Ayodhya- 3 Books By Koenraad Elst

1] AYODHYA AND AFTER 2]AYODHYA-THE CAE AGAINST THE TEMPLE 3] AYODHYA, THE FINALE:SCIENCE VS SECULARISM,THE EXCAVATIONS DEBATE By Koenraad Elst Full text from www.voiceofdharma.org

Ayodhya And After Issues Before Hindu Society Koenraad Elst

Published By Voice of India New Delhi, India

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 Introduction  Chapter 1 : Summary of the historical question

 Chapter 2 : Belief and history  Chapter 3 : Righting the wrongs of history  Chapter 4 : Ram Janmabhoomi and the courts  Chapter 5 : Ram Janmabhoomi politics  Chapter 6 : Communalists and their communities  Chapter 7 : Press reporting on Ayodhya  Chapter 8 : The misuse of history  Chapter 9 : Secularism and India's Integrity  Chapter 10 : Secularism as it is  Chapter 11 : The riots  Chapter 12 : Book banning

 Chapter 13 : Facing the truth the only solution  Chapter 14 : Hindu Fascism  Chapter 15 : The Hindu Movement  Glossary  Appendix I  Appendix II  Notes

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 selfrespect. 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 centrestage 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.

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 1 Study in Hindu-Muslim conflict, 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 2 existence of this 11th century building we can be certain. 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 pillarstones 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 3 was built there. 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, either prince Rama was a historical character, born in the castle of the local ruler, which would logically (i.e. strategically) have been built on this elevation, and then his birthplace temple would also have to be there. Or we do not assume Ram's historicity (without necessarily excluding it) and we also do not assume that he was born there, which is the JNU historians' position, and then the question is reduced to whether people would have refrained from building a temple on this hilltop.

Ayodhya is a place of pilgrimage and temple city of long standing. The JNU historians themselves cite evidence that it housed important temples of the Buddhists, Shaivas and Jains. In such a temple city par excellence, it is virtually impossible that the geographical place of honour would have been left unused. The contention that there was no temple on the Babri Masjid site goes against all we know of ritual patterns in the lay-out of sacred places the world over: it violates the principle of coherence. That the Babri Masjid replaced a pre-existent centre of worship, is also indicated by the fact that Hindus kept returning to the place, where more indulgent Muslim rulers allowed them to worship on a platform just outside the mosque. This is attested by a number of different pieces of testimony by Western travelers and by local Muslims, all of the pre-British period, as well as from shortly after the 1856 British take-over but explicitly referring to older local Muslim sources. A 4 5 number of these documents have been presented by Harsh Narain and A.K. Chatterjee . That they are authentic and have a real proof value, is indirectly corroborated by the attempts made to 6 make two of them disappear, which Harsh Narain and Arun Shourie independently discovered . Most of these sources explicitly declare that the Babri Masjid had replaced an earlier Hindu temple, and even specify that it has been Ram's birthplace temple. But whatever their historical explanation for this unusual phenomenon of Hindus insisting on worshipping in a mosque's courtyard, they testify to the existing practice. And these Hindus were going into a mosque courtyard for specifically Hindu worship -- not for common Hindu-Muslim worship of some local Sufi, as you find in some places, but for separate Hindu worship of Lord Ram. The JNU historians completely fail to explain this well attested fact. The attachment of the Hindus to the Babri Masjid spot cannot reasonably have originated in the period when the mosque was standing there. For the sake of argument, we might opine that perhaps a great miracle happened on the spot, sometime later than 1528: but in that case, there would be a tradition saying so. No, the Hindus' attachment to the spot clearly dates back to preMasjid days, and stems from a pre-existent tradition of worship on that very spot. Since this near inevitable assumption is corroborated by all relevant documents and by the local Hindu tradition, and is not contradicted by any authentic source giving a different explanation, we might as well accept it. However, while the inference that there was a pre- existent tradition of worship on the spot is necessary for explaining the Hindus' centuries-long attachment to the place, it may not be sufficient. There are many destroyed temples to which Hindus have not kept returning. They simply built a new temple somewhere else, and even when Muslim power ended, they stayed with the new arrangement and forgot about the destroyed and abandoned temple. If they were so attached to the place, it is probably not because the erstwhile temple had made it important, but because the place had an importance of its own, and retained its special character even regardless of there being a temple in place or not. This assumption is coherent with the unanimous and uncontradicted testimony of Hindu and pre-colonial Muslim and Western sources, that the place was believed to be Ram's birthplace. When in December 1990 the Chandra Shekhar government asked both parties to collect evidence for their case, a small group of scholars, on being invited by the VHP, traced some more strong pieces of documentary evidence. At the same time, dr. S.P. Gupta and Prof. B.B. Lal came out with unambiguous archaeological and iconographical proof that a Vaishnava temple has stood at the site until it was replaced with the Babri Masjid. By contrast, the Babri Masjid Action Committee could only muster a pile of newspaper clippings, articles and book extracts by partisan writers who gave their anti-Mandir opinion, but no evidence whatsoever. The Hindu team of scholars had no difficulty in demonstrating, in a rejoinder, the utter lack of proof value of the AIBMAC evidence. The VHP documents Evidence for the Ram Janmabhoomi Mandir and Rejoinder to the AIBMAC Documents are the definitive scholarly statement on the Ayodhya dispute.

