Ayodhya and After: Issues Before Hindu Society

386 Pages·1991·1.453 MB·English

by  Koenraad Elst

Introduction
I am not a Hindu. And I am certainly not a Muslim. So, when I started
writing my earlier book Ram Janmabhoomi vs Babri Masjid, a Case Study
in Hindu-Muslim Conflict, in the spring of 1990, I was an outsider to this
conflict between Hindus and Muslims. But as I ventured deeper into the
unique configuration of forces now existing in India, I saw that this was not
a conflict between just any two communities. It is not just a struggle
between one self-interest and another self-interest. It is a struggle between
very unequal contenders, with unequal motives for waging this struggle at
all.
On the one hand, there is the society that has continued the age-old
civilization of this country. It has been badly bruised by centuries of foreign
rule and oppression, with the moral losses more serious than the territorial
and cultural ones : it suffers of self- forgetfulness and lack of self-respect.
But it is still far better off than most of the cultures that have been overrun
by the Muslim conquerors or the European colonizers. It has a real chance
of coming through.
On the other hand, there is a community, which is allowed to function
within this larger society, but which has the roots of its separate identity
outside this society's age-old civilization. These people's ancestors were in
may cases pulled out of Hindu society and made members of the Muslim
community under duress. Now, they would automatically evolve back into
Hindu society, were it not for some politicians and theologians who instill a
separate communal identity in them.
The Ayodhya movement, which wants to reintegrate the sacred place of
Ram Janmabhoomi into the living Hindu tradition by building a Mandir on
it, is at the same time an invitation to the Muslim Indians to reintegrate
themselves into the society and the culture from which their ancestors were
cut off by fanatical rulers and their thought police, the theologians. It is thus
an exercise in national integration.
The struggle of Hindu society is not primarily with the Muslim
community. The most important opponents of Hindu society today are not
the Islamic communal leaders, but the interiorized colonial rulers of India,
the alternated English-educated and mostly Left-leaning elite that noisily
advertises its secularism. It is these people who impose anti-Hindu policies
on Hindu society, and who keep Hinduism down and prevent it from
proudly raising its head after a thousand years of oppression. The worst
torment for Hindu society today is not the arrogant and often violent
agitation from certain minority groups, nor the handful of privileges which
the non-Hindu communities are getting. The worst problem is this mental
slavery, this sense of inferiority which Leftist intellectuals, through their
power positions in education and the media, and their direct influence on
the public and political arena, keep on inflicting on the Hindu mind.
These Leftist intellectuals work in a strange collusion with the Islamic
fanatics. Normally, the atheist Left should be the sharpest opponent of
religious obscurantism and dogmatic adherence to anti-universalist belief
systems like Islam. But in India, the two work happily together for the
destruction of their common enemy: Hindu Dharma. Of course, the Leftists
are mistaken if they think they can use the Muslims for their own ends. It is
a one-way collaboration, and increasingly so, as the Left is put on the
defensive while Islam is still on the offensive. So far, the Left has rendered
some fine intellectual services to the cause of Islam. It has strongly
supported the movement for the Partition of India on the basis of the
Islamic Two-Nation Theory. After Partition, it has used its increasing hold
on the entire intellectual and educational scene in India to paralyze all
criticism of the historical record and ideological character of Islam.
Then again, the impression that this westernized elite is merely being
used for Islamic communal designs, may be superficial. This elite itself is
quite confident that it is in no way threatened by Islamic self-assertion. And
rightfully so : Islam cannot seriously challenge modernity once it has really
taken off and shaped the polity (as it has in India, far more than in the
Shah's Iran). While Islamic resurgence may pose a physical threat to Hindu
society, the deeper challenge and the sharpest disdain are coming from the
Left-leaning westernized (short : Nehruvian) establishment.
So, one of the first tasks in the awakening of Hindu society is to
scrutinize and expose the Nehruvian establishment, it its political and in,
more fundamentally, its intellectual dimensions. Today, that is becoming
easy. When in the fifties people like Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel were
waging an intellectual struggle against Communism, they were up against a
dense fog of widespread fascination with this intrusive ideology. But in the
nineties the sky is clearing up, and we witness the swan song of the once so
arrogant Leftist intellectuals even in their last strongholds. It is a foregone
conclusion that their empire is nearing its end, it is just a matter of not
letting their exit drag on for longer than necessary, and being prepared to fill
the vacuum.
At the intellectual level, Hindus will son be able to breathe freely. They
will be able to rediscover and reformulate the numerous valuable
expressions of the one Sanatana Dharma. They will be able to affirm the
unity and integrity of this Sanatana Dharma, without being falsely accused
of assimilative communalism when they restate the scientific fact that
Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism are full members of the one Hindu
commonwealth of schools and sects. They will be able to reaffirm the unity
and integrity of Hindu society, and to debunk the casteist and regionalist
separatisms that have been fostered by its enemies and equipped with a
pseudo- historical basis. They will be able to put the evils of Hindu society
into the correct historical perspective on the basis of the real facts, and
judge them by universal standards rather than by the hostile ad hoc
standards that have been applied to Hindu society by its enemies.
