As I write this, the Ram Mandir fervour is being worked up to a fever pitch. No one is in any doubt that what is envisaged is a great deal more than the inauguration of a temple. It is, as Swapan Dasgupta of the BJP said the other day, ‘a symbol of Hindu self-assertion’. Self-assertion of this kind is as political as it is religious. Corporate or communal self also is.
Two basic facts need to be noted in this regard. First, spiritual self does not have to be asserted. It only needs to be, as the flower is, as the birds of the air are, as the lily of the valley is. Second, ‘assertion’ implies aggression against something cognate in kind. So, Hindu self-assertion has to be over and against the Islamic ‘other’. In truth, religious self-assertion is nothing if not the trampling underfoot of religious otherness, to which God or gods are merely incidental.
Ironically, the façade of religious self-assertion is already undermined by the sulking of the Shankaracharyas, the putative supreme Pontiffs of Hinduism. They realize a tad too late in the day that this ritual of Hindu self-assertion involves a violation of the ritualistic integrity of Brahmanical orthodoxy. Shastras and sacerdotal prescriptions are clinically adjusted to political expediency. The Shankaracharyas demur because their authority has been undermined. Hindu self-assertion is welcome, provided the hierarchic etiquettes are respected and priestly hegemony is preserved. But what was their role in making the Temple happen? Next-to-nothing. That too is typical. The priestly class remains inactive till the dish is cooked and ready. Then they must come and claim their ceremonial right to lord over it. That seemed the right and legitimate order of things, till political exigency superseded religious proprieties. As a pro-Mandir hothead said thirty years ago, ‘We will not heed it, even if Lord Ram himself were to ask us to refrain from building this temple’. Clearly, the Shankaracharyas are out of touch with the New India.
One would have wished that the Shankaracharyas had scruples also about the dharmic issues pertaining to this temple-centric Hindu self-assertion. Didn’t the Supreme Court opine, after all, that the act of destroying the Babri Masjid was a crime? The venerable judges chose to gloss over this illegality in order to lay a vexatious issue to rest. But the erection of a place of worship on the foundation of illegality did not bother the Pontiffs. So, the situation stands as follows. It is all right to short-change justice, so long as ritualistic conformity is not breached. Alas, it doesn’t work that way. Unfortunately, the dharmic and the ceremonial involve each other. So, if dharmic principles are violated, ceremonial niceties too will be. The ultimate irony of this elaborately choreographed media event -for all right-wing parties everywhere in the world, everything has to be a mega media event- is that it signals the enfeeblement of Hindu religious orthodoxy. In Modi’s Naya Bharat not only will Gandhi be marginalized and Nehru deleted from public memory, the superstructure of Hindu religious hierarchy too will be settled in its newly assigned niche. This historical contingency was anticipated by Savarkar. It is basic to his vision that the purely religious, incorrigibly riddled with disunity, is deemed a hindrance to Hindu unity.
When Solomon built a temple for Yahweh, he also modified God. He made God his glorified tenant. No ruler feels secure in his seat of power till he has made God an adjunct to his throne. Hence the political psychology of temple-erection as a regal project of power and splendour. By building real estate for gods, rulers appropriate gods as their own. Once that is done, it becomes ‘impious’ to dissent from the ruler or to withhold spontaneous and unconditional loyalty from him. At this point, political dissent morphs into religious heresy, diversity gives way to homogeneity, and the leader gets elevated to a status between the human and the divine, and becomes a demi-god.
There is, all the same, this positive thing about Ram Mandir envisaged as a unifying symbol for the hitherto disparate segments of the Hindu religious panorama. It was not for nothing that Nirad C Chaudhury described India a continent of Lotus eaters. (The irony here, if any, is entirely adventitious!). What Napoleon said about the Chinese – ‘The giant is sleeping. Let him!”- has been true of India as well. Our vast potential has gone untapped for want of a keen sense of national awakening. Chairman Mao Zedong served as the wakeup call to China. The history of China since then has been a heady mixture of suffering and success: prodigious achievements peppered with poignant suffering. Now that we intend to catch up with the Chinese, maybe our time has come for the Mao Zedong moment in our history. Who knows?
Since the writing is there on the walls in bold letters and mega fonts, we must as well read it. With the inauguration of the Ayodhya Temple, V.D. Savarkar’s dream of conjuring up Hindu Rashtra has become a national reality. ‘Secularism’ is already obsolete in our political lexicon. ‘Democracy’ stands perilously next to ‘secular’ in the Constitutional description of the ‘India of our dreams’. And that….is a worrisome thought.