Arun Shourie Courtesy- Google Pictures

Lessons for All

Although efforts to gain access to the spot at which Mir Baqi built the mosque had been going on for a long time, the mosque became more and more of a target in the last 10 years not because people felt that Babar had done wrong and that wrong should be set right. Acquiring the spot became a symbol of protest against the politics of the last 15 years, a politics that began to call to people’s mind the politics of the 1930s and 1940s—the politics, that is, which ended in the partition of India.

The state bending to rank communalists on Shah Bano, on Rushdie; the state stoking and then not being able to put Bhindranwale out; two lakh Hindus being thrown out of Kashmir and not one Prime Minister having a moment to even visit them; the media not only turning its eyes away from them, but giving currency to lies about the circumstances in which they had to leave; a Prime Minister trooping to the Imam; two parties getting portions of their manifestos whetted by that personage to the point that both contained an identical list in regard to Muslims; ‘intellectuals’—in the academia and in the press—drowning evidence, the very evidence which had been asked for, by evasions and distortions....

As I watched all this, and as I watched in particular and at close quarters the way V.P. Singh and

later Narasimha Rao’s team handled the ‘negotiations’, I felt convinced by the day that these persons were ensuring the destruction of the mosque. When V.P. Singh turned turtle, as he withdrew the Ordinance, and as Mulayam Singh went round U.P. proclaiming himself to be ‘Mulla Singh’, I was left with no doubt, and therefore wrote in November 1990:

‘The destruction of the structure at Ayodhya shall now become an ideology in itself. And thus far it was appeasement of the presumed Muslim leaders which was the spur. Thus far the politicians who bent back-wards to appease these leaders were the focus. But the Muslim leaders were individuals. Now in large parts the Muslims as a community will have to bear the ire.’ Such warnings were as usual denounced as ‘communal’.

Again, last July, as I came to know what had transpired in the meeting of the Prime Minister with the sadhus, I was left with even less of a doubt. ‘What about the existing structure? Will it be allowed to stand or will it go?’—that was what was being asked. ‘The answer is not in some formula,’ I felt and wrote,

‘nor is it in the hands of the government or even the VHP. Even if some formula is agreed upon by these agencies but politics and discourse 45 remain what they are, a harsher movement will arise with destroying the structure as an article of its faith. If politics and discourse improve, compromise will be hailed as statesmanship....

 ‘If subsequent events bear out the spirit in which the Prime Minister talked to the sadhus and if they bear out the assurances which were held out, things will go one way. If the government tilts once again, if the reference to the Supreme Court is not in accord with what has been agreed to, if the proceedings in the Court are once again allowed to be stalled, not just the sadhus but the Hindus themselves will conclude that they have been tricked once again. And the structure will be downed.’ As has been the unvarying pattern since terrorism exploded in Punjab, this warning too was denounced as ‘communal’. Well, like so many others, I told you so.

Everyone recoils from destruction. And that was the first reaction to the news. But, again, as I had not the slightest doubt would be the case, what the English-speaking intelligentsia and the leaders disowned, the Hindus owned up. What the government rushed into doing in the days that followed—arresting L.K. Advani and others, banning the RSS etcetera, declaring that the mosque would be rebuilt at the very spot, dismissing the BJP governments— and what the English press continued to paste on them, made them own the destruction even more defiantly. The way things are going, I think they would also be willing to own up to the charge of conspiracy, even if there was none. ‘Yes, we acted as Shivaji used to do,’ I can hear a sect proclaiming. And should the idols be shifted, and the mosque rebuilt at that spot, the destruction of the new structure will become even more an article of faith with the Hindus than the destruction of Mir Baqi’s structure had been, specially since the killings by Mulayam Singh’s government.

The hand that destroyed the mosque was of course that of the persons who had gathered there. But that hand was impelled by all our familiar perversities. Politicians pressing their immediate advantage. A government which collects evidence but which, instead of disclosing it, goes on weighing alternatives and eventually puts its trust, not in disclosing the facts to our people, but in cleverness: ‘Use the Courts to make them do another Srinagar, that will finish them.’ Courts which go on and on with legalisms....And a totally apologetic, defensive elite.

