Dawn, 18 Oct, 2010
by Jawed Naqvi
Paramilitary soldiers escort the lawyers of Sunni Central Waqf Board and All Babri Masjid Action Committee as they leave the High Court in the northern Indian city of Lucknow September 30, 2010. A court ruled on Thursday the site of a demolished mosque in India would be divided between Hindus and Muslims, in a ruling that could appease both groups in one of the country's most divisive cases. – Reuters Photo
An Aesopian story I heard in 1990 from a Hindu priest of Ayodhya may hold a lesson for India’s dizzying romance with religious revivalism, which is inexorably mutating into religious fascism.
According to the story, a hungry lion spotted a fawn that was drinking water from the same forest stream as him and decided to make a meal of the baby deer. But being the king of the jungle the lion was prone to guilt pangs and required a veneer of responsibility. He clearly needed an excuse to attack the helpless creature. So he first pulverised the fawn with a predatory roar, and then ambled to a whispering distance from his quarry.
“How dare you drink from the same stream as I? You have polluted the water.” The lion thundered menacingly. “But please sir, I am here downstream and you were perched up there, upstream, so how could I pollute your share of the water? There’s a mistake.” The fawn’s logic didn’t please the lion. “Well, well, well. Aren’t you the rascal that hurled abuses at me at the forest fair last year?” The famished beast roared, changing his argument.
“Your majesty,” the shaken fawn replied with mock bravery. “I am not even a year old yet, so how could I have been at the fair where someone seems to have abused you last year?” The impatient lion didn’t wait for another chance. “If it wasn’t you then it must have been your father or your grandfather who abused me, and now you must pay for it.” Just as he had planned at the outset, the lion easily killed the baby deer which was no more than a morsel for him. But since his appetite was enormous he resumed the search for his next meal. Or so goes the fable.
The man who told me the story was an associate of Baba Lal Das. The Baba was appointed as the chief priest of the controversial makeshift Ram Temple inside the Babri Masjid’s sanctum sanctorum by a high court order in the 1980’s. Apparently he was too much of a good Hindu, liberal and open-minded about his religious beliefs, to merit the post. So when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in Uttar Pradesh he was promptly evicted from the sensitive job. Lal Das became a star witness for the prosecution in the criminal case of the mosque’s demolition in 1992.
I learnt during my recent visit to Ayodhya that the Baba was killed shortly after the BJP inspired the sacrilege at the mosque-temple where he was the pujari. Veteran journalist Sheetla Singh whose Jan Morcha newspaper has bravely covered the Ayodhya story from his precarious but strategic perch in neighbouring Faizabad told me that the Baba was publicly discredited before his mysterious death, and some of the rightwing lumpens called him a Marxist, which he wasn’t.
You don’t need more than a daylong visit to the warren of meandering lanes and temples of Ayodhya, including the state-protected and awkwardly erected shrine to Lord Ram atop the rubble of the demolished Babri mosque, to discern how the overtly sleepy, dusty hamlet, barely four kilometres from Faizabad, the former capital of the Shia nawabs of Oudh, has become the epicentre of a fascist project that cannot be stopped by any one of the formidable institutions of the Indian republic.
The juggernaut cannot be stopped by the courts. Hitler was sent to prison for the Beer Hall Putsch and he came out a hero. Some of my left and liberal friends have expressed valid doubts about the high court’s recent verdict in which it divided the disputed land between Hindus and Muslims. One of the judges claimed it was the spot where Ram was born and therefore it should be handed over to the Hindus. I don’t for a moment doubt the judgment was absurd and dangerous and political and certainly not legal. But the entire argument about legality is useless.
The religious upsurge cannot be stopped by legal arguments and intentions of fair justice. The parliament on its part is largely divided between Hindutva and soft Hindutva. There is a robust argument that if it has to be Hindutva victory it should be full-blooded, why settle for the spurious version. Results from the Bihar state polls next month could be a pointer to this drift. There is no reason to believe that the government in Delhi — the present one and its predecessors — could be ever interested in stalling religious revivalism, much less frontally taking on its proteges, the determined hordes of Hindutva.
Possibly the only way to defeat the spreading hatred would be through a vigorous political mobilisation of the largely secular and predominantly Hindu masses. There is nobody in sight to organise them, much less to lead the campaign. Virtually each and every priest in Ayodhya is a political vendor of a garbled sense of Hindu valour that was blunted by Muslim invaders. In a temple on the meandering route to the site of the Babri rubble, a gaggle of energised priests runs an outfit devoted to King Dashrath, father of Lord Ram. It is difficult to determine if the saffron clad priests were keener for me to admire the pictures of Hindutva heroes adorning the walls or do a darshan of the deities. Their narrative of the mosque’s demolition was blood curdling to put it mildly.
A smaller problem was that they demanded money for the Ram temple project but I had been instructed by my colleagues in Ayodhya not to carry a wallet or even a wrist watch, since these were not allowed at the Ram Janmabhoomi site. The pujari at the heavily guarded site proper was also expecting some money to be put in the charity box but I had none and was rebuked with an angry glare. To approach the site of the makeshift temple you have to pass through a meandering tunnel of thick metal gauze. Just as well, since the kilometre long tunnel not only marshals you to a safe distance from the idols of Ram and his consort Sita, it also guards the pilgrims from an excitable army of monkeys that has been allowed to prosper in and around the temples out of reverence.
The darshan complete you automatically enter the bustling bazaar selling mementoes and this is the really lethal part. These contain videos and photographs celebrating the demolition of the mosque and spewing venom against Muslims — or practically anyone who does not agree with the VHP worldview. The venue has little to do with the legend of Ram like the several absorbing ones of Homi Wadia fame we grew up with. They have everything to do with the political project launched in his name. Members of the security forces supposedly guarding the area find time to join the spine chilling video show. It is useless and perhaps too late to assure anyone in Ayodhya of Allama Iqbal’s famous affirmation of Ram as the Imaam of Hindostan. Or who would be interested in Rasoolan Bai’s nostalgia-laden voice in Ayodhya today? Listen to her heart-tugging Chaiti: “Yehi thaan’ee motia hiraae gaele Rama/ Kahaa’n wa’an wehka dhoondhoon?” (It’s here somewhere I lost my pearl O Ram/ Now what am I to do, where else to look?) Rasoolan Bai’s house was burnt to cinders in Gujarat in the 1969 communal violence. That was evidently a forerunner for the project that saw fruition in 2002.
As my liberal and predominantly Hindu friends and their Muslim comrades in Delhi mull the next steps of the Ayodhya conflict in the Supreme Court, they should bear in mind the fable of the lion and the fawn. The project is not merely an assault on Muslims by the BJP and its political cousins. There is a completely secular looking onslaught under way to violate the sanctity of the Niyam Giri mountains in Orissa which the local Dongria Kondh tribespeople worship as their deity. The mountains contain billions of dollars worth of bauxite. The Babri mosque rubble contains the chance to seize political power. There is no political worldview without an economic insight. The lion will be hungry even after a Ram temple is built in Ayodhya.
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