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Ayodhya
and After: Issues Before Hindu Society by Koenraad Elst
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VOICE OF INDIA ARCHIVES
Righting the wrongs of history
By Koenrad Elst
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www.voi.org/books/ayodhya/ch3.htm
www.voi.org/books/ayodhya/
3. Righting the wrongs of history
3.1 The bricks or the truth
Advani is the modern Babar, that is how some secularist Hindus
(who at least don't deny the historical fact that Babar was a
temple-destroyer) comment on Mr. Advani's plan to relocate the
disputed structure and build a temple on the spot. With their
natural Hindu generosity, they want to keep assuring the
non-Hindus that their places of worship are safe in Hindusthan.
And they reject attempts to undo temple destruction by means of
mosque-destruction. "Two wrongs don't make a right",
they keep on writing.
And it is true: if someone has stolen from you, it is not right to
just steal it back from him, or from his children. Not even if it
is a place of worship. The best solution would be, that the
culprit, or his juridical successor if any such be, returns the
stolen good of his own free will. The second best solution is that
an impartial competent authority, in application of principles
universally in force or mutually agreed upon, imposes a settlement
that undoes the wrong done. Either way, the matter should be
settled openly, not by counter- theft.
In the controversy under consideration, the best solution is, that
the Muslim community makes a gesture to undo the wrongs it has
inflicted on the non-Muslims for centuries. Failing that the
second best solution would be, that the government imposes such a
goodwill gesture: that would then not be a gesture of
reconciliation, but at least an official recognition of the
injustice done and the resolve to at least symbolically undo such
injustice.
Some diehard Hindus activists demand that all the thousands of
mosques built on top of destroyed temples, be handed over to the
Hindus. They think that would be a physical undoing of the
historical wrongs. Well, that is a very crude way of doing justice
to Hinduism. It overlooks the fact that these stone structures are
but the outermost layer of the real harm done to Hindu society.
There has been a loss of vast territories -- they may be claimed
back, but that would hardly be any less superficial. Far more
fundamental is the moral damage that has been done : the loss of
self-confidence, the unprecedented and harsh enmity within Hindu
society (internal enmity and bitterness typically occur in
powerless groups), the boot-licking attitude among the Hindu
intelligentsia, the negative self-image (e.g. Hindu caste
inequality vs. Muslim brotherhood). The moral damage again is
partly due to a loss of knowledge and memory : the Hindu education
system has been destroyed, and the Hindus are helpless in the face
of concerted efforts to disinform them and destroy their soul.
Claiming from thousands of local Muslim communities that they give
back the place of worship that their ancestors had stolen from the
Hindus, would be very insensitive and create immense resentment
and ill-will. It is a case of Fiat justitia pereat mundus (justice
be done even if the world must perish for it). Sometimes
unpleasant steps cannot be avoided, but in this case it seems to
me that Hindus had better concentrate on more useful goals.
Among these more urgent goals, I will mention social justice, but
I won't stress it too much because firstly, that would confirm the
untruthful missionary propaganda, today repeated by almost
everyone, that Hindu society has been less just and humane than
other societies in comparable circumstances, and secondly, I don't
want to fall into the Christian/moralistic trap of considering an
ethical life and an ethical society the ultimate good. Having
known some society-improvement movements from within (such as the
disarmament movement), I have not much faith left in moralistic
attempts to make society better, as a goal in its own right.
I have come to agree with the basic assumption of Hindu culture,
that consciousness is the basis of everything. Ethics and justice
are necessary in human society, but they are not the ultimate in
human endeavor and happiness. Forget about a humane society if you
do not create a cultural (dharmik as much as sanskritik) cradle
for it. Do-gooders like Rajmohan Gandhi (with his Moral Rearmament
background) can go on preaching about caring and sharing14, that
is superficial, doctoring of outside symptoms, and by itself it
will lead nowhere. Social involvement should be there, but it can
only be guided and sustained by a larger cultural feel and
consciousness. It is only from an awareness of our fundamental (adhyatmik)
akinness, from a feeling of our unity (ekatmata) in diversity
(every entity its own swadharma), that compassion and
fellow-feeling can grow. And it is only though self-respect that a
larger sense of duty and responsibility can grow; the crass
selfishness now rampant in Nehruvian India is very much related to
the cultural climate of self-alienation and self depreciation.
