The Eminent Historians' guilt

(This is a never-published reaction to an article about archaeologist KK Muhammed correctly allotting the blame for the Ayodhya affair to the Eminent Historians; presumably KA Antony's "Left historians prevented resolution of Babri Masjid dispute, says KK Muhammed, former ASI regional head", First Post, 21 January 2016.) Last week a few marginal media reported that archaeologist KK Muhammad had a startling revelation on the responsability for the Ayodhya controversy and all its concomitent bloodshed. Young people may not know what the affair, in the years around 1990, was all about. So, briefly, Hindus had wanted to build proper temple architecture on one of their sacred sites, the Rama Janmabhumi or "Rama's birthplace". So far, the most natural thing in the world. However, a mosque had been built in forcible replacement of the temple that had anciently adorned the site: the Babri Masjid. Not that this should have been a problem, because the structure was already in use as a temple, and the site was of no importance to the Muslims. Unlike millions of Hindus, Muslims never go on pilgrimage there. So, Rajiv Gandhi's Congress government was manoeuvring towards a compromise allotting the site definitively to the Hindus all while giving some goodies to the Muslim leadership. This was not too principled, just pragmatic ("horse-trading"), but it had the merit of letting nature take its unimpeded course and allowing a Hindu shrine on a Hindu place of pilgrimage. And especially: it was bloodless. Unfortunately, this non-violent formula was thwarted. An unexpected factor came in between. It stimulated and hardened Muslim resistance and especially, it made politicians hesitant to move forward on Ayodhya. Though the contentious site had no special value for the Muslims, it suddenly became the Mecca of another influential community: the secularists. Not that they would go on pilgrimage there, they never move too far from their posh cocktail parties. But they made it the touchstone of secularism's resistance against "aggressive Hindu fundamentalism". As a weapon against Hinduism, and as a way to whip up Muslim emotion, they proposed the allegation that the Hindu claimants of the site had been using false history. They insisted that there had never been a temple at the site, and that what the Hindus targeted for replacement with a proper temple was an innocent mosque, now symbol of India's "composite culture". Then already, it was known from written testimonies (Muslim and European) and from BB Lal's partial excavations at the site that a major temple had existed at the site. Moreover, until the 1980s, the forcible replacement of the temple by the mosque had been a matter of consensus, as when a 19th-century judge ruled that of course a temple had been destroyed, but that after centuries it was too late to remedy this condition. The British rulers favoured an uneventful status-quo, but agreed that there had been a temple, as did the local Muslims during the trial. It is allowed for historians to question a consensus provided they have new evidence, which here they failed to produce. In a statement of 1989, JNU's "eminent historians", turned an unchallenged consensus among all parties into a mere "Hindutva claim". After that, the Indian mainstream politicians did not dare to go against the judgment of these authorities. The international media and India-watchers were also taken in and shared the hatred of these ugly Hindu history-falsifiers. Only, the Court-ordered excavations of 2003 have fully vindicated the old consensus: of course the temple remains were found underneath the mosque. Moreover, the eminences asked to witness in Court had to confess their incompetence one after another (as documented by Meenakshi Jain: Rama and Ayodhya, 2013): they had never been to the site, they had never studied any archaeology, etc. Abroad this news has hardly been reported, and experts who know it make sure that no conclusions are drawn from it. But for twenty years, the false and disproven narrative of the eminent historians has reigned supreme. No one has bothered to set the record straight. It is symptomatic for the power equation in India and in Indology that this is a repeating pattern. Thus, the identification of the Vedic Saraswati with the Ghaggar in Haryana had first been proposed in 1855, had been a consensus among scholars since then, but has recently been ridiculed by secularist academics and their foreign dupes as a "Hindutva concoction". For close observers, this news was not surprising. I had spoken on it in passing in my paper "The three Ayodya debates" (St-Petersburg 2011, available online), and in an interview with India First (8 Jan. 2016: "... 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 front line symbol of secularism." But easy dismissals that are sure to be tried against me. They will be harder when the allegation comes from an on-site archaeologist, moreover a Muslim. The media had allotted an enormous weight to the Ayodhya affair: "Secularism in danger", "India on the brink" and similar headlines were daily fare. When the Babri Masjid was demolished by impatient Hindu youngsters on 6 December 1992, the Times of India titled its editorial: "A requiem for norms", no less. Given all the drama and moralistic bombast with which they used to surround this controversy, one would have expected their eagerness to report KK Muhammad's eyewitness account. But no, they were extremely sparing in their coverage, reluctant to face an unpleasant fact: the guilt of their heroes, the "eminent historians".
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What the West’s academy has to say on Ayodhya