There is one architectural argument which has not been used in the VHP evidence bundle, though it seems quite pertinent to me. The central dome of the Masjid is slightly deformed, and it is supported by a front wall that forms a sort of screen before part of the dome. The reason seems to be that the builders had to adjust the upper part of the Masjid to the walls and pillars of the pre-existing Mandir, which they were incorporating rather than razing them flat and starting totally anew.

1.2 Methodological Errors In order to save their contention that the Babri Masjid was not built on a Hindu place of worship (let alone a specially sacred place), several Babarwadis have resorted to questioning the validity of the documents attesting the Hindu worship in the Masjid courtyard during the period of Muslim rule. Their claim is that all those authors, as well as the Hindu worshippers who they described, were mistaken : they had unknowingly swallowed a false rumor which from about 1800 onwards the British had consciously floated in order to create Hindu-Muslim riots, which they hoped would help them in eventually annexing Awadh, the state of which Ayodhya was a part. This hypothesis is quite an amazing construction. First of all, four of the sources are pre-1800. The Western travelers William Finch and father Tieffenthaler visited Ayodhya in 1608 and 1767 respectively. A document by a Faizabad Qazi proving that Hindus used the mosque courtyard for worship and wanted to take over the Masjid itself, and a letter by Aurangzeb's granddaughter encouraging the Muslims to assert their hold over ex- Hindu shrines at Varanasi, Mathura and Ayodhya, were written in the first half of the eighteenth century. Secondly, the Babarwadis want us to believe that the local Hindus decided to set up a puja tradition in a mosque courtyard and thereby constantly risk a lot of trouble with the Muslim population and rulers, just because some foreign paleface came to tell them that in their elaborate Ram tradition one little piece of information was missing, which he then promptly furnished : Ram had been born right there on that mosque spot. This is not at all coherent with all that we know about religious traditions in general and brahminical pilgrimage traditions in particular : it arbitrarily assumed an extreme gullibility, an astonishing lack of serieux concerning the native sacred tradition among the very guardians of that tradition, and an uncharacteristic openness to utterly non-expert foreign opinion (even today they will have nothing of the chronology imposed on Indian history by scholars). Thirdly, that the British concocted a story of temple demolition and replacement by a mosque, because that would create riots, presupposes that they had to break a state of communal harmony, which existed in spite of the fact that the country was full of demolished temple demolitions failed to create trouble, why concoct one? Or why not start with exploiting to the full the trouble- making potential of the non-concocted temple demolitions? The postulated rumour is not known to be part of a British tactic attested anywhere. But all right, sometimes very improbable and uncharacteristic scenarios turn out to be true,. So even while the hypothesis of the British concoction of a Ram temple destroyed by Babar is grossly incoherent with our general knowledge relevant to the issue, I would be willing to consider it if they manage to come up with a single positive indication : a letter by a British officer mentioning the creation of this rumour, for instance. But the 25 eminent JNU historians, quoted by every secularist in India, and other academics like Gyanendra Pandey or R.S. Sharma, have not come up with a single piece of evidence. In the numerous and voluminous archives of the British Raj that are still extant, they have not found anything. They have not even come up with any similar British ruse in any other part of India. Therefore, the hypothesis that the destruction of a Hindu temple and its replacement by the Babri Masjid is merely a rumour created by the British

