Gulf News, October 6, 2010
The Ayodhya court order was delivered on the basis of spurious and politically manufactured claims of faith and fabricated evidence
by Shajahan Madampat, Special to Gulf News
The verdict of the Lucknow bench of the Allahabad High Court in the vexed mosque-temple dispute in Ayodhya and most of the euphoric reactions to it are a reflection of the extent to which the illogicity of majoritarian thinking has been internalised by considerable sections of the Indian polity.
The verdict, which can only be understood as an assault on India's secular traditions and a vindication of Hindu fundamentalist aggression from 1949, confirms beyond any shadow of doubt that the judiciary is not above the sectarian rot that has plagued India over the last three decades.
The most dangerous fallout of the judgement is the stamp of legitimacy the court conferred on the majoritarian nationalist Hindutva movement, which provoked much bloodshed and mayhem across India.
While the court insinuated that the very construction of the mosque in the 15th century was illegitimate and even went against the tenets of Islam, it remained either ominously mum on or glossed over the illegitimacy of the series of aggressions committed by Hindu extremists well within its jurisdiction, beginning from the state-connived installation of an idol inside the mosque in 1949 and culminating in the wanton destruction of the mosque and the construction of a make-shift temple on its ground in 1992 against the explicit orders of the Supreme Court of India. The communal carnage and genocidal violence against the minorities that preceded and followed the destruction of the mosque would obviously merit no mention in such a verdict!
Many of those who hailed the verdict have done so on the assumption that a ‘pleasing all' solution will bring communal peace. Jettisoning justice in the larger interest of peace is doing gross disservice to both justice and peace, for in the absence of the former the latter is but a mirage.
Also important to note is the fact that a majority of India's Hindus consistently and fiercely opposed both politically and culturally the Hindutva movement and its attempts at undermining the country's pluralist moorings. They always knew well that a movement inspired by European fascism would do no good for a polity marked by such diversity of religions, cultures, languages, traditions and histories.
Had it not been a court verdict, but a compromise arrived at between the disputants, the division of the disputed land would still have made sense; dividing the land thus may have united the nation. Even an act of magnanimity on the part of the Muslim leadership in late-19th century or even later — giving up claims on the mosque in the larger interest of social harmony — would have perhaps preempted communal violence in the late 20th century.
But a court of law in a secular democratic country issuing a partisan verdict on the basis of spurious and politically manufactured claims of faith and fabricated archaeological evidences is a travesty of justice, to say the least.
A majority of India's internationally acclaimed historians and archaeologists scoff at the claim that the mosque was originally built either on the ruins of an ancient temple or after razing it to the ground.
In utter disregard of an impressive corpus of historical and archaeological scholarship available on the subject, the verdict put its stamp of approval on the much contested findings of the Archaeological Survey of India.
The ray of hope for the country is the peaceful way the people went about their lives during and after the frenzied media debates over the verdict.
Decades of violence and communal carnage seem to have finally convinced them that 21st century India would remain captive to medieval passions and animosities so long as divisive issues such as the mosque-temple dispute are allowed to overshadow the real issues of livelihood and dignified existence.
A 21st century modern nation state can subordinate justice and fairness to its fear of a lunatic fringe only at great peril to its own future. The fact that the same lunatic fringe was implicated in the assassination of its father of the nation, Mahatma Gandhi, is perhaps worth remembering in times such as these!
Shajahan Madampat, based in Abu Dhabi, is a cultural critic and commentator with varied publications in English, Arabic and Malayalam.
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