Can The Ram Temple Lead To Real Secularism In India?

As Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the construction of Ram Temple at Ayodhya Wednesday, two newspaper articles attracted my attention. One was an edit in the Hindustan Times, another an opinion piece by noted liberal thinker Pratap Bhanu Mehta. The HT edit among other things called for making Ayodhya a site for secularism. A brooding Mehta disowned the Ram Temple altogether calling it a symbol of revenge by a militant political Hindu movement.

Let's take the HT edit first. It falls back on the historical dispute over the site to dilute the centrality of faith for Ayodhya. Lord Ram's tolerance and humanism - as the epitome of Maryada - and the conception of Ram Rajya as an ideal State are used to buttress the argument. For added measure, it says that the political mobilization that led to today's event has scared the minorities, and hence advises that any triumphalism should be eschewed.

Ayodhya is cited in many scriptures as one of the seven holy cities where one gets Moksha (liberation) by the virtue of birth itself. The sanctity of Ayodhya stands at par with the Vatican or Mecca. Just because Hinduism does not have the institution of a centralised Church, does not take away from the centrality of Ayodhya to the faithful of the Hindu fold. Forget about triumphalism, leaders of RSS led Hindu right have gone extra lengths to restrain any show of jubilation that could have elicited any adverse reaction.

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Mehta almost loses it by calling the Wednesday inauguration as "consecration of a monument to a violent, collective narcissism." A toast of the liberal intelligentsia, he misses the most basic fact. The event was a corollary to the November 2019 Supreme Court verdict, as much, if not more, than the political movement that brought the issue to centre stage of Indian politics over the last three decades.

Some might disagree, but even BJP's coming to power on its own can't be fully attributed to the Ayodhya movement, UPA rule having played it's role in bringing Modi from Gandhinagar to Delhi.

Is Mehta suggesting that the unanimous verdict that had judges of all ideological persuasion including Justices Chandrachud and Nazeer, shows a lesser understanding of the constitution and its values? Two, he accuses the present establishment of making Ram synonymous with revenge. Let me quote him: "They made Ram synonymous with revenge, with an insecure pride, with blood-curdling aggression, violence towards others, a coarsening of culture, and the erasure of every last shred of genuine piety in public devotion and public life."

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I guess Mehta should have visited Ayodhya once, from where I write this piece. As I stood for coverage of the event from Ram Ki Paidi - one of the Ghats - an elderly woman sat around idling. I asked her "Amma, Kya Kar Rahin Hain?" She said, she was just soaking in the spirituality of the surroundings as part of her daily routine after her retirement as a junior clerk from a local court. She then narrated a story from medieval times of a clash to save the temple by Bairagis, and that the coming up of the temple was the culmination of a long struggle. She has no affiliations with the derided Hindu right, and was speaking of memories of a distant past, not the lived experience of 1992. Mehta dismisses this collective, brutalised psyche, as revenge and the temple as "dangerous and uncalled for!"

Ram Temple's electoral utility hit the law of diminishing returns some time ago. Realizing this, even the BJP evolved its position on the issue from when it first picked it up in 1989 at its Palampur national executive. The famous resolution that adopted Ayodhya as the party's political credo clearly ruled out a judicial settlement. In contrast, both the 2014 and 2019 manifestos mentioned the 'constitutional framework' as the way out for the dispute. Despite pressures from the larger RSS family, the Modi government completely avoided the temptation of taking the legislative or executive route. This gains particular significance in the backdrop of the recent Hagia Sofia development in Turkey.

Would the torch bearers of secularism then want to reboot the whole debate? The unanimous Ram Temple judgment calls it a basic feature of the constitution and provides a template for a future course of action. By sanctifying the Places of Worship Act, 1991, which prohibits conversion of any religious structure to that of another, the verdict seeks to put a lid on the possibility of an Ayodhya like movement repeating at say Mathura or Kashi. To quote from the judgement: "The law speaks to our history and to the future of the nation. Cognizant as we are of our history and of the need for the nation to confront it, independence was a watershed moment to heal the wounds of the past."

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The Constituent Assembly of India that gave us the constitution, debated secularism thrice between November 15 and December 6, 1948, rejecting it each time. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru sat through the debates, and Law Minister BR Ambedkar actually made a statement of veto, responding to an amendment moved by member KT Shah who wanted the words 'secular and socialist' included in the preamble. It was in 1976 that through the 42nd Amendment the word 'secular' was surreptitiously introduced in the condition without any debate during the Emergency, thus giving the nation no opportunity to deliberate its form best suited for India.

As the recent CAA/NRC debate had shown, the 70 yrs experiment of Nehruvian secularism has come undone. The singular lack of empathy that the CAA protesters showed towards the tortured and humiliated Hindu and Sikh minorities in Pakistan and Afghanistan, was symptomatic of that failure.

Ambedkar quit the Nehru cabinet over the issue of half baked Hindu Code Bills - the civil law reforms that excluded other communities. There are other provisions in the Constitution that in the name of minority rights foster a sense of separateness, if not outright separatism. This has obstructed the forming of a collective national identity which can act as a glue against the centripetal forces that India's diversity often generates. If the Ayodhya issue can be considered a closed chapter for Indian politics, it's time we moved to a more positive, religion-neutral citizenry construct like some form of uniform civil code. Goa provides a template, and more than the minorities, it won't be easy even for the Hindu right to convince a great majority. With Triple talaq gone, and polygamy not exactly a rampant practice, it is over issues like the benefits of Hindu Undivided Family (HUF) that the battle would be fought.

Prime Minister Modi in his address from Ayodhya projected Ram more as a cultural icon with universal acceptability, including in Muslim majority Indonesia. He went on to add that 'equality of citizens' was integral to his idea of State - Ram Rajya - which even Mahatma Gandhi spoke of. Since he was speaking at a purely religious function that imagery was apt, but might make the purists of secularism uncomfortable.  For that reason alone perhaps, UCC might be an idea whose time has come.

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