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[On 9 December 1992, three days after the historic demolition of the Babri Masjid, Girilal Jain wrote a seminal piece in The Times of India, which silenced all intellectual opposition or exposed that there was no legitimate intellectual argument against this spontaneous decision by nameless and faceless Ram bhaktas.
- Implicit in the above is the proposition that while India did not cease to be India either under Muslim or British rule despite all the trials and tribulations, she was not fully Mother India. And she was not fully Mother India not because she was called upon to digest external inputs, which is her nature to assimilate, but because she was not free to throw out what she could not possibly digest in the normal and natural course, This lack of freedom to reject what cannot be assimilated is the essence of foreign conquest and rule. The meaning of Ayodhya is that India has regained, to a larger extent than hitherto, the capacity to behave and act as a normal living organism. She has taken another big step towards self-affirmation.
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First, no living culture is ever wholly autonomous; for no culture is an airtight sealed box; Indian culture, in particular, has been known for its catholicity and willingness to give as well as take. It withdrew into a shell when it felt gravely threatened and became rigid; but that is understandable; indeed, the surprise, if any, is that Indian culture survived the Islamic and Western onslaught at all.
Secondly, a culture, if it is not swallowed up by an incoming one, whether by way of proselytization or conquest or both, as the Egyptians and Iranians were by Islam, or if it is not destroyed as the Aztec was by the Portuguese and the Spaniards, must seek to recover; even Indians in Latin America have not given up the effort. Surely, since no one can possibly suggest that Indian culture was either swallowed up or destroyed; it is only natural that it should seek to recover its genuine self. Surely, this is neither an anti-Islamic nor anti-Western activity.
- Similarly, while it cannot be denied that the RSS, the VHP, and the BJP have played a major role in mobilizing support for the cause of the temple, it should also be noted that they could not have achieved the success they have if the general atmosphere was not propitious and the time not ripe. Indeed, not to speak of Gandhiji who aroused and mobilized Hindus as no one had before him, fought the Christian missionary assault and successfully resisted the British imperialist designs to divide Harijans from Hindu society, it would be unfair to deny Nehru’s and Indira Gandhi’s contributions to the Hindu resurgence that we witness today. A civilizational revival, it may be pointed out, is a gradual, complex, and many-sided affair.
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When a master idea seizes the mind, as socialism did in the twenties, and as Hindutva has done now, it must usher in radical change. In the twenties and the decades that followed before and after independence, conservative forces were not strong enough to resist the socialist idea. Similarly, conservative forces are not strong enough today to defeat the Hindutva ideal. There is a difference, though, for while the socialist ideal related primarily to economic reorganization and was elitist in its approach by virtue of being a Western import, Hindutva seeks, above all, to unleash the energies of a whole people which foreign rule froze or drove underground.
When a historic change of this magnitude takes place, intellectual confusion is generally unavoidable. The human mind, as a rule, trails behind events; it is not capable of anticipating them. But it should be possible to cut through the mass of confusion and get to the heart of the matter.
The heart of the matter is that if India’s vast spiritual (psychic in modern parlance) energies, largely dormant for centuries, had to be tapped, Hindus had to be aroused; they could be aroused only by the use of a powerful symbol; that symbol could only be Ram, as was evident in the twenties when the Mahatma moved millions by his talk of Ramrajya; once the symbol takes hold of the popular mind, as Ram did in the twenties and as it has done now, opposition to it generally adds to its appeal.
- While almost everyone else is looking for scapegoats, to me it seems that every known actor is playing his or her allotted role in the vast drama that is being enacted. We are, as it were, witnessing the enactment of a modern version of Balmiki’s Ramayana.
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The competition, as a shrewd Congress leader once said to me, has been between ‘communalism’ and ‘casteism’.
[From The Hindu Phenomenon, UBSPD, New Delhi, 1994, p. 113]
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