(published earlier in Daily Times)
by J Sri Raman
The court took note of the ‘belief’ of the Hindus that the site under the central dome of the destroyed mosque was the birthplace of Hindu deity Ram. This, according to the majority judgment, gave the avowedly pro-Hindu outfits the title to the site and the right to build a temple over the Babri’s ruins
In this column two weeks ago, we talked of a much-awaited court verdict and the win-win situation it was expected to land India’s far right in. The verdict of September 30, however, has brought the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its band a victory beyond their wildest anticipations.
This is not because the Lucknow Bench of the Allahabad High Court, hearing the Ayodhya case, decided the dispute in favour of organisations claiming to represent the Hindus. The BJP and the parivar (the far right family) have not stopped celebrating because the judgment, in effect, justified the Babri masjid demolition of December 1992.
The court took note of the ‘belief’ of the Hindus that the site under the central dome of the destroyed mosque was the birthplace (janambhoomi) of Hindu deity Ram. This, according to the majority judgment, gave the avowedly pro-Hindu outfits the title to the site and the right to build a temple over the Babri’s ruins. By the logic of the ruling, the mosque-breakers were only razing an illegal structure to the ground, or removing an encroachment. This may not have been a legal remedy, but a historical redress — as a layman might have read the ruling.
Attempts are being made ever since the pronouncement of the verdict to obfuscate this most important of its implications. The attempts are being made by sections and spokespersons of both the BJP and the ruling Congress.
The first response from the pro-mandir (temple) camp came, fittingly, from its pioneer, BJP luminary and former deputy prime minister, Lal Krishna Advani. Commending the court for placing “faith over law”, he claimed the verdict came as a “vindication of my rath yatra”. The allusion was to his ‘chariot ride’ (in a decked-up car) across the country towards Ayodhya, which left a long trail of blood and led to the demolition.
Notably, he did not repeat his oft-reiterated statement that the date of demolition was “the saddest day of my life”. Presumably, the Iron Man of the BJP thinks that a posture of contrition is no longer needed to protect him in the separate demolition case.
A supposedly more sophisticated interpretation of the verdict has come from Arun Jaitley, leader of the opposition in the Rajya Sabha (upper house of India’s parliament) and a successful Supreme Court lawyer. According to him, the high court has based itself not on ‘faith’ but the ‘facts’ of popular perception. Not content with this quibbling, he goes on to say that this was an issue not raised before the court but one ‘framed’ by it. He does not ask whether the court had the authority to answer this question or whether it ordered any opinion-based survey to ascertain the belief or the popular demand or desire for action on this basis.
A senior journalist, solicitously defending the court, argues that the inadequacies of individual judges cannot detract from the judiciary’s authority just as those of a legislator cannot make the legislature any less august. The analogy may be misleading. The better comparison of this verdict may be to a less than constitutional enactment by a legislative majority.
Meanwhile, Uma Bharti, a ‘family’ firebrand who had called upon the mob to give the mosque a final push, has contradicted Jaitley by saying that the verdict proves the veracity of the claim that Ram was indeed born at that specific site. Another Hindutva hothead, Vinay Katiyar, however, is disappointed at the verdict because it also gives a Muslim organisation some space in the area around the demolished structure for building a new mosque.
As for the Congress, Union Home Minister P Chidambaram has voiced the party’s and the government’s clever, if contrived, position. He asserts that the court has not condoned the demolition because it cannot justify any group of people “taking the law into their own hands”. The BJP’s interpretation of this can be that the minister is implicitly acknowledging that demolition would have been all right if carried out by an agency of law after a due process. The Hindutva hardliners can also argue that the demolition squad took the law into its own hands because law-enforcing agencies did not listen to their demand and act accordingly.
Chidambaram and other leaders of the Congress and the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government have carefully refrained from mentioning the real core issue involved. It is one of religious-communal fascism. What made the demolition much more than a petty criminal offence, of the kind resulting every other day from real estate rivalries, is the politics of communal mobilisation and seeking a political harvest from systematically manufactured Hindu-Muslim hatred.
The writer is a journalist based in Chennai, India. A peace activist, he is also the author of a sheaf of poems titled At Gunpoint
|
