhist activists insist that the spot was chosen by upper caste Hindus to usurp a Buddhist legacy. The day of the demolition – December 6 – according to this theory, was chosen to belittle Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar’s birthday that Dalit-Buddhists celebrate on that day.
The Liberhan Commission investigated the circumstances that led to the razing of the mosque, and he has blamed Hindu extremists for the act. However, the actual dispute – whether there was a temple to Ram which was razed by a general of Mughal Emperor Babar in order to build a mosque on the site is dragging on in the courts. A former judge who dealt with it told me that the issue of belief was ‘non-justiciable’ any way. In other words a secular court could not be reasonably expected to judge on a dispute concerning a matter of faith. Whether there is God or soul – as Russell had wondered – is not the concern of a secular court. So what are we then quarrelling about?
This is where counterfactual history is helpful. Let us ask the question differently? Suppose there was no mosque in Ayodhya, would there be no Hindu-Muslim strife? Would Lal Kishan Advani not have sat on a make believe chariot to instigate bloody violence across much of the country to win votes anyway? In the cause-and-effect calculus of fascism there need not be a Godhra train carnage to trigger a wider pogrom of an accused community. A trigger could be conjured from a four hundred year old narrative to cynically wreak havoc. This was amply shown to be the case in Ayodhya.
What does it mean to ordinary Indians when an alleged injustice inflicted on a make believe community (Hindu) by another make believe community (Muslim) whips up bloody-mindedness even if the said injustice is claimed to have occurred hundreds of years ago? Discussants at a daylong symposium about India’s ‘war on its own people’ offered a few thought-provoking frameworks last week.
Prof Jagmohan Singh, a nephew of Bhagat Singh, told the symposium that much of the strife in India was carried out at the behest of the state to corner the peoples’ shrinking resources – water, minerals, land, forests, to list some of the loot. A writer-activist presented a radically new framework.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, she argued, India had to take drastic new positions to cozy up to the surviving superpower.
Going by this argument two locks were opened in India in 1990 – one in Ayodhya that opened the floodgates of religious fascism and the other that ushered an aggressive form of economic fascism. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s economic reforms are thus perceived as euphemism for unpopular policies that can only be sustained by a police state. Moreover, his prescriptions would probably not have passed through parliament without the smokescreen of religious turmoil and an attempted false polarisation of Indian citizens into mutually hostile religious entities.
Several cabinet colleagues of Prime Minister Narasimha Rao had protested against his sleepy response to Ayodhya, which happened under his watch. However, it has never been made clear what if any position did Dr Singh take on the bloody mayhem. There is circumstantial evidence, however, of a dialectical relationship between him and the Bharatiya Janata Party. After all did he not hero worship Atal Behari Vajpayee, described by Justice Liberhan as a key architect of the Ayodhya crime.
Bhishma Pitamah – isn’t that what Dr Singh called Mr Vajpayee? And yet, in the wider evolution of India’s religio-economic fascism, handy issues like Ayodhya and personalities like Dr Singh are mere accidental conduits. There are and will always be good, even better, alternatives.
This was the worrying message from the symposium on the war by the Indian state against its own people. Debating God and the soul is one thing. Using them as a decoy for a nefarious agenda is another.
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