Did PM just discredit India’s freedom fight?
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has exhorted his fellow citizens to treat August 5 on a par with August 15, India’s Independence Day. The call, made after conducting the bhoomi pujan of the Ram temple at Ayodhya on Wednesday, August 5, defies logic and negates history. Ram’s devotees, Mr Modi included, have every right to be joyous when their lord, venerated as Maryada Purushottam, or the epitome of honour, gets a proper abode; none has a reason to quarrel with them either. But drawing an impossible parallel with Indian Independence movement and the one for the temple has its risks. For one, the freedom movement was a unifier in itself — Indians of all hues, irrespective of their religion, caste, language, sex, race and region were part of it. Countless people willingly sacrificed their lives for the cause, or suffered in silence, or became martyrs or spent their lives in villages changing their faces. It was a movement to not only liberate this nation from the yoke of foreign rule but also an attempt to unshackle itself from the very many forms of bondages that stopped its citizens from living their lives to the full. And the best product of the movement was the Constitution of India — which promised every Indian citizen justice.
The Ram Janmabhoomi movement, on the other hand, had always been a partisan political one, coopted and nourished by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and its political arm, the Bharatiya Janata Party. Thousands of Indians who had nothing to do with the temple or the movement lost their lives or suffered huge losses due to it. The rathyatra of the then BJP president, L.K. Advani, left a trail of blood and destruction across Indian streets. The land on which the temple will now come up is freed through acts of violence, a fact underlined by the Supreme Court, which ordered construction of the temple. Mr Modi’s call for seeing the temple as a symbol of India’s unity would have better acceptance had he mentioned those innocent victims and begged their pardon. Perhaps, it would have been a true tribute to Lord Ram.
Equally incomprehensible is the silence or subservience of the opposition, save of the Left, to the politicisation of an essentially religious ceremony. None seems to have an issue with the Prime Minister, accompanied by the chief minister of a state, laying the foundation stone of a place of worship of one religion. The Congress, as it has always been on the issue, is a confused lot, speaking in many voices. The Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party expressed no opinion, nor the DMK of Tamil Nadu. Kerala’s CPI(M) chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan, however, made two points. One, India’s secularist ideals would not have suffered this jolt had the Congress chosen to hold on to them. Two, our agenda must be to contain Covid-19 which has already affected 19 lakh people, and then bring succour to the people the pandemic has reduced to penury. That’s some semblance of political sanity and sagacity, if you will.
Equally incomprehensible is the silence or subservience of the opposition, save of the Left, to the politicisation of an essentially religious ceremony. None seems to have an issue with the Prime Minister, accompanied by the chief minister of a state, laying the foundation stone of a place of worship of one religion.