Book 1 S. Gurumurthy TheThe RamRam TempleTemple MovementMovement AA massmass initiativeinitiative forfor reinstatementreinstatement ofof HindutvaHindutva inin SecularSecular IndiaIndia Untitled-7 1 11/8/2016 3:55:41 PM Untitled-7 2 11/8/2016 3:55:41 PM Chapter I The Ayodhya movement and reinstatement of Hindu spirit in Indian polity The Ayodhya movement for building the Ram Temple, which re-railed the derailed Indian nation and nationalism and helped to recapture and reinstate the Indian identity in Indian polity – was perhaps the greatest mass movement that the people of India generated in the twentieth century. The background to the Ayodhya movement has been succinctly captured in the White Paper on the Ram Temple Movement brought out by the Bharatiya Janata Party. The BJP White Paper says that ‘‘the movement had a religious and cultural origin, but it has profoundly influenced the political destiny of India because of the insensitivity of the current political leadership that is free India’s political leadership, to the spiritual and cultural aspirations of the Indian nation’White Paper on the Ram Temple Movement published by the BJP p.7] Here in lies the clue to why the Ayodhya movement rose like a tornado in Indian polity. It was a movement waiting to happen given the humiliating conditions which secular polity, as practised by almost all political forces, had imposed on the people of India. It turned out to be a massive protest against the amnesia into which this ancient nation was being forced by the expediencies of electoral and day to day politics. Instead of eternal values of this ancient nation anchoring the day to day politics, the vagaries of power hungry politics heavily devalued and endeavoured to discredit its eternal principles and destabilised its mind and psyche. The Untitled-7 3 11/8/2016 3:55:41 PM 4 • Party Document Vol-8 compulsive needs of secular politics as understood and articulated purely in electoral terms demanded a massive self-negation from the nation. The self-negation demanded amounted to disowning its past and disconnecting from its roots. A country whose soul, Maharishi Aurobindo said, was and continues to be ‘Sanatana Dharma’– a non-conflicting and conflict-resolving philosophy for which the world on the throes of civilisational clashes borne out of intolerant and imperial religions awaits India – was slow poisoned to distance and disconnect itself from its soul and roots. It is essentially the insensitivity of the secular India to the sensibilities of the cultural and non-conflicting religious values of ancient India and the manner in which the secular polity began demeaning and deriding the Hindu sentiments and Hindu cultural icons that laid the foundation for the alienation of the Hindu masses and classes alike from the state and polity of India. What started in electoral calculus as the protection of the minorities, turned by theory and practice of secular politics that became euphemism for vote- bank politics, promotion of the minorities and later got perverted into appeasement of minorities. It was not just limited to that, but extended to undermining the Hindu character and Hindu identity of India by characterising everything that connected India to its roots and soul as communal and anti-minorities and unsecular. It was not sufficient if a political party was pro-minority to be regarded and accepted as secular, it had to demonstrate its anti-Hindu character to prove its secular credentials. The direct result of this distorted and perverted secular politics, which was celebrated by equating this perversion with the constitutional concept of secularism and even modernism, was the marginalisation of the cultural majority of the nation under the guise of secularisation of the national life and polity. The BJP White Paper summed up the hidden triggers behind this historic movement thus: “To understand how the Ayodhya movement and how it has struck deep chord in the Indian mind we must see how the Ayodhya issue was always a potentially political issue and eventually graduated into one; how the Indian leaders ignored history and wanted the people also to ignore it; how the provocative ocular effect of the invaders’ monuments was underplayed rather than understood as to its potential effect; Untitled-7 4 11/8/2016 3:55:41 PM Cultural Nationalism • 5 how false unity was promoted instead of an understanding rooted in facts and resulting in assimilation; how the consequence was distorted secularism; how Rama and Ramarajya are our national heritage whose potentiality has been realised only now; how the evolution from Somnath was suspended after the death of Sardar Patel and how the Ayodhya is the recommencement from the point where the spirit of Somnath stood suspended.” [Ibid p.7] The White Paper adds: “The Ayodhya movement was not just a plea for a temple for Sri Rama, that instead it reflected a far deeper