So the long wait over centuries is over. A bhavya Ram mandir in Ayodhya, the birth place of Prabhu Shri Ram will be rebuilt, and at the very spot where the old temple was situated before being ravaged by invading Mughal marauders. Whether the villainy was committed by Babur’s general, Mir Baqi, in 1528, or Aurangzeb after 1717 as some reports suggest, is immaterial. Archaeological findings have proved beyond reasonable doubt that the disputed structure known as the Babri Masjid was erected over the ruins of a Hindu temple by jihadi Mughal rulers.
The five-judge bench of the country’s apex court led by the diminutive Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi scaled hitherto unprecedented heights of jurisprudence. That it was unanimous sealed the matter. The decision to hand over the disputed site to the Ram Janmbhoomi Nyas after a marathon forty-day hearing will remain etched in the pages of history. Much like England’s Glorious Revolution in 1688 which saved the island from the re-imposition of Rome raj after Henry the Eighth’s break with the Vatican in the 16th century. No other judgement delivered by the Law Lords in the annals of post-Independence Bharat is likely to have as far reaching an impact in a long time. We are witnessing history. Shanivar 23 Kartik 2076 Vikram Samvat will be remembered as a momentous day in the calendar of Hindu revival and resurgence.
Like the panch-parmeshwar in Premchand’s eponymous story, the top court rose above the cramped concerns and rights of individuals and communities so integral to the twisted pseudo-secular cause upon which rest the borrowed ideas of our Constitution. For once the justices ruled to protect and preserve the Bharat of yore, not the India which the British left in the care of the spiritually bereft Jawaharlal Nehru before departing our shores.
Truth to tell the structure was a sitting duck for demolition since 22-23 December, 1949, when murtis of Ram Lalla were smuggled inside and installed on the pulpit of the illegal mosque. Seen in retrospect what transpired on the sixth of December, 1992, was pre-ordained. Much like the razing of the Berlin Wall aptly recalled by Prime Minister Narendra Modi while welcoming the verdict. Historical wrongs have a way of correcting themselves through the ages. They are seldom forgotten. So the oft heard argument of the frustrated and hapless secular brigade on the illogic of raising the Titanic over ancient and medieval wrongs in contemporary politics is essentially counterfeit.
Bottomless is the well of the past, wrote Thomas Mann in his timeless work, Joseph And His Brothers. It haunts. Jews still fast and mourn the destruction of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem, once at the hands of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar in 587 BCE, and again by the Romans in 70 CE. The pillaging of their temples, twice, marked the end of Jewish sovereignty over their homeland, quite apart from the mass massacre, plunder, dispossession, and exodus which followed the cataclysm. Going hungry for an entire day is their way of reliving antiquity and identifying with the grief of their ancestors. The Ninth of Av, Tisha b’Av, in the Jew calendar is the annual connect to their past. It is a day of mourning as well as the secret to their survival as a people. Millions perished in Hitler’s gas chambers. And from its horrors was born the state of Israel.
The Mongols and Mughals were to the Hindus what the Babylonians and Romans were to the Jews. They slaughtered millions, razed, ravaged, and ransacked our temples and towns to unshackle our sanatani heritage stretching back to the Vedic era and beyond. Pour over the pages of the Baburnama to understand the satanic workings of the Mughal mind. Even Akbar, the so called great, was in reality a bigot. Fraudulent Marxist historians heaped “greatness” on him. The British for all their intellectual and cultural rootedness as colonial masters could have imposed a course correction but instead used Hindu-Muslim tensions to widen the chasm between the communities. Quite apart from looting the country of its wealth.
Seventy years of a flawed and faulty secular inheritance have produced whole generations of self-loathing Hindus with enfeebled minds. They have forgotten their heritage. The malaise is particularly severe among the educated classes who are ready to accommodate any assault on their cultural legacy as long as it does not affect their private interests.
Given the preponderance of Leftist ideas which have shaped public discourse under the umbrella of a self-serving Nehruvian consensus, the SC could not have done a better job of dispensing justice. It was a tightrope walk for Justices Gogoi, Bobde, Chandrachud, Bhushan, and Nazir, but they came out winners. This, despite a few incongruities.
Though the justices were at pains to stress that their decision was strictly anchored around the title suit to the disputed land, not faith, the fact remains that had the Hindus not stood their ground that the place was indeed the birth place of their aaradhya, Shri Ram, and persisted in his worship right through the 19th century, the “balance of probability” that theirs was the more genuine case could never have been proffered. Faith thus was a factor, but it slipped in through the backdoor. It is easy to scoff at faith, but nothing in life moves without it, be it in fellow humans, cause, prophet, or God. On Faith alone rests the future of human happiness. That secular compulsions compelled the judges to play down its importance is at best unfortunate.
Again, having sanctioned the building of the Ram Mandir, and yet describing the demolition of the Babri structure an “illegal” act is a paradox. Could the court have given the go-ahead to erect the temple had Babri been intact? Would the BJP have been ruling the country since 2014 and ushered in a Hindu revival without L K Advani’s Ratha Yatra. The mobilisation led up to the events of 6 December 1992 in which 16 kar sevaks lost their lives in police firing, and hundreds in riots across the country. What occurred that day was the denouement of a political movement to reassert Hindu pride and culture.
Savarkar, Bhagat Singh and several other freedom fighters adopted violent methods against the British in the fight for freedom. Was it “illegal”? Was the storming of the Bastille in the French Revolution of 1789 illegal? This is not to justify violence. But stuff happens when pent up emotions bottled up over decades are unleashed in a mass upsurge. It is difficult to view such events through the prism of the Indian Penal Code.
Strangely enough the judges never referred to the case of “criminal conspiracy” pending in the Special CBI court since May 2017 against L.K Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi, Uma Bharti (then a minister), and a few others of the Sangh Parivar. The charges under Section 120 of the IPC were filed on orders of the SC which in April of the same year used its extraordinary constitutional powers under Article 142 to restore the criminal conspiracy charges framed against the same persons. This was done after overruling the Allahabad High Court’s 2010 judgement upholding the special CBI court’s decision to drop conspiracy charges against Mr Advani and others in 2001.
In her paper on the role of political violence in history, author Kellie Carter Johnson says most scholars readily admit there have been few major transitions in political history that have not involved some sort of violence: Riots, rebellions, and revolutions all contain (and perhaps even require) elements of political violence.
“…During the French Revolution, for example Robespierre declared that a revolution is essentially virtue combined with terror, and further explained that notion by adding, “virtue, without which terror is destructive; terror, without which virtue is impotent.
“To dismiss the Jacobins as guillotine-happy, without analysing the politics of violence, is to misunderstand the French Revolution completely. But “virtue” is based on values, and we are compelled then to discuss what we mean by “value” and which values we are referring to. Is not politics primarily a particular set of values…?”
These are arguments which, ideally, the SC ought to have considered before commenting on the “illegality” of the Babri demolition. Nothing will be more hare brained and preposterous than the scenario of the Ram Mandir being built but the very leaders who made it possible packed off to jail. Unlikely, but you never can say.
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