The definitive Ayodhya chronicle

 

 

There are very few publications giving a factual account of historical facts underlying the Ayodhya controversy. Yet this controversy has played a decisive role in recent Indian politics, giving the BJP the electoral breakthrough that ultimately brought it to power. Therefore, it ought to be a matter for surprise that the professional India-watchers and the academics concerned remain satisfied with the handful of very partial and highly partisan treatments available in print. But the prevailing poverty of information on at least the factual basis of the affair has now been remedied. This book Rama & Ayodhya by Dr. Meenakshi Jain (Arya Publ., Delhi 2013) will henceforth be required reading for anyone pronouncing on Ayodhya.

Dr. Meenakshi Jain is a historian formerly with the Nehru Memorial Library, presently Associate Professor in History at Gargi College, University of Delhi. In this book she gives a very detailed enumeration of all the sources of a pre-Muslim veneration for or cult of Rama: inscriptions, sculptures and literary references. These already start in the pre-Christian age and soon cover all of India. Yet, the Marxist historians started the Ayodhya controversy in the late 1980s by claiming that there could not have been a pre-Muslim Rama temple in Ayodhya as Rama worship is of more recent vintage. This chapter concurs with the testimonies to Rama worship of the historians employed by the Vishva Hindu Parishad in the Government-sponsored scholars’ debate of 1990-91, except that it is far more complete.

Highly original is the chapter on Hindu testimonies of Muslim iconoclasm and the counter-measures which Hindu society took to prevent or remedy instances of iconoclasm. Particularly under Maratha rule, Hindu ownership of Muslim-occupied places was often restored. But this process was not easy and even in the Maratha domains far from complete. Often there was a factual Maratha but a nominal Moghul sovereignty to which lip-service had to be paid. Sometimes also, the local Brahmins were so fearful of a Muslim return to power that they preferred whatever humiliating makeshift arrangement they had negotiated to a full restoration of the erstwhile Hindu temple. Often idols were dug up from their shelters in the ground and rituals were prescribed in the event of their restoration. These testimonies supplement the Muslim testimonies of iconoclasm presented by Sita Ram Goel in his epoch-making book Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them. Significantly, the “eminent historians” do not touch the subject with a barge-pole.    

Another chapter gives an exhaustive enumeration of all the testimonies, including statements made in court, for the tradition that the Babri mosque had replaced a Hindu temple. Here again, many instances will sound familiar to those who have closely followed the debate, but the list stands out by its completeness. It includes pre-colonial European testimonies as well as reports by colonial officers, but most numerous are the testimonies by local Muslims. It also cites the verdicts and internal correspondence of the magistrates, and some statements by politicians. They all prove that until the 1980s, it was a matter of consensus that the Babri mosque had been built in forcible replacement of a Hindu temple. It was shared by all parties concerned: Hindus, Muslims, European travellers as well as British administrators and scholars. Yet, in a very sudden reversal, a statement by the “eminent historians” from JNU in 1989, statement which already was questionable at the time and has been proven false since, managed to make practically all media and all Indian and foreign observers turn against the established consensus and present it as the “Hindu fundamentalist myth”. I am proud to say I was an exception. But now, that consensus has been restored, and unwilling secularists still denying and lambasting it are fighting a fruitless rearguard action.

An even more damaging part for the secularists is Meenakshi Jain’s presentation of their own testimonies in court.  For the first time, we get to see how one after another, the secular “experts” collapse or lose their credidibility when subjected to cross-examination. One after another admits under oath that he or she has no experience with or no professional competence on the history or archaeology of Ayodhya. Their bluff was enough to fool the mass of secular politicians and gullible press correspondents, but failed to stand up to critical questioning. The Indologists who have invoked those “experts” as arguments of authority, can somewhat restore their lost honour by publicly naming and shaming them and by apologizing for following in their footsteps and ridiculing the old consensus – rather than, at best, looking away and pretending there never was an Ayodhya controversy in the first place; or, worse, still keeping up the false allegations that once swept the concerned public opinion across the globe.

The book also discusses related court cases, the strange fact that a deity can act as a juridical person (though, like a minor, it has to be represented by a fully empowered citizen), and the archaeological findings as well as the unsavoury controversy around these. Ultimately, they all turn out to support the old assumption that the Babri mosque was built on a demolished Hindu temple.

