(published earlier at dawn.com)
by Jawed Naqvi
Monday, 04 Oct, 2010
So why should we be surprised that the Indian courts have once again sided with regressive forces notwithstanding the fact that the Indian State according to the constitution is supposed to be a ‘socialist, secular, democratic republic?’ –Photo by AFP
A story ascribed to the progressive Urdu poet and wit Raghupati Sahai Firaaq Gorakhpuri gives an agreeable perspective on last week’s court verdict on the Babri Masjid-Ram Janmabhumi dispute.
Rightwing Indian nationalists hallucinate about an imagined Golden Period from their history, which they require as a tool for political mobilisation. The Nazis conjured lofty images of Germany’s past to critique their messy present of the 1930s. One such Hindu nationalist approached Firaaq Saheb who he admired as a professor of English literature at the Allahabad University.
The man whispered to Firaaq conspiratorially. “My father was digging a 20-foot deep trench to lay the foundation of a new house, when he discovered a yard of copper wire. It conclusively proves there was electricity in ancient India.” Firaaq Saheb took a small sip of his dark Rum with soda and replied after a moment’s pause: “When my father was digging the foundation for his house, he didn’t find any wire. He died believing that in ancient India there was wireless too.”
Last week’s high court verdict on the Babri Masjid has no basis in either law or logic. It rewards the right-wing vandals who took law into their own hands while demolishing the Babri Masjid. The judgment pulls off a feat by avoiding any reference to the demolition, arguably one of the most painful moments of modern Indian history. In its intellectual content the judgment was somewhat on par with the man whose father found a copper wire while he was digging. It would have been funny if it were not so dangerous and if it did not set a precedent for worse things to come. One can only hope that India’s Supreme Court will bring more gravitas to this vexed issue.
Some years ago, Justice Haider Raza, a former Marxist who was handling the Ayodhya case, told me that matters of faith were not justiciable under secular law. He said the only thing he could do was to determine the ownership of the land on which the mosque stood before it was demolished on December 6, 1992. He retired before he could find a legally tenable answer to the 61-year old dispute. Or was it a 124 years old issue? That was when Colonel Chamier, an Englishman serving as the District Judge decided a suit claiming a right to build a temple outside the mosque premises. He visited the site. He concluded that it was built in Babur’s time, that it was on land held sacred by Hindus, and then said:
“… but as that event occurred 356 years ago, it is too late now to agree with the grievances.” Justice Raza couldn’t have agreed more with Chamier’s conclusion though he would have avoided the passing reference to a matter of faith in a legal dispute. So why did the three judges give a verdict which bases its findings on obscurantist evidence, whether from the Muslims or the Hindus?
The arbitrary division of the disputed land into three parts saw Muslim litigants, though denied a legal logic, getting a third and two separate representatives of Ram’s worshippers getting the rest, including the place that used to be the central dome of the mosque. That at least one of the judges believed that the place of the razed dome which now serves as a makeshift temple with idols that were installed there surreptitiously in 1949 was actually the birthplace of Lord Ram is a matter of concern.
The Hindu-Muslim division of the mosque-temple complex has all the ingredients of the 1947 partition, which the Congress had opposed because it argued for a secular nation as opposed to one based on religious identity. And yet the judgment is of a piece with the policies pursued by the Indian state immediately after partition. In other words, while Pakistan was (rightly) accused of moulting into a religious state defying the promise by its founder to keep it secular, India’s much touted secular constitution was abused by state-backed zealots as early as 1949. And there has been no stopping in the compromises India has made with obscurantist forces to keep the promised liberal ideals on a short leash.
Perhaps the most regressive challenge to the Indian constitution came from the ostensibly liberal Congress party under Nehru. In 1959, a progressive government was dismissed in Kerala because it had sought to free the education system from religious groups who had so far controlled it. In 1977, the first non-Congress government came to power in Delhi. Its first job was to ban history textbooks written by India’s most qualified historians, including Romila Thapar and Bipan Chandra. How could anybody believe the historically proven claim that Brahmins in ancient India ate beef, the communal education minister argued? Henceforth the overtly secular Congress and the avowedly revivalist BJP would hunt in pairs. Their quarry: India’s secular promise.
By the time we come to Rajiv Gandhi’s 1984-89 leadership, the Sikhs had already been alienated with an overdose of communal policies heaped on them by a Hindu upper caste dominated Delhi. Of course many of the Sikh leaders were themselves more than a match for the Congress’ obscurantist politics. But Rajiv Gandhi and his cabinet took the cake. They allowed themselves to be kicked around by obscurantists of every kind, including Hindus and Muslims.
His government banned a book that Muslims found objectionable. It uncorked the Ayodhya genie by opening the locks on the Babri Masjid, to assuage Hindu voters. Simultaneously, bowing to the clamour raised by reactionary Muslims, Rajiv reversed the landmark Supreme Court’s verdict that awarded Shahbano, a Muslim divorcee alimony and other rights that Indian women from other communities enjoyed. Even as he tried to introduce computers to take India into the 21st century he waltzed with Hindu and Muslim obscurantists.
So why should we be surprised that the Indian courts have once again sided with regressive forces notwithstanding the fact that the Indian State according to the constitution is supposed to be a ‘socialist, secular, democratic republic?’ The most obvious answer is that the courts, very much in synch with other instruments of the Indian State, are being used to divide the hundreds of millions of the Indian poor, (who would become a serious threat if they were to unite) and set them upon each other with its obscurantist mobilisations.
The worker who is denied a bonus by the factory management, the small farmer who is drowning in debt, the landless Dalit labourer, or the displaced adivasi, thus becomes a Hindu or a Muslim or a Dalit Christian or an adivasi Hindu whose adversary is not someone who denies him justice but someone he is made to believe is his real enemy. That’s why the likes of Bal Thackeray and Narendra Modi are hot favourites of big business.
That is also why all the big time TV anchors are applauding the dangerous verdict on Ayodhya by seeing in it the possibilities of an India of their limited dream. Feigning magnanimity they are now appealing to the Hindus to be graceful in their victory. It would be more honest and less hypocritical if they just went ahead and gloated.
Let me end with a couplet by Mir Taqi Mir, who seemed to live in a far more liberal atmosphere in the 19th century India than what we are witnessing in the name of secular democracy.
Mat ranja kar kisi ko, ke apne to etiqaad! Dil dhaay kar jo Kaaba banaya to kya hua!! (A prayer hall in our lives has no part If built on the rubble of a broken heart)
Needless to say, the reference is to the people who are believed to have demolished a temple to build a mosque as much as it is to those who demolished the Babri Masjid and have never been punished for it. Last week’s judgment gives legal sanction to vandalism as long as it is done in the name of the ‘faith’ of the majority.
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