Modi Redeems a Sacred Pledge in Ayodhya

In 1989, discerning observers of Indian politics noticed a curious phenomenon: the rash of excitement in villages and small towns over the ritual consecration of bricks embossed with the words Shri Ram. Like the mysterious chapattis that were quietly passed from village to village in 1857 indicating ominous developments, the bricks, lovingly wrapped in saffron cloth, were ceremonially taken in procession to nearby collection centres for eventual despatch to Ayodhya. They were to be used for the construction of a grand temple at the very site where Lord Ram was believed to have been born. Some 200,000 Ramshila bricks, including some from Hindu communities overseas, were despatched to Ayodhya. Each brick told a different story, but they also indicated something else—the people’s involvement in the campaign to ‘liberate’ Ram Janmabhoomi.

The manner in which a simmering local dispute in the town of Ayodhya came to capture the national imagination in the three years between the Ramshila pujas and the kar seva of December 6th, 1992 that led to the demolition, in an act of mass frenzy, will always fascinate future historians. That the Ayodhya upsurge was accompanied by meticulous mobilisation of people by an unstructured coalition of forces—including those well outside the radar of public life—is obvious. The more relevant issue is why Ayodhya became a focal point of Hindu disquiet. Equally fascinating is the protracted war between raw sentiment and an entrenched Establishment that is heading towards a possible conclusion.

The limitations of mass mobilisation at a time of pandemic ensured that the numbers of Ram bhakts that arrived in Ayodhya to personally witness the bhoomipuja of the proposed temple on the afternoon of August 5th was small. It was a far cry from the bloody kar seva of October 30th and 31st, 1990 and the one on December 6th, 1992, when the Babri Masjid constructed in 1528 by an army of occupation was flattened by bare hands and pickaxes. On those occasions, the country witnessed shows of defiance and assertiveness by both devout and angry Hindus who had assembled in Ayodhya from all over the country. Their actions had triggered furious controversy, not to mention state repression, and the mobilisation was both preceded and accompanied by communal violence. In March 1993, Mumbai experienced a deadly bout of serial bombings—the first example of Muslim retribution.

August 5th was very different. Thanks to the very different media environment from 1992, most Indians watched Prime Minister Narendra Modi undertake the bhoomipuja on their television sets. Almost every one of the countless news channels in different languages covered the occasion live and embellished it with devotional songs and other Ramayan attractions. Without any prompting, people did pujas inside their homes or in their local temples. Except for West Bengal, where, using the lockdown as a pretext, the authorities clamped down on public celebrations, including those in roadside temples, the day passed off without trouble. It was a day marked by happiness and dignified observance of a momentous occasion. The consecrated bricks, kept in storage for nearly 30 years, were now ready for use.

Yet, there was no escaping the fact that the environment of India has changed beyond recognition in the 28 years between the demolition of the Moghul shrine and the bhoomipuja for the new temple.

First, whereas three decades ago, the slogan ‘mandir wahin banayenge’ had provoked sharp divisions, even within Hindus, the reaction to the bhoomipuja suggested a spectacular level of Hindu unity. The manner in which the media competed among themselves to give the best coverage to the puja in Ayodhya was revealing. It suggested that the construction of the Ram Janmabhoomi temple had become a part of the national common sense. Lord Ram, it seemed, had finally come home to independent India to be honoured in a manner befitting his status.

Second, unlike 1992 when nearly the entire Establishment, including the judiciary, had united in rubbishing the kar sevaks who had taken the law into their own hands, there were hardly any significant expressions of disquiet. Yes, some intellectuals lamented what they perceived as the legitimisation of a criminal act. Others despaired of the assault on secularism involved in the presence of the Prime Minister at a purely religious occasion. However, apart from the Left, almost all the non-BJP parties tried to ensure that they weren’t perceived as being opposed to the move. Their only refrain was that Ram belongs to everyone and not merely the BJP.

Arguably, the co-option of the Indian Establishment into the Ram temple project had a great deal to do with the Supreme Court’s judgment in a case that had dragged on for nearly seven decades. No doubt, the apex court’s belated sense of urgency owed almost entirely to the personal interest in the matter by the erstwhile Chief Justice of India, Ranjan Gogoi. In the past, political leaders opposed to the temple were inclined to put the ball in the legal arena because they lacked the resolve to take the final call. While the BJP had quite clearly committed itself to the Ram Janmabhoomi cause as early as 1989, a party such as the Congress dithered between making Hindus happy and displeasing the Muslim community. At various times in the past, Congress Governments had attempted to be too clever—Rajiv Gandhi’s conduct being an example—or allowed events to take their own course—as PV Narasimha Rao did on the day of the demolition. However, when confronted by the BJP’s aggressive stand, it tried to skirt the issue but without a happy outcome.

The unhappy position of the Congress is worth dissecting. Beginning from the freedom movement till the mid-1980s, the Congress was the natural party of the Hindus. Without necessarily embracing Hindu nationalism and despite the excessive secularist zeal of Jawaharlal Nehru, it occupied the solid middle ground of the Hindu consensus. It was this position that in turn allowed it to secure the support of the Muslim community leaders, particularly the more conservative elements who were happy at the party’s non-intrusive approach to Muslim personal laws. Indira Gandhi displayed a markedly pro-Hindu tilt from 1980 to 1983 but as far as Muslims were concerned, this was offset by her unrelenting opposition to the bigger enemy, the BJP.