One point I disagree with, is her seeming acceptance of the VHP thesis that the Babri mosque replaced a “magnificent” Rama temple.  Some temples which lay out of the way of the population centres and military routes failed to attract attention and thus survived; the famous temples of Khajuraho come to mind. But Ayodhya became a provincial capital of the Delhi Sultanate, and it is simply unthinkable that a sizable Hindu temple, a place of pilgrimage moreover, could have survived the Muslim conquest and occupation. This scenario denies the large-scale and systematic Islamic iconoclasm which could not have spared a major place of Hindu pilgrimage; a deluded secularist could have thought it up, but those who believed the VHP was anti-Islamic will be surprised to learn of the whitewash of Islam implicit in the thesis that a Rama temple could subsist for centuries in a centre of Sultanate power. More likely, Babar found an existing mosque on the spot, in dilapidated condition (as a consequence of the collapse of the pre-Moghul Lodi dynasty) or, like in the recent past, under Hindu occupation. Only because he restored it as a mosque has it been called the Babri mosque. Early in the Ayodhya debate already, a theory surfaced that the “Babri” mosque had been built in the preceding Sultanate period, as testified by its building style.

On closer inspection, this position is truthfully described in some detail on p.292-4 as coming from the pro-temple archaeologist R. Nath as well as from the pro-Babri (and otherwise also disgraced) historian Sushil Srivastava, but without evaluation. In the preface (p.xvii), she only says that Babar “allegedly” destroyed the Rama Janmabhumi temple, so the reader cannot find anything wrong in her presentation of the controversy. At any rate, the mosque called Babri Masjid was certainly built after the demolition of a Hindu temple, but it is not sure that this was done by Babar. Not everything in this case is known, but the core of the matter, viz. that Islamic iconoclasm motivated by Prophet Mohammed’s precedent destroyed a major Hindu temple, has been firmly established.

This is henceforth the standard book on the Ayodhya affair. Any so-called expert who now fails to refer to it, is not to be taken seriously.    






(India First, 24 September 2014)

 

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Ayodhya interview 2013

(This interview was conducted by e-mail, rendered here exactly as in my correspondence with the editor of India Facts. It was published there on 8 January 2014.)

 

 

1. It has been 21 years since the Babri Masjid has been demolished, and the issue has all but been forgotten. As one of the experts on the issue, what do you think has happened? Have the Hindus lost that zest that characterized the Ram Janmabhoomi movement?

 

Firstly, the Hindu masses have seen that even their leaders who led this movement have practically abandoned the issue. And those who are committed to the temple, have channeled it through official procedures that don’t requie participation of the masses.

 

Secondly, it is a fact that the rise in consumerism and rampant westernization have made the Hindus less Hindu, less passionate about Rama. Christian schoolmasters have this as their explicit goal: Hindu pupils are not forcibly converted to Christianity, but are taught to get estranged from and indifferent to Hinduism, to look as outsiders upon it. The same strategy is, consciously or de facto, followed by the present media, the educational and the cultural sector: to estrange the Hindus from Hinduism by feeding them Sufi music, Christian concepts of religion and general westernization. In Mumbai films, Hindu priests are subtly but systematically slandered or ridiculed to familiarize the Hindu audience with the idea that there is nothing venerable about Hinduism.

 

 

2. If a new Government comes to power in 2014--headed by whichever party--do you think it would have the political will to rebuild the temple? If yes, and if the temple indeed begins to get built, do you foresee riots and/or violence akin to the ones witnessed in the 1990s? 

 

That Ayodhya is a far less important issue than in 1992, makes the atmosphere more conducive to a peaceful settlement. It is less prominent in the media thanks to the fact that the dominant intelligentsia have suffered a judicial defeat, so they are more muted. So, normally the days of the Ayodhya riots should be over. The Court verdict of 2010, though disappointing for the Muslim side, already caused no riots.

 

 

3. From a historical perspective, it was relatively easy for Sardar Patel to rebuild the Somanath temple. Why did Ayodhya become such a huge problem? 

 

Because the secular intelligentsia felt so self-confident that they could blow this issue out of all proportion. They could reasonably have taken the position that a temple was indeed demolished to make way for a mosque but that we should let bygones be bygones. Instead, they went out of their way to deny facts of history. Rajiv Gandhi thought he could settle this dispute with some Congressite horse-trading: give the Hindus their toy in Ayodhya and the Muslims some other goodies, that will keep everyone happy. But this solution became unfeasible when many academics construed this contention as a holy war for a frontline symbol of secularism. Now that the evidence and the judicial decision have put them in the wrong, they are not so loud anymore.

