Many lessons in life are learnt with the benefit of hindsight. After history has already moved on, we realise we ought to have been on the right side of history. However, there is nothing wrong if recognition of mistakes leads us to course correction. All commit mistakes of one kind or the other, at some time or the other. Knowing we committed mistakes, and having the courage to rectify them, absolves us in the judgment of history.
The millennia-old journey of India shows that the integration of diverse elements and creating unity out of this diversity has been its greatest strength. Someday, the entire world will have to follow this universal ideal of India.
Those who negate the diversity and unity of India, and reject the principles that sustain both its diversity and unity, are inevitably pushed to the wrong side of history. For proof, look at how Pakistan created itself by partitioning India through a bloodbath on the basis of the false 'Two-nation Theory’, and the mess it has landed itself in.
Diversity: A Benchmark of Indian Civilisation
Civilisational India has never scoffed at or suppressed diversity. Do I profess a religion different from that practised by others? No problem. India still treats me as much of an Indian as others. Do I speak the language of a minority community that is different from others? No problem. I will not be persecuted and excommunicated here for that reason.
True, injustices of different kinds have often marred our society. But it has never been bereft of the impulse of self-reform and self-renewal. Kingdoms have fought wars here, as has happened everywhere else in the world. But India has never witnessed destructive civil or religious wars.
Rather, our social and national life has proceeded on the lines of reconciliation of the apparent opposites. By and large, mutual tolerance –the spirit of live and let live – has been the leitmotif of Indian civilisation.
But this does not mean diverse elements have lived here in splendid isolation and separation, simply tolerating the existence of neighbours but having very little to do with them. No. The force of uniting them through the virtue of mutual learning, mutual assimilation, and the creation of a broader synthesis has been ceaselessly at work. Without this force, India would have disintegrated long ago into many warring social groups and nations.
In his profound essay On Nationalism (first published in 1917), Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore reflects on this uniting force and writes: "For India has all along been trying experiments in evolving a social unity within which all the different peoples could be held together, while fully enjoying the freedom of maintaining their own differences. The tie has been as loose as possible, yet as close as the circumstances permitted. This has produced something like a United States of a social federation, whose common name is Hinduism.”
The use of the word 'Hinduism’ in the context of examining the uniting factor of Indian nationalism may seem controversial. However, the controversy disappears once we know that, throughout history, the word 'Hindu’ has carried dual meanings. It has stood for the peaceful coexistence of a disparate set of religious beliefs and practices without allegiance to a single Book or a Prophet.
But it has also connoted the distinct national identity of the people living in this geography. None, perhaps, has explained the evolutionary connection between the words 'Sindhu’, 'Hindu’, 'Hind’, and 'India’ better than Jawaharlal Nehru in his classic The Discovery of India. (To this day, the Chinese name for India is 'Yindu’.)
Ram Is at the Core of the Idea of India
Why this rather long preface on Indian nationalism in an article on the reconstruction of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya, which will be inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on 22 January with a lot of fanfare? Marxists, Islamists, and Ambedkarites will contest this, but the reason is this: Ram has been one of the main symbols of what Tagore describes as “the United States of a social federation, whose common name is "Hinduism”.
Reading the story of the Ramayana is sufficient to know how Ram came to reign in the hearts and minds of a majority of the people in the vast landmass of India. From North to South, and from West to East, the footprints of Ramayana are spread everywhere.
My native village Satti, on the banks of River Krishna in Northern Karnataka, is over a thousand miles away from Ayodhya, but its main temple is that of Ram. While studying in my third standard, my school took me on an excursion to the historic town of Hampi (seat of the glorious Vijayanagar kingdom). Near River Tungabhadra, we saw three lines marked on a large rock.
The guide explained that these were of Sita’s saree falling over the rock when Ravana abducted her and took her to Lanka. KV Puttappa (Kuvempu) the greatest Kannada poet in modern times, won the Jnanpith award for his magnum opus 'Sri Ramayana Darshanam’.
