From: abdutta@icaen.uiowa.edu (Abhijit Dutta)
Subject: START OF A NEW BEGINNING: An Article from Illustrated Weekly of India
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 1993 17:41:47 GMT
Organization: Iowa Computer Aided Engineering Network, University of Iowa

The following article has been taken without permission from The Illustrated 
Weekly of India, December 12-18, 1992.  

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                          Start of a New Beginning

                                     by

                                 M.V. Kamath

If our leftist intellectuals and secular editors stop screaming all the time
about secularism, fundamentalism, "trishul-weilding sants" and fascist Hindus
and their ilk and try to understand the nature of our society, we might still 
come to terms with our past.  There are many ways to understand the Ayodha 
issue, but showering choice abuse at the VHP or the BJP or the Kalyan Singh 
government (or ex-government) is not one of them.  

    There are Hindus and Hindus.  The President of India, Dr. Shankar Dayal 
Sharma, happens to be a Hindu and a brahmin.  So for that matter is the prime 
minister of India, P V Narshima Rao.  Both have strongly condemned the sheer
vandalism indulged in by some people against the Babri Masjid and no doubt it
will be rebuilt, this time by Hindus themselves. 

    So what happens in Ayodha is not a Muslim versus Hindu affair, millions of 
Hindus probably couldn't care less about the whole controversy.  Surely many 
wouldn't even have heard of it a couple of decades ago.  If a random poll is 
taken among Hindus south of the Vindhyas, in small towns and villages and even 
in poor localities in the cities today, the indifference of the people may come 
as a surprise to all concerned.  In a sense Ayodha is local issue; from the very 
beginning it should have been handled as such, as something concerning the local 
administration.  A local issue was first turned into a state issue and then a 
national issue, now there is the the possibility of its being internationalised. 

    Now in understanding Ayodha one must look at it in the historical 
perspective. Some of our intellectuals tell us "But don't bring history in. 
History is dead. Look to the future".  The trouble is that like Banquo's ghost, 
it is ever present in our life.  It can't be wished away.  One can rewrite it, 
one can reinterpret it,but it is there.  And for many Hindus it is painful.  A 
muslim intellectual, Iqbal A Ansari writing in The Islamic Times International 
(July-September 1992) got it right when he said "communal readings of the 700 
years of medieval folks history has passed into the collective Hindu psyche 
(which) suffers from a sense of hurt and humiliation".  Obviously the millions 
of poor Indians who have never gone to school, who cannot read and write, who 
have never heard of Ghazni or Ghouri Mohammads, or Aurangzeb etc haven't the 
foggiest idea of history to take a "historical" view of Islam.  But somewhere in 
the subconscious even among the illiterate Hindus there are "commun al readings" 
(to put it mildly) of Muslim intolerance, of conversion under threat etc etc.  
Sikhism would not have been born were it not for Muslim intolerance. The
argument that the Quran says something about to each his own religion, does not 
wash.  If that was so, there woyuld have been no conversions to the Islamic 
faith and hardly any muslims in India.                                               

    But, there are Muslims in India and many Hindus feel that they betrayed 
their country in demanding Pakistan anfd getting it.  The argument could be made 
that not all Muslims wanted Pakistan.  Then who wanted it ?  Not the congress, 
the dominant secular, political party in India.  It was the Muslim league which 
swept the Muslim votes in the 1946 elections.  The league secured as many as 75 
to 95 per cent of the Muslim votes on the cry for a separate muslim state.  The 
implication was that once Pakistan was obtained all those who voted for pakistan 
would go there.  That, of course, never happened.  Only a small percentage left; 
the poor had to stay behind, cowering, not realising- or, perhaps, realising too 
well,- the nature of their folly. And now I quote Ansari again: "Hindus percieve 
Muslims as inherently incapable of wholly belonging to India and being loyal to 
it, of keeping Indian nationhood above religion; the perennial question of 
Indian first or Muslim first".
Distrust piled on distrust.

The Pakistanis fuelled anti-islamic sentiment in India by their crass insistence
that Kashmir belonged to them because a majority of Kashmiris (forgetting those
in Jammu and Ladakh) were Muslims. Had Pakistan left India alone, distrust of 
Muslims would have died a natural death. But that was not to be. And Muslims in
India have not told their co-religionists in Pakistan to shut up. At least not
loudly and not insistently. A fear has always persisted in Hindu minds that
Muslims are not reliable. This has been another factor governing Hindu-Muslim 
relations in India. 

Now the Congress has always insisted that it is secular. After partition on 
non-secular lines it could not possibly behave as if it was a Hindu party. It
had to prove to itself and to others that it was indeed secular, even if it hurt
itself in the process. Nehru therefore succumbed to pressure not to have 
Vande Mataram as the national anthem. When, on December 22, 1949 the idols of 
Sri Ram, Laxman and Sita were smuggled inside the Babri masjid, the place was
ordered closed by the district magistrate of Faizabad under instructions from 
the UP government headed by another brahmin, Govind Vallabh Pant. Of course it
infuriated many, but it was a Congress government and right or wrong, the 
Congress had to show that it was secular and never mind if the Ayodhya dispute
was over a century old and the Hindus had an emotional link with the site.

