From: abdutta@icaen.uiowa.edu (Abhijit Dutta)
Newsgroups: alt.hindu
Subject: Start of a New Beginning
Date: 5 Jan 93 20:33:05 GMT
Organization: Iowa Computer Aided Engineering Network, University of Iowa
Status: OR
To: editor@rbhatnagar.csm.uc.edu
Originator: editor@rbhatnagar
Return-Path: <abdutta@icaen.uiowa.edu>

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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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