There is no clean slate in history

Fascist megalomania and its discontent

Babri masjid, Ayodhya, India.

January 22, 2024 could well be a watershed in India’s long history. Some say that secularism long been dead was finally buried on this day.

The consecration of the Ram temple in Ayodhya is in essence the coronation of Hindutva, the ideology of Hindu supremacy which began with the founding of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in 1925. It took nearly a hundred years for the dream of Hindu domination to become a reality.

The loud and vulgar spectacle unfolding in Ayodhya and the mad frenzy being whipped up in the streets is not about Ram or a mandir or a masjid. It never was. It is about revenge. It is about the hatred of Muslims. It is about humiliating a community, cutting it down to size. It is about showing them their place, finally.

It is also about electoral politics. All fascist outfits need an “other” to beat up on. Muslims are the arch enemy and many ills, especially the partition of India, are laid at their door. They are made to bear the burden of all that is considered unpalatable and problematic in the past. Take out Muslims from the electoral equation, and Hindutva brigade would have no legs to stand on. Winning on substantive issues that matter to the people is hard, it requires vision, dedication and planning. Why bother when people could be fooled in the name of religion, duped in the name of hurt pride and a besmirched past.

In that sense, this triumphal ethno-nationalism is also very much about Muslim emperors who came from outside and ruled over these lands. It is about the sense of Hindu victimhood, the shame of being conquered and dominated by Muslims in particular. The Hindutva ire and rage is rarely directed at the British who colonized, brutalized and oppressed India for nearly 200 years. The colonizers destroyed the country’s economy, exploited its land and its people and looted it to the tune of tens of trillions of dollars.

The British depredation and depravity do not inspire as much anguish among Hindu nationalists as the antics of the Sultans and Mughals who, despite their imperial ambitions and atrocities, did not rob the native wealth and carted it away to their ‘home’ countries. They settled here, especially the Mughals, and made it their home and contributed to its economic and cultural flourishing. The magnificent Mughal monuments, for one, dotting the length and breadth of India bear testimony to it.

But the very same landmarks are an eyesore for those who see the past only in terms of domination and slavery and humiliation. It is a tendentious reading of history. It is a selective reading of history. It is seeing history as a compendium of slights and hurts. It is as if the sole purpose of Muslim rulers was to insult and denigrate Hindus and their places of worship; as if their only motive was to convert the natives by force. To view the past this way is to simplify and flatten the complex intermingling of peoples and cultures and deny the natural ebb and flow of history.

Mobs climb on top of Babri masjid, 6 December, 1992.

Where Babri masjid once stood, today there’s a temple built on its ruins. Babri masjid in turn was built by allegedly destroying a temple. But there’s a crucial difference. Even if a temple was razed to make way for the masjid, this was done in medieval times when brute force was the currency of power. Might was right. Not that it made it right, but that was how the world operated then. There was no rule of law. However, the destruction of Babri masjid in December 1992 took place in a secular, democratic set up. The mob was allowed to demolish the structure in broad daylight while all levels of administration stood by, complicit. The Supreme Court of India called it an illegal and egregious act.

But such legal niceties are of no use when the popular will demands a temple aggressively and insistently—a desire which the same Supreme Court in its judgement readily acknowledges and concedes despite evidence and despite its considered wisdom. The new Ram temple is seen as a vindication, a reclamation, a correction of a historical wrong. But history is complicated and unwieldy. It does not yield itself to our neat, cut-and-dried ideologies and desires. Every historical wrong that we want to correct there’s always another one that’s ready to bite us in the back. For every mosque built on a destroyed temple, there is a temple built on a destroyed Buddhist or Jain religious place. If Muslim rulers destroyed temples, so did Hindu kings. There is no clean slate in history.

How far should we go back to right historical wrongs? The answer often lies in the hands of those who wield the stick. In this essential aspect it seems nothing much has changed since the time of Babur. It is as if we have come full circle. Or time has stood still. A prime minister is the prima donna hight priest, the new sultan with a penchant for grandeur and ostentation to match. His hubris and his megalomania would devastate many more masjids and many more lives. Not that there is no blood on his hands already.

It is as if in the six hundreds years since Babur we have made no moral progress. As if we are stuck in an ethical logjam. Fascists have come and gone and we have yet to see the last of them. But fascists do not grow in a vacuum. They prey on us—the people. Time and again we have fallen for their cheap tricks and false promises allowing them to excite our base emotions, making us turn on one another.

How not to fall for the trickeries of the conmen? Education would help. But education bereft of critical thinking is more dangerous than having no education. It is the so-called educated classes in India and in the diaspora who are supporting, justifying and legitimizing the coronation of the semi-literate, narcissist upstart. They not only see nothing wrong in their Ram and their religion being usurped by him and his ilk but in fact are proud of it, celebrating the desecration of their faith.

This usurpation of Hinduism for political power in modern times is a new phenomenon. In Islam the state and the faith are conjoined at the hip, that is why Islamic societies are less conducive to secularism. Fortunately Hinduism had no such burden to carry. But unfortunately, the Hindutva project having taken a leaf out of the Nazis and Judeo-Christian orthodoxies has been transforming Hinduism into an organized creed. To put it crudely, they have talibanized Hinduism, imbuing it with intolerance, bigotry and proclivity for violence—attributes alien to its nature. Many of its proponents see it a triumph which was long time coming. It is their rightful place in history they say they are claiming, finding their voice and finally emerging from the shadow of a soft, effeminate past.

The way things stand, Modi would ride to another easy victory in a few months’ time. The Ayodhya extravaganza was orchestrated precisely to seal that outcome. The opposition is weak and divided, and so is their votes. Rahul Gandhi is connecting with the people at the grass roots with his Bharat Jodo marches and he seems sincere and credible and would make for a good leader. But he carries the dynastic stigma of his illustrious family. Besides, he lacks the cunning and charisma that Indians for some perverse reason want to see in their leaders.

So it seems until 2029 we would continue to hurtle along from one spectacle to another. A consolation is that nothing lasts forever and hopefully this vain, soul-crushing circus would come to an end too. But by the time it is done it would have laid to waste all that we value and cherish. And by the time we rebuild and restore our humanity another fascist with a silver tongue and a wicked heart would come knocking at our door. One step back two steps forward. History it seems is nothing but a Sisyphean struggle.

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Images are taken from the internet.