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AYODHYA: A HISTORICAL WATERSHED
Following is the final chapter of Mr. Giri Lal's book, "The Hindu Phenomenon".
AYODHYA: A HISTORICAL WATERSHED
1992 will doubtless go down in Indian history as the year of Ayodhya. This
is so not so much because recent events there have pushed into background
all the other issues such as economic reforms and reservations for the
'other backward castes' as because they have released forces which will
have a decisive influence in shaping the future of India.
These forces are not new; they have been at work for two centuries.
Indeed, they were not even wholly bottled up. But they had not been
unleashed earlier as they have been now. It is tryly extraordinary that
the demolition of a nondescript structure by faceless men no organization
owns up should have shaken so vast a country as India. But no one can
possibly deny that it has. These forces in themselves are not destructive
even if they have led to some violence and blood-letting. They are essen-
tially beneficent. They shall seek to heal the splits in the Indian
personality so that it is restored to health and vigour.
Implicit in the above is the proposition that while India did not cease
to be India either under Muslim or British rule despite all the trials
and tribulations, she was not fully Mother India. And she was not fully
Mother India not because she was called upon to digest external inputs,
which is her nature to assimilate, but because she was not free to throw
out what she could not possibly digest in the normal and natural course.
this lack of freedom to reject what cannot be assimilated is the essence of
foreign conquest and rule. The meaning of Ayodhya is that India has regained,
to a larger extent than hitherto, the capacity to behave and act as a normal
living organism. She has taken another big step towards self-affirmation.
All truth, as Lenin said, is partisan. So is mine. I do not pretend to
be above the battle, or, to rephrase Pt. Nehru, I am not neutral against
myself. But partisan truth is not demagogy and patently false propaganda,
which is what advocates of 'composite culture' have engaged in. Two points
need to be noted in this regard.
First, no living culture is ever wholy autonomous; for no culture is an
airtight sealed box; Indian culture, in particular, has been known for its
catholocity and willingness to give as well as take. It withdrew into a
shell when it felt gravely threatened and became rigid; but that is under-
standable; indeed, the surprise, if any, is that Indian culture survived
the Islamic and Western onslaught at all.
Secondly, a culture, if it is not swallowed up by an incoming one,
whether by way of proselytization or conquest or both, as the Egyptians
and Iranians were by Islam, or if it is not destroyed as the Aztec was
by the Portuguese and Spaniards, must seek to recover; even Indians in
Latin America have not given up the effort. Surely, since no one can
possibly suggest that Indian culture was either swallowed up or destroyed;
it is only natural that it should seek to recover its genuine self. Surely,
this is neither an anti-Islamic nor anti-Western activity.
Pt. Nehru almost never used the phrase 'composite culture'. His was a
more organic view of culture and civilization. He believed in, and spoke of,
cultural synthesis which, if at all, could take place only within the old
civilizational framework since Islam did not fianlly triumph. Pt. Nehru
also wrote and spoke of the spirit of India asserting itself again and
again. Surely, that spirit could not be a composite affair. In the Maulana
Azad memorail lecture he also spoke of different cultures being products of
different environments and he specifically contrasted tropical India with
the deserts of Arabia. He even said that a Hindu-Muslim culture synthesis
had not been completed when other factors intervened. Apparantly he was
referring to the British Raj.
This should also dispell the impression that the Nehru era was a
continuation of alien rule intended to frustrate the process of Indianization
of India. This charge is not limited to his detractors. It is made by his
admirers as well, though, of course, indirectly and unknowingly. They pit
secularism against Hinduism which is plainly absurd. Hindus do not need the
imported concept of secularism in order to be able to show respect towards
other faiths. That comes naturally to them. For theirs is an inclusive
faith which provides for every form of religious experience and belief;
there can be no heresy or kufr in Hinduism.
For Nehru, secularism, both as a personal philosophy and state policy,
was an expression of India's cultural-civilizational personality and not
its negation and repudiation. Secularism suited India's requirements as he
saw them. For instance, it provided an additional legitimizing principle
for reform movements among Hindus beginning with the Brahmo Samaj in the
early part of the nineteenth century. It met the aspirations of the
Westernized and modernizing intelligentsia. Before independence, it denied
legitimacy to Muslim separatism in the eyes of Hindus, Westernized or
traditionalist. If it did not help forge an instrument capable of resisting
effectively the Muslim League's demand for partition, the alternative
platform of men such as Veer Savarkar did not avail either. After partition,
it served the same purpose of denying legitimacy to moves to consolidate
Muslims as a separate communalist political force.
Pt. Nehru's emphasis on secularism has to be viewed not only in relation
to the Muslim problem which survived partition, but it has also to be seen
in the context of his plea for science and India's need to get rid of the
heavy and deadening burden of rituals and superstitions, products of periods
of grave weakness and hostile environment when nothing nobler than survival
was possible. Seen in this perspective, the ideologies of socialism and
secularism have served as mine sweepers. They have cleared the field of
dead conventions sufficiently to make it possible for new builders to move
in. Sheikh Abdullah exaggerated when he charged Pt. Nehru with Machiavellian-
ism, but he was not too wide off the mark when he wrote in Aatish-e-Chinar that
Nehru was "a great admirer of the past heritage and the Hindu spirit of India..
He considered himself as an instrument of rebuilding India with its ancient
spirit".
