Attempting & Tempting

10 November 2019

#How&FallOutOfAyodhyaVerdict

Which ever way one looks at this, the judgement of the SC was an attempt to use the judiciary to bring about reconciliation and retribution as a form of justice for an issue that was clearly outside the four corners of legal determination. It showed how our Founding Fathers as members of the Constitutional Assembly while shaping India as a Republic, did not foresee this key narrative of her nationhood, however bitter or dark it may have appeared.

In historical determination, the sack of temples of worship and pillage and plunder was an act of political dominance, the faith of the ruler being adopted as the faith of his subjects too was an act of political allegiance. Long before Islam came through armies from North West South Asia and Central Asia bearing it, Islam had come to India through trade and travel. That facet of conquering religion of not just Islam but Christianity and Dharma itself, as she organised over millennia, was to claim ownership to preexisting sacred shrines and sites is civilisational, it is universal, and one that cannot be denied, is also known.

True scholarship and ecclesiastic trapping would need balance in a modern post colonial world, which unfortunately was given a go by, for like Kemal Ataturk and his Turkey which has not survived the onslaught of religious revivalism, Nehruvian secularism was even more short-lived in India, discarded by his daughter who succeeded him, after the brief interlude of Lal Bahadur Shastri. I can dare say, that if Tashkent had not consumed Shastri, and if he had served a full term, then too, India would have veered toward her disposition of tokenism to the separation of state and its polity in matters of faith.

So if today we try to make sense of a 1000 odd pages of judicial obtusity and slants of dealing a sense of retributive justice and restorative justice you can see how tough the tight rope walk has been for the Constitutional Bench to deliver its verdict. The evidence was overwhelming that the legatee Government of India saw the first infringement of Muslims rights, for pre Independence attempt recorded as one in 1885 to violate the space was thwarted, and the state had borne the cost of repairs at that time. Since we do not have a law that says that we must freeze the character of religious sites on the day we became a Republic and gave ourselves a Constitution, arose this situation of 1948, then 1986 and finally 1992. In these actions, the District Magistrate of Faizabad was the key instrument, though in 1986 the then PM a grandson of Nehru no less was decision making authority, as in 1992 what transpired was actually under monitoring by an active bench of the Supreme Court of India itself.

Of course, political analysts can say that it was a policy of appeasement, first opening the lock on the Babri Masjid in beginning of February of 1986 an act salutary in favour of Hindu conservatives and reversing a SC decision on Shah Bano case was to pander to Muslim conservatism towards the end of that month, was a balancing act. It is also understood that Mr VP Singh’s unleashing of the Mandal Committee recommendations for reservations for BCs and OBCs was another attempt at appeasement, by attempting to translate tangibly for Indian society a polity of allegiance and benefit through alignment on religious and caste lines- what famously is described as politics of Kamandal and Mandal!

So when the Allahabad High Court gave its order in 2010, it gave 2/3 parcel of the disputed land to Hindus and 1/3 to the Muslims. In an ideal sense, since for last 1000 years the Muslims had held visibly and in law possession of the area for more than half that period, and though the same was not exclusive, with claims of Hindu worship on a platform in the courtyard of the very mosque called Ram Chabhutara (if one compares Mathura or Kashi as contested sites like Babri, the sanctum in these places is not under any mosque dome as is alleged here) and despite there being no medieval historical fact like how Somnath was plundered and pillaged, a preexisting structure that was not Muslim, which could have been Buddhist or Jaina or Hindu structure, the SC could have corrected the HC order to make an equitable 50:50 distribution, ordering the Government of India to supervise and construct a Temple and a mosque side by side, thus delivering both restorative and retributive justice.

The eventual judgement was politically correct with our times, allowing for Hindu majoritarian sentiments while paying lip service to Muslim angst at the destruction of the preexisting structure. So it offered the entire 100%. While so doing it also made the Nirmohi Akhara a representation within the to be established shrine board to protect its interests as a litigant. It also offered the Muslim Shrine board land in compensation, at a ‘prominent space’ in Ayodhya. Had the SC spent some ink in chalking out directions to the Central Government for a similar Wakf board to oversee the construction of a new Babri Masjid and at the cost to be borne by the Centre, then the seeming tilt toward delivering a Ram Mandir while offering consolation to the other community would have been averted entirely.

So India and her shift to ward this politically Hindu and constitutionally Hindu country is what any jurist with semblance of constitutional justice will aver, for the judgement is based on no judicial consideration. Here in the 1000 odd pages including the ‘appending judgement’ written concurrently the basis for this order is ‘faith’. While doing so, it magnanimously admits to the fact that there was a functional mosque at the site, that there was injury to the mosque which is was an insult to constitutional law, that the aggrieved community needed to be recompensed in a suitable way. It is also judicial wizardry where admittedly until late 18th century when one Mahant Raghubar Das petitioned the then British judicial system for permission to extend the Chabutara and fully make for a functional temple for Ram there, it was denied. Then the Ram Lalla was smuggled into the premises, and this time in Independent India, in 1948, and what happens? The Muslims are told to avoid the contested area, then in 1986 the locked up premises are opened, and one pujari is entrusted with performing worship and bhog though general worship is forbidden. Finally in 1992, the structure is physically altered and an ad hoc shrine comes up, which is then ordered to be maintained as the ‘new status quo’. So if you took at judicial view of the case, a house was demolished, the demolished now gets the plot to build a house of his own under court monitoring within government scheme, and the original evictee is now offered a plot to now go ahead a build one for himself on his own.

India is a banana republic. Yes in 1991 India’s lawmakers woke up to the reality of endless contestation of public places of worship. They made a law Places of Worship (special provisions) Act ( 42nd Act of 1991) which practically froze the character of all temples, churches, gurudwaras, masjids and others as of 15 August 1947, except at section 5 of the act, it excluded wholly the place known as Babri Masjid-Ramjanmabhoomi shrine. So you can see even in this legal proviso, the conditionality was that Ayodhya was open to a take over, while promising to retain the character of others as they were prior to independence. On 9 November, ( new 9/11) India’s Tower of Justice fell! A blow felling it could also allow a new India to arise, based on a fond hope that after this, we will let matters be, let bygones be bygones! Will India now turn the page of religious restitution and reclamation which Ram Mandir Shilanyas movement was all about, or will this whet the appetite for Mathura and Kashi as the original BJP slogan? Want to bet?

One can only say if Ram Janmabhoomi was a contest, which Hindus had to win in order to heal as a community, and if only by getting past it they would discover their zen again, then good for them. Political religiosity as the Roman Church showed, as the Caliphate of Islam showed are exercises of blending state power with religion which offered diminishing returns and got reduced to empty pipe streams or vestiges like the Vatican. So we don’t know if and in what form Ram Rajya would emerge from India’s current churn!!