[nukkad] A good article by Shashi Tharoor

["indian rediff" <>]

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Tip of the day:  Always proofread carefully to see if you any words out.       
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I thought many of the chest-thumping Hindus would do well to read this article. (I got this on the SAJA list).

http://www.shashitharoor.com/articles/nyt/indiaspast.htm

 The New York Times
March 6, 2002
OP-ED

India's Past Becomes a Weapon
By Shashi Tharoor

"I'll tell you what your problem is in India,'' the American businessman
said. ''You have too much history. Far more than you can use peacefully.
So you end up wielding history like a battleaxe, against each other.''

The businessman does not exist; I invented him for a novel, ''Riot,'' that
came out last year and concerns a Hindu-Muslim riot that erupts during a
campaign to erect a Hindu temple on the site occupied for four and a half
centuries by a mosque. Yet the views of this fictional character seem more
real each day as reports describe a renewed cycle of killings and mob
violence over plans to build a temple to Ram above the ruins of the Babri
mosque in Ayodhya, in northern India. In a nonfiction afterword to
''Riot,'' I alerted readers to the threat by Hindu extremists to commence
construction in mid-March this year. I take no solace whatever from
prescience. The tragedy in India is that even those who know history seem
condemned to repeat it.

It is one of the ironies of India's muddled march into the 21st century
that it has a technologically inspired vision of the future yet appears
shackled to the dogmas of the past. The temple town of Ayodhya, in India's
most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, has no software labs; it is devoted to
religion and old-fashioned industry. In 1992 a howling mob of Hindu
extremists tore down the Babri Masjid, which occupied a prominent spot in
a town otherwise overflowing with temples. The mosque had been built in
the 1520's by India's first Mogul emperor, Babur; the Hindu zealots vowed
to replace it with a temple to Ram. In other words, they want to avenge
history by undoing the shame of half a millennium ago.

India is a land where history, myth and legend often overlap; sometimes
Indians cannot tell the difference. Some Hindus claim the Babri Masjid
stood on the exact spot of Ram's birth and had been placed there by Babur
to remind a conquered people of their subjugation. Historians -- most of
them Hindus -- reply that there is no proof that Ram ever existed in human
form, let alone that he was born where the believers claim he was. More to
the point, there is no proof that Babur demolished a Ram temple to build
his mosque. To destroy the mosque and replace it with a temple would not
be righting an old wrong but perpetrating a new one.

To most Indian Muslims, the dispute is not about a specific mosque --
Babri Masjid had lain unused for half a century before its destruction,
most of Ayodhya's Muslims having emigrated to Pakistan upon Partition of
British India in 1947 -- but about their place in Indian society. For
decades after independence, Indian governments had guaranteed their
security in a secular state, permitting the retention of Muslim ''personal
law'' separate from the country's civil code and even financing hajj
pilgrimages to Mecca. Two of India's first five presidents were Muslim, as
have been innumerable cabinet ministers, ambassadors, generals and Supreme
Court justices. Until the early 1990's, India's Muslim population was
greater than that of Pakistan. The destruction of the mosque felt like an
utter betrayal of the compact that had sustained the Muslim community as a
vital part of India's pluralist democracy.

The Hindus who attacked the mosque had little faith in the institutions of
Indian democracy. They saw the state as soft, pandering to minorities out
of a misplaced and Westernized secularism. To them, an independent India,
freed after nearly 1,000 years of alien rule (first Muslim, then British)
and rid of a sizable portion of its Muslim population by Partition, had an
obligation to assert an identity that would be triumphantly and
indigenously Hindu. They are not fundamentalists in any common sense of
the term, since Hinduism is a religion without fundamentals: there is no
Hindu pope, no Hindu Sunday, no single Hindu holy book and indeed no such
thing as a Hindu heresy. Hindu ''fundamentalists'' are, instead,
chauvinists, who root their Hinduism not in any of its soaring
philosophical or spiritual underpinnings --and, unlike their Islamic
counterparts, not in the theology of their faith -- but in its role as a
source of identity. They seek revenge in the name of Hinduism as badge,
rather than of Hinduism as doctrine.

In doing so they are profoundly disloyal to the religion they claim to
espouse, which stands out not only as an eclectic embodiment of tolerance
but as the only major religion that does not claim to be the only true
religion. All ways of worship, Hinduism asserts, are valid, and religion
is an intensely personal matter related to the individual's
self-realization in relation to God. Such a faith understands that belief
is a matter of hearts and minds, not of bricks and stone. The true Hindu
seeks no revenge upon history, for he understands that history is its own
revenge.

The Hindu zealots who chanted insultingly triumphalist slogans helped
incite the worst elements on the Muslim side, who set fire to a railway
carriage carrying temple campaigners; in turn, Hindu mobs have torched
Muslim homes and killed innocents. As the courts deliberate on a solution
to the Ayodhya dispute, the violence goes on, spawning new hostages to
history, ensuring that future generations will be taught new wrongs to set
right. We live, Octavio Paz once wrote, between oblivion and memory.
Memory and oblivion: one leads to the other, and back again. And history
is not a web woven by innocent hands.

-- 


Indian (Sai)

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