  

What the West’s academy has to say on Ayodhya

(Pragyata, 24 December 2020)

 

At this year’s digital version of the American Academy of Religion’s Annual Conference, the most agenda-setting event worldwide in the field of religious studies, several of the hundreds of sessions were devoted to Hinduism Studies. Of these, one (Boston, 9 dec 2020), presided over by Diana Dimitrova, addressed “The Ayodhya Verdict: The Jurisprudence and Geography of Modern Hinduism”. Nothing important, this report of ours: just letting you know what goes on in influential places. The on-line programme book announced:

“This panel examines the 2019 Supreme Court of India’s controversial judgement on the ‘Ayodhya Dispute’, M Siddiq (D) Thr Lrs v. Mahant Suresh Das & Ors, in order to better understand modern Hinduism as a juridical and geographic phenomenon. Two papers focus on the jurisprudence (legal theory) of the judgement itself: how Rāma is conceived of as a juridical person capable of owning land; and how the court’s privileging of Rāma’s rights over those of Muslim litigants effectuates a legal endorsement of majoritarian Hindu claims to contested spaces by state institutions. How does the legal language of the judgement recast Ayodhya and India more broadly as a ‘Hindu’ space? In what ways is modern Hinduism shaped by the language of law? Conversely, the next brace of papers posit that text of the judgement itself is the culmination of longstanding practices of Hinduizing India’s geography. These papers explore the religious practices - temple building, pilgrimage, and intense devotion to Hanuman - whereby Hindus built possessory claims over the contested space in Ayodhya. Thus, this panel theorizes modern Hinduism majoritarianism’s spatial and legal dimensions.”

 

No Ayodhya debate

So, the actual Ayodhya debate, about the history of the site, was starkly avoided. In the past, the Indologists all meekly parroted India’s Eminent Historians that there never was a temple there, that it was merely a Hindutva concoction. It would be in the scholarly fitness of things if they were to face their mistake, acknowledge that they had made a false allegation of a “concoction” and that the evidence has robustly confirmed the demolished temple scenario. But they haven’t done that on any forum whatsoever.

The judicial aspects were safer ground for the Eminent Historians and their foreign allies: the insiders among them know of their hilarious defeat in the scholarly debate, so they avoid or muzzle any mention of it. Their ostentatious position of around 1990 was proven wrong and is now all the more embarrassing in proportion to how high-profile it was back then. So, their loyalists in the US likewise tiptoe around the issue.

Even many of their followers abroad have gone remarkably silent on the Ayodhya history: they still do obligatory instalments on what they call “Hindu history manipulation”, but whereas the Ayodhya debate used to be their crowning example, now it has gone down the memory hole, though in fact it was the one case that was fought out in the public square and came to a clear verdict both scholarly and judicial, viz. to the complete detriment of the anti-Hindu camp. Thus, the Flemish tabloid De Morgen (25 March 2020) did a multi-page article on an alleged policy by Narendra Modi to rewrite history, but innovatively left out all reference to the Ayodhya affair (my reply: “Negationisme in India”, Doorbraak, 5 April 2020, English translation: Koenraad Elst: . Negationism in India, and in De Morgen).

The only ones in the anti-temple camp who are staying the course and repeating what they used to say in the 1990s are people who haven’t paid attention for the last 20+ years. At the Leiden conference in July 2019 of the International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS), an all-Korean panel discussed India’s religious conflict. They were well-meaning and had nothing of the foaming hatred against Hinduism that many secularists and their Western acolytes display, but they were poorly informed; or rather deliberately misinformed, most of them having studied in Delhi at JNU. So, while saying nothing about the scholar’s debate on the Ayodhya site’s history, they focused on some conspiracy theories featuring the Hindu forces, e.g. that the public works in Varanasi to open a corridor between the Gyanvapi mosque (standing on the Kashi Vishvanath site) and the river, intended to make it more visible, are “in reality” Narendra Modi’s and Yogi Adityanath’s preparation for engineering a new temple-mosque controversy.