Kuvempu was not a Brahmin. I am saying this just to underscore that Ram is venerated by Hindus of all castes. The name of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar’s father was Ramji. And Ram appears in the names of many Dalit leaders, including Kanshi Ram, Ram Vilas Paswan, and Ramdas Athawale. Deep South in Rameswaram near Kanyakumari, one of Tamil Nadu’s magnificent temples is that of Ram. High up in the Himalayas, Nepal has Ram Janaki Temple in Janakpur, the birthplace of Sita.
Come to Sindh in the West, a province now in Pakistan. In his autobiography My Country My Life, veteran BJP leader LK Advani, who led the Ram Rath Yatra in 1990 to popularise the demand for reconstruction of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya, reminisces about his childhood in Karachi. “Religious fanaticism,” he writes, "was foreign to both Muslims and Hindus in Sindh.
This is best illustrated by the teachings of Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai, who was born in the late seventeenth century and is universally regarded as the greatest Sindhi poet of all times. A yogi himself, he writes in Sur Ramkali, a book of poems about renunciants: "Yogis carry nothing with themselves, certainly not their own self (ego).... They have sewed up their hearts to Rama. . . For them joy is the same as sorrow; they offer arati with their tears of blood.... If you want to be a yogi, follow the guru, forget all desires, and proceed to Hinglaj. Yogis respond to an ancient, timeless call – a call given well before Islam. They have given up everything, to be one with Gorakhnath."
The reference to Hinglaj here is to the Hinglaj Mata Temple situated in distant Balochistan. According to local legend, Lord Rama is believed to have meditated at the cave in Hinglaj to atone for his sin of killing Ravana, who was a great devotee of Lord Shiva.
Even today, Hindu pilgrims and local Muslim residents jointly celebrate the annual fair at the temple.
Come to the East, to Thailand, which lies in India’s extended civilisational neighbourhood. Ayutthaya, around 70 kilometres North of Bangkok, is Thailand’s Ayodhya, the capital of the ancient kingdom of Siam. It was founded by King Rama I who ascended the throne in 1782. Since then, all the kings of Thailand have Rama in their name.
The name of Ram (and several other Hindu deities) appears reverentially more than 500 times in Guru Granth Sahib, the sacred religious book of the Sikhs. Guru Nanak Devji says: "In this dark age Kaliyug, enshrine thou Rama’s Name in thy heart.” He visited Ayodhya in 1510, just as he also visited Mecca. Like Mahatma Gandhi, who came long after him, Guru Nanak Devji believed that God is One, and all the people on this planet are His children…and they have a God-imposed responsibility to live in harmony and mutual cooperation.
In her book, Sri Ramachandra – The Ideal King, Annie Besant highlights the centrality of the Ramayana in shaping the national consciousness of Indian people. She writes: “We owe to these great poems (in the epic written by Sage Valmiki) most of what is known publicly of ancient India. Therein we see how the national, social and family life was carried on, the ways of living, the joys and sorrows, the education of the young, the ideas of the populace. To think of ancient India, with all that we have learnt from the Ramayana blotted out, would be to gaze at a blurred canvas instead of a living picture.”
For Kabir, the great saint-poet of Nirguna sampradaya (the tradition that sees God in a formless manner), Ramanama (chanting the name of Ram) is better than reading the Vedas and Puranas. He also hailed Ram as a harmoniser of Hindu and Muslim communities – "Brahma is Rama, and He is Rahim."
Many Indian Muslims, too, have shown great respect for Ram as an ideal ruler who embodied noble human qualities. For example, Allama Iqbal, regarded by Pakistanis as their national poet, described him as India’s 'Imam-e-Hind’ (the spiritual leader of India). Here is the poem he wrote eulogising Ram:
The cup of India has always overflowed
With the heady wine of truth.
Even the philosophers from the West
Are her ardent devotees.
There is something so sublime in her mysticism.
