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Once again, showdown over
Ayodhya
By Ranjit Devraj
NEW
DELHI - With flowing white locks, beards and the saffron
robes that mark them as Hindu holy men, they marched to
parliament in the Indian capital on Monday to demand
legislation that would enable them to finally possess
the land on which they claim their warrior god Ram was
born 10,000 years ago.
But for legal hurdles
concerning legal title to the ancient strip of land in
Ayodhya town in northern Uttar Pradesh state, the holy
men would have ensured that by now a grand temple to Ram
stood on the site where they had, for that very purpose,
torn down the medieval Babri Masjid in December 1992.
The 10 intervening years saw the rise of Prime
Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's pro-Hindu Bharatiya
Janata Party (BJP) to national power from being an
obscure regional party in a political space dominated by
the professedly secular Congress party.
Now, it
is payback time. Under pressure from the Vishwa Hindu
Parishad (VHP), or World Hindu Forum, with close links
to the ruling BJP, the government has moved the Supreme
Court to set aside a ban on religious activity at the
site. The court has responded by constituting a
five-member bench which will decide on the issue through
a sitting slated from March 6.
Organizations
representing the Muslim community, such as the
All-Indian Muslim Personal Law Board, have objected to
the haste by which the Vajpayee government seems to have
been served an ultimatum by the VHP that the site at
Ayodhya would be forcibly taken over in March.
After a noisy weekend dharam sansad or
religious jamboree, the holy men, many of them VHP
members, decided to take their case to the gates of
parliament to give it a chance to intervene in the title
dispute.
Calling the agitation a "religious war
to end all religious wars", VHP's firebrand leader
Praveen Togadia declared that if the temple to Ram does
not get built soon "we will turn every village in the
country into an Ayodhya". Togadia said that he was not
concerned that the BJP and Vajpayee stayed in power, but
would support any political group, including the
Congress party, if it supported the temple cause.
"We have nothing against you [the Congress
party] and love all those who have love for Ram,"
Togadia said in a speech in which he promised the
Congress the backing of majority Hindus and a two-thirds
majority in the next elections if it endorsed the Ram
temple project.
Time is rapidly running out for
the Congress and its Italian-born leader Sonia Gandhi,
which faces the BJP in a series of crucial state
assembly elections this year. Polls are due in states
like northern Himachal Pradesh, where Gandhi has been
campaigning by denouncing the BJP's "communal politics".
The Congress party is smarting from a resounding
election defeat it suffered at the hands of the BJP in
western Gujarat state in December. There, in spite of
accusations that it was behind a pogrom unleashed on the
minority Muslim community in February and March last
year, the pro-Hindu party captured two-thirds of the
state assembly seats.
Political analysts say
that the BJP victory was the result of polarization of
votes between majority Hindus and the minority Muslims -
who form 10 percent of Gujarat's population. The party's
general secretary, Venkiah Naidu, declared that the
"experiment" would be replicated in other states.
As the Hindu holy men, backed by hundreds of
supporters waving tridents and blowing conch shells,
gathered outside parliament, Gandhi told the law-making
Lok Sabha (lower house) that "it is incumbent on all of
us to wait for and respect the verdict of the judiciary"
on the temple project.
But the VHP is in no mood
to wait for any legal process. It has announced a mass
awareness program that will run through most of March
before culminating in a huge rally in the national
capital on March 27 to press their demand to be allowed
to begin work on the temple.
Vocal leaders of
the VHP such as Ashok Singhal have declared that
irrespective of how the Supreme Court decides on the
ownership issue, the construction of the temple will
begin. "We have no quarrel with the court but we are in
confrontation with the government which has used the
courts to delay the process by which the land should
have been handed over," he said.
Singhal said
that he could not understand why, when the overwhelming
majority of legislators in parliament were Hindu by
faith, they could not legislate to settle the dispute.
"The present agitation is to show who stands where on
this important issue."
But the Times of India
newspaper, in an editorial on Monday, saw a ruse in the
VHP's posturing. It also accused the BJP of adopting a
"carefully contrived posture of ambiguity towards the
VHP's agenda, alternating between counsels of restraint
and open show of support".
Togadia's demands go
beyond the Ram temple at Ayodhya. He has said that he
wants to see every one of India's billion plus people
become devotees to Ram. He also seeks the renaming of
India as "Hindustan" or the land of Hindus, repudiating
its constitutional identity as a secular country that
respects all faiths equally.
Recently, Togadia
threatened to enlarge the movement to ensure that every
mosque built over demolished temples would be targeted
for attack by the VHP with the support of "genuine
Hindus". Already, violence fomented by the VHP has
erupted in the town of Dhar in central Madhya Pradesh
state over a shrine disputed by both Hindus and Muslims.
(Inter Press Service)
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