as part of their "divide and rule" policy, has to be rejected as both extremely improbable and totally unsupported by evidence. The British concoction hypothesis is not only untenable. It is so far off the mark, so totally out of tune with the known historical and cultural context, so totally unsuggested by any relevant document, that no unbiased historian would ever have come up with it. It warrants a suspicion against the pretended objectivity and scientific temper of the secularist participants in this debate. In methodological terms, we could say that the pro-Babri case, including the JNU professors' statement, violates the principle that"entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity", also know as"Occam's razor". Against every element in the very coherent hypothesis of the preexistent Ram Mandir, they have to invent a counter- hypothesis, altogether a long string of separate ad hoc hypotheses, of which it remains to be proven that they add up to a coherent scenario. What is more, while the Ram Mandir hypothesis is coherent with well-established behavior patterns (of general city building, of Hindu devotion, of Muslim conquest, of British colonial policy), and postulates little more than that the general pattern applied in Ayodhya as well, the JNU historians continually have to postulate uncharacteristic courses of events. Thus, in postulating that the Babri Masjid was built on empty land, they implicitly postulate that the Ayodhya people for some reason made an exception to the custom of building something important on the place which by its elevation was the place of honour in their city. This special entity which the JNU historians implicitly create within their theory, and of which they should accept the burden of tracing the existence in reality. For another example, in postulating that the Hindus did not have a pre-1528 tradition of worship on the Janmabhoomi spot, they are forced to create within their scenario a reason why the Hindus suddenly engaged in the strange behavior of defying the Muslim rulers by starting a strictly Hindu worship right in a mosque's courtyard. They implicitly postulate a highly unusual event that made the Hindus behave so uncharacteristically. This event is another entity they create, and of which they should show the historicity. When you analyze and explicate all the implications of the secularist historians' version of the Babri Masjid story, you find that they in fact postulate a great many unusual entities. And they create them purely in the air : not a trace of evidence of a reason for leaving the place of honour in Ayodhya unused, no evidence for an event that made the Hindus start worship in the till then unimportant mosque courtyard, no evidence for a British rumour campaign. If the (explicitly or implicitly) postulated scenario elements were found to correspond to a real historical entity or event, then they would not be a multiplication of entities beyond necessity. But so far, the antiMandir scenario is dependent on a multiplicity of entities postulated ad hoc, beyond necessity. Beyond necessity, because there is a coherent alternative scenario that integrates all the available information : the Ram Mandir hypothesis. The argumentation developed by anti-Mandir polemists like Syed Shahabuddin, Mrs. Surinder 7 Kaur , and the JNU historians, is simply unbecoming of educated people. This postulating of very improbable theoretical possibilities without any coherence is not really the scholarly defense of an alternative Ayodhya scenario, it is just a diversionary tactic made up to put the pro- Mandir people on the defensive. As the historian Sita Ram Goel has said, it is a typical strategy of unscrupled lawyers. For instance, in the Indira Gandhi murder trial, the facts were amply clear, and all that an honest defense lawyer could do, was to pleas circumstances in order to avert the death penalty. But no, they constructed a fantastic scenario, bringing in a conspiracy involving Indira's son Rajiv, totally unfounded, but enough to jeopardize the prosecution case for a little while, by forcing it to prove what it had considered evident and already sufficiently proven. Of course, lawyers are paid by clients to try such un- truthful tactics, so we may perhaps forgive them. In the case of historians, or even for politicians claiming high ideals, this is unacceptable.

Incidentally, the same methodological mistake is made, though less blatantly, in the discussion of Ayodhya's ancient history. The contention that the Ramayana is just fictional, postulates a nontypical cultural phenomenon which needs an explanation, a reason (i.e. a theoretical entity). After all, what great epic in any ancient culture is known to have been purely fiction? Western scholars long thought that Homer's epic on the Trojan war was pure fiction, until Heinrich Schliemann started digging and found Troy. So long as no independent indications for the Ramayana's purely fictional character are given, it is more logical to assume that, like most ancient epics, it has a historical core with a lot of fabulation around it. But the ancient history is not what concerns us here. It is far more difficult to get at conclusive evidence regarding Ram's existence, era, abode etc., but fortunately it is not important for the political issue which historians are called upon to help solve. Once it is established that there was a Ram temple on the spot, and that there is a genuine tradition that considers it Ram's birthplace, then the am Janmabhoomi should get equal respect with other sacred places, like the Kaaba, of whom nobody asks whether Mohammed's claim that it was built by Abraham, is at all historical. The question is only whether it is indeed a Hindu sacred place, not why it is one.

1.3 Who built Babar's mosque? An entirely different aspect of the Babri Masjid's history is whether it really was built by Babar (or his lieutenant Mir Baqi) at all. The JNU historians have chosen to cast some doubt on this assumption, which so far had seemed evident because it is confirmed by the Persian inscriptions on the building, itself. Another secularist, Sushil Shrivastava, has made much of the matter, and opines that the inscriptions are a later forgery (on the ground that the calligraphic style is 8 anachronistic), and that the structure was built under Khwaja-i-Jahan in the fourteenth century . His justification for this dating is the architecture of the building, especially its imperfect domes, which in his opinion must have been built before the dome architecture was perfected under the Delhi-based Turkish sultans in the fifteenth century. Of course, this architectural anachronism, it at all substantiated, can easily be explained in other ways, starting with the general fact that architectural innovations spread only gradually. Moreover, Mr. Srivastava's somewhat unexpected theory leaves its proponent with the task of explaining how and why the mosque came to be associated with Babar. On the other hand, it would take the last bit of force out of the (already discredited) argument that Babar cannot have demolished a temple on that spot as sources of the Moghul period do not mention the temple demolition : the "Babri Masjid would have been a long-accomplished fact by the Moghul period, but it could just as much have replaced a Hindu temple under an earlier ruler". In fact, the two contentions that the Mosque was built before Babar, and that it was built on a forcibly demolished temple, have been combined by R. Nath. when he read in the Indian Express that pages of his own book History of Mughal Architecture had been included in the pro-Babri and anti-Mandir evidence of the BMAC, presented to the government of India on December 23, 1990, he sent in a reply, in which he stated that he was completely sure that the Masjid had been built on a temple, and that inspection on the spot had confirmed him in this conviction. On the other hand, he argued that the mosque cannot have been built by Babar or Mir Baqi, because in their brief stay in this area they had to wage a difficult struggle against the Pathans, and had no time for building mosques. Rather, the earlier Muslim rulers of the area could have demolished the temple and replaced it with the mosque. Mir Baqi at most renovated it, and does not claim more than that this happened under Babar's reign (rather than at Babar's command, though this translation is disputed). But theories about the exact date of the Babri Masjid construction are not really to the point, except in so far as they can or cannot be coordinated with other data. At any rate, the Muslim

