For God’s Sake

The Supreme Court did India a historic favour. It took emotionalism off the political table. The people will be relieved today. The political class, some exceptions apart, will grasp the full ramifications only a bit later.

The past is a dangerous place. Its vast landscape of nostalgia is interspersed with minefields of trauma. Something in our psychology keeps us transfixed to the danger zones. When the mines are infused with faith their explosive force multiplies. Given our complex inheritance from history, and the life-sapping infections injected by nearly two centuries of colonial policy, religion has often become a reason for internal conflict rather than a source of social harmony.

But emotions cannot always be scissored out of public discourse. There is a way of dealing with them based on our civilisational sense of what is the right thing to do. Mahatma Gandhi underlined this before our first nationwide mass upsurge in 1920 when he took a commitment from Muslim imams and leaders that they would support an end to cow slaughter. This was his condition for the merger of his Non-Cooperation Movement with Khilafat. Gandhi did not want Muslims to believe in a ban on beef; he expected them to respect the sentiments of fellow Indians on a core aspect of Hinduism. It was, in multiple ways, an article of faith in Gandhi’s philosophy of unity.

A significant step away from a troubled past, towards a common future, was taken on November 9th. The road map was finalised by a bench that will command a place of honour in our annals. Three faiths were represented among the five justices who reached a unanimous verdict: Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi and Justices SA Bobde, DY Chandrachud, Ashok Bhushan and Abdul Nazeer. If this was a fortuitous coincidence, then so be it. If this was a conscious decision to get all Indian perspectives, then wisdom has prevailed. The unanimity of the bench was itself an extremely powerful message. Indians accepted the integrity of this judgment without a murmur.

It was fitting that the verdict was read out by Chief Justice Gogoi, a man who has done more than anyone else to bring closure. We should not be misled into thinking that the Ram temple issue had lost its deep resonance. Justice Gogoi surely knew that familiar saying: nothing is as dangerous as the fire you think has gone out.

Those who dismiss religion as irrational do not get the point. Religion too is based on reason. It answers those fundamental questions which are beyond the comprehension of the human mind. It gives meaning to life and death. Birth is transformed from an accident to a cyclical miracle. No religion believes in death as the end of life, only as a transition to another form of existence. Marxists reject religion as a human invention; believers view God as the architect of a universe far beyond the limitations of human knowledge. Religion places life on earth as some infinitesimal part of infinity, outside the contours of time and space as we experience them in the brief whiff of our mortality.

There is no rational evidence for the existence of God but 99 per cent, if not more, of India is certain that there is God, the Creator.

Hindus and Christians believe that God took human form and came down to earth to guide us towards eternal salvation, whether as Lord Ram, Lord Krishna or Christ the Lord. Muslims and Jews accept the concept of tawheed, or the indivisible unity of God. But all of us believe in some manifestation of God as the lord of the universe.

Those who believe that God was born on this earth revere, logically, the birthplace. Hence Bethlehem, where Jesus was born, is on the apex of Christian pilgrimage, on a par with Jerusalem, where Christians believe Jesus was crucified. For the last millennium-and-a-half, both places have been ruled by Muslims or Jews, except for the Crusader interregnum. But no one has ever stopped this pilgrimage. To do so would be barbaric, outside the code of civilised co-existence. Indeed the bloody wars collectively known as the Crusades were fought for the control of ‘holy places’ and not to expand empires.

The compulsion of pilgrimage to the birthplace of the Lord is an elemental journey in every relevant religion. The Supreme Court, by adjudicating on the legality of the deity and granting an unfettered right to the deity’s birthplace, has created space for India to move on.
If an emotional issue becomes a focal point of electoral gravity, then it squeezes out what should be the dominant factor in any election: good governance. This is true of any democracy, including its most stiff-lipped version a few thousand miles away from India. The basic truth is simply this: if we do not exhaust emotionalism through an acceptable and credible process, then emotionalism will exhaust a nation.

Indian democracy can now revolve around the core competence of governments, which is excellent news for the citizen.

Interfaith conflict has inflicted a heavy body blow on the unity of India in the past. It retained the potential of becoming the chief obstacle to the future of modern India, and a threat if not to India, then certainly to modernity.

Gandhi’s Ramrajya was based on the equality of every faith, the freedom and dignity of every individual, economic emancipation of the poorest of the poor and gender reform. That is the scripture of modernity. As Prime Minister Narendra Modi said after the Supreme Court verdict, “This decision should not be seen as a victory or defeat of anyone. Be it Rambhakti or Rahimbhakti, this is the time for all of us to strengthen the spirit of Bharatbhakti.”

About The Author

MJ Akbar

MJ Akbar is the author of, among several titles, Tinderbox: The Past and Future of Pakistan. His latest book is Gandhi: A Life in Three Campaigns

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