Equipped with a renewed self-awareness, Hindus will be able to face the
challenge posed by the increasingly militant Muslim world. So far, with the
help of the leftists, Islam has been able to impose a kind of Emergency on
India. During Indira Gandhi's Emergency rule, everyone was perfectly free
to sing the praise of Nehru's daughter, but criticizing her was a dangerous
thing to do. All the Indian intellectuals refer with indignation to this episode
(during which the Constitution was amended to make India a secular
socialist republic). Similarly, it is allowed to eulogize Islam as a religion of
peace and brotherhood, but scrutinizing Islamic history and doctrine, or
merely asking some critical questions, is quite out of bounds. Books that do
these things, have a good change of getting banned, with the tacit or explicit
approval of the secularists, and newspaper editors have interiorized this
bank on critical writings about Islam. At the intellectual level it is very easy
to put Islam on the defensive and cool down its arrogance, just by doing
those very things which this Emergency wants to prevent. If Hindus take
cognizance of the real texts of Islam, the real doctrines they embody, the
real story of the Prophet's mission and career, and the real story of the
application of these doctrines in the Islamic conquest of India, then they
will soon shed their habit of eulogizing this imperialist ideology. If
moreover they apply the precise psychological categories, which Hindu
tradition has developed, to understand the quality of consciousness that has
generated the central texts and doctrines of Islam, they will soon be cured
of their mental subservience to Islam.
It is my conviction that Islam will not last very much longer. In the
confrontation with the rational spirit, which was present in Hindu, thought
since millennia, but which has been brought centre-stage in modern culture
and education by the West, the dogmas of Islam cannot survive. The
universalist attitude of science revolts against the belief that one man could
get a special message from none less than the Creator of the Universe,
while others are excluded from any such direct contact. The critical attitude
of science rejects the demand that we accept Mohammed's claim to
prophethood without verification. Islam has no satisfying reply to this
challenge of science and rationality.
Moreover, the present upsurge in Islamic activism, no matter how
threatening it may look, will not be able to deliver the goods. It may
mobilize popular aggression against the non-Muslims of the world, but
when it comes to running a country, it will note fare better than
Communism. Of course, it has more roots in the soul of the people. But it is
faced with material needs and popular attitudes and expectations that
modernity has spread to all the countries of the world. Even Islamic rulers,
even in a dictatorship, somehow have to please their people. To do this, they
need the material products of modernity, if only because in the
overpopulated countries of today, a modern infrastructure is indispensable
to feed the people (we needn't even mention the fondness of Islamic as
much as Kafir rulers for modern weaponry). So, they cannot avoid bringing
in modern technology, therefore modern science, therefore modern
thinking. While modern thinking is certainly not the final word in the
progress of humanity, it is quite sufficient to undermine the exclusivist
beliefs central to Islam.
With that, we have only demonstrated the weakness of Islam. It cannot
possibly win against the culture of rationality and humanism. However, it
can hold out for some time and still gain a lot in numbers and power. How
fat it will crumble, depends partly on the emergence of people, especially
born Muslims, who go in and actively criticize Islam in forums with
Muslims audiences. It also depends on the frankness and serenity with
which non-Muslims who are in regular contact with Muslims, such as the
Hindus, express their skepsis regarding the central claims of Islam, and the
logic and humanity with which they present alternative views. Confronting
Islam with rational criticism will constitute a turning-point, very delicate
but inevitable. But it is the positive attraction of superior (i.e. more rational
and humanist) thought and culture that will be the single most important
factor in the inescapable decline of Islam.
The Hindu reply to Islam should consist mostly in a positive attitude of
understanding, rooted in Hindu humanism and springing from the
knowledge of the soul which Hindu tradition has been cultivating since
ages. It should, for instance, make a careful distinction between the two
cultural components of the present Islamic upsurge : one is the self-
assertion against the imposition of the spiritually impoverished
(secularized), reductionist culture of the West, which is a stand Hindus may
share; the other is the fanatical imposition of the Islamic belief system. The
Hindu should understand the mental and the social processes that tie people
to such irrational belief systems, and maintain in his attitude and judgment a
scrupulous distinction between the human beings that have been caught in
this belief system, and the Islamic belief system itself. This will be easier,
more credible and less hostile, if he takes an equally sobre look at the state
of his own culture, dropping both the self- depreciation and the
compensatory self-glorification so prevalent in contemporary Hindu
rhetoric.
This critique of Islam, it should be clearly understood, is a critique of a
belief system and its concomitant code of behaviour, and not an attack on a
community of people. It is also not a goal in itself. at the political level, it is
merely a practical diagnosis of an acute problem: the cause of the persistent
communal tension in India is Islam. After all, any two communities,
religious or other, can pick a quarrel, but it remains occasional; while the
tension between Muslims and all other religious is chronic and systematic.