habit of destroying Hindu temples and replacing them with mosques, often using some of the temple materials as a display of victory over Paganism, has remained unchanged during the entire Turko- Afghan and Moghul period. Whether the temple was destroyed by Mohammed Ghori in 1194, or by Babar, or by a ruler in between these two, or even by more than one of them (since Hindus were tireless rebuilders if given a chance), this all makes no difference to the facts pertinent for the Hindu case: one, there was a temple there since at least the eleventh century, attested by archaeology : two, the use of temple materials in the Babri Masjid entirely fulfills a set pattern of temple destruction followed by replacement with a mosque; three, Hindus continued to worship on the spot to the extent possible, as witnessed by travelers and locals, something they would never have done except on a specially sacred spot and in continuation of a pre-Masjid tradition. In keeping with the internationally accepted standards of methodology and inference in scientific history-writing, we may conclude that all the indications available confirm the traditional belief, consensually held by the local Muslims as well as Hindus, that the Babri Masjid was built in replacement of a Hindu temple where Ram worship used to take place. In fact, this conclusion is merely a restatement of what was a matter of consensus until a few years ago. This time it is supported by a bundle of evidence, but it had been known all along. It is only recently that politically motivated academics have manufactured doubts concerning this coherent and well-attested tradition. And it is not on the strength of arguments, but exclusively through their grip on the media, that they temporarily managed to create the impression that the Hindu case was built on myth and concoction. As Lenin, Goebbels and other masters of lies knew, it is sufficient to repeat a big lie often enough, to make it pass as truth. So, the truly outstanding feature of the Leftists' and Muslim fanatics' campaign of distortion has been its shameless persistence. No matter what hard evidence they got confronted with, the Romila Thapars and R.S. Sharmas just kept on lambasting the Hindu side for distorting history and concocting evidence and for merelybluffing in the face of "incontrovertible evidence that no Ram temple ever stood on the site". While they had not given any such evidence nor replied to the pro-Mandir evidence (they have kept on willfully ignoring B.B. Lal's affirmation of strong archaeological evidence, and have not addressed the 9 massive documentary evidence at all) , they kept up the offensive and absurdly accused the other side of not facing the evidence. The way the anti-Mandir falsehoods have been given wide currency in 1989-91 will make an interesting case study for future scholars. A classic in propaganda.

2. Belief and history 2.1 The belief in Ram The near-certainty that the temple which stood on the Babri Masjid spot was a celebrated Ram temple, does not clinch the issue of whether Ram was actually born on that very spot. We do know that the Hindu culture, even more than most traditional cultures, has shown a tremendous capacity of preserving traditions, poetic compositions as voluminous as the Vedas, and the information contained therein. It is therefore not at all unthinkable that the birthplace of a heroic figure like Ram may have been remembered in an uninterrupted chain of tradition for several thousands of years. But then that is the maximum we can say : it is possible. However, for the political decision of whether to give in to the Hindu demand concerning Ram's traditional birth site, it is sufficient that there is a consensus among those people who worship

Ram (the contention that a number of different temples in Ayodhya all claim to be the real Janmabhoomi is, upon closer inquiry, simply not true). When on October 8, 1990 fighting broke out in Jerusalem over the Dome on the Rock and the Al Aqsa mosque, absolutely nobody has stood up and questioned the Muslim claim that the Al-Aqsa mosque was built over the Prophet's footprint in the rock. No one has demanded a probe into the myth that the mosque is where Mohammed landed after a flight through heaven on a winged horse. Even when most people are convinced of the impossibility of making a footprint in a rock, or of flying on a horse, they have all chosen to respect the Muslims' belief. So, why should Hindus start proving the sacredness of their sacred places? The JNU historians have made a lot of the priority of history overbeliefs. They have done this without making the crucial distinction between a theological belief of a dogmatic and anti-rational kind, and popular belief which is neither rational nor its opposite, but just a cherished convention at a different level of discourse (the mythical language game)9a. A theological belief is one that is essential to the defining belief system of a given religion. In Islam, two such beliefs are central : the rejection of all gods except Allah, and the Prophethood of Mohammed. Whoever doubts these, places himself outside the Muslim fold. In Roman Catholicism, theological beliefs are declared dogma. The Council statements that formulate the dogma (and which are attributed to the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, who is also present at the Councils), conclude with the statement that he who doesn't believe it, anathema sit, he is banned: non-belief in a dogma places one outside the Church. Apart from these theological beliefs that are theologically unimportant or even heterodox : concerning relics of saints, apparitions of the Virgin Mary etc. In Hinduism, no such thing as theological dogma exists. Even those teachings that indologists consider crucial to Hinduism, can be freely rejected. Thus, A.K. Coomaraswamy, as no doubt some Hindus before him, rejected the common belief in transmigration of individual souls. Many sections of Hindu society, both in India and more so overseas, have dropped the caste system, often considered a defining component of Hinduism, without being any the less Hindu for it. The belief that Ram was born at the disputed spot in Ayodhya is also not a matter of theology. It is not essential for Ram bhakti, and Ram bhakti in turn is not essential for being a Hindu. The belief in the Janmabhoomi is of the order of popular belief, and has only some practical (pilgrimage) but no theological implications. The practical thrust of the entire JNU statement is that the Hindu belief regarding Ram's birthplace should not be respected: since you give no scientific proof for Ram's being born there, you will not get your temple. Instead you may get a secular national monument, where religious rituals will be forbidden by law. If the secularists reject an arrangement that would accommodate a widespread popular belief, viz. a Ram Janmabhoomi Mandir, they should have the courage of their conviction, and take this stand wherever it applies. And they should keep up their Nehruvian habit of meddling in Israeli/Palestinian affairs. This means they should go tell the Muslims of Jerusalem that the historical fact of the Jewish Temple should have priority over the "myths" of the Prophet's footprint and of his ride through heaven. But if they prefer, Muslims' sentiments and beliefs, then they should have the same respect of Hindu beliefs surrounding a sacred place. If they fail to show equal respect to the Muslims of Palestine and to the Hindus of India, then they discriminate on the basis of religion. Which no true secularist would ever do.