Anyway, it was in the audience that someone brought the long-buried claim of a no-temple scenario in Ayodhya back to life. Unbelievably, Italian scholar Marzia Casolari (who wrote about alleged links between Italy’s Fascist regime and the Hindutva movement, as discussed in K. Elst: The Saffron Swastika, p.483-500) still voiced the belief that it was merely a British divide-and-rule concoction launched by Montgomery Martin. Why would they concoct a novel mosque-replaces-temple scenario when there were so many of these present in India, often clearly visible with the temple remains worked into the mosque, and often affecting other prominent Hindu sacred sites (as in the aforementioned Gyanvapi mosque)?

Anyway, this flight of fancy only survived the first months of the Eminent Historians’ offensive, for pre-colonial testimonies of the Hindu pilgrimage to the contentious site soon surfaced. The negationist story therefore had changed already in the beginning: from blaming the British to blaming the Ramanandi Sadhus. But time had stood still in the minds of the meekest followers, including Dr. Casolari’s: having interiorized the victory claims of the anti-temple camp thirty years earlier, she kept on repeating them in blissful ignorance of the scholarly defeats meanwhile suffered by her side.

Otherwise, the no-temple claim has been buried even by India’s anti-Hindu forces, and though this news has clearly not reached all their loyalists, their American friends have clearly come to toe their line. Although, the next speaker made a semi-exception.   

 

Rama as litigator

Christopher Fleming addressed the topic: “In Breach of Trust with God? Fiduciary Principles and the Bar of Limitation in the Ayodhya Verdict”.

“My paper attends to a novel facet in the Supreme Court of India’s controversial 2019 judgment concerning the ‘Ayodhya Dispute:’ the fiduciary relationship between the juridical person ‘Ram Lala Virajman’ and his erstwhile servants (shebaits), the Nirmohi Akhara. The Nirmohi Akhara, a monastic order, had long claimed the right to represent Ram Lala Virajman (a perpetual minor under the law) and to enjoy a percentage of the revenues brought by pilgrims coming to Ayodhya. The court, however, found that, despite their representations otherwise, the Akhara had acted against Ram’s best interests (collaborating with Muslim litigants and undermining Ram’s proprietary claims) in a mala fide (bad faith) manner. Ironically, the court ruled that the Akhara’s breach of trust with Ram constituted a ‘continuing harm’ that protected Ram’s suit O.O.S. No.5 of 1989 (Regular Suit No.236 of 1989) from the bar of limitation. My paper concludes that the way the court construed Hindu religiosity as a justiciable form of Trust with a deity is a unique feature of modern Hinduism as a legal phenomenon.”

These are details about a well-known fact, though certainly surprising to outsiders: that a Hindu deity can be a party to litigation, and that it has the status of a minor as his case has to be taken up by a guardian. The perceived divergence between the deity’s interests and its guardian’s position in this particular case adds spice to this exotic situation. This is not controversial, so here we need not go deeper into it.

However, in presenting the verdict, Fleming claimed in passing that the Supreme Court in its verdict was non-committal on the historical question. Naturally, he too avoids going into the history question itself, and even the judicial treatment of that evidence is passed over swiftly. This much is true, that the Supreme Court did not explicitly base its verdict on the history question, partly even falling back on the inertial reasoning of the 1885 Court case, when the status quo (then de facto Muslim possession, now de facto Hindu possession) as such was taken as sacrosanct. Earlier, Prime Ministers Rajiv Gandhi and Narasimha Rao had wanted to base the solution on the historical facts, which they knew to be the pre-existence of a Rama temple; and the UP High Court had, after ascertaining the historical evidence, given its verdict on this basis.

This verdict was confirmed by the Supreme Court. The whole background gives a central place to the historical evidence, which the Supreme Court wouldn’t go against. Still, unlike the UP High Court, which for years had been preparing a verdict based on the evidence, the Supreme Court looked hesitant to follow the evidence, which would necessarily lead to a pro-temple verdict. From the media reports, admittedly a doubtful source, the Supreme Court seemed to be more resolutely “secularist”, meaning prejudiced against the Hindu position.

This appeared from a strange episode in mid-2019, of which we must await the explanation from the jurists involved. The Supreme Court seemed to throw out all that had been acquired in terms of evidence, and instead leave it to a compromise between the parties. It declared that it did not want to impose a verdict, instead preferring a negotiated solution. (Imagine the murderer of your daughter standing trial and the judge declaring: “No, we don’t feel like sitting in judgment. Try to find an agreement with him.”) This was back to square one, reopening all possibilities, depriving the Hindu side of the lead that it had built on the scholars’ and archaeologists’ findings.