When Bhindranwale invites Sikhs into believing that Sikhs are actually slaves in India, that Sikhism has been and forever is irreconcilably different from Hinduism, these worthies say; ‘When one brother says he is going his own way, what can be done? You have to let him go.’ When the students in Assam point to the infiltration, they dub them communalists. When Kashmir all but bolts, they see a rationale for that too. When terror and murder by militants compels over two lakh Hindus to leave Kashmir, they tell each other that actually the Governor has encouraged them to clear out so that he can come down all the more heavily on Muslims in the Valley. When but a hundred-odd of the three and a half lakh Bangladeshis illegally settled in the very capital of the country are sent back, they heckle the authorities no end. When at last the government gets the two sides to sit down and exchange documents on the mandir, the evidence is drowned in all sorts of phony-ness.

It is this which has so distanced the people from the elite. It is this— more than anything else, I would say —which had driven the kar sevaks to that pitch of anger, which had convinced them that whatever Advani or anyone may say, they were not going to get a hearing in their own country. And it is because all of us—politicians, civil servants, IB men, editorialists—are so distanced from them that everyone so grossly underestimated the anger which had welled up in the kar sevaks, the anger which converted that congregation into a crowd, that crowd into a mob, and thence into a pack.

No one who sees in the rule of law the only foundation on which a society can rest can reconcile himself to what was done. But to refuse to see the anger which impelled the deed is just as fatal. To condemn the kar sevaks for striking at secularism but to persist with the double standards and pander to brokers of bloc votes which impelled them is to confirm them in their conviction. To condemn the Hindus as ‘savages’ one day and to expect them to suddenly heed our appeals to their ‘great traditions of tolerance’ is to play the self-deluding fool. To expect that after we have, day in and day out, stuffed 80% of a society with guilt, it will have the will to save itself, is to play the same fool.

The destruction therefore calls to mind once again the sorts of lessons which persons like me have listed often, and for listing which we have been denounced as communal. Assume I maintain that I alone have been given the Revelation; that Revelation, I maintain, is in the Book; that as that Book, I say, contains the Revelation, every word in it is true, that it is eternally true, that every word of it is eternally binding; and that Book says: ‘You should surely destroy all the places where the nations you shall dispossess served their gods, upon the high mountains and upon the hills and under every green tree; you shall tear down their altars, and dash into pieces their pillars, and burn their...(deity) with fire; you shall hew down the graven images of their gods, and destroy their name of that place.’

If I insist that as the Book is the essence of my religion I must and will live by every word of it, I cannot then be surprised that the other fellow, even without the help of the Book, will do exactly the same thing to my places of worship, altars and all. I cannot suddenly turn around and say: ‘But that goes against your traditions of tolerance. That goes against secularism.’ He will not heed me. When he gets the chance he will do to me what I say is my right and duty to do to him because my God through the Book has bound me to do that to him. The point is not in the passage—that one is not from the Quran or Hadis but from the Bible. The point is in the premise: of my alone having been given the Revelation, of my living by it and not by the laws and mores of the time and place.

Secularism is also a jealous god, as jealous as Jehovah of the Old Testament, as jealous as Allah of the Quran. For him to prevail all most obey him, and in every particular. Ayodhya shows how the contrary presumption—that the majority must adhere to secularism but that the minority has the right to live by some other norms—will eventually be blown apart. Similarly, when I insist that on one matter—say, personal law—1 shall not bide by secular laws, I undermine the very secularism I want to, I need to invoke to protect myself, my beliefs, my practices. When I invoke the Book as the justification for not going by the secular laws of the land —for instance, on even such a simple thing as paying alimony—I goad others to disregard those laws too.

 

What is true of secularism is just as true of the rule of law. When I overturn the electoral law so as to nullify a court verdict holding me guilty of corrupt electoral practices; when I prostitute the Constitution to clamp the country in an Emergency, or to dismiss state governments at will; when I overturn the law to overturn a judgement of the Supreme Court regarding an old, indigent woman; when I do not implement its orders on Cauvery, on shifting a grave or two in Varanasi, on clearing out shops in Jaipur, on demolishing illegal additions to a mosque in Calcutta; when I use the courts to stall proceedings against those who have looted the country as in Bofors; when, moreover, the courts go along with all this, by prevarication if nothing else—I cannot suddenly turn around and shout: ‘But they must wait for the court verdict.’ They won’t.

The second lesson cuts even closer to the bone. As the passage I began with shows—and the passage is merely one illustration, as will be evident from chapters of my book, Indian Controversies, it can be supplemented with literally scores and scores — there are aspects of the Revelation which are just not compatible with secularism. They are not compatible with living in a multi-religious, closely packed, modernizing society. It is not enough for me to say: ‘But I am not executing those decrees. Why are you throwing the Book at me?’ For I do invoke the Book—in affirming that my ‘identity’ is distinct and separate for instance, in maintaining that I will live under one set of laws rather than another. Each time I invoke the Book I reinforce the stereotype of me in the other’s mind, I draw him to focus on the dogma which I say defines my essence rather than on the fact that I am not really living by that dogma. Therefore, the Revelation has at the least to be reinterpreted, and aspects of it which are incompatible with secularism, with living in a multi-religious society have to be ascribed a new meaning.