So, the more fundamental concern should be the reviving of Hindu
consciousness, both in a spiritual and in an intellectual sense.
Of all the politicians involved in the Ram Janmabhoomi movement,
how many have ever taken parliamentary initiatives to revive
Sanskrit education, to give more chances to the teaching of the
Hindu cultural traditions, to abolish the discrimination against
teaching Hindu religion in state-subsidized schools? How many have
taken a look into the systematic distortion of history that is
being broadcast by all the official media including the school
curricula, and taken the official media including the school
curricula, and taken initiatives to counter it at the intellectual
or political level? It seems that all these Hindu campaigners
needed a crudely physical issue like the bricks in Ayodhya in
order even to get reminded of their responsibility to Hindu
society.
I cannot blame them too harshly, they just show the results of a
centuries-long physical and ideological attack on Hindu culture.
Nonetheless, if they want to give proof of something better than
utter mental laziness, they must start cultivating a deeper
understanding of the problems of their society, and develop a
commitment to the restoration of Hindu self- awareness. That is
more important than the restoration of brick structures.
I am not saying that they just should forget about these thousands
of temples razed and replaced with mosques (and sometimes
churches). Those thousands should not be ignored, to the extent
that they can be useful in consciousness-raising. One level at
which some evil- intentioned people try to rob Hindus of their
consciousness, is history. History as an illustration of the
intrinsic character of certain ideologies deserves to be
highlighted. The time will come when closed theologies will bother
humanity no longer, but for now, it is better to be aware of what
they can do. In Europe, Nazi concentration camps are kept in their
historical state, in order to teach future generations about what
to avoid. In India too, monuments of intolerance should be
preserved. School books, local guide books, even a signboard with
an explanatory text in front of the building, should tell the
history of every place of worship, truthfully.
If Hindu organizations really care about Hinduism, let them drop
the demand for the hand-over, let them rather demand that the
truth be told on every appropriate occasion. They should not allow
the truth to be concealed or distorted. On the other hand, they
should deal sensitively with it. There is no point in troubling
simple Muslim villagers with the unasked-for-truth about the
crimes of Aurangzeb. They did not commit these Islamic crimes, and
educating them should ideally not proceed via instilling in them a
feeling of guilt.
In any case, education about the crimes and future crime potential
of pretentious closed creeds should only be a part of a more
general study in the impediments to open mindedness and
truthfulness : the closed creeds of the revealed religions are
only a special case (though a very systematic and dangerous one)
of a certain state of mind. This study of what kinds of mental
attitude to avoid, should be integrated into a positive education
in mental culture and truthfulness. That is what Sanatana Dharma
is all about. Today, saying the truth about the crimes of Islam,
against attempts to suppress it, is very much needed. But
ultimately, these negative things have to be said only to clear
the way for the positive and humanist culture which these
fanatical creeds had denounced and tried to obliterate.
The prime target audience for the truthful reporting about
Hindu-Muslim history is not the Muslims, but the Hindus
themselves. the Hindus are their own worst problem, because of
their self-alienation, self- denigration, and self-forgetfulness.
They should stop blaming and maligning themselves : a clear and
truthful view of the mischievous history and doctrines of those
who go on blaming and denigrating Hinduism, will make room for an
honest self-discovery. Hindus can turn the tables on the
Hindu-baiters. They should take pride in their pluralistic
culture, and be conscious of the dangers of closed and
exclusivistic creeds.
So, by all means, drop the demand for the hand-over of those
thousands of brick structures in which fellow human beings with
Arabic names conduct their prayers. It is enough if the truth
about those buildings' histories is not concealed.
