Ep. 122: The Return of Sri Rama to Ayodhya, Hindu Holocausts and real secularism

Not for retribution, but in homage, and in resolve to never let it happen again. Never again.

Used with thanks according to Fair use provisions, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36096379

The 5 villages in the Mahabharata

It is ironic that when Sri Rama is center-stage, the Mahabharata, or to be precise, a telling minor episode from it, may be even more relevant than the Ramayana. That is the episode wherein the Pandavas and the Kauravas negotiate how they will divide up their kingdom, now that there are irreconcilable differences. The Pandavas ask for just five principalities; the Kauravas reject it. The Pandavas then request just five villages; the Kauravas reject that too, in toto.

That led, inevitably, to conflict. 

In the modern version, Hindu groups asked for just three of their holiest shrines to be returned to them, just three: Rama Janmabhumi, Krishna Janmasthan, and Kashi Viswanath’s Gyanvapi. This, despite physical and documentary evidence that of the order of 100,000 Hindu temples were torn down and replaced by mosques (and churches too, for example the Mylapore Shiva temple on the seashore razed and the San Thome Basilica built on top of it).

It is my belief that the Muslim side was willing to concede Ayodhya, Mathura, and Gyavapi, especially given that these sites were of no particular interest whatsoever in Muslim theology: they were merely victory monuments. On the other hand, they were important to Hindus. 

But a peaceful resolution, while still possible, was thwarted by Communists and Leftists.

This is implied even by K K Mohammed, the Archeological Survey director who led the Ayodhya excavation. Jaundiced Leftist ‘scholars’ convinced Muslims that there was no need to compromise; they guaranteed victory because they, ‘eminent historians’, would ‘prove’ there was no buried temple. 

These same Leftists were later exposed as charlatans when they testified in the Supreme Court. One JNU ‘historian’ had to confess she had never even visited Ayodhya. Another had to admit under oath that she had lied about witnessing the excavations: records showed she wasn’t there when the evidence was unearthed. Yet both had pontificated loudly. And today there’s another JNU PhD who floods Twitter/X with half-baked theories, notable only for sheer chutzpah.

Thus, it appears that the opportunity for conciliation was lost and the minimum demand for just Ayodhya, Kashi, and Mathura may no longer hold. There are many others – the Bhojshala, Qutb Minar (built over 27 Hindu and Jain temples) and St. Paul’s (expanded over the Vedapuri Iswaran temple in Pondicherry) all could now be in play –  if not all 100,000 temples that were destroyed and taken over: see Sitaram Goel’s Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them?

Nobody is asking for reparations, or blaming people today for what happened in the past, but there is a growing quest for historical justice, through proper legal means. 

That means due process, and it was the Supreme Court of India that ruled, after weighing the evidence, that there had been a pre-existing Hindu temple on the Ayodhya site. The evidence for the Gyanvapi site is even more clinching. And as someone who has visited Mathura, I can say that there too, the Idgah is visibly a later addition, looming over the pre-existing Sri Krishna temple. The murtis were allegedly moved, and buried below the steps of a mosque.

The remarkable Places of Worship Act, 1991, passed during the prime-ministership of PV Narasimha Rao (Congress), also needs to be revisited. Why on earth should there be such a one-sided and arbitrary statute of limitations? Besides, even in Ayodhya, the Muslims have been given a 5-acre plot of land to construct a very large mosque, so there is ample recompense. 

An incredible ten days

The past few days have been evocative and eventful:

• Jan 22: Pran Pratishta in Ayodhya

• Jan 23: the date of the Battle of Talikota, 1565, that led to the total destruction of the fabled Vijayanagar Empire and the loot, sack and burning (apparently for six months) of its capital

• Jan 26: ASI report on Gyanvapi released, which suggests there is evidence that there was a Hindu temple over which the mosque was built

• Jan 27: Jewish Holocaust Day (marking the release of prisoners from the Auschwitz concentration camp): one more instance of Abrahamics persecuting others (even though in this case the victims were also Abrahamics)

The sad thing, though, is that the reality of a Hindu Holocaust is not appreciated by most Hindus, not to speak of foreigners. I have personally been to State-funded memorials to Jews and to Roma in Berlin, and to the Cambodian memorial in Phnom Penh, but in India there is only one Hindu Holocaust Museum, a private effort by Francois Gautier in Pune at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Museum of Indian History. 

Why this collective amnesia? Very likely 100 million Hindus were killed under colonial rule, both Turkic Muslim (through war) and European Christian (through loot and famine; see Mike Davis in Late Victorian Holocausts); this has to be remembered. Not for retribution, but in homage, and in resolve to never let it happen again. Never again. 

