The Sarayu
must have wept quite a lot. The river
which bathed Rama’s childhood and watched the conflicts that the Maryada
Purushottam suffered during his adult life went on to witness much more nasty
conflicts a whole yug later.
When India
became independent more than half of the Muslims made arduous journeys across
the new national border reducing their population in India to a meagre
10%. The first Prime Minister of secular
India, a visionary who considered dams more sacred than gods, announced that
“All of us, to whatever religion we may belong, are equally the children of
India with equal rights, privileges and obligations.”
Ayodhya was
not much affected by the Partition. The
Muslims there chose to stay back placing their trust in Nehru’s
secularism. The Muslims had working
relationships with the Hindus in Ayodhya.
Muslim artisans made many of the idols that adorned Hindu temples. One temple there even had a Muslim manager.
Then someone
had a dream. The dream shattered the peace
that had hitherto marked the “quiet town of temples, narrow byways, wandering
cows and the ancient, mossy walls of ashrams and shrines.”* Abhiram Das, a
sadhu, told his disciples that Lord Ram appeared to him in many dreams standing
under the central dome of the mosque/temple.
The dream was shared with the Faizabad city magistrate, Guru Dutt Singh,
who claimed to have had the same dream many times. The duo decided to put a Ram idol in the
mosque surreptitiously.
The
“miraculous” apparition of “Ram Lalla” in the mosque sent tremors through the
heart of the Sarayu in Nov 1949. The
sadhus and some Ram devotees lit sacred fires outside the mosque and recited
verses from the Ramayana. Since India is
liberated, the birthplace of Lord Ram must also be liberated, Abhiram Das
declared.
The government
officials in Ayodhya and Faizabad cooperated wholeheartedly with the sadhus in
spite of Nehru’s orders to remove the idol from the mosque. The Muslims who tried to enter the mosque
were stopped by the police. Moreover,
the Hindu leaders got some Muslims to sign an affidavit stating that they did
not wish to pray in a place which was originally a temple. [The authenticity of this affidavit has been
in question for quite some time now.] A legal battle started soon led by a lawyer
named Gopal Singh Visharad to take complete possession of the mosque/temple. Akshaya
Brahmachari, a young sadhu who argued that the whole of Ayodhya was Rama’s own
place and that the attempt to seize the mosque was a slur on the god was beaten
up by the other sadhus and banished from Ayodhya.
Ayodhya on Sarayu |
Three decades
later, in the
1980s, the sorrow of the Sarayu stretched far and wide and became a national
sorrow. In 1984, about 500 sadhus from across India gathered in Delhi in order
to formulate strategies for defending Hinduism from onslaught by other
religions. “We cannot even light a holy
lamp” at Lord Ram’s birthplace, Karan Singh cried unto the sadhus. Karan Singh, son of the last king of Kashmir,
was terribly upset with the conversion of 400 Dalit families in Meenakshipuram,
Tamil Nadu, into Islam in 1981. The
meeting decided that the Hindu “culture was under siege” [Ashok Singhal’s words
– he had convened the meeting as VHP’s joint general secretary]. The meeting decided to retrieve three holy
sites, Ayodhya being the most important.
A rath yatra was organised immediately
starting from Sitamarhi in Bihar. It
reached Ayodhya 12 days later. The
devotees went to the banks of the Sarayu and took an oath holding the river’s
water in their cupped hands that they would give up anything in order to
construct the Ram mandir.
Two years
later, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi succumbed to Muslim pressure and his party annulled
a Supreme Court order in the infamous Shah Bano case which sought some sort of
gender equality in Indian Islam. This
appeasement of Muslims enraged the Hindus.
Rajiv Gandhi appeased the Hindus in return by allowing them to open the
Ayodhya mosque/temple which had been under lock and key for quite some time. The politics of religious appeasement got
stuck like a cancerous vermin.
The Sarayu
wept again.
* Ayodhya: The Battle for India’s Soul by Krishna Pokharel and
Paul Beckett, serialised by The Wall
Street Journal from Dec 3 to Dec 8, 2012.
PS. This is
going to be much longer than what I expected.
I wish I could make it shorter.
But history is a harsh taskmaster.
It insists on teaching us too many lessons than we can handle. So let me carry on after a break. You too, my dear reader, take a break. Let the Sarayu too have a break.
Religion is a greater pressure point in people's mind. If gandhi was to see any of the religious riots in Indian history he would have cursed himself and died. people dont learn to see religion and politics to be different and value humanity over them. It's India's curse that she has such ignorant and careless citizens
ReplyDeleteIndia's greatest curse is religion. Nehru. our first PM, said that. And we are back to that curse now.
DeleteOpening up Indian history, unfortunately, is like examining an atom bomb on your kitchen table. Ramayana, to me, is not more than one of the finest literary creations in the world. It contains history; it contains the best narrations about human life and transformations. How Raman, it's protagonist, who took a personal decision to spend long fourteen years in the forest ends up asking Sitha to declare her purity. This purification is strictly religious, and after returning to his kingdom, he becomes a slave in the hands of the Brahmin men who by then had taken total control of India. He couldn't take any personal decision not to sent his wife to the fearsome forest. And with abandoning Sita, he knew, he was abandoning his future-his children. Who's winning in Ramayana? The rotten Brahmanic religion and their imposterous utterances in the name of God and spirituality. The majority dumb-ass Indians see their primary objective in life is to show absolute commitment to these impostures. These men are an extremely dangerous creed. They can see dreams as they shit, and there are these dumb-asses to execute those wishes. And the impact of colonialism has brought untold miseries to India. Who is responsible for the uncountable death of the Muslims and Hindus in the name of Indian partition. How was no boundary between India and Pakistan not promulgated until two days after India's freedom day? How could Nehru not see the danger? It's sad. Now the bloody brahmins are still ruling India. So, the history of India offers so much more to sense than what appears on paper.
ReplyDeleteI consider both Ramayana and Mahabharata great epics worthy of eminent place in world literature. Both reveal human nature vividly. As the preface to Mahabharata says, whatever is there in the world will be found in it: love, hatred, war, peace, lust, greed, jealousy... everything. Rama's angst is our own. His helplessness is our own. Unfortunately people spiritualised the whole thing and stripped Rama and other characters of their humanness, Eventually we started fighting in their names forgetting what they taught. But that's true in the case of every religion.
DeleteReligion is merely a tool for achieving worldly things such as power. Ayodhya is also fundamentally a political issue more than religious. It is about 'garv' rather than god.