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3.2. Kashi and Mathura
The Hindu struggle is about cultural self-awareness and
self-esteem, not about brick structures. However, there may be a
case for insisting on the hand-over of two central sacred places,
those of Krishna and of Shiva, that are occupied by mosques, and
the very special case of the Ram Janmabhoomi. People with a very
short historic consciousness think that everything that happened
before the Indians said goodbye to the British and installed a
British legal-political system for themselves, should not have any
consequences today. It is time-barred, they say. But who are they
to rule that history should be held to be of no consequence?
Perhaps the Hindus do think that certain historical wrongs have
been so vast as well as profound, that they need righting even
today. Especially because the ideology that motivated these wrongs
is not yet a part of history.
The situation is this, Muslim conquerors and rulers have made
systematic attempts to destroy Hindu culture, and as long as that
was not immediately possible, many of them have done everything to
humiliate the Hindus. And this was not an accidental list of cruel
rulers, to be joined to the list of Genghis Khan, Ch'in Shih
Huang, Tiglatpilesar and other classics of cruel conquest and rule
: there was an ideological backbone in this sustained effort to
impose Islam and persecute the Kafirs. Aurangzeb is gone, but that
ideological backbone may still be there. One of the crowning
symbols of the Muslim persecution of the Hindus was the
replacement of the most sacred Hindu temples with mosques.
Now, either the conflict between Islam and Hinduism no longer
exists. The Muslims no longer identify with the persecution effort
of their forebears. In that case, they will have no problem in
distancing themselves from the take-over of temples, and in
understanding the Hindu sensitivity concerning this painful past.
They will understand that they themselves would not like to be
robbed of their Kaaba, and they will give back the chief places
sacred to Shiva and Krishna.
Or, in the other case, the Muslims do identify with Babar and
Aurangzeb, and stick to the doctrine that the Kafirs must be
fought and their temples destroyed. In that case, they are the
heirs to the responsibility for the temple destructions, and then
the Hindus can demand reparations from them. Either way, some
symbolic reparation should be made. Some gesture of finishing this
history of temple-destructions and attempted destruction of Hindu
Dharma, should be made.
In my opinion, the Hindus should not demand the handover of the
Kashi Vishvanath (Shiva) temple site and the Krishna Janmastham
temple site from the state. But they may demand it from the Muslim
community.15 And they should make it a demand not for a building,
but for a gesture. There should be not a trace of a threat of
forcible take-over. The Hindu leaders should say to the Muslim
leaders : Look, we want these places back. For many centuries they
have been our sacred places, and we have suffered the mosques
built there only under duress. We do not believe in the forcible
take-over of places of worship, we are not Babars and Aurangzebs.
But we want from you a gesture of goodwill, a sign that you turn
this infamous persecution page of history. We will not take any
kind of revenge if you do not feel ready for this gesture, but we
will expressly wait until you are ready.
The same would have counted in principle for the Ram Janmabhoomi.
However, there the situation has been slightly more advanced : in
1949 it already became a Hindu temple again. And it is not the
Hindus who have been demanding a hand-over, it is actually the
Muslim groups like BMAC, BMMCC, IUML, Jama'at Islami. It is
unbelievably arrogant that some Muslims could be against the
hand-over of even one of the thousands of stolen Hindu places, and
still have dared to demand the hand- over of that one mosque that
they let slip through their fingers in 1949. They demand the
return of 100% of the places they lost, and want to return 0% of
the places they took. Who said that Islam believes in equality?
To sum up : on the Ram Janmabhoomi, the Hindus should concede
nothing. It is their own temple again since 1949, and if they want
to architecturally redesign it along the lines of traditional
Mandir architecture, then that is an entirely internal affair of
the Hindus. On Kashi Vishvanath and Krishna Janmasthan, the Hindus
may choose to leave it at the present compromise situation (temple
rebuilt next to mosque), but it is not unreasonable and they are
within their rights if they make a moral demand on the Muslim
community to return these two sacred places. The demand should
focus not on the buildings, but rather on the free-will gesture of
a hand-over to formally finish the history of Hindu-Muslim
conflict. Concerning the thousands of other stolen or destroyed
temples, no organisation devoted to the advancement of Hindu
culture and society should rake up those controversies. On the
contrary, Hindus should be satisfied with a clear and frank
recognition of the history of these places. For the rest, these
places are occasions for a thousandfold generous gesture of
forgive and forget.