The Ram Janmabhoomi movement was the single most important factor in the breakdown of the Congress consensus among Hindu voters. The highly emotional mobilisation around the Ram temple that began in 1988-1989 had a far greater impact among Hindu voters than the Congress realised. The reversal of the Shah Bano judgment by Rajiv Gandhi, the rise in Muslim fundamentalism globally after the beginning of the war in Afghanistan and the revolution in Iran in 1979 and, finally, the spate of communal riots in the 1980s provided the context for the growing appeal of Hindu nationalism. Between the elections of 1989 and 1991, the Congress lost the support of Hindus in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh and it has never been able to recover from that loss. Today, despite Rahul Gandhi’s frenzied temple visits and his pathetic attempts at reinventing himself as a committed Hindu, the Congress is no longer seen as the natural home of all middle-of-the-road Hindus. Its position as India’s default party has been erased after the two devastating defeats in 2014 and 2019. No wonder, it has become marginal to the explosion of Hindu pride that followed the advent of Modi.

Finally, there is a crucial question that the bhoomipuja and Ram temple construction throw up. Has the Indian state ceased to be secular? Has it become an expression of Hindu majoritarianism, as the critics of Modi claim?

In January 1993, barely a month after the demolition of the Babri shrine and amid the highly charged mood of the times, Girilal Jain—once a pillar of the Congress Establishment who had moved over to the side of Hindu nationalism—put forward his assessment of the event in Organiser: ‘The structure as it stood, represented an impasse between what Babur represented and what Ram represents. This ambiguity has been characteristic of the Indian state since Independence. In fact, in my opinion, no structure symbolised the Indian political order in its ambivalence, ambiguity, indecisiveness and lack of purpose, as this structure. The removal of the structure has ended the impasse and marks a new beginning.’

Jain was certainly very prescient in detecting the symbolic ambiguity of a so-called mosque that had, since 1949, become a de facto Ram temple. In many ways, the structure epitomised the ambiguities of the post-Independence state and the very Indian connotations of secularism. Some of these had come to the fore in the debate over the reconstruction of the ruined Somnath temple, a debate that involved Nehru on the one hand and KM Munshi and Rajendra Prasad on the other. India’s secular character had also been at the centre of concerns over the various anti-cow slaughter and anti-religious conversion legislation passed by different Congress-controlled state governments in the 1950s and 1960s. However, these ambiguities had wilfully been glossed over. The hard secularism of Nehru had coexisted, even if uneasily, with the pro-Hindu tilt of Congress stalwarts in the states—Pandit Sampurnanand and DP Mishra being two important exponents of alternative views. However, till the formal injection of ‘secularism’ in the Preamble to the Constitution, this debate never assumed juridical overtones; it remained, by and large, an internal debate of the Congress. The Ayodhya movement brought the debate into the realms of competitive politics.

Since 1992, and until the bhoomipuja, an additional complication developed vis-à-vis the site of the erstwhile shrine. The Moghul structure had been well and truly demolished and a makeshift Ram temple erected at the site of the garbagriha (sanctum sanctorum). This awkward arrangement was upheld by various judicial orders. The courts, despite their dim view of the demolition, had never quite mustered the resolve to remove the temple altogether. This strange arrangement, too, was highly symbolic. It indicated the end of the old ambiguity and the emergence of a new one—of a Hindu order that was barricaded and barred from coming into its own. It is in this context that the proposed Ram temple is extremely significant.

In his speech on the occasion, the Prime Minister presented the proposed temple as a symbol of modernity. In a spirit of reconciliation he glossed over the tradition of Ram as a warrior king who had undertaken and won a difficult war against Ravana. Instead, he emphasised Ram’s notion of kingship and the idea of Ram Rajya and sought to link it with notions of good governance in contemporary India. It was a very momentous address whose significance will be increasingly realised in the coming years. Yet, there is another aspect of the Ram temple that he didn’t address.

It is by now understood that the proposed Ram temple will be much more than a mere place of worship where the devout Ram bhakts will come to pray to Bhagwan Ram. It is viewed by many as the emerging symbol of a New India that has come forth as a consequence of a movement Modi linked with the freedom struggle. So far, the enduring legacy of the freedom struggle led by Mahatma Gandhi has been the recovery of national sovereignty and the Constitution which Modi once described as India’s only holy book. In that case, what will be the relationship between the Constitution and the new monument to a New India?

One of the biggest issues confronting the notion of constitutional patriotism is the underlying assumption that 1950 is Year Zero and that all stately wisdom begins and concludes with the Constitution. What the Ram temple does is to link nationhood to a deeper and longer perspective, incorporating India’s entire cultural inheritance, from antiquity to the present.

The rules governing public life are spelt out in the Constitution but India’s sense of nationhood and its self-identity are captured by the new Ram temple. The emerging new order in India deems that the Constitution and the Ram temple must complement each other, rather than be in a state of conflict.

AyodhyaBabri MasjidHinduismNarendra ModiRam Temple