Moreover, the Hindu negotiator appointed by the Supreme Court was Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, which raised some eyebrows. His record in interfaith discussions was rather spineless, with booklets about Christianity and Islam churning out the usual flaky sentimental pap, and a video debate with Zakir Naik bandied about by Muslims as a shattering victory for their side. On the other hand, he has set up a network of meditation centres in the Middle East, which is extremely meritorious and makes up for any shortcomings by far; but it also makes him vulnerable to blackmail from the Muslim side. However, during this episode, he consulted with a very goal-oriented VHP, that monitored the mediation closely. At any rate, the sell-out that some observers had feared, never materialized. No one wanted to give up his claim, as the judges had hoped. So, a disappointed Supreme Court gave up on this mediation gambit and took up the process of judgment again.

The verdict that resulted was predicated partly on other considerations (like the status quo factor confirming the extant Muslim possession in 1885 and the extant Hindu possession in 2019) than the long-available proof for the temple, which had earlier already informed the UP High Court’s verdict. But if the evidence had not been there (let alone if it had pointed the other way), it is strongly to be doubted that the Supreme Court would have awarded the contentious site to the Hindus.   

 

Space

         One of the buzzwords of Subaltern and other Grievance Studies is “space”. The third speaker, Knut Axel Jacobsen, dealt with “Hinduization of Space and the Case of Ayodhyā”:

“This paper discusses Hinduization of space as a historical process in India. It presents some central features in the development of Hindu pilgrimage sites and makes some comparisons with modern and contemporary developments. The close connection between political power and expansion of sacred sites is analyzed and the paper looks in particular at sacredness as a form of land appropriation and the function of parikrāmas as a way to construct and mark religious boundaries. The paper looks at different ways Hindu sacred sites have been constructed and expanded in the past and compares these processes with the present Hinduization of space in India and especially with the contemporary centre of Hinduization policies of Ayodhyā.”

Throughout the whole field of Hindu Studies, you just have to get used to the omnipresence, though in different doses, of the Marxist-inspired reduction of religion to worldly categories. Prominent among these is “appropriation”, as in e.g. “cultural appropriation” or indeed “sacredness as a form of land appropriation”. There are power dynamics, to be sure, but you’re never going to understand Rama worship and the place of the Ayodhya site in it by forever dragging it down to the political level; just as Romila Thapar or Richard Eaton were fated never to understand the Muslim invaders’ iconoclastic zeal given their reduction of temple destruction to a mere political statement. It is an occupational hazard of post-religious scholars of (or opinionators on) religion that they just don’t understand the passion involved in their subject, including the destructive passion springing from a religion’s iconoclastic doctrine.  

To be sure, economic and political dimensions of religious activity also exist, and may present legitimate objects of study. We can’t hold it against Jacobsen individually that he chose this theme, but having followed the scene for decades, we know that the academic authorities in this field do channel all scholarly energy towards this reductionist view of Hinduism. This is much less true for other religions: it is Hinduism that is very disproportionately targeted for reduction to its external dimension.

 

The Marwaris

Another form of reductionism focuses on the financial dimension of Hindu initiatives. Thus, Jeremy Saul dealt with “The Ayodhya Decision and Marwari Merchants: Financing Ram Devotion Through Hanuman”:

“This talk focuses on the decades leading up to the Ayodhya decision as a time of Marwari merchants’ cultural activism, when they championed devotion to Hanuman as a representation of Ram. The rise of Hanuman worship was thus a stand-in for the long-stalled Ram temple-to-be in Ayodhya. The Marwaris, prosperous merchants who reside in cities throughout India but trace their ancestry to northern Rajasthan, modified their longstanding reverence for ancestral shrines in their Rajasthan homeland, long reified as a symbol of ancient Marwari dignity, into Vaishnava (Ram-oriented) temple devotion in that region. They thus adopted the Hindu nationalist ideology of reviving Ram’s mythological domain onto Marwari ancestral piety. Thus, this talk argues, the chronology of Marwari donations to Hanuman temples in Rajasthan has closely paralleled the historical trajectory of the Ram Janambhumi movement. The patronage arose as a consequence of the formation of urban Marwari devotional organizations dedicated to Rajasthani folk manifestations of Hanuman during the late 1980s, just as public enthusiasm for the Ayodhya movement was reaching its climax in the destruction of the Babri mosque.”