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3.3. A gesture, not a compensation
The problem with forgiving is that genuine forgiving can only take
place if the committed wrongs are admitted (forgiving someone who
doesn't deplore his act but still thinks it was justified, is
tantamount to inviting him to do it again; it is not forgiveness
but masochism). What Hindus are in fact demanding from the Muslim
leadership, is an uninhibited recognition of the injustice their
forebears have inflicted upon the Hindus. There would be no need
for a good-will gesture if there had not been some serious
injustice in the past. Such recognition of the past would be
implicit in an official Muslim acceptance of the Hindu rights over
Ram Janmabhoomi, in fact it would be the most important thing
about it. But this historical recognition is the hardest part of
the whole situation. Not even concerning one single contentious
place are the Muslim communal leaders willing to openly concede
that there was anything wrong with Babar's behaviour. What is so
difficult about such acceptance of past wrongs?
In 1989-90, the Japanese people have, via both their prime
minister and their new emperor, openly expressed their regrets
over the oppression meted out by them to the Korean people in the
half-century before 1945. No one has interrupted them to say that
this was a long- forgotten affair, time-barred, sterile raking-up
of old quarrels. On the contrary, everybody involved realizes that
this little apology is the very real beginning of a new
Japanese-Korean understanding and, in the longer run, of a renewed
friendship.
What makes it more difficult for the Indian Muslims to make such
an apology to the Hindus, than for the Japanese to the Koreans?
One reason is probably that the Japanese people does not
constitute an ideological unit. The ideology of Japanese supremacy
and militarism, which determined Japan's policies in the decades
before 1945, has disappeared and left room for a recognition of
the crimes which to a supremacist people seemed justified, but are
not considered such any longer. The new willingness to come to
terms with the past has been made possible by a real change in
Japan's dominant ideology. Now, that change does not endanger
Japan : a country does not have a permanent ideology, yet it has a
kind of permanent identity, independent of ideological fashions.
For the Muslim community, the situation is radically different.
The admission of wrongs done in application of the Islamic
ideology, would immediately endanger the adherence to that
ideology. Well, many Hindus have believed that untouchability was
an integral part of Hinduism and given it up nonetheless,
confident as they were that Hinduism is not a seamless garment,
but rather an ocean from which you can afford to take important
quantities away without really diminishing it. But Muslim leaders
are afraid that the admission of the systematic wrong done to the
Hindus in direct application of unambiguous tenets of Islam, would
seriously damage the integrity of the seamless garment of Islam.
If you disown the persecution part of history, and implicitly also
the persecution part of the doctrine, then where will this
disowning stop? A scar on the nose is a scar on the face, and the
repudiation of one Islamic doctrine (jihad) is the repudiation of
Islam.
The Japanese have remained Japanese even after shedding their
supremacist ideology, but will the Muslims, who are defined by
their adherence to an ideology, remain Muslims once parts of this
ideology are officially discredited? In this sense, openly facing
the facts of the persecution part of Muslim history may really
endanger the belief in Islam and therefore the very existence of
the Muslim community as such. That is why the Muslim communal
leadership will not even consider any formal admission of the
bloody past. Their only chance is to depict the Muslim atrocities
as aberrations from the true Islamic path of tolerance and peace
(as some friends of Islam have been doing). But they are wail
aware that this really implies declaring much of the Prophet's own
behaviour to be aberration and un-Islamic, as well as the
behaviour of revered Muslim heroes who merely imitated the
Prophet's example and implemented Quranic commandments. So, while
many innocent common Muslims would not mind restoring a place of
worship to the Hindus, the communal leadership is aware of its
larger doctrinal implications, and refuses to give in.