2.2 Jerusalem and Ayodhya In the Ayodhya debate, the comparison with the Jerusalem Temple Mount controversy has been made only sparingly. And when it was made, it was mostly turned upside down. It was assumed

that in both cases, a mosque is threatened with a takeover by non-Muslims, and that is the relevant similarity. Stefan de Girval has put it this way : "(The Jews) want to rebuild the temple of Jerusalem, which was destroyed by the Romans in the first century AD. But they face the same 10 problem and dilemma that the Hindus are facing at the Ram Janmabhoomi site." The nonMuslim communities involved in these two temple- mosque-controversies do indeed have things in common. They both have voluntarily and unilaterally set up a secular state. Their creations, upon departure of the British, were both at the same time partitions into a secular and an Islamic state. In both cases, the partition was immediately followed by an invasion from the Muslim neighbour (here there is a remarkable difference : Israel gained territory in the ensuing war, while India lost Azad Kashmir). They both live with a Muslim minority, which does encounter problems but is still treated far better than minorities in the surrounding Muslim countries. On the other hand, after their creation both Israel and India have had to receive many refugees, Jewish and Hindu respectively, who had to flee intense persecution in Muslim countries. Both communities have been persistently targeted by the same Muslim-Communist combine : Israel by the ArabSoviet alliance, Hindus society by the Leftist and pro-Muslim Nehruvians and by the China11 Pakistan alliance. But all that does not make for a strict parallel in the two controversies. The differences include the following. In Jewish theology, there is a belief that only the Messiah, when he comes, should rebuild the Temple. No such belief is involved in the Ayodhya controversy. In Jerusalem, the disputed area is a sacred place to both religions involved; in Ayodhya, the Muslims have never attached any religious importance to the site of the Babri Masjid, which was built only to humiliate the Hindus. In Jerusalem, the Muslims built their mosques in all innocence on a wasteland, where the Romans had destroyed the Jewish Second Temple centuries before; whereas in Ayodhya they most probably destroyed the temple themselves before building a mosque over it. But the most important difference is this. In Jerusalem, a sacred place of a religious community is being used for regular worship by that community, to the exclusion of members of the other community, but it is being claimed by fanatics of this other community; in Ayodhya, exactly the same situation obtains. However, in Jerusalem the tenant community is Muslim, in Ayodhya it is non-Muslim. In Jerusalem, the fanatics who want to grab the other community's sacred place are non-Muslim, the Faithful of the Temple Mount, in Ayodhya they are Muslim, the BMAC and BMMCC. This important factual contrast is compounded by a political difference. In Israel, a truly secular government is proud of Israel's policy since he liberation of Jerusalem in 1967, which has guaranteed freedom of worship to Jews, Christians and Muslims in their respective sacred places, in contrast to the ban on Christian and Jewish access to the sacred places under the previous Islamic regime. This secular government has given the Jewish fanatics no chance to challenge the status-quo, and is not ready to make any concession to them, or to force a compromise with them on the tenant Muslim community. In India, by contrast, some governments have been succeeding each other, that have not been all that secularly impartial in religious controversies, in spite of their comprising vehemently secularist parties. These governments have amply lent their ears to the fanatics who challenge the functional status-quo and intend to snatch the sacred place from the tenant community. For clarity's sake, it may be repeated that the tenant community is, since 1949, the Hindu community. And the Hindus want to keep the functional status-quo, viz. the Ram temple remains a Ram temple, even while its architecture may be changed from a mosque-like domed structure to a traditional Mandir structure. But instead of unflinchingly upholding their right to their sacred place, the government pressurizes them to give in to the BMAC and BMMCC demands, or at least to accept a mid-way compromise. 12

So, the Temple Mount is not a Jewish Ayodhya rather a Muslim Ayodhya. We should of course not take the comparison too far, for that would only lead into distortions. Yet, it so happened that there is one more analogy. In both places the autumn of 1990 has witnessed a bloodbath among

the tenant community, inflicted by police bullets. In Jerusalem, police killed around twenty people when, according to the official report, they were throwing stones at Jews praying at the Wailing 13 Wall (the only leftover of the Second Temple). In Ayodhya, police killed sixteen, or one hundred and sixty- eight, or five hundred, or who knows, people who were unarmed and singing Ram Dhun. And this similarity is again compounded by a stark difference : the Jerusalem shooting triggered as much as a UN resolution against the Israeli government, but the Ayodhya shooting triggered absolutely nothing as far as the Human Rights professionals are concerned.