 

There is a third lesson dealt with in detail elsewhere, which can be recalled here in terms of the Babri masjid itself. On all counts, few Muslims had heard of the Babri masjid five years ago, It may have been at some stage like the Quwwat ul Islam mosque in Delhi, a symbol of the triumph of Islam in this land. But that was long ago. Over the last five years, however, it became everything: a symbol of identity: ‘If I do not stand up for even a mosque, how am I a Muslim?’; a symbol of security: ‘If we yield on this, what is there to prevent them from swallowing us up altogether?’; a symbol of whether the country is secular at all. And to save this symbol there was the confidence in the old politics: of operating through persons occupying governmental chairs, of operating through progressive historians and the progressive press.

These two factors—this proclivity to see in everything a symbol of Islam, to suddenly conclude that the future of Islam hinges on it, coupled with the confidence in being able to use the state because one can manipulate persons who are holding office—and the collective image Muslims have of Islamic history, of its martyr ology, lead them to always embrace as their symbol, as their leader, as their standard, the leader or position which most stands for intransigence at that moment. Arafat the day before yesterday Saddam Hussain yesterday, the ‘non-negotiable’ position on the structure of the Babri masjid today. The denouement is always the same— Arafat is thrown out of Lebanon, Saddam is defeated. And now the Babri masjid has been pulverized.

Imagine for a moment what would have happened if Muslims, who as they rightly say have had nothing to do with, and therefore no proprietary interest in what Babar did, had said: ‘Yes, we see that you have believed that this is where Rama was born, that you have gone on trying to regain this spot for 400 years. We will hand over the site to you as a mark of our regard for your sentiments. Join us in shifting this structure to another site. And allay our apprehension that this is not the beginning of your damaging other places of our worship.’ The structure would have survived. The gesture would have been the most resonant announcement possible that Muslims esteem the sentiments of non-Muslims also. The Hindus could have been held to a position.

In the event, not only is the structure gone, it is gone in the most consequential way; it has not gone by agreement among a few leaders, it has not gone by the verdict of three or four judges. It has been pulverized by very large numbers, and that pulverization has been appropriated by the Hindus—barring, I agree, some of the English- speaking among them. The Hindus have thereby been made aware that they are in very large numbers, and that numbers can do such things.

And the Muslims are put in a real dilemma. If they now follow the government and insist that the mosque be rebuilt on that exact spot, they will be ensuring its destruction, and ever-increasing insecurity for themselves. If, on the other hand, they now agree that the structure be rebuilt elsewhere, they will be giving wind to the Hindu militants. That is the cost of hugging the position or leader that seems most intransigent. It is the cost, too, of the old politics —of the faith that by manipulating this ruler or that, by getting articles written in some newspapers, the ‘interests’ of the ‘community’ can be furthered.

I am not sure that the correct inference will even now be drawn— that the security of every section lies only in, the interests of every section can be advanced only by, all of us working together to strengthen institutions, not by that section becoming a vote bank and bolstering this leader or that party in the hope that that leader or party in turn will keep the hordes at bay. In this moment of hurt, one can be impelled to defiance and that, in turn, can lead one to the opposite resolve: ‘As I have been pushed to the wall, as I am going to die in any case, I will get ten of them before dying, I will bring the whole thing down.’ Should any group by that sort of reasoning take to terrorism, for instance, that will not be the end of India, but it certainly will be the end of India with Muslims. The same sort of result, I fear, will follow should Pakistan move to ‘protect the interests of our brothers’, or should Muslim countries cut off oil supplies etcetera. While the poor Muslim here would have had nothing to do with those decisions, the hardships which will result will be blamed on him—and the consequences will be terrible, for our entire country eventually of course, but for Muslims immediately.

There are twin lessons for the ‘secularists’ too. No one—no government, no politician—in the end enraged the Hindus as much as the ‘secularists’. It is not just that in this particular instance their efforts to drown the evidence by phony arguments—‘Ayodhya was in Afghanistan, says scholar’—were among the main factors which led Hindus to conclude that they would never get a hearing. It is that everything they say and do springs from a superior prejudice. A sheaf of examples can be given from what the English press has been putting out in the after- math of the destruction. But let us turn to a more durable one.

