Mukulika Banerjee : My parents bequeathed to me a lived liberalism. From Dec 6, 1992, that virtue, that country, is besieged

By Dilip -
I had a dream on the night of December 6, 1992, the day the Babri Masjid was destroyed. 
It went like this:

My parents and I are travelling in an open top safari-style jeep. We are looking over the sides, scanning the trees on either side of the rough road, searching for something. And then one of us shouts to indicate they had spotted something and we come to a halt and scramble out. Pulling the thick undergrowth aside, we find what we are looking for - large white human bones, that resemble the rounded form of Henry Moore’s sculptures. My father says, “there he is, there is Gandhi. We can take him back with us now”. 

As we lift the pieces carefully, we realise that in our frantic search we had unknowingly crossed a line, a border of some sorts, across which “Gandhi” lay. Realising we would not be allowed to bring him back from across the border, we lower the pieces we had so eagerly picked up and drive back the way we came, looking over our shoulders and thinking how close we had come to the treasure we could not claim. I have only once in my life had a dream like this, but it has stayed with me forever. I remember narrating it to my doctoral supervisor in his Oxford office. Even though its vividness felt real, it had come across as embarrassingly heavy with meaning and symbolism in the telling and so I rarely spoke of it again.


But the dream has never gone away and this year especially, it gives expression to inchoate emotions that have dominated the last few months. This will be the first December of my life without my parents. My mother died exactly two years ago, on my parents’ 56th wedding anniversary and my father at the end of May this year, a week after the new Indian government took office. With them, they also seemed to have taken an India that they had given my generation and me. ...
https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/babri-masjid-demolition-new-india-ram-janmabhoomi-ayodhya-ram-temple-6152805/



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