At the intellectual level, the critique of Islam is merely an exercise or case
study in the pathology of religion, as part of a general exploration and
mapping of man's religious history, which in turn is part of the groundwork
for the integral human education in the global civilization of tomorrow. I for
one have no intention of spending my life crusading against Islam or any
other It is just that we have to free ourselves from illusions about certain
intrusive and pretentious belief systems, and once that is done, we can
concentrate on more positive dimensions of social and spiritual life.
The same thing counts for the critique of the contentions put forward by
the secularists. It is thoughts, not people, that are the problem. However,
people who have been practising slander with so much gusto and self-
righteousness, will only understand if the proper name- tags are attached to
the criticism of their thought. I have dealt with them at rather great length in
this volume, and I have not spared them. They pretend to be the champions
of modernity, rationality and democracy, and that makes their distortions
and their anti- democratic and even totalitarian stand on important issues all
the more unacceptable. They have to be exposed, and I have made my
contribution to the discharge of this fairly unpleasant job. I wish and intend
it to be the last time that I have to go after them. Once Hindu society has
shaken off these Hindu-baiting leeches, i.e. when it is no longer under their
mental spell, it can concentrate on developing and actualizing the treasures
it has to offer to mankind, and achieving genuine national integration.
Actually, this national integration that every talking body in India talks
about, is a very natural condition and needs no achieving. Rather, it requires
dropping a few things. It requires dropping the anti-Hindu separatist
doctrines that have largely been created for the purposes of several
imperialisms, and are now being kept afloat with a lot of distortive
intellectual and propagandistic effort. Just drop this effort, and this country
will naturally find back its unity. Delhi, 5th February, 1991.

Chapter 1. Summary of the
Historical Question
1.1 Before the Masjid, the Mandir
The historical starting point of the Ram Janmabhoomi issue is the
contention that the Babri Masjid structure in Ayodhya was built after the
forcible demolition of a Hindu temple on the same spot by Muslim soldiers.
In the first part of my book Ram Janmabhoomi vs. Babri Masjid, a Case
Study in Hindu-Muslim conflict,1 I have dealt extensively with the
arguments given pro and contra this contention. The case can be
summarized as follows.
There is archaeological evidence that a temple, or at the very least a
building with pillars, has stood on the Babri Masjid spot since the eleventh
century. Of course, because of the structure standing there, the
archaeological search has been far from exhaustive, but at least of the
existence of this 11th century building we can be certain.2
When the building was destroyed, we do not know precisely, there are no
descriptions of the event extent anywhere. Mohammed Ghori's armies
arrived there in 1194, and they may have destroyed it. It may have been
rebuilt afterwards, or it may only have been destroyed by later Muslim
rulers of the area. so it is possible that when Mir Baqi, Babar's lieutenant,
arrived there in 1528, he found a heap of rubble, or an already aging
mosque, rather than a magnificent Hindu temple.
However, it is very unlikely that the place was not functioning as a Hindu
place of worship just before the Babri Masjid was built. As is well known,
fourteen pillar-stones with Hindu temple ornamentation have been used in
the construction of the Babri Masjid. Considering the quantity of bricks
employed in the building, one cannot say that these fourteen pillar- stones
were used merely to economize on bricks: quantitatively, they simply didn't
make a difference. These remnants of Hindu architecture were more
probably use in order to display the victory of the mosque over the temple,
of Islam over Paganism. That was in keeping with a very common practice
of Muslim conquerors, who often left pieces of the outer wall of the
destroyed temple standing (as was done in the Gyanvapi mosque in
Varanasi, replacing the Kashi Vishvanath temple), or worked pieces of idols
into the threshold of the newly- built mosque, so that the faithful could
tread them underfoot.
Since the actual practice in the case of the Babri Masjid conforms to this
general pattern, we may infer that in all probability the Masjid was built in
the same material circumstances in which the pattern normally applied, viz.
just after the demolition of a Pagan place of worship. This is all the more
probable considering that no alternative explanations for the presence of
these Hindu pillar-stones have been offered, not even by those historians
who would have an ideological and argumentative interest in doing so.
In methodological terms, our conclusion that the use of Hindu remnants
in the mosque building indicates an immediately preceding temple
demolition because such a sequence fulfills a common pattern, is based on
the principle of coherence. This principle as a ground for historical
inference does not given absolute certainty, but at least a good measure of
probability. But conversely, a contention that violates the principle of
coherence without being supported by hard evidence, thereby becomes very
improbable. As we shall see, the advocates of the Babri Masjid cause,
including a team of 25 JNU historians, have disregarded the coherence
principle in central points of their argumentation.
In their well-known and oft-quoted statement on the Ayodhya
controversy, the JNU historians have rejected the contention that there was
a temple on the disputed spot before the Babri Masjid was built there.3 This
is a wildly improbable contention. There is a general cultural pattern that
would have made people build a temple there, a very important one.
If you go to Ayodhya and walk to the Masjid/Janmabhoomi, you will find
yourself walking uphill, even after passing the Hanuman Garhi which itself
is on a little hill. Relative to the flatness of the entire Ganga basin, the
disputed split is quite an elevated place, and it overlooks Ayodhya. Now,