quest for capturing national identity. The movement is firmly rooted in the inclusive and assimilative cultural heritage of India. It represents the nationalist thrust of the freedom movement. The post Independence political creed of the Congress and of most other political parties had come to regard everything that inspired this nation in the past as less than secular – in fact, communal and even anti-national. The movement for the restoration of the Temple at the birthplace of Sri Rama evolved as a corrective to this distortion. It developed into a massive protest against the derailment of all that inspired the freedom movement – the elevating chant of Vandemataram which Maharishi Banchim Chandra gave to this nation, the goal of Ramarajya held out by Mahatma Gandhi as the destination of the free India, the ideal of Spiritual Nationalism expounded by Swami Vivekananda, the Spirit of Sanatana Dharma which Sri Aurobindo described as the soul and nationalism of India and the mass devotion to the motherland built around the Ganpathi festival by Bal Gangadhar Tilak. The Ayodhya movement symbolised the re-establishment of these roots of our nationhood which had dried up due to the post-independence polity and a spiritually bankrupt nation. Indeed, secularism became a perverted slogan – merely a means to catch votes and a slogan to shout down every nationalist’ [Ibid p.7]. The immediate drives of the Ayodhya movement could not have been brought out better. These immediate triggers for the Ayodhya explosion were the sustained and calibrated result of free India’s intellectual distortions and perversions that denied the Indian antiquity and cultivated a sense of irreverence for the Indian past. These distortions originated in the colonial interpretation of the Indian history, traditions, values, religion and society. The secular India’s Untitled-7 5 11/8/2016 3:55:42 PM 6 • Party Document Vol-8 scholarship which was keen to de-link modern India from ancient India was keen to lap up and did lap up all biased and distorted colonial scholarship on India which was calculated to undermine India in the minds of Indians. A compulsive element that persuaded the secular scholarship to endeavour to de-link the modern India from the ancient Indian traditions was the unbelievable negationism in the secular Indian scholarship that had as its principal object the suppression of the near barbaric Islamic invasion in India for the purpose of instituting an India not only de-linked from the Past, but an India that will have no memory of the bitterness of the past. So the idea of avoiding bitterness became an ideal for which negationism became a permissible and even an unavoidable tool. And as it was an ideal to be achieved even forging facts and opinions in history for avoiding historical constructions and interpretations that might revive bitterness of the past was not only permissible but also mandatory in secular scholarship.’’ It is necessary at this point to look back and capture how the masses, who have been peacefully agitating for the construction of the Ram Temple at Ayodhya exploded on December 6, 1992. A foreword written by Shri L.K. Advani, who undertook the historic Rath Yatra from Somnath to Ayodhya which triggered unbelievable and unprecedented mass participation of the people in the movement and also brought the issue into the centre of Indian politics, he said that apart from the natural urge of the Hindu society to have a temple erected for Sri Rama in his place of birth the other causes and urges which constituted the powerful drives of the movement. Advani wrote: “But another powerful current arose among the people, and the confluence of the two has given the power to the Sri Rama- janmabhumi movement which we see today. The manner in which the state bent to the fundamentalists and terrorists, the manner in which self-styled leaders of minorities sought to revive the politics of separatism which had led to the partition of the country, and even more the manner in which Prime Ministers and others genuflected to them; and the double standards which came more and more to mar public discourse in India to the point that the word “Hindu”‘ became something to be ashamed about, to the point that nationalism became a dirty word – these ignited a great revulsion among the Untitled-7 6 11/8/2016 3:55:42 PM Cultural Nationalism • 7 people. As all this was being done in the name of “Secularism”, it led the people to believe that what was being practised was not Secularism but a perversion. The people began to search for what true Secularism meant, they began to wonder how our country could at all survive if nationalism was to be anathema.’’ Reconstructing the temple for Sri Rama became the symbol of this rising consciousness – ridding the country of the perversions to which it was being subjected in the name of Secularism, forging a strong and united country.