It is from the Supreme Court itself. For a hundred years Westerners, and of course our secularists have denounced Hinduism for what has been an excrescence, for what has to do with an unchanging economic base and has nothing to do with the essence of Hinduism—that is, the rigidities of the caste system. Christianity and Islam have been exalted by contrast on the ground that they do not divide humanity. That the widest possible differentiation between believers and non-believers is an article of those faiths is of course glossed over. Now, the majority judgement in the Mandal case follows this pattern to the dot. It denounces Hinduism for its caste system. Then comes the time to extend reservations to Muslims, Christians etcetera. It says that reservations should be extended to them also as there are castes—rigid, endogamous—among them too. But this, it says, is so because these religions, too, have been infected by Hinduism, with the virus. The obvious fact that the presence of castes among all religions here shows that it is not one religion which has caused castes but an unchanging economic and technological base. But that is not paid any attention. The blame is laid at the door of Hinduism.

It is this kind of reflexive slander of which the Hindus have by now had enough. This and the double standards. On the one side therefore, the secularists have enraged the Hindus so that by now the latter do not need them at all; they conclude that they must grab the law in their hands. On the other, by giving Muslims the false impression that they have support among the powerful, the secularists have encouraged them to plummet for that intransigence I spoke of earlier, the one which has brought the current consequences upon the Muslims. The one which has reduced the secularists also to mere heckling.

Much re-examination is therefore in order by the secularists. The essential gene of our country is the religious spirit, and the essence of that spirit is the Hindu ethos—you just have to see the difference between the way Sufis are venerated here and the way they have been set upon elsewhere to see that this is so. By denouncing Hinduism day in and day out, they deny the land itself. They leave the people no sense of self-worth. Will a society bereft of self-worth do anything worthwhile? Will a people deprived of self-worth stand by any norms? Do our commentators not see that by the rhetoric they espouse not one leader of our reawakening — Ramakrishna, Vivekananda, Aurobindo, Tilak, Gandhi, Ramana Maharishi—not one is anything but a Hinduism monger?

Finally, there are four aspects of the destruction of the Babri masjid which the Hindus have to reflect on. These are things which they have to reverse swiftly, else the consequences will be as harmful for them as they have been for other communities. While they were propelled to it no doubt by what successive governments, the courts, the secularists were doing and not doing, the fact is that in the end a mob took the law in its own hands. So that this may not become the pattern, all of us must redouble efforts to get the institutions working again. Otherwise there will be mobs of many kinds, and nothing will survive.

Second, sadhus and mahants have been inducted—they have had to be inducted, I am prepared to concede —into what had become in part at least a political question. This must be swiftly reversed lest it lead to the Khomeniization of our politics, and to the same results. Third, while vast numbers among those who gathered at Ayodhya were bhaktas of Rama, a number were the sort who would not abide by norms, by civility. Their induction into such a movement, to say nothing of relying on them for any sort of work cannot but disrupt civil society.

Finally, while it is entirely a fact that the state having bent repeatedly to the brokers and sole spokesmen of non-Hindus, it was but natural for Hindus to react as Hindus; while it is true, also, that this they could not have done till an organization, and in our political system a political party, rose to espouse their cause; while it is true also that the partisanship of pseudo-secularism could not have been nailed till the Hindus had spoken as Hindus; while all this is true, it is also a fact that this movement has at one level inducted into politics religion narrowly conceived. So that the state may not be bent by others, Hindus had to be awakened as Hindus—true. But it is equally true that anyone may inflame any group to a sense of deprivation—as we saw only too recently in the case of Bhindranwale.

The mixture is so potent that no one, save perhaps only a •Gandhi, can fine-tune the resulting explosion—the inability of leaders like L.K. Advani, of the RSS itself to control the congregation at Ayodhya is as vivid a warning as the genuine anger which had welled up in them. Neither should be ignored. The movement should therefore now be focused more sharply on ensuring true secularism, and true nationalism rather than on any narrower objectives. In a word: the Muslims and secularists must look to the recent past and see where the politics of intransigence and the discourse of double standards have landed them and the country; and the Hindus must look to the future and see where the politics they have been impelled to pursue will lead them and the country.