Temple-breaking as ‘Masks of Conquest’

The January 26th news about the Gyanvapi is notable, as Reshmi Dasgupta writes. For one thing, in photographs it is evident that Aurangazeb’s mosque was hastily built on top of the still-standing columns of a Hindu temple. Now comes the damning evidence that there were attempts to obfuscate, with (recent) erasures of stone inscriptions that gave the dates of the building of the mosque, and “deliberate blocking with debris and stone” of sealed cellars, which, when opened, showed damaged Hindu murtis, according to Nupur Sharma. 

This reminded me of the claim by PN Oak years ago that the Taj Mahal is a repurposed Hindu palace/temple, and that its sealed cellars, if opened, would be full of Hindu artifacts. 

Amit Majmudar articulated why the reconsecration of Ayodhya's Ram Mandir is a singular and historical phenomenon. He argues there has never been another instance where a shrine of a non-Abrahamic religion had ever been reconstructed after it had been conquered, razed and replaced with an Abrahamic shrine. 

Innumerable 'pagan' or 'heathen' temples that have been torn down and Christian or Muslim places of worship, mostly as an emphatic assertion of the primacy of the Abrahamic deity over those of the earlier religion, for example in Europe (over ‘pagan’ shrines), West Asia, and Latin America (over Inca and Maya temples). How humiliating it must have been to the worshippers of the old gods, and how much easier it would have made it to convert them!

These new structures were 'masks of conquest', much as the imposition of the conqueror's language is, as in Gauri Visvanathan's book. Indeed, the words 'pagan' or 'heathen' are full of disdain and contempt, signifying people who are somehow inferior, because their gods were inferior, because those gods could not even protect themselves. 

These conquered peoples (that is, those who had not converted) could do nothing more than seethe in impotent rage. Most of us internalized this as inevitable, and secretly began to, if not hate ourselves, accept that we are indeed low-class human beings. This was reflected in the entire discourse by Indians in the media for long. It was worse than a mere acceptance of religious apartheid, it was a veritable celebration of it under the rubric of ‘secularism’. 

From pseudo-secularism to secularism; from darkness to light

One of the unexpected moments during the prana-prathishta ceremony was during the recitation of Mahatma Gandhi’s favorite kirtan Raghupati Raghava Rajaram: he had gratuitously inserted a phrase “Ishwar Allah tero naam” (Thy name is Iswar or Allah) which has no obvious place in a Hindu hymn. But here they reverted to the original verses without Gandhi’s changes. That was the right thing to do.

I am writing this on Martyr’s Day, Jan 30th, the day of Gandhi’s assassination. He was a good man, well-meaning, and we all mourn for him. But he did have some strange views. 

The kind of ‘secularism’ (indeed it is pseudo-secularism, possibly an Indian invention) espoused by Gandhi and Nehru was distinctly skewed: instead of the State being impartial, it has been used to discriminate against Hindus, most brazenly in the fact that Hindu temples (and only Hindu temples) are controlled by the State. There is no question that this is an anomaly that needs to be corrected. 

In this context, another Narasimha Rao-era law, the Waqf Act of 1995 is also hard to justify. In effect, it creates an entitlement where Waqf boards (Muslim religious land boards) can lay claim to any property whatsoever. The Congress ‘donated’ a lot of property to the Waqf, eg. the Delhi High Court grounds; and I have heard Mukesh Ambani’s mansion is also on Waqf property. 

If Waqf claims your property, and you wish to contest it, the onus is on you to prove your ownership, else it will be absorbed into Waqf; you have to first deal with a Waqf tribunal, before you can take the case to civil courts. All this sounds positively surreal. 

Thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis

On the other hand, conflict is not inevitable. It is possible for someone to be culturally Indian (which means Dharmic), while professing their own religion. This is similar to what Vivek Ramaswamy emphasized during his run for POTUS: he is culturally American (which means Judeo-Christian), while retaining his Hindu religion. A Jewish Indian friend is a patriotic Indian.

Dharmic Asian faiths (“religions of the forest”) do not try to dominate others. I have seen that the eight-armed Lord Vishnu murti in Cambodia’s Angkor Wat is now ochre-robed and worshiped as the Buddha. I wrote in 1997 about how, according to Hsuen Tsang in the 7th century CE, the deity in Sabarimala was revered simultaneously as Lord Siva and the Bodhisattva (Buddha-to-be) Avalokitesvara Padmapani. In temples in Java, Indonesia, it is hard to tell where Lord Siva ends and the Buddha begins.

West Asian Abrahamic faiths (“religions of the desert”) would do well to be a little more tolerant and respectful like Dharmic faiths; fortunately, some of their faithful are.

I was reminded of this when listening to a song Janaki Jaane from the Malayalam film Dhwani (1988): a hymn to Rama and Sita, written in Sanskrit by a Muslim, Yusuf Ali Kecheri, and sung beautifully by a Christian, Yesudas. And possibly the very best cinematic interpretation of the Ramayana, The Legend of Prince Rama (1993), an animated masterpiece, was by Yugo Sako, a fellow-Dharmic Japanese. 

1750 words, Jan 30, 2024