The trouble is that self-styled Nehruites and other secularists are not
able to recognize that India is no longer the convalescent she was not only
when Gandhiji launched his first mass movement but also when she achieved
independence with Pt. Nehru as the first prime minister. The two leaders
have helped nurse her back to health as have their critics in different
ways. That is the implication of my observation that the energies now
unleashed have been at work for two centuries.
Only on a superficial view, resulting from a lack of appreciation of
the history of modern India, beginning with Raja Rammohan Roy in the early
19th century, can the rise of Ramjanakbhoomi issue to its present prominence
be said to be the result of a series of 'accidents': the sudden appearance
of the Ramlalla idol in the structure in 1949 and the opening of the gate
under the Faizabad magistrate's orders in 1986 being the most important. As
in all such cases, these developments have helped bring out and reinforce
something that was already growing - the 200-year-old movement for self-
renewal and self-affirmation by Hindus. If this was not so, the 'accidents'
in question would have petered out.
Similarly, while it cannot be denied that the RSS, the VHP, and the BJP
have played a major role in mobilizing support for the cause of the temple,
it should also be noted that they could not have achieved the success they
have if the general atmosphere was not propitious and the time not ripe.
Indeed, not to speak of Gandhiji who aroused and mobilized Hindus as no
one had before him, fought the Christian missionary assault and successfully
resisted the British imperialist designs to divide harijans from Hindu
society, it would be unfair to deny Nehru's and Indira Gandhi's contribu-
tions to the Hindu resurgence that we witness today. A civilizational revival,
it may be pointed out, is a gradual, complex, and many-sided affair.
Again, only on the basis of a superficial view is it possible to see
developments in India in isolation from developments in the larger world.
Nehru's worldview, for instance, was deeply influenced by the socialist
theories sweeping Europe in the wake of the First WW and the Soviet
revolution in 1917. By the same token, this worldview, which has dominated
our thinking for well over six decades, could not but become irrelevant in
view of the collapse of communist regimes in eastern Europe, and the
disarray in the Soviet Union itself. This cannot be seriously disputed
even on rational grounds. Intensification of the search for identity in
India today is part of a similar development all over the world,
especially in view of the collapse of communist 'universalism'. But if
it is a mere coincidence that Ramjanabhoomi issue has gathered support
precisely in this period of the disintegration of Soviet power abroad and
the decline of the Nehruvian consensus at home, it is an interesting one.
At the conscious level, the BJP, among political formations, has chosen
to be an instrument of India's cultural and civilizational recovery and
reaffirmation. As such, it is natural that it will figure prominently in
the reshaping of India in the coming years and decades. But others too will
play their parts in the gigantic enterprise. VP Singh, for instance, has
already rendered yeoman service to the cause by undermining the social
coalition which has dominated the country's politics for most of the period
since independence.
When a master idea seizes the mind, as socialism did in the twenties,
and as Hindutva has done now, it must usher in radical change. In the
twenties and the decades that followed before and after independence,
conservative forces were not strong enough to resist the socialist idea.
Similarly, conservative forces are not strong enough today to defeat the
Hindutva ideal. There is a difference, though, for a while the socialist
ideal related primarily to economic reorganization and was elitist in its
approach by virtue of being a Western import, Hindutva seeks, above all,
to unleash the energies of a whole people which foreign rule froze or
drove underground.
When a historic change of this magnitude takes place, intellectual
confusion is generally unavoidable. The human mind, as a rule, trails
behind events; it is not capable of anticipating them. But it should be
possible to cut through the mass of confusion and get to the heart of
the matter.
The heart of the matter is that if India's vast spiritual (psychic in
modern parlance) energies, largely dormant for centuries, had to be tapped,
Hindus had to be aroused; they could be aroused only by the use of a
powerful symbol; that symbol could only be Ram, as was evident in the
twenties when the Mahatma moved millions by his talk of Ramrajya; once the
symbol takes hold of the popular mind, as Ram did in the twenties and as
it has done now, opposition to it generally adds to its appeal.
An element of subjectivity and voluntarism, typical of a modern Western-
ized mind, has got introduced in the previous paragraph because that is
the way I also think. In reality, the time spirit (Mahakala) unfolds itself
under its own auspices, at its own momentum, as it were; we can either
cooperate with it, or resist it at our peril.
Historians can continue to debate whether a temple, in fact, existed at
the site of Babri Masjid in Ayodhya; whether it was , in fact, a Ram temple;
whether it was destroyed; or whether it had collapsed on its own. Similarly,
moralists and secularists can go on arguing that it is not right to replace
one place of worship by another, especially as long as the foregoing issues
have not been resolved. But this is not how history moves and civilizational
issues are settled.
Pertinent is the fact that for no other site have Hindus fought so
bitterly for so long with such steadfastness as over Ramjanambhoomi in
Ayodhya. There is no rational explanation for this and it is futile to
look for one. All that is open to us is to grasp the fact and power of
the mystery.
In all cultures and societies under great stress flows an invisible
undercurrent. It does not always break surface. But when it does, it
transforms the scene. This is how events in Ayodhya should be seen. The
Patal Ganga, of which all Indians must have heard, has broken surface
there. Human beings have doubtless played a part in this surfacing. But
witness the remarkable fact that we do not know and, in fact, do not care
who installed the Ramlalla idol in the Babri structure and who demolished
the structure on 6 December 1992.
While almost everyone else is looking for scapegoats, to me it seems that
every known actor is playing his or her allotted role in the vast drama that
is being enacted. We are, as it were, witnessing the enactment of a
modern version of Valmiki's Ramayana.