That her star soars high above constellations.
There have been thousands of rulers in this land
But none can compare with Ram;
The discerning ones proclaim him
The spiritual leader of India.
His lamp gave the light of wisdom
Which outshone the radiance
Of the whole of humankind
was valiant, Ram was bold, wielded deftly his sword,
He cared for the poorest of poor
He was unmatched in love and compassion.
In the final years of his life, Iqbal (1877-1938) became a votary of the Muslim League’s demand for Pakistan and even disowned his poem on Ram. But that only proves the baneful effect of the ideology of Muslim separatism on him. It does not diminish the greatness of Ram, as the greatest Urdu poet in the modern era had himself once acknowledged.
Maulana Zafar Ali Khan, regarded as the father of Urdu journalism, wrote:
Naqsh-e-tehziib-Hunud ab bhi numaya hai agar
To wo Sita se hai, Lachhman se hai aur Ram se hai
(If the imprints of the Hindu civilisation are still evident. These are because of Sita, Lakshman and Rama.)
Not all Hindus – or others who respect Ram – view him in the same way. Many regard him as God or God’s incarnation. But some don’t. They see him as a noble person who, nevertheless, committed some mistakes since he was after all a human being.
In the vast commentaries on Ramayana, Ram is sometimes criticised for the manner in which he slayed Vali, the Vanara king, and for asking his wife Sita to undergo Agni Pariksha (the fire test) to prove her purity and loyalty. Similarly, the Buddha, who is also regarded by many Hindus as an incarnation of God, did not believe in the existence of God.
Hinduism has room for such diversity of views. People enjoy the freedom to criticise and even reject well-established norms, without institutional persecution. This tolerant trait of Hinduism has deeply influenced the making of modern India as a democracy and a free and open society.
Congress Dilly-Dallied on the Temple Issue
All this, and much more, is known to well-informed Indians. They know that the unity of India is not something administrative, created by the British colonial rule. Nor is it guaranteed only by the Constitution of India, adopted in 1950. Rather, it is essentially cultural and civilisational, and Ram is one of the central figures – albeit not the sole figure – in the formation of India’s national identity.
Therefore, when the Hindu demand for the reconstruction of the Ram Temple at the site of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya surfaced soon after Independence, it was entirely legitimate.
The demand did not gain nationwide attention because India had just come out of the trauma of Partition. But it is wrong to think, as many leftist secularists do, that the demand was artificially created by the Sangh Parivar.
Subsequent events, including the massive response to Advani’s Ram Rath Yatra, have amply proved that crores of Hindus of all castes supported this cause.
When the demand resurfaced in the 1980s, many Congress leaders in Uttar Pradesh and North India backed it much before the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) adopted a formal resolution endorsing it at the meeting of its National Executive in Palampur, Himachal Pradesh, in June 1989.
One of them was Gulzarilal Nanda, a widely respected Gandhian, a minister in the governments of Jawaharlal Nehru, Lal Bahadur Shastri, and Indira Gandhi, and also India’s interim prime minister on two occasions, in 1964 and 1966. I have heard from an unimpeachable source that when Paramahans Ramachandradas, a widely respected saint from Ayodhya who had been championing the temple cause since 1949, met Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in early 1984 and sought her support, her response was emphatically positive. Tragically, she was assassinated in October of the same year.
Today’s Congress leaders should also remember that the locks of the Babri Mosque were opened in 1986 when Rajiv Gandhi was the Prime Minister. In November 1989, he sent Buta Singh, the then-home minister, to Ayodhya to participate in the Shilanyas (foundation stone-laying) ceremony of the temple.
He even launched the Congress party’s campaign for the 1989 parliamentary election with a rally at Ayodhya-Faizabad. At this meeting, he promised to establish ‘Rama Rajya’.