It should be stressed that what Hindus are demanding is not a full
compensation, not revenge, not getting even. Getting even would
take millions of killings and acts of slave-taking, acts of temple
destruction and so on, and that would still not bring the victims
of Islamic fanaticism back to life. So, getting even is out of the
question. Revenge is still something else. It would include the
destruction of the most sacred places of Islam, like the Kaaba.
That plan has not been formulated either. The point in this case
is merely a symbolic restoration of one or three ancient Hindu
sacred places, a formal gesture. Even that, the Muslim leadership
is not willing to make, so far.
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3.4. Enactment of status-quo
However, quite a number of individual Muslims have expressed their
willingness to make a goodwill gesture and leave the Ram
Janmabhoomi site to the Hindus. Most of them demand in return the
enactment of a law fixing the status-quo for all places of worship
as on August 15, 1947, or at least as on January 26, 1950. This
demand has also been made, without any offer in return, by the
militant Muslim organizations.
Well, such a law does not immediately seem objectionable. Not that
it exists in any secular country. It is the product of the Indian
situation, where the Muslims have grabbed a whole lot of places of
worship without being able to eliminate or even marginalize the
pre-existent society. So now they face the threat that the
victimized party demands restoration, and such a law protects them
against this embarrassing eventuality.
Hindus have nothing to gain from such a law. Hindu temples up for
dispute are very few. While Hindus historians have published long
lists of mosques built on demolished temples, no-one has come
forward with a similar list of Hindu temples. An impression has
been created by the dishonest crowd of secularists that there are
many Hindu temples that once were Buddhist. Well, let them start
with pointing out where these temples are. Let them secondly bring
up documentary or archaeological indications for a forcible rather
than a mutually voluntary take-over. And let them show that there
is an existing Buddhist community with a genuine use in taking
over such a temple. I am sure that Hindus will not object, even
regardless of whether the same procedure is applied to mosques
that have forcibly replaced temples.
The Bodh Gaya temple case, in which Buddhists and non- Buddhists
have co-operated to restore this erstwhile Buddhist place of
pilgrimage, has clearly proven this willingness on the part of the
Hindu leadership. The British interference and the stubbornness of
one temple priest have drawn out the process over several decades,
but since 1953 the Bodh Gaya temple is functioning as the Buddhist
shrine it originally was.16
Two facts about the Bodh Gaya temple case are particularly
inconvenient for the secularist theory of Hindu-Buddhist
antagonism. One is that a decisive role in the settlement was
played by the "Hindu communalist" organization Hindu
Mahasabha. The second is that the Bodh Gaya temple was never
forcibly taken over nor destroyed by the Hindus.
The Buddhists abandoned the place when they were exterminated by
the Islamic invaders, around 1200 AD. It was lying there,
deteriorating, even after a Shaiva monk order came to inhabit the
domain in 1590. Only around 1880 did a Hindu priest move in to use
the building as a temple, after efforts by the king of Myanmar to
repair it were stopped because of the Burmese war. The priest was
pressured by the British not to make concessions to the foreign (Lankan
and, more seriously, Japanese) Buddhists who were working to
revive this Buddhist place of pilgrimage. It was this priest's
successor who would thwart all attempts at settlement, even when
these involved Swami Vivekananda and Surendranath and Rabindranath
Tagore. But the settlement won through. Hindus had never forcibly
taken the place from the Buddhists, and yet (or should I say : and
that's why) they have shown sensitivity to the Buddhists'
attachment to the temple, and restored it as one of Buddhism's
chief places of pilgrimage.
If there are more such places (and the anti-Hindu crowd claims
there are many), let these secularists put their evidence on the
table. As a man of scientific temper, I will not forgive them if
they repeat their allegation without substantiating it. You see,
the case with allegations is simple : either you prove them, or
you withdraw them and offer apologies. The secularists should not
get away with doing neither one of these two.
Hindus have, until proof to the contrary, no temples to protect
from historical claims, and so they have nothing to gain from a
law fixing the status of places of worship. But since I don't
think these buildings are really the point, I also don't think
such a law would hurt the Hindu cause very much. However, it would
be wrong to agree to the enactment of such a law as a quid pro quo
for the hand-over of the Ram Janmabhoomi site. Since you don't
have to pay for what is yours, Hindus should not give anything in
return for the Ram Janmabhoomi. And Muslims will show that their
new respect for Hindu sacred places is genuine by not making it
conditional. The enactment of a further status-quo should be
considered on its own merits and not as a part of a deal.
