People's Democracy

On December 7, 1992, the parliament, in spite of the usual hullabaloo, remained supine, discarding even the then speaker’s reported advice that a resolution of national sorrow be communicated to the world, especially to heal the wound in Muslim hearts. It was perhaps the lowest point in our recent history.

  TEN YEARS AFTER AYODHYA

Dire Danger To Our Civilisational Entity

Hiren Mukherjee

ON December 6, 1992, when the 500 years old Babri mosque in Ayodhya was brought down with devilish glee by contingents of frenzied religio-fascists mobilised by the notorious Sangh Parivar, with its political flagship the BJP and odious outfits like Vishwa Hindu Parishad, Shiv Sena, Bajrang Dal, etc, it was not only our fleeting image as a ‘secular state’ but our historically involved civilisational entity which lay nearly shattered. Other events followed, helping the BJP to rise from near-inconsequentiality in Lok Sabha (where its membership was reduced to two!) to its present position of power. This piteous predicament from the common people’s point of view was cruelly compounded earlier this year when a suspiciously incendiary enormity in Godhra presaged an unprecedented, government-condoned, unspeakably cruel, four-month program, reminiscent of Balkan style “ethnic cleansing” that delighted the gloating ‘globalisers’ of the West that has found the goings so good in the post-Gorbachev period of moral-ethical atrophy all over the earth.

 LOWEST POINT IN RECENT HISTORY

“Hey Ram!’ were the last words from the lips of Gandhiji as, on January 30, 1948, he fell to bullets fired by a Hindutva fanatic. ‘Jai Shri Ram’ (‘Hail Shri Ram’), said the ‘volunteers’ (karsevaks) breaking the Babri mosque, not only a place of worship but a massive edifice adoring the skyline of a city of shrines, Ayodhya. As the structure came down, the BJP’s national leaders watched and cheered, so very unlike an old-style Congress leader and priest to boot, the late Kamlapati Tripathi, who once said (I remember distinctly) that if a brick of the mosque was broken he would go there and fast till death.

The Congress, of course, had changed; it was Congress leaders from Govind Ballabh Pant to Rajiv Gandhi who had queered the pitch for a peaceful settlement at the site of the mosque. The day after the vandalism, on December 7, 1992, the parliament met, in an outwardly stormed (but perhaps with many who really rejoiced but concealed their glee!), and while Vajpayee looked sad beyond words and Advani appeared dazed, the Congress prime minister P V Narasimha Rao sat pouting his lips, the very picture of melancholy. However, the parliament, in spite of the usual hullabaloo, remained supine, discarding even the then speaker’s reported advice that a resolution of national sorrow be communicated to the world, especially to heal the wound in Muslim hearts. It was perhaps the lowest point in our recent history.

How ironic in this context is recollection of the verse in Valmiki Ramayana where Ram talks Lakshmana that “this golden Lanka” (iyam swarnamoyee Lanka) was “not to his liking” and went on to add that “the mother and motherland were more glorious than heaven” (“jananee janmaboomischa swargaadapi gareeyashi”). Such words seem to be an anathema today in Hindutva-toting India!

HIDEOUS SLUR ON INDIA’S IMAGE

Field Marshal Lord Wavell, India’s viceroy preceding Mountbatten with his ‘Plan Balkan” (1947), noted in his 1946 diary that he was surprised at Labour foreign minister Ernest Bevin’s venomous hostility towards India’s freedom, and also that the ‘West’ must continue to be in control of ‘the middle of the earth,’ the Indian subcontinent. Britain, never conceding independence, agreed to the “transfer of power” to India and Pakistan, extracting in exchange the partition of our country. For historic reasons the region comprising Pakistan would be made easily to slide into the pocket of imperialists and serve, as a time bomb, to be switched at will against India – a role Pakistan has been playing even today.

But India, for all her debility and degeneracies, has been more intransigent and during the Cold War period could have the gumption to spout the concept of non-alignment and was accused of ‘tilting’ towards the Soviet Union. Thanks to the ‘contrived’ eclipse of socialism since 1987-89, the world is ‘safe’ again for a rejuvenated capitalism – or rather ‘corruptalism’, in view of its innate link with corruption and crime – and we have today in India a party in power, though more than precariously, the BJP, with its peculiar adherence to a sort of religio-fascism whose depredations from Ayodhya (1992) to Gujarat (2002) have been and are such a hideous slur on India’s image.

