The Gateway to Bharat

AYODHYA IS, AND WILL perhaps always be, the abode of the most ardent bhakts. The ones who never lost faith. Hanuman to Lord Ram, Nandi to Lord Shiva.

On the dawn of January 22, to mark the Prana Pratishtha (ritualistic ceremony to install the statue of Ram Lalla) the devout will fall to the ground and scoop up the hallowed soil sprinkled with stone shavings—the flakes of a devoted back-breaking labour that fashioned the Ram temple out of hard rock. The devotees will then run the dust across their foreheads—tilak in place, they will chant “Jai Sri Ram”.

Once a graveyard of impossible dreams, Ayodhya is today heaving with possibilities. It aspires to be the miracle laboratory offering the formula to catalyse the civilisational continuum of Bharat and the atomised progressivism of India. If the experiment succeeds, Ayodhya will be that rare idyll on earth—thus far only ever imagined in the great epic scripted as homage to Ram’s maryada.

The Prana Pratishtha’s prelude, the Bhoomi Pujan, was performed on August 5, 2020, and broadcast to millions. To those glued to their television sets, Ram had lost none of his appeal. Thirty years earlier he had drawn the faithful, like moths, to the flickering incandescence of a Televista TV set. The weekly series, Ramayan, undeniably amplified the Sangh Parivar’s objective of reclaiming and resurrecting the legacy of Ram to galvanise Hindus to a more political end.

Just as they do now with respect to the Prana Pratishtha, some saw the carefully choreographed liturgical iconography of the Ram Janmabhoomi puja—with Prime Minister Modi as acting ‘pontiff’—as a cynical attempt at reinforcing the notion of Hindu ascension. A ‘dismantling’ of the old republic’s spirit of inter-faith accommodation and the Bhoomi Pujan of the new Hindu republic—the “first real colonisation of Hinduism by political power.”

Commenting after the Bhoomi Pujan, made possible by the epochal Supreme Court verdict, political scientist Pratap Bhanu Mehta among others would go on to imply that the BJP-RSS have made Ram’s name “synonymous with revenge, with an insecure pride, with a blood curdling aggression, violence towards others, a coarsening of culture, and the erasure of every last shred of genuine piety in public devotion and public life.”

Such laments had the effect of stirring politicians like the sectarian firebrand Asaduddin Owaisi.

A few days ago, Owaisi began worryingly exhorting young Muslims to “inhabit mosques” to prevent the conspiracy supposedly “taking place regarding [the takeover of] three-four more mosques.”

No one can, of course, deny that the demolition of the Babri Masjid was an egregious assault on constitutionalism. The demolition undoubtedly undermined the maryada of Ram, in whose name the case for the reclamation of the Ram Janmabhoomi was meticulously made in both the Supreme Court and the tragically consequential court of public opinion.

But it is also easy to overlook that the construction of the Ram temple has been complemented by the Indian state granting land measuring five acres to the Muslim community to build a grand mosque. This mosque will be in Ayodhya, and that too not very far removed from the Ram Mandir.

The compensatory land grant from the Supreme Court is an acknowledgement of the wrong committed upon Muslims. Think about it. Would a state machinery guided by a revanchist exclusivist instinct ever display any gesture that seeks to make amends for a wrong done to the proverbial ‘other’?

Notably, the Indian state has even made donations for the construction of the mosque tax-free. Moreover, ordinary Hindus have come forward to shoulder a significant share of the costs for the mosque’s construction by making generous contributions. There may not have been a public apology but there is quite clearly a willingness to atone.

Once a graveyard of impossible dreams, Ayodhya is today heaving with possibilities. It aspires to be the miracle laboratory offering the formula to catalyse the civilisational continuum of Bharat and the atomised progressivism of India

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Even the alleged desecrators of the Babri Masjid, or those the ideological left has accused of warring in Ram’s name, had the sense to express regret.

In his autobiography, LK Advani—BJP veteran, mass leader and spearhead of the Ram Janmabhoomi agitation—writes, “I could not share the sense of elation that some leaders of the movement exhibited… It was the saddest day in my life.”

The loss of credibility prevented BJP from deriving electoral benefits solely from the Ram Janmabhoomi issue.

Stranded at the ballot far from where it needed to be to stake power in Delhi, the ‘politically untouchable’ BJP consciously embarked upon blunting the jagged edges of its Hindutva outreach.

In the first of its most noticeable steps, BJP renounced the use of extrajudicial means to attain its goal of freeing Ram Janmabhoomi. Its 1989 Palampur resolution was effectively dead in the water.

But even though he had expressed sadness, Advani was also clear that for BJP, “December 6 represented an epoch-making day in the life of India and also of Hindus.”

In his autobiography he writes: “Thus, through an action that neither the leaders of the temple movement nor the leaders of the central government could control or prevent, a group of Kar Sewaks delivered their own verdict on some of the seminal questions of Indian history, both medieval and modern. Ram or Babar? Genuine secularism or pseudo secularism? Justice for all or always appeasement of some? Are Hindus to remain perpetually divided on caste, regional and linguistic lines or should they unite when fundamental challenges confront faith…?”

Advani could well have been addressing these questions to the ideological opponents of BJP-RSS.

For years, there has been a concerted attempt by the “rootless anglicised elite”, as writer-diplomat Pavan K Varma describes them, to de-hyphenate Bharat’s Hindu roots from our civilisational history.

Many years ago, VS Naipaul had assessed Romila Thapar’s book on Indian history and likened it to displaying a “Marxist attitude to history, which in substance says: there is a higher truth behind the invasions— feudalism and all that. The correct truth is the way the invaders looked at their actions. They were conquering, they were subjugating… Only now are the people beginning to understand that there has been a great vandalizing of India… What is happening in India is a mighty creative process. Indian intellectuals, who want to be secure in their liberal beliefs, may not understand what is going on… but every other Indian knows precisely what is happening: Deep down he knows that a larger response is emerging even if at times this response appears in his eyes to be threatening.”

Naipaul may have presaged the emergence of a “larger response”, but threatening it isn’t.

Today’s Ayodhya is far more than a one-time staging ground for an epochal movement centred on the reclamation of Hindu religious rights. It is now conceived to serve as a cradle of a ‘sabke Ram’.

Indeed, Ayodhya’s temple to ‘sabke Ram’ may be the centrepiece of the Ram Janmabhoomi complex but it also houses temples to other venerables associated with the Ramayana.

Many disadvantaged communities—Dalits, SCs and STs—view themselves as the legatees of Valmiki, Sabari, Jatayu, Vishwamitra, Vashishta, and Hanuman.

The exaltation of icons revered by these marginalised communities is intended to remind them that they are first among equals. That they are being accepted as the prideful custodians of an unbreakable bond with Ram and through him with Hindu universalism.

Clearly then, Ayodhya is not the monotheistic epicentre of a Hindu Mecca or a Hindu Vatican. It is destined to be the symbolic gateway connecting modern India to Bharat’s civilisational inheritance—its all-embracing Sanatana Dharma.

About The Author

Rahul Shivshankar

Rahul Shivshankar is Consulting Editor, Network 18

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