Pratap Bhanu Mehta - Events of December 6, 1992 assaulted both secularism and Hinduism
The 25th anniversary
of that fateful day in Ayodhya when the Babri Masjid was demolished brings a
sense of foreboding. The psychological and historical significance of that day
is complex. But when all is said and done, it has to be admitted that the worst
of our political tendencies that were on display on December 6, 1992, are now
in the ascendant. Open majoritarianism and divisiveness is now a dominant
cultural and political sensibility. The nature of the act that brought down the
Babri Masjid structure, a form of violent vigilantism, is freely accepted in politics.
The idea that something nebulous like community sentiment can trump the
Constitution, values of equality and individual liberty, and the rule of law
itself, is now considered political common sense.
The sensibility that
informed the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, a kind of coarse, mediocre and insecure
aggression, has become second nature to politics. The transformation of
Hinduism that the events in Ayodhya represented continues unabated. Instead of
its highest philosophical aspirations being guided by the plenitude of the
world and a blissful realisation of the Self, Hinduism’s aspiration became
defined by raw assertions of power. Its leadership, if we can call it that,
came to be characterised by an odd combination of agitators and new-age
hucksters.
Piety was replaced by
a will to power. The cultural ideal that Ram constituted was finally reduced to
a single point. The living reality of Ram, in an effective sense, had till this
point never been erased. But by reducing Ram to a crude historical drama, India
for the first time assaulted Ram. That fateful day assaulted the Ram of
Valmiki, Tulsi and Kamban and countless other real Rams. They replaced it with
the Ram of L.K. Advani and Adityanath and Ashok Singhal. Did faith live or die
that day?
Then there was the
corruption of all political parties under a feigned faith. As the Congress once
again does the rounds of temples, it is worth remembering that it was its
duplicity, its double-speak on constitutional values, its attempts to run both
Hindu nationalism and Muslim identity politics together that brought us to this
pass. Whatever its professed values, its credibility was reduced to a point
from which it is still not recovered. The BJP had its ups and downs since the
movement, but its organisation and commitment made sure that its views
penetrated across a range of civil society institutions. But it is politically
reaching a point where it will be hard for it to deny its core supporters the
satisfaction of the temple being built. Almost all the elements of building the
temple, creating a political momentum, opening up institutional spaces, are
being put in place. We will give in out of sheer weariness. But the scars of
divisiveness will continue.
Indian institutions
have never been strong, and riot victims from numerous riots, including 1984,
still await justice. But the role of non-elected institutions should come under
the scanner. Cases were not swiftly disposed of from the early Fifties, keeping
the ground perpetually open for facts on the ground to be distorted. Despite
the Liberhan Commission, the leaders in that act of vigilantism have, 25 years
later, not been called to account. The psychological message that sends, that
you can get away with anything, so long as you can invoke faith, damages institutions.
For years, the Supreme
Court has tried its old trick of a modus vivendi by deferring the decision. Now
the Court has decided to resume hearings in February next year. It will not be
appropriate to speculate how it will rule. But it is a fair institutional point
that the Supreme Court has damaged its reputation and credibility so much over
the last few months that it will have to go the extra mile of care, fairness
and probity to ensure that whatever its judgement, justice is not only done,
but seen to be done.
There is no question
that on that day, a significant number of Hindus felt, even if briefly, a sense
of catharsis. The range of psychological complexes behind that need to be
unpacked. At a very immediate level, the rank opportunism of the Congress
during the Eighties left the country insecure; from Salman Rushdie to Shah
Bano, it was easy to indict the Congress. Thanks to the Rajiv Gandhi years,
Nehruvian secularism became a byword for opportunism and corruption, not for
liberty and rule of law. So the symbolic destruction of the so-called Nehruvian
order became a live force in Indian politics. The demolition of the masjid
represented that.
Second, as V.S.
Naipaul, one of the few writers who has the depth to go to dark psychological
spaces, understood, there were too many suppressed histories in India; and the
simple-minded historical pieties and institutional control of the Left-Congress
alliance on history could no longer cope with these. The sense that many
Indians have, of being denuded of their history and their own power to write
it, was and remains widespread. Stories of cultural oppression win out because
there is sometimes a comfort in victimhood; it directs attention away from our
failings. But more deeply, we
could never say: It should not matter what the medieval India story is, let the
historians argue it out. But we cannot tie the fate of the present to what
happened in the 16th century. It binds us to the past more than it liberates
the future. Babri Masjid is the symbol of the tyranny of the past over the
future.
Hindutva as an
ideology was constituted by resentment because it saw Hinduism as constituted
by three deficits: It has no political centre, its history has been marginalised
by others, and it is internally weak and divided. Ayodhya was the cheap
psychological recompense for these deficits. It attempted to give a Hinduism a
political identity and centre, it attempted to reclaim history, and one could
always have a consciousness of strength by targeting minorities. But this sense
of lack, once internalised, cannot be easily satiated because it is a flight
from reality. It does not have the inner cultural resources to make Hinduism
creative and progressive; instead, it sees diversity, creativity and plenitude
as a threat. It has no ethical mooring, because its idea of strength is a crude
masculine assertion, not the power of inner conviction. The agitators tied
themselves to the yoke of the temple, because they felt Ram’s presence, his
karuna, the least. The events of December
6, 1992 assaulted both secularism and Hinduism, and the consequences are still
to play out fully.
see also
The Broken Middle (on the 30th anniversary of 1984)
Documents of the Sampradayikta Virodhi Andolan
1948: Assassination of Gandhi
The Abolition of truth: on the Parivar's celebration of Godse
सत्य की हत्या
The Abolition of truth: on the Parivar's celebration of Godse
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