A clever ruse is being attempted at present to show us all a cleaner face of the BJP, projecting its leader, Atal Behari Vajpayee, as a humane and sensitive person (even his deputy, the already tainted Advani poses as a ‘liberal’) running a “secular” government that the constitution requires it to be. The Savarkar-Golwalkar ‘doctrine’ that Muslims (and presumably other religious minorities) are “only territorially Indians” in a virtually Hindutva state is the sheet-anchor of the BJP’s perverted ideology. What is known as the ‘Sangh Parivar’ ensures that the team, including the so-called National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in whose name the union government is run, toes the same line of policy. The Bal Thackerays and Ashok Singhals and others, whose noxious names one hates to mention, are thus having the time of their lives. While the law of the land remains discreetly frozen, the unspeakable Gujarat inhumanities could happen and continue for months, and these neo-fascist incendiaries gloat openly about their “unfinished agenda” of performing before long in holy cities like Mathura and Varanasi enormities similar to what they have so egregiously done in Ayodhya (1992).

CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVE

This is why there is anxiety over what might happen on the tenth anniversary of the Babri mosque demolition. When Gujarat happened, the prime minister Vajpayee could only express abroad a small part of his dismay over the demonisation of politics that had sullied India’s reputation but he could do it stealthily. In parliament he defended his heinous goons in Gujarat and elsewhere. Putting on the regulation RSS shorts, he repeatedly affirmed loyalty to the Golwalkar line.  No wonder the Bush-Blair duo and other blackguards pat on the back just as more blatantly as they patronise their stooge who runs Pakistan. It has been our failure, the failure of the multifurcated communist movement, and of the Left generally, which will be listless in the absence of communist unity, that has in some way facilitated the BJP and its usually amoral allies to surge on sensationally to seize power in New Delhi. It will be more calamitous if we fail again to stop their blackguard advance.

That must not be allowed to happen. There are many signs of our people resenting and resisting the religio-fascist turn in our politics. On the tenth anniversary of the Ayodhya infamy, if some of us find it difficult to overcome that pessimism of the mind that has set in (whether we know it or not) since the Gorbachev excrescence and the atrophy of morals and ethics in public life, we must mobilise optimism of the will and unitedly call upon our people to rise to the occasion and throw out, as soon as possible, the BJP’s neo-fascist regime. The basic good sense of our people was seen in the fact that the Gujarat epidemic of the demonisation of man could not spread in spite of the nefarious government being in power. This task --- helping our “mother and motherland who are more glorious than heaven” to emerge again in a new lustre --- is a categorical imperative.

SYNTHESIS OF CULTURES

It is more than time for us to remember with pride that for all our defaults and debilities, this old country of ours has been from time immemorial hospitable to religions and races, always nurturing the idea of Unity in Diversity, a co-existence of differences, an almost infinite eclecticism that could come to terms with militant affirmations (like that of some Muslim rulers), same capacity also of achieving not only commingling but also a kind of synthesis of divergent cultures.

We have had nothing like the Christian Crusades against Islam, the persistent religious wars as in Europe, whence Islam had been ejected with merciless cruelty from Spain, south Italy, Sicily, etc; nothing like the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48) and the auto da fe’ and burnings at the stake of Christian dissidents, no such concepts as the monarch’s religion  to be compulsorily followed by the subjects (“Cujus regio ejux religo”). We have absorbed Persians, Greeks, Scythians, Sakas, Pallavas, Huns, etc, who found shelter in India’s bosom. Long before Muslim invaders came, we had contacts with pious men as well as traders from Arabia whose tombs near Madurai and Tiruchi and elsewhere in south India pre-date the celebrated Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti, laid to rest near Ajmer where Muslims and Hindus have been paying homage for seven hundred years.

Unlike the marauders from Europe --- Portuguese, Dutch, French, English et al --- Muslims proved they were neither ‘birds of prey’ nor ‘birds of passage’ and settled in this country.  This was clear by the 14th century when, says Rabindranath Tagore, the new Mahabharatvarsha began, with Muslims as part of the soil, its life and culture. May I add that around 1940, at a Calcutta debate on the then new-fangled idea of Pakistan, I shared the platform with the Muslim League spokesman, Abdur Rahman Siddiqui, the mayor of Calcutta? This former Congressman said that though Calcutta, his home, could not be in Pakistan, but he did not mind. When a Hindu dies, he added, his body is burnt and the ashes are thrown into the river to be carried by the current the devil know where, but when a Muslim dies he wants six feet by three of the country’s earth, showing that he “he belongs to this country in life and in death.” It thrills me even now to recollect this and I know that the great Muhammed Iqbal, Brahmanzada-e-Kashmir as he proudly called himself, not only wrote some of our loveliest patriotic hymns but also on “this land where Chishti brought the gospel of truth, this garden where Nanak taught the unity of all religions,”  adding that here “the habitations of the heart” (dil ki basti) are becoming “empty.” He said: “Let us together build a new temple of ours (naya shivala).”