This was an interesting but perfectly inconsequential piece of research in the margin of the very consequential Ayodhya affair, the kind that our academics fill their time with to distract from the real issue. The noteworthy aspect was a little contemplation on the Kothari community. It was mentioned that among these Marwaris in Kolkata were the Kotharis, who count in their ranks the brothers Ram and Sharad Kothari, who were martyred during the Ayodhya agitation in late 1990. The speaker claimed that the Kothari sub-caste belongs to the Terapanthi Oswal Jain community, which doesn’t practice murtipuja (“idol-worship”).

That is when discussant Deepak Sarma intervened, who said his very own wife is a Kothari Jain. He agreed that it was odd for the Kothari brothers to be that deeply involved with Vaishnava worship when they shouldn’t have been into “idol-worship” in the first place. He was smirking and dismissive of the Kotharis’ doctrinal inconsistency.

In fact, this intervention exemplifies how estranged the Indo-American secularists are from the reality of India’s religious landscape. As we have been able to ascertain ourselves in Delhi and Gujarat, there is no fixed boundary between Vaishnavism and Jainism, they are communicating vessels with lots of intermarriage within the Bania class. Mahatma Gandhi was a Vaishnava Bania but had the Jains’ extreme concern for non-violence. We have visited the Kothari family’s home in Kolkata to pay our respects to the martyred brothers, and we saw nothing non- or anti-Hindu there. The idea that Jainism (or Sikhism, Virashaivism etc.) is separate from Hinduism, a kind of anti-Hindu revolt, is a figment of the secularists’ imagination. They cultivate the Christian misconceptions about religious boundaries (which they think can only be crossed by “conversion”, e.g. Khushwant Singh describing Banda Bairagi’s entry in the Khalsa as a “conversion”), as if they are first-time tourists bringing their baggage of Christian categories to Hindustan.

 

Feedback

         Through the chat facility, I put the following feedback in writing:

“Contrary to what Christopher Fleming claims, the court-ordered excavations in 2003 did yield evidence that the structure replaced a Hindu temple: this (rather than the plentiful documentary evidence) was the main ground for the UP High Court's 2010 verdict. It confirmed what earlier partial excavations since 1974 had found. Far from being a ‘Hindutva concoction’, it was confirmed by the participant senior archaeologist KK Mohammed. The High Court also called a line-up of ‘eminent historians’ who had earlier pleaded in public that there never had been a temple there, to the witness stand. One after another, they collapsed and were reduced to stammering: ‘I have never been to the site’, ‘I am not an archaeologist’; their evidence for a non-temple scenario amounted to exactly zero, and they were fiercely reprimanded by the Court for their misuse of authority to mislead the public.

“The Ayodhya evidence debate has presented the hilarious sight of an entire academic and mediatic establishment in India and abroad denying what had been a matter of consensus till the mid-1980s, and this on the strength of strictly no evidence at all. In all these years, documentary and archaeological evidence for the demolished temple has been accumulating, and some has kept on coming to light even after the debate had ended. This to the extent that the judges simply couldn't push a verdict going against this wealth of evidence. Now that the Ayodhya dispute is over, the question remains when all these academics are going to climb down from the denial of history on which they had staked their august reputations. The present power equation, which has allowed them to get away with this historical negationism in years past, and to keep the lid on their defeat now, is not going to last forever.”

Talking to those people is like tossing a message in a bottle into the ocean. Probably it will go nowhere, but there still is that slim chance of someone somewhere picking it up. It just might set a consciousness revolution in motion. 

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The guilt of the "eminent historians"

 

(published in The Pioneer, 26 Jan. 2016)

 

 

Last week a few marginal media reported that archaeologist KK Muhammad had a startling revelation on the responsibility for the Ayodhya controversy and all its concomitant bloodshed. 

 

Young people may not know what the affair, around 1990, was all about. Briefly, Hindus had wanted to build proper temple architecture on one of their sacred sites, the Rama Janmabhumi ("Rama's birthplace"). So far, the most natural thing in the world. However, a mosque had been built in forcible replacement of the temple that had anciently adorned the site: the Babri Masjid. Not that this should have been a problem, because the structure was already in use as a temple, and the site was of no importance to the Muslims, who never go on pilgrimage there. So, Rajiv Gandhi's Congress government was manoeuvring towards a compromise allotting the site definitively to the Hindus all while appeasing the Muslim leadership. This was not too principled, just pragmatic, but it had the merit of being bloodless.

