(From The Guardian, 3 October 2010)
by Kapil Komireddi
The verdict on the Babri mosque has given Hindu nationalists a victory in their efforts to recast Indian identity in Hindu terms
Move on. That is the refrain across India after the Allahabad high court on Thursday delivered its judgment on the ownership of the land in Ayodhya in northern India where, until just over a decade and a half ago, the Babri mosque had stood for nearly six centuries.
On 6 December 1992, Hindu mobs razed the mosque to the ground, inaugurating a cycle of communal slaughter. The mosque, they claimed, had been built upon the site of the Hindu deity Rama's birth, after destroying a glorious temple that honoured him.
The mosque was thus emblematic of Muslim barbarity and Hindu servitude. As history, it was nonsense: there is no evidence to suggest that Rama even existed.
But to its proponents – primarily the rightwing Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) whose hierarchs campaigned for the mosque's destruction and, according to some reports, incited the mobs to bring it down on 6 December – this atavistic act of vandalism was an announcement of India's irrevocable departure from the assumptions around which its nationalism had been built. Religion was no longer going to be irrelevant in determining full membership to the Indian state.
The Allahabad court has done nothing to reverse course. In fact, rather than wresting India from Hindu majoritarianism, its verdict has given legal imprimatur to it. According to it, the Hindu litigants, whose claim to the property has factual basis only in terror, should be rewarded for their actions with two-thirds of the land. Muslims, whose mosque was first appropriated and then destroyed, will get one-third of it. Those who assumed the absurdity of the case would be limited to admitting Rama as a real-world litigant had evidently underestimated the justices' capacity for cowardice.
What is more disappointing, however, is the ease with which Indian secularists have accepted this verdict. India, they say, has moved on – but in what direction? If Indians seem less concerned today by this dispute than they were in the 1990s, it's not because the issue does not resonate with them: it is because what was at stake then – Indian secularism – itself has been allowed to diminish in importance by its custodians.
The wall that once separated membership of faith from citizenship of the country has come down in today's India. What does it say about a nation's capacity to sustain its plural identity when its liberal voices accept – even welcome – the entrenchment of a dictum which, ignoring every principle of natural justice, punishes the injured minority to placate the majority?
The votaries of Hindu nationalism have won their first major battle to recast Indian history and identity in explicitly Hindu terms. To them, this verdict paves the way for the completion of the Rama temple they seek to erect on the site of the mosque they destroyed. The message to India's minorities is clear: they owe their rights to the goodwill of the majority. The verdict of the Allahabad court may yet be overturned by the supreme court – but something terrible already has happened: India has come to resemble Pakistan.
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