3. Righting the wrongs of history 3.1 The bricks or the truth Advani is the modern Babar, that is how some secularist Hindus (who at least don't deny the historical fact that Babar was a temple-destroyer) comment on Mr. Advani's plan to relocate the disputed structure and build a temple on the spot. With their natural Hindu generosity, they want to keep assuring the non-Hindus that their places of worship are safe in Hindusthan. And they reject attempts to undo temple destruction by means of mosque-destruction. "Two wrongs don't make a right", they keep on writing. And it is true: if someone has stolen from you, it is not right to just steal it back from him, or from his children. Not even if it is a place of worship. The best solution would be, that the culprit, or his juridical successor if any such be, returns the stolen good of his own free will. The second best solution is that an impartial competent authority, in application of principles universally in force or mutually agreed upon, imposes a settlement that undoes the wrong done. Either way, the matter should be settled openly, not by counter- theft. In the controversy under consideration, the best solution is, that the Muslim community makes a gesture to undo the wrongs it has inflicted on the nonMuslims for centuries. Failing that the second best solution would be, that the government imposes such a goodwill gesture: that would then not be a gesture of reconciliation, but at least an official recognition of the injustice done and the resolve to at least symbolically undo such injustice. Some diehard Hindus activists demand that all the thousands of mosques built on top of destroyed temples, be handed over to the Hindus. They think that would be a physical undoing of the historical wrongs. Well, that is a very crude way of doing justice to Hinduism. It overlooks the fact that these stone structures are but the outermost layer of the real harm done to Hindu society. There has been a loss of vast territories -- they may be claimed back, but that would hardly be any less superficial. Far more fundamental is the moral damage that has been done : the loss of self-confidence, the unprecedented and harsh enmity within

Hindu society (internal enmity and bitterness typically occur in powerless groups), the boot-licking attitude among the Hindu intelligentsia, the negative self-image (e.g. Hindu caste inequality vs. Muslim brotherhood). The moral damage again is partly due to a loss of knowledge and memory : the Hindu education system has been destroyed, and the Hindus are helpless in the face of concerted efforts to disinform them and destroy their soul. Claiming from thousands of local Muslim communities that they give back the place of worship that their ancestors had stolen from the Hindus, would be very insensitive and create immense resentment and ill-will. It is a case of Fiat justitia pereat mundus (justice be done even if the world must perish for it). Sometimes unpleasant steps cannot be avoided, but in this case it seems to me that Hindus had better concentrate on more useful goals. Among these more urgent goals, I will mention social justice, but I won't stress it too much because firstly, that would confirm the untruthful missionary propaganda, today repeated by almost everyone, that Hindu society has been less just and humane than other societies in comparable circumstances, and secondly, I don't want to fall into the Christian/moralistic trap of considering an ethical life and an ethical society the ultimate good. Having known some societyimprovement movements from within (such as the disarmament movement), I have not much faith left in moralistic attempts to make society better, as a goal in its own right. I have come to agree with the basic assumption of Hindu culture, that consciousness is the basis of everything. Ethics and justice are necessary in human society, but they are not the ultimate in human endeavor and happiness. Forget about a humane society if you do not create a cultural (dharmik as much as sanskritik) cradle for it. Do-gooders like Rajmohan Gandhi (with his Moral Rearmament background) can go on preaching about caring and sharing14, that is superficial, doctoring of outside symptoms, and by itself it will lead nowhere. Social involvement should be there, but it can only be guided and sustained by a larger cultural feel and consciousness. It is only from an awareness of our fundamental (adhyatmik) akinness, from a feeling of our unity (ekatmata) in diversity (every entity its own swadharma), that compassion and fellow-feeling can grow. And it is only though self-respect that a larger sense of duty and responsibility can grow; the crass selfishness now rampant in Nehruvian India is very much related to the cultural climate of self-alienation and self depreciation. So, the more fundamental concern should be the reviving of Hindu consciousness, both in a spiritual and in an intellectual sense. Of all the politicians involved in the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, how many have ever taken parliamentary initiatives to revive Sanskrit education, to give more chances to the teaching of the Hindu cultural traditions, to abolish the discrimination against teaching Hindu religion in state-subsidized schools? How many have taken a look into the systematic distortion of history that is being broadcast by all