 

Unfortunately, this non-violent formula was thwarted. An unexpected factor came in between. It stimulated and hardened Muslim resistance and especially, it made politicians hesitant to move forward on Ayodhya. As a consequence, street rowdies took over, killing hundreds. The Hindu-Muslim violence culminated in a multiple Muslim terror attack in Mumbai on 12 March 1993, which set the pattern for later terrorist attacks from New York and Paris to Mumbai again. On the other hand, it threw the issue into the BJP’s lap, making it the principal opposition party in 1991 and ultimately bringing it to power.

 

So: who thwarted the Ayodhya solution, thus creating a new type of terrorism as well as setting the BJP on a course towards power? Though the contentious site had no special value for the Muslims at first, it had suddenly become the Mecca of another influential community: the secularists. They made it the touchstone of secularism's resistance against "aggressive Hindu fundamentalism".

 

As a weapon against Hinduism, and as a way to whip up Muslim emotion, they alleged that the Hindu claimants of the site had been using false history. In fact, history was only peripheral to the Hindu claim on the site: it is a Hindu pilgrimage site today, and that ought to suffice to leave it to the Hindus. Yet, secularism’s favoured “eminent historians” insisted on interfering and said that there had never been a temple at the site.

 

Then already, the existence of the temple was known from written testimonies (Muslim and European) and from BB Lal's partial excavations at the site in 1973-4. Until the 1980s, the forcible replacement of the temple by the mosque had been a matter of consensus, as when a 19th-century judge ruled that a temple had indeed been destroyed, but that it had become too late to remedy this condition. The British rulers favoured the status-quo, but agreed that there had been a temple, as did the local Muslims. It is allowed for historians to question a consensus provided they have new evidence, but here they failed to produce any.

 

Yet, in a statement of 1989, JNU's "eminent historians" turned an unchallenged consensus into a mere "Hindutva claim". It is symptomatic for the power equation in India and in Indology that this is a repeating pattern. Thus, in the Aryan Homeland debate, the identification of the Vedic Saraswati river with the Ghaggar in Haryana is likewise being ridiculed by secularist academics and their foreign dupes as a "Hindutva concoction", though it had first been proposed in 1855 by a French archaeologist and has been accepted ever since by most scholars.  

 

After the historians’ interference, the Indian mainstream politicians did not dare to go against the judgment of these authorities. The international media and India-watchers were also taken in and shared their hatred of these ugly Hindu history-falsifiers. Only, the Court-ordered excavations of 2003 have fully vindicated the old consensus: temple remains were found underneath the mosque. Moreover, the eminences asked to witness in Court had to confess their incompetence one after another (as documented by Meenakshi Jain: Rama and Ayodhya, 2013): one had never been to the site, the next one had never studied any archaeology, a third had only fallen in line with some hearsay, etc. Abroad this news has hardly been reported, and experts who know it make sure that no conclusions are drawn from it. After the false and disproven narrative of the eminent historians has reigned supreme for two decades, no one has yet bothered to demythologize their undeserved authority.

 

For close observers, the news of the eminent historians’ destructive role was not surprising. I had spoken on it in passing in my paper "The three Ayodya debates" (St-Petersburg 2011, available online), and in an interview with India Facts (8 Jan. 2016): "The secular intelligentsia… 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."  

 

Facile dismissals are sure to be tried against me. They will be harder when the allegation comes from an on-site archaeologist, moreover a Muslim.

 

The media had allotted an enormous weight to the Ayodhya affair: "Secularism in danger", "India on the brink" and similar headlines were daily fare. When the Babri Masjid was demolished by impatient Hindu youngsters on 6 December 1992, the Times of India titled its editorial: "A requiem for norms", no less. Given all the drama and moralistic bombast with which they used to surround this controversy, one would have expected their eagerness to report KK Muhammad's eyewitness account. But no, they were extremely sparing in their coverage, reluctant to face an unpleasant fact: the guilt of their heroes, the "eminent historians". These people outsourced the dirty work to Hindu and Muslim streetfighters and to Islamic terrorists, but in fact it is they who have blood on their hands. 

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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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