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3.5. International standards
And that brings us back to the question : should the wrongs of
history be righted? If international custom is anything to go by,
yes. Right now, many court cases are being fought in the New
World, by Native Americans and Australian Aborigines, to claim
back ancestral sacred places and other property. Some are lost,
some are won. Even in some of the cases they lost, it was a
technicality or whatever else that came in the way, but the
principle that the wrongs of history may have to be righted, was
not questioned as such. And every case which the natives have won,
is a moral support for the restoration of Hindu sacred places.
In the Soviet Union too, many places of worship that were
confiscated and turned into storing-rooms, offices and what not,
are being given back to the religious communities. The fact that
the victimized communities had managed to do without these
buildings for so long, and the fact that now all these offices
etc. had to be moved, was not taken as a sufficient excuse for
keeping the status-quo.
The situation in India is not fundamentally different from that in
the Communist countries and in the New World. In each case, a wave
of ideologically sustained rapine and destruction has taken place.
The ideologies that gave a good conscience to the mass murders,
ruthless oppression and thorough cultural destruction, are of the
same stock.
Moses taught the Hebrew people a religion which divided humanity
in two : the Chosen People and the rest It divided space in two :
the Promised land and the rest It divided time in two : the time
before the Covenant (between Yahweh and His People) and the
unfoldment of God's plan starting with the Covenant.17
For Moses, anything was allowed if it fulfilled God's plan of
giving the Promised Land to the Chosen People.18 Fortunately, in
later centuries, when the Jews had no political power left, they
transformed their self- righteous religion into a strongly ethical
religion with a mystical dimension and a pluralistic culture of
Scripture interpretation through intellectual discussion.
However, the seed of Moses was still there, and it was taken up by
Christianity. Christianity again divided humanity into Christians
(saved ones) and Pagans (doomed ones). This automatically divided
space into two : the Christian countries and the Pagan countries.
But while the Jews had limited their ambition to the Promised
Land, Christianity wanted to convert the whole world. As the New
Testament had said, in seeming innocence: "Go and teach all
the peoples". It also divided time into two: the time when
the original sin reigned supreme, and the era of Jesus Christ, the
Saviour, our Lord (marked as AD, Anno Domini, year of the Lord).
Mohammed, who used to travel to the Christian city Damascus as an
agent of his wife Khadija's company, brought monotheism and
prophethood to Arabia. He divided humanity into two, the believers
and the unbelievers. He divided the world into two: the
Muslim-ruled countries, or Dar-ul-Islam, and the rest, called Dar-ul-Harb,
the land of strife. Again, this was not meant as a permanent
co-existence : the land of the believers had to inflict Harb on
the Dar-ul-Harb until it could swallow all of it. Islam also
divided time into two : the Jahiliya or ignorance, before the
Prophet (peace be upon him), and the time of Islam, which will
last until the day of Judgment.
Marxism is the latest and shortest-lived offshoot of this lineage
of closed and aggressive creeds. Its God is history, which is a
one-dimensional version of the Christian-Islamic doctrine of
"God's plan unfolding in history". It divides humanity
in two: the progressive forces, who have history on their side
(today: the proletariat), and the rest, who will be wiped out of
history soon. It divides time into two: before and after the
revolution. It divides the world into two: the Socialist Republics
where the proletariat is in power and does its redeeming work of
establishing classless society, and the rest, where the revolution
is yet to take place.
The one thing these three world-conquering creeds have in common,
is their boundless self-righteousness in overrunning the societies
of the non-chosen peoples. They have respected nothing of what was
sacred to the Pagans, often not even their lives. Where these
three have come in conflict with each other, they have not spared
each other either, witness the Crusades and the Spanish
Reconquista, the treatment meted out to the Chri
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