 

4. Hypothetically, had the Ayodhya movement occurred in today's milieu, would it garner a similar kind of fervour? 

 

Two things have changed: the Hindu masses don’t care as much about Ram, and the artificially created doubt about the history of the site has been cleared by the excavations and the verdict of the Allahabad High Court. It should never have caused such fervor or even a controversy in the first place. After all, it is a Hindu sacred site, Hindus go on pilgrimage there but not Muslims, and functionally the mosque already was a temple. Any sensible person would have awarded the site to the Hindus without further ado. Instead, the secular intellectuals raised the issue of history, falsely alleging that it was not what people had always thought. It is not just that they were wrong on the history, it is also that this wasn’t an issue of history in the first place. The site is venerated as Ram’s birthplace, and therefore deserves protection by a state that calls itself secular, not because something happened there hundreds of years ago, but because this belief is alive right now.

 

 

5. Has the BJP and/or Sangh Parivar all but abandoned the Ram temple issue? This question is not from an election issue perspective, but from the perspective of a party which claims to speak for, and is seen as perhaps the only hope for Hindu-related causes and issues. 

 

The BJP had already abandoned the issue after reaping the electoral harvest in the 1991 elections. From then on they treated it as a hot potato and preferred the Courts to handle it. That is why LK Advani was in such distress when he witnessed the demolition of the temple/mosque: he was there to show that the BJP could master the Hindu emotions about Ayodhya and make the masses toe the line scripted by the elite. He didn’t expect this much of Hindu activism and certainly didn’t side with it. Today, the broader Hindu movement, not just the Sangh, feels confident that it will henceforth have its way on Ayodhya through official channels.

 

 

6. Political parties apart, has there been a gradual build up of a sort of apathy even among large sections of the Hindu society towards the Ram temple rebuilding? 

 

Yes. But that apathy has also developed inside the “militant” Hindu movement. The logical consequence of the Ayodhya agitation would have been a systematic look at the history of Muslim-Hindu hostility, but in reality nothing of the sort has happened. In the 1990s a few retired historians were working on Muslim history, chiefly Harsh Narain, KS Lal and of course SR Goel, but that school is long dead, and nothing has replaced it, except maybe the Shivaji museum in Pune. The Sangh has simply given this issue away to the secularists, who have filled the textbooks with their version of history, downplaying Islamic destruction and generalizing Islam’s intolerance to all religions including Hinduism.

 

In the very long run, of course, truth will be restored. If you can learn anything at all from history, it is that everything changes. So, the present power equation that has made these distortions possible, won’t endure forever. It is a foregone conclusion that one day, the negative role of the secularist historians will be seen for what it was. Western Indologists who chose to toe the secularist line, even against their own research findings, will not look good either. But that will only happen after they are safely dead, after enjoying a life of prestige and positions. For there is no one in sight who could threaten them, certainly not the Hindu movement.  

 

 

7. You had in an earlier interview mentioned about the moderate Muslims (for e.g. Ali Asghar Engineer) who were willing to come to a reasonable settlement. Given how aggressive Islamism has crept into India over these two decades--for e.g. the Owaisis--would you reconsider this position? 

 

Frankly, I know little about the internal trends in the Muslim community. I have the impression that they are investing their energy in more important concerns than this purely symbolic issue. They may have understood that the Muslim stand was unreasonable: it is a Hindu site, of great significance to Hinduism and not to Islam, so insisting on re-Islamizing a Hindu sacred site wouldn’t win them friendship or goodwill. But if they care less about Ayodhya, it means they care more about issues involving tangible power and privileges, such as reservations for Muslims.  

 

 

8. You were someone who mounted a scholarly & bold opposition to secularist historians during the Ayodhya evidence phase. However, as we notice, the same breed of historians have returned to the academia and we observe the same distortions in school and college textbooks. And this despite Arun Shourie's expose. What happened? Is it merely that the political equations returned to status quo after 2004? 

 

Nothing happened, that is precisely the problem. Against the great offensive by secularist historians to whitewash Islamic rule and to deny that the mosque was built on a Hindu site, the Hindu movement did nothing at all. There were some private Hindu historians, all long dead now, but they were given no organized support. That the BJP seems set to win the general elections gives little hope: they already were in power in 1998-2004 and did nothing to implement any part of their Hindu agenda, though they did provide good governance on the economic front. The one thing they did try, viz. to change the history textbooks, was a horror show of incompetence.

 

But maybe Narendra Modi will prove different. He has been denounced systematically for over ten years by the secularists and slandered no end in the media, to the extent that the US has denied him a visa. Usually this sort of hounding by the secularists leads a Hindu to take extra secularist positions, but in this case Modi might really remember just how vicious the secularists can be. Perhaps he will do something really Hindu for once. Only time will tell.

 

 

 

9. In the end, do Hindus really have any hope at all to see the Ram temple getting built? 

 

 The more marginal the temple becomes, the better its chances of being built. This shrill controversy wasn’t very Indian anyway.  Better to work discreetly and achieve your goal, than this banging your head against the wall.

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