In the last 40 years, rightly or wrongly, the feeling has grown that the 
Congress would do anything to please the Muslims in order to get their votes. (
The Muslims it is only fair to say, have been saying that they have not recieved
anything, not even crumbs from the government and can rightfully point out to 
the miniscule number of Muslims in the various number of services and in the
police). The Shah Bano case only strengthened that feeling. In Kerala, the 
communist regime went to the extent of carving out a separate Muslim majority
district, Malapuram, adding to the feeling that Muslims will never live 
peacefully side by side with Hindus. A similar district has been carved out in 
Tamil Nadu. 

So much for the historic background and now for the emotional background. There
has been a persistent attempt, specially by the Jawaharlal Nehru University  
"intellectuals" to show that if Ram ever existed, he was the king of a minor 
principality and hardly a god, that if he was born in Ayodhya, that Ayodhya lay
somewhere near the border of Nepal and in present-day Uttar Pradesh, that if
indeed he was born in present-day Ayodhya there is nothing to prove that he
was born at the site where the Babri masjid now exists, that if indeed he was 
born where it is claimed he was, the temple to him was built on the foundations
of a Buddhist vihara and so on. Not the slightest concession is given to deeply
held emotional feelings. The worst instigators of communalism, to my mind are
the Hindu "secular" intellectuals whose arrogance is matched only by their 
insensitivity. Every religion has its myths. A Catholic will feel insulted if 
one were to question either virgin birth or resurrection- and rightly so. And it 
takes considerable stretching of one's imagination to believe that the prophet 
came riding on a winged horse and landed at the site in Jerusalem where, it is 
believed a footprint of his can even now be seen. If one can accept these 
pleasant myths surely one can accept the belief that Sri Ram was born at the
Babri Masjid site?

What a fine gesture it would have been if the Muslim leadership at the very
early stages, had graciously conceeded the right of Hindus to build a temple at
the site and even helped them to do so? What enormous goodwill would have 
accrued to the Muslim community by that one single act of grace that would have
cost them nothing, but would have wiped out the many angers of the past? There 
was even some talk that the VHP would rebuild the Babri masjid at another site,
stone by ancient stone at its own cost. The wounded Hindu psyche would then have
been healed. We would have gone a long way towards national integration. But the
Syed Shahabuddins had to take a confrontationist stand. They would not accept a 
belief(let us conceed that it is a myth) that would have cost them nothing but
won them only goodwill. The demand was that the VHP should 'prove' that the 
masjid was built on the temple site.

Let it be presumed that no temple ever existed, that even no Sri Ram ever 
existed and that everything is a myth. Would it have damaged Islam or the 
Muslims if the latter were to have the grace to concede something over which 
Hindus have been straining for decades? The argument is made that if one site
was conceded the VHP might have asked for three more and then 300 more and then
where would it all stop? Shouldn't one take a firm stand from the very stand and
decline to oblige? And thus the argument has run. But this was a matter for 
negotiation and to the best of my information this matter was never ever brought
to the negotiating table. 

The truth of the matter seems to be that the Muslim leadership was afraid to 
conceed anything. This has led to 'minorityism'-the minorities' perrinial fear
that if one concedes a point to the majority, the matter will not stop there.

The irony is that it is not the Muslim who is afraid, but the Hindu with all
the accumulated fears of the past. Banquo's ghost just will not disappear. The 
Hindu psyche demands that some restitution be done to it, though it is not 
expressed quite that way. It is not quite revanchist. To believe so would be a 
wrong reading of the situation. There is such a thing as a "pyschological"
minority - the existence of which is seldom recognised because one wants to face
facts, besides which, it would be embarrassing to admit that one is afraid. But
the fact remains that both the numerical minority and the psycological minority
live in fear of each other. Every time there is a report of conversion to Islam
it touches a raw nerve. 

Many further believe that the Muslim attitude is one of: "what we have is ours, 
what you have is also ours". The Muslims voted solidly for the Muslim League and
for Pakistan. Today's generation says that it cannot be made to pay for what 
their fathers did. But surely those fathers are still around who should have 
known better? The Shahi Imam says that he wants India to be "secular". Were 
those mullahs who coughed fire and brimstone in 1946 secular?

Then there are other questions asked: if the situation had been reversed, say in
Pakistan or any muslim country would a temple have been safe?  How many temples
have been destroyed in Pakistan? in Bangladesh? even in Kashmir?

The secularists argument is that Indians should be different from the 
fundamentalists Muslims.  They should be. but alas, they aren't.  One wished 
that there never was a Ghazni or Aurangazeb or a Jinnah to haunt our dreams. 
What is significant is that there are many who argue that Hindu rulers also have
ransacked temples; that Ghazni only wanted the wealth of Somnath and was 
unconcerned with idolatrous Hindus etc., etc.  It has also been argued that \
Hindus have not been less vicious and that they have had gory fights with 
Buddhists and Jains, so what is wrong with muslims killing Hindus?

It is easy for our secularists to point an accusing finger at the VHP, the BJP
or its leaders like L K Advani.  But are Congress, Janata Dal, Janata Party
and the leftist leaders any the less guilty?  All of them were playing games.
The Congress wanted to take shelter behind the judiciary; it was an excellent 
example of passing the buck.  Narasimha Rao could say sanctimoniously that the 
BJP was not upholding the constitution while what seems clear is that more than
the BJP it was the non-BJP coterie that is responsible for what happened.  The 
BJP was not in need of the muslim vote.  The Congress is; so is the Janata Dal.
The BJP may or may not be right.  But the Congress party is frankly dishonest.
Everyone has been playing politics, as the saying goes.  Nobody has any clean
hands.


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