I know I am being tiresome. But how can I keep out a repeated mention of that stupendous genius, Amir Khusrau, court poet of the Khiljis 700 years ago, who could write that “every pearl in the royal necklace congeals the tears in the eyes of the oppressed peasantry”! A disciple of the great syncretist, Hazrat Nizamuddin, he called himself ‘Hindustani Turk’, Khusrau was one of the makers of Hindi and a creative contributor to music and the arts. How can one forget the great Nanak, “Guru to Hindus and Pir to Muslisms”, or Mahatma Kabir who preached what he called ‘Bharatpanth’, or Baba Fareed and Shah Lateef, virtual makers of Punjabi and Sindhi, or Ramananda and Ravidas, or Meera Bai and Chaitanya (with his Muslim disciple Haridas), or other gentle giants of the Bhakti movement, emanating with the saints of Tamilnadu and of Maharashtra, and in amity with the Sufi trend in Muslim thought (Shah Kalandar, Bahruddin Zakaria and others) which spread over all India an aura of sweetness and light! How wonderful was Prince Dara Shikoh’s presentation of the Upanishads “a moment,” wrote K N Panikkar, “in universal history!” How inspiring it is to remember that in spite of the most virulent politico-military Sikh-Muslim hostility, Guru Arjun who built in the Golden Temple the ‘holy of holies’ called “Hari Mandir Saheb” (damage to which cost Mrs Indira Gandhi’s life in 1984) and at its inauguration brought in as chief guest the most revered saint of the time, Miyan Mir! What a phenomenon has been the Indo-Muslim synthesis in architecture, music, literature, painting, philosophic reflection, jurisprudence, even cookery and dress habits and ways of living that have a luminous quality! No wonder we have the second largest Muslim population in the world, much larger than Pakistan’s! No wonder that we cherish the fact of our Kerala having the world’s record mix of various Christian denominations apart from Muslims, Jews, etc, and Christians forming today a sizeable part and even a majority in Mizoram, Nagaland, Meghalaya, Goa --- all being states of the Indian Union! Even more, we cherish Kashmir, that lovely slice of earth, which has a dominant Muslim majority and yet with her own Kashmiriyat that gells better with India (with her Unity in Diversity) than with Pakistan.

NO TIME TO DESPAIR

At ninety-five plus, doubtless at the end of my tether, I pen this rigmarole to justify myself to myself as a communist who joined the party, then legally banned in British India (1936). I confess I am in torment to see our movement at home and abroad going through a troubled time-span. But as a communist, however unworthy, I cannot despair: I prefer, in Shelley’s words, “to hope till hope creates out of its wreck the thing it contemplates.” And as I see bright signs of people’s mobilisation against the fraudulent, so called ‘globalisation’ claiming for ever to demolish socialism, I remember what some seventy five years ago, a great teacher of mine, Kuruvila Zachariah, told me when I was agonised by things happening in the then world. In life, he told me, certain things happen that are “ineluctable” and you cannot prevent them, but you must “learn to see the rainbow in the rain.”

That rainbow, today as in modern history, has been communism, “the gospel according to St Marx,” as some witty critics have said. But that is the message --- that the workers of the world, the salt of the earth, will rise again to uphold and never let it down in India as well as elsewhere. This petty and putrid menace of neo-fascism (of Hindu or other vintage) will go, burnt in the fire of its own evil passions, and out of its ashes will rise, slowly but steadily, a new humanity. Let us pledge we will do all we can to assure the future and get rid of the demonising blackguards of religio-fascism in our land.

As a communist, I cannot despair: I prefer, in Shelley’s words, “to hope till hope creates out of its wreck the thing it contemplates.” And as I see bright signs of people’s mobilisation against the fraudulent, so called ‘globalisation’ claiming for ever to demolish socialism, I remember what some seventy five years ago, a great teacher of mine, Kuruvila Zachariah, told me when I was agonised by things happening in the then world. In life, he told me, certain things happen that are “ineluctable” and you cannot prevent them, but you must “learn to see the rainbow in the rain.”