Several Congress leaders are now claiming that he was ill-advised by a coterie in his own party into committing these "egregious mistakes”. If this was indeed the case, it reflects badly on Rajiv Gandhi’s leadership and exposes his confused thinking on an important matter. This becomes clearer when, earlier in 1985, he used the Congress party’s brute majority in Parliament to annul the Supreme Court’s verdict in the Shah Bano case. The Congress Party’s downward slide – and the BJP’s meteoric rise commenced then, and has continued till now.
Congress Party’s Clouded Judgment on Ram Mandir Matter
The Congress party’s confused stand on the Ram Mandir at Ayodhya has continued till today.
The party has declined the invitation for Sonia Gandhi, party president Mallikarjun Kharge, and the party's leader in Lok Sabha Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury to attend the inauguration ceremony on 22 January. The reason it has given for skipping the event is that "the RSS/BJP have long made a political project of the temple in Ayodhya,” which is entirely true.
But in the same breath, the party’s press statement says: "Religion is a personal matter.”
If religion is indeed a personal matter, why did Rajiv Gandhi do all that he did in Ayodhya? Why have several leaders of the Congress in UP, including the newly appointed state president Ajay Rai and in-charge Avinash Pande, announced they will visit Ayodhya on 15 January, take a dip in the holy Saryu and then offer prayers to Ram Lalla?
We should not be surprised if Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi, and Priyanka Gandhi also visit the Ram Temple in Ayodhya in the near future. The question is: Why did the Congress leadership dilly-dally on this matter for so long?
Why did it disregard the Hindu sentiment and oppose the Ram Janmabhoomi movement in the beginning, thereby allowing the BJP to monopolise it? Why didn’t it actively persuade the Muslim community to accept and respect the legitimate aspirations of that of Hindus.
Muslim Leaders’ Intransigence Failed the Community
A majority of the Muslim community’s religious, social, and political leaders adopted an obdurate stand on the matter.
First, along with many leftists, they simply rejected the Hindu claim that the Babri Masjid was built after demolishing a pre-existing Ram Temple on a site that many Hindus believe is the birthplace of Ram. Whether it was indeed the birthplace of Ram is a matter of faith. But that the Babri Mosque was built at a place where an ancient temple existed is an irrefutable fact.
This fact has been established beyond a shadow of doubt by archaeological and documentary evidence.
The breaking of idols and destruction of Hindu temples took place in many parts of India under the rule of some fanatic Muslim kings. Denial of this fact is futile.
If Muslim fanaticism and intolerance could result in the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddha in Afghanistan in the age of television, how can it be argued that such acts of zealotry did not take place in the past?
The second wrong step most Muslim leaders took was to tell their community that keeping the Babri Mosque intact at the place where it stood was a life-and-death issue for Muslims in India. They simply refused to listen to the Hindu community’s plea that the Babri Mosque could not have the same significance for Muslims as it did for Hindus.
There was a time when Advani and other leaders of the temple movement publicly appealed to the Muslim community to respect the Hindu sentiments for Ram Janmabhoomi so that the Babri Mosque could be respectfully shifted to a nearby location making way for the construction of the temple. Advani even said, "If the Muslim community supports our cause at Ayodhya, I shall persuade Hindu religious leaders to give up their demand to shift the mosques in Kashi (near Vishwanath Temple) and Mathura (at Krishna Janmasthan).” His plea fell on deaf ears.
The third wrong was the common stand of the Congress, leftists, and the Muslim leadership that protection of the Babri Mosque was necessary to protect secularism in India. This made more and more Hindus believe that secularism, as professed and practised in India, is partial to Muslims and inimical to Hindus. Since 2014, when Modi became the PM, the BJP has conducted this propaganda to malign secularism with great effect.
Finally, Muslim leaders, as also Congress and leftist leaders, said, “Let the courts decide. We have faith in the judiciary.” Had they come forward to give up their claim on the disputed site and engaged the Hindu leaders in a trust-promoting out-of-the-court solution, both the mosque and the temple could have been rebuilt through mutual cooperation. The positive effect of doing so on communal harmony and national integration would have been immeasurable.
