History is being rewritten in India. The groundbreaking of Ram temple in Ayodhya with Prime Minister Narendra Modi laying the first brick of the grand temple was a quiet assertion of how India has changed and is likely to change in the coming decades. Outwardly, the country is quiet and calm. There are no protests, everyone seems to have bowed their head in obeisance to the Hindu deity. But the wave of saffron sweeping Ayodhya today leaves little doubt that the word ‘secular’ in the Indian constitution and in the Indian ethos has lost relevance.
Hinduism, as a philosophy and as a way of life, has long been a part of the Indian culture that extends beyond any particular religion. Hindu deity Rama was always associated with ‘dharma’ (righteousness) and each one of us first read about him in comic books with beautiful illustrations and then as grown-ups, we dwelled on the many messages, allegories and nuances of his life and he belonged to all of us. Somewhere in these last few decades, the whole thing became political and frankly unrecognizable. Cries of ‘Jai Shri Ram’ (Victory to Hindu deity Ram) had less to do with worship and more to do with electoral outcomes.
In 1992, a group of people affiliated with the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and its sister organisations gathered in Ayodhya and tore down the Babri mosque. It was an attempt to correct the inaccuracies and wrongs done in the past, was the justification, and the law be damned. The Mughal emperor Babur had destroyed a temple in the same spot and built this mosque, it was claimed. And this was the place of the birth of Rama. So now the logic was to tear down the mosque and reclaim the Hindu past and pride, all in one go. If only life and history were that simple. In tearing down of the mosque in 1992 and today, in the rebuilding of the temple, India has shrunk. Its space for its many religious minorities, not just the Muslims, has narrowed. The space to debate, dissent, question and demand a separation of the Church and the State, as laid down in the Indian constitution, has been given a quiet burial. And there seem to be no mourners.
Religion has entered the realm of politics quick and fast in these last few decades. The rise of the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), the ever-high popularity of Modi and the electoral defeats of the opposition in polls after polls, has ensured that no political party today utters the suicidal word ‘secularism’. The old Congress Party which prided itself on upholding the secular fabric of this country has shed its secular garb faster than the blink of an eye. Not that it has helped them reverse their political fortunes, but it has certainly opened them to the charges that the party was always ‘pseudo-secular’. It’s a dead party, fighting for its own survival, and offers no real opposition to the BJP.
Where then does this leave India’s religious minorities? The Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, and Parsis constitute about 19.3 per cent of its billion plus population with Muslims taking about 14 per cent of that share, according to the 2011 Census. For most of the minorities, the Hindu culture has always been a part of their own identities. Many rituals and traditions borrow from the other and that has always been the beauty of this country. Hindus have prided themselves on a philosophy that gave space to atheists as much as to devotees. The story of Rama, or Ramayana as it is popularly called has hundreds, if not thousands of versions and even a Jain version. They differ in many points but essentially it is the story of the deity Rama. These various versions have all been a part of Hinduism and India.
However, in Ayodhya, we seem to have chosen one version of Ramayana, one depiction of Rama and one vision of India, over multiple options. In doing so, we have closed the door on differences and on the ‘other’. The religious ‘others’ will now have to figure out where they fit in this ‘new’ India.
*Simran Sodhi is a senior journalist based in Delhi, India.
August 8, 2020