Lessons for Muslims, ‘secularists’, Hindus—but these are lessons for sections. The main lesson of the happenings of the last month is the one to which contributors to seminar, and none more doggedly than Raj and Romesh Thapar, have been emphasizing for decades —that nothing else will avail unless we get our institutions functioning again. The explosion in Bombay is a textbook example—actually any one of the things we see around us would do as well, the scam for instance. On the surface we have elaborate structures—the central government, the state government, the police hierarchy, and an even more comprehensive collection of statutes and lists—from Articles of the Constitution to lists of powers of the centre and the states. And the moment a riot explodes, debate whirls around these—whether Article 352 or Article 355 should be invoked, whether the army when called in has to wait upon the magistrate, why the magistrate was not available....

The sequence and eventual outcome are always the same: the violence dies down as suddenly as it had exploded, as forest fires do, having exhausted themselves. Or, if it does not die down soon enough, the only way to bring it in control, it becomes evident, is to turn to the dons and beseech them to ‘cooperate’ and help the authorities out. In Bombay for instance, in the end, apart from relying on the army, everyone had to turn to Bal Thackeray and his counterparts among Muslims to restore calm. The reluctance of the Prime Minister to censure him, to say nothing of taking a step against him, may have been grist to the editorial mills, but it was a faithful reflection of reality.

This is the real problem: that the structure of governance has become so very enfeebled. The real problem thus is entirely secular. The eruption takes different forms—Yadavs killing Harijans one day, Hindus and Muslims killing each other the next. But that is just the form. The breakdown in Bombay is just the latest example. Bal Thackeray has as little to do with Hinduism as Dawood Ibrahim and Haji Mastan, two with whom he may have nothing else in common, have to do with Islam. The aims as well as the results, too, are wholly secular: which shop- owner for instance in Bombay will henceforth default on paying protection money to the Shiv Sena? The parallel is Karachi: there are not Hindus enough in that city for the explosion to take a Muslims versus Hindus form; there the form is Punjabis versus Sindhis one day, natives versus mohajirs the next, Pathans versus Pakistanis the third.

Each of these bouts—Surat a fortnight ago, Bombay last week, Karachi every few months—points to one common, wholly secular fact: in part after part of the subcontinent we now have states within the state where the writ that runs is of the local don rather than that of the government. Second, in each instance these dons act under some high falutin label. The MLAs who were directing the kidnappings in U.P. were samajvaadis; patronizing the Muslim corporators who control and direct crime goes for ‘secularism’; Thackeray acts the Hindu. Finally, every single party has been infiltrated by such elements, each in some area or the other is today dependent on, indeed controlled by them.

Several lessons follow. We should see these explosions for what they are: the press itself can help by laying bare the roots in criminality common to these occurrences rather than getting us to consign all of them at the same level of superficiality—‘another communal holocaust’. And we should see also that these criminals can be dealt with only, to convert a person into a figure of speech, by K.P.S. Gill’s methods.

What goes for individual dons and their gangs holds all the more for mobs: given that the tinder of animosities and anger is strewn all round, and given, too, the fact that the instruments of violence and arson are in such abundance, the only way to prevent a spark from becoming round upon round of retaliation is to be absolutely ruthless at the very first moment. The police in Bombay acted sternly and swiftly in early December—on the 3rd when those who had built illegal constructions tried to protect these charging authorities with being communal, and then after the 6th. The violence was contained. Everyone pounced on the police. It is but natural that a force pilloried for doing its duty will desist from doing it the next time: the result we have seen.

Two lemmas follow. Laws can be enforced only if they are enforced uniformly: leaders of Muslims or politicians or judges who thought that blocking traffic and occupying public roads ostensibly to offer namaaz would not lead to similar action by some organization speaking in the name of Hindus, must have been fools of the first order, unless they are knaves.

The second lemma of endorsing firmness is just as ineluctable: the one who commits the offence is the one who will be crushed. When the police guns down a terrorist in Punjab it is not being ‘anti-Sikh’; when it guns down an aggressive mob it is not being ‘anti-Muslim, any more than, to use an example the don himself has given, it was anti-Maharashtrian when it gunned down rampaging espousers of Samyukta Maharashtra. Nor, looking into the future, would a policeman be ‘anti- Hindu if he were to shoot down a person who was marking the houses of Muslims for terrorizing them or, worse, for ‘future operations’.

But then even these are specifics. The key lies, as it has lain for 40 years, in getting a better type into politics. But then that has been the leitmotif of seminar.

DISCLAIMER:                                                                                                                                                                                               The views expressed in the Article above are Arun Shourie’s personal views and kashmiribhatta.in is not in any way responsible for the opinions expressed in the above article.                                                    

Courtesy: Seminar: February, 1993