The Judiciary, as is its wont, delayed its work inordinately. The delay helped the hardliners in the Sangh Parivar to inflame Hindu sentiments, which ultimately resulted in the demolition of the Babri Mosque on 6 December 1992 – an act of mob criminality that was as unconstitutional as it was against the basic ethos of Hinduism. In the riots and terror attacks ensuing and preceding this event, hundreds of innocent people belonging to both communities were killed.
The SC finally pronounced its judgment in November 2019 in favour of the Hindu claim, paving the way for the construction of the Ram Temple. Soon thereafter, Ranjan Gogoi, the Chief Justice who headed the five-judge bench that delivered the verdict, was nominated to the Rajya Sabha. This, along with its recent verdicts in so many other cases of national importance have placed a question mark over the integrity of the higher Judiciary.
Let’s Heed Mahatma Gandhi’s Words on Ram Rajya
The occasion also places questions before the Muslim community and its leaders. What did they gain from their obduracy? Will they introspect? Time only will tell.
Predictably, the Modi government and the entire Sangh Parivar have created an atmosphere of unprecedented Hindu triumphalism and political religiosity before the inauguration of the Ram Temple, which has still not been constructed fully.
Clearly, the date of inauguration has been brought forward to benefit the BJP in the 2024 parliamentary elections, which are just a few months away. But true devotees of Ram should ask themselves: Is this the purpose for which the temple has been built? Is true devotion to Ram about prayer or pomp? Is it about elevating the moral character of society or spreading bigotry and showing hideous power-play?
Hindus must also ponder over this important question: Can religious fervour of the masses be used to buy their silence, especially the silence of the educated classes, over the government’s brazen assaults on democratic principles and institutions?
There are also other questions that call for Hindu introspection. Its demand for reconstructing the Ram Temple at Ayodhya was justified. But can the mob action to demolish a Muslim mosque be justified? Or, the igniting of anti-Muslim sentiments all over the country, only in order to help a political party win elections and consolidate its grip on power? Or, mob lynching of innocent Muslims, attacks on Muslim places of worship; economic boycott of Muslim traders; blatant discrimination in education, employment and housing; and near-total disenfranchisement of Muslims in the legislative and governance structures of Indian democracy…can all these be justified?
By making common Hindus intolerant, fanatic, bigoted, and immune to violence, isn’t Hindutva copying the worst features of Islamism?
If we Hindus don’t struggle to recover the essential virtues and teachings of Hinduism, we will be guilty of doing far greater harm to Indian democracy, Indian secularism, and India’s national integration than has already happened. At least with the benefit of hindsight, all of us need to learn the lessons of history.
A final question. Ram Temple is here. But where is Ram Rajya – the rule of Dharma (righteousness)? The rule of ethics and justice? The rule of compassion? The spirit of reconciliation and peace-building?
As India remains transfixed in the coming days and weeks on the inauguration of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya, it is useful to recall the wise words of the greatest Ram Bhakt of our times.
In October 1947 – that is, two months after partitioned India gained bloodstained independence and three months before he was assassinated by a person who had 'Ram’ in his name – Mahatma Gandhi wrote in his Harijan newspaper. “My Hinduism teaches me to respect all religions. In this lies the secret of Rama Rajya. (19-10-1947). “If you want to see God in the form of Rama Rajya, the first requisite is self-introspection. You have to magnify your own faults a thousand-fold and shut your eyes to the faults of your neighbours. That is the only way to real progress. (26-10-1947).
Through these words, the Mahatma speaks to Hindus, Muslims, Congress, BJP, leftists, rightists … to all of us.
(The writer, who served as an aide to India’s former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, is the founder of the ‘Forum for a New South Asia – Powered by India-Pakistan-China Cooperation’. He tweets @SudheenKulkarni and welcomes comments at sudheenkulkarni@gmail.com. This is an opinion piece. The views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)
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