the official media including the school curricula, and taken the official media including the school curricula, and taken initiatives to counter it at the intellectual or political level? It seems that all these Hindu campaigners needed a crudely physical issue like the bricks in Ayodhya in order even to get reminded of their responsibility to Hindu society. I cannot blame them too harshly, they just show the results of a centuries-long physical and ideological attack on Hindu culture. Nonetheless, if they want to give proof of something better than utter mental laziness, they must start cultivating a deeper understanding of the problems of their society, and develop a commitment to the restoration of Hindu self- awareness. That is more important than the restoration of brick structures. I am not saying that they just should forget about these thousands of temples razed and replaced with mosques (and sometimes churches). Those thousands should not be ignored, to the extent that they can be useful in consciousnessraising. One level at which some evil- intentioned people try to rob Hindus of their consciousness, is history. History as an illustration of the intrinsic character of certain ideologies deserves to be highlighted. The time will come when closed theologies will bother humanity no longer, but for now, it is better to be aware of what they can do. In Europe, Nazi concentration camps are kept in their historical state, in order to teach future generations about what to avoid. In India too, monuments of intolerance should be preserved. School books, local guide books, even a signboard with an explanatory text in front of the building, should tell the history of every place of worship, truthfully. If Hindu organizations really care about Hinduism, let them drop the demand for the hand-over, let them rather demand that the truth be told on every appropriate occasion. They should not allow the truth to be concealed or distorted. On the other hand, they should deal sensitively with it. There is no point in troubling simple Muslim villagers with the unasked-for-truth about the crimes of Aurangzeb. They did not commit these Islamic crimes, and educating them should ideally not proceed via instilling in them a feeling of guilt. In any case, education about the crimes and future crime potential of pretentious closed creeds should only be a part of a more general study in the impediments to open mindedness and truthfulness : the closed creeds of the revealed religions are only a special case (though a very systematic and dangerous one) of a certain state of mind. This study of what kinds of mental attitude to avoid, should be integrated into a positive education in mental culture and truthfulness. That is what Sanatana Dharma is all about. Today, saying the truth about the crimes of Islam, against attempts to suppress it, is very much needed. But ultimately, these negative things have to be said only to clear the way for the positive and humanist culture which these fanatical creeds had denounced and tried to obliterate.

The prime target audience for the truthful reporting about Hindu-Muslim history is not the Muslims, but the Hindus themselves. the Hindus are their own worst problem, because of their self-alienation, self- denigration, and self-forgetfulness. They should stop blaming and maligning themselves : a clear and truthful view of the mischievous history and doctrines of those who go on blaming and denigrating Hinduism, will make room for an honest self-discovery. Hindus can turn the tables on the Hindu-baiters. They should take pride in their pluralistic culture, and be conscious of the dangers of closed and exclusivistic creeds. So, by all means, drop the demand for the hand-over of those thousands of brick structures in which fellow human beings with Arabic names conduct their prayers. It is enough if the truth about those buildings' histories is not concealed.

3.2. Kashi and Mathura The Hindu struggle is about cultural self-awareness and self-esteem, not about brick structures. However, there may be a case for insisting on the hand-over of two central sacred places, those of Krishna and of Shiva, that are occupied by mosques, and the very special case of the Ram Janmabhoomi. People with a very short historic consciousness think that everything that happened before the Indians said goodbye to the British and installed a British legal-political system for themselves, should not have any consequences today. It is time-barred, they say. But who are they to rule that history should be held to be of no consequence? Perhaps the Hindus do think that certain historical wrongs have been so vast as well as profound, that they need righting even today. Especially because the ideology that motivated these wrongs is not yet a part of history. The situation is this, Muslim conquerors and rulers have made systematic attempts to destroy Hindu culture, and as long as that was not immediately possible, many of them have done everything to humiliate the Hindus. And this was not an accidental list of cruel rulers, to be joined to the list of Genghis Khan, Ch'in Shih Huang, Tiglatpilesar and other classics of cruel conquest and rule : there was an ideological backbone in this sustained effort to impose Islam and persecute the Kafirs. Aurangzeb is gone, but that ideological backbone may still be there. One of the crowning symbols of the Muslim persecution of the Hindus was the replacement of the most sacred Hindu temples with mosques. Now, either the conflict between Islam and Hinduism no longer exists. The Muslims no longer identify with the persecution effort of their forebears. In that case, they will have no problem in distancing themselves from the take-over of temples, and in understanding the Hindu sensitivity concerning this painful past. They will understand that they themselves would not like to be robbed of their Kaaba, and they will give back the chief places sacred to Shiva and Krishna.

Or, in the other case, the Muslims do identify with Babar and Aurangzeb, and stick to the doctrine that the Kafirs must be fought and their temples destroyed. In that case, they are the heirs to the responsibility for the temple destructions, and then the Hindus can demand reparations from them. Either way, some symbolic reparation should be made. Some gesture of finishing this history of templedestructions and attempted destruction of Hindu Dharma, should be made. In my opinion, the Hindus should not demand the handover of the Kashi Vishvanath (Shiva) temple site and the Krishna Janmastham temple site from the state. But they may demand it from the Muslim community. 15 And they should make it a demand not for a building, but for a gesture. There should be not a trace of a threat of forcible take-over. The Hindu leaders should say to the Muslim leaders : Look, we want these places back. For many centuries they have been our sacred places, and we have suffered the mosques built there only under duress. We do not believe in the forcible take-over of places of worship, we are not Babars and Aurangzebs. But we want from you a gesture of goodwill, a sign that you turn this infamous persecution page of history. We will not take any kind of revenge if you do not feel ready for this gesture, but we will expressly wait until you are ready. The same would have counted in principle for the Ram Janmabhoomi. However, there the situation has been slightly more advanced : in 1949 it already became a Hindu temple again. And it is not the Hindus who have been demanding a handover, it is actually the Muslim groups like BMAC, BMMCC, IUML, Jama'at Islami. It is unbelievably arrogant that some Muslims could be against the hand-over of even one of the thousands of stolen Hindu places, and still have dared to demand the hand- over of that one mosque that they let slip through their fingers in 1949. They demand the return of 100% of the places they lost, and want to return 0% of the places they took. Who said that Islam believes in equality? To sum up : on the Ram Janmabhoomi, the Hindus should concede nothing. It is their own temple again since 1949, and if they want to architecturally redesign it along the lines of traditional Mandir architecture, then that is an entirely internal affair of the Hindus. On Kashi Vishvanath and Krishna Janmasthan, the Hindus may choose to leave it at the present compromise situation (temple rebuilt next to mosque), but it is not unreasonable and they are within their rights if they make a moral demand on the Muslim community to return these two sacred places. The demand should focus not on the buildings, but rather on the free-will gesture of a hand-over to formally finish the history of Hindu-Muslim conflict. Concerning the thousands of other stolen or destroyed temples, no organisation devoted to the advancement of Hindu culture and society should rake up those controversies. On the contrary, Hindus should be satisfied with a clear and frank recognition of the history of these places. For the rest, these places are occasions for a thousandfold generous gesture of forgive and forget.

3.3. A gesture, not a compensation The problem with forgiving is that genuine forgiving can only take place if the committed wrongs are admitted (forgiving someone who doesn't deplore his act but still thinks it was justified, is tantamount to inviting him to do it again; it is not forgiveness but masochism). What Hindus are in fact demanding from the Muslim leadership, is an uninhibited recognition of the injustice their forebears have inflicted upon the Hindus. There would be no need for a good-will gesture if there had not been some serious injustice in the past. Such recognition of the past would be implicit in an official Muslim acceptance of the Hindu rights over Ram Janmabhoomi, in fact it would be the most important thing about it. But this historical recognition is the hardest part of the whole situation. Not even concerning one single contentious place are the Muslim communal leaders willing to openly concede that there was anything wrong with Babar's behaviour. What is so difficult about such acceptance of past wrongs? In 1989-90, the Japanese people have, via both their prime minister and their new emperor, openly expressed their regrets over the oppression meted out by them to the Korean people in the half-century before 1945. No one has interrupted them to say that this was a long- forgotten affair, time-barred, sterile raking-up of old quarrels. On the contrary, everybody involved realizes that this little apology is the very real beginning of a new Japanese-Korean understanding and, in the longer run, of a renewed friendship. What makes it more difficult for the Indian Muslims to make such an apology to the Hindus, than for the Japanese to the Koreans? One reason is probably that the Japanese people does not constitute an ideological unit. The ideology of Japanese supremacy and militarism, which determined Japan's policies in the decades before 1945, has disappeared and left room for a recognition of the crimes which to a supremacist people seemed justified, but are not considered such any longer. The new willingness to come to terms with the past has been made possible by a real change in Japan's dominant ideology. Now, that change does not endanger Japan : a country does not have a permanent ideology, yet it has a kind of permanent identity, independent of ideological fashions. For the Muslim community, the situation is radically different. The admission of wrongs done in application of the Islamic ideology, would immediately endanger the adherence to that ideology. Well, many Hindus have believed that untouchability was an integral part of Hinduism and given it up nonetheless, confident as they were that Hinduism is not a seamless garment, but rather an ocean from which you can afford to take important quantities away without really diminishing it. But Muslim leaders are afraid that the admission of the systematic wrong done to the Hindus in direct application of unambiguous tenets of Islam, would seriously damage the integrity of the seamless garment of Islam. If you disown the persecution part of history, and implicitly also the persecution part of the doctrine, then where will this disowning stop? A scar on the nose is a scar on

the face, and the repudiation of one Islamic doctrine (jihad) is the repudiation of Islam. The Japanese have remained Japanese even after shedding their supremacist ideology, but will the Muslims, who are defined by their adherence to an ideology, remain Muslims once parts of this ideology are officially discredited? In this sense, openly facing the facts of the persecution part of Muslim history may really endanger the belief in Islam and therefore the very existence of the Muslim community as such. That is why the Muslim communal leadership will not even consider any formal admission of the bloody past. Their only chance is to depict the Muslim atrocities as aberrationsfrom the true Islamic path of tolerance and peace (as some friends of Islam have been doing). But they are wail aware that this really implies declaring much of the Prophet's own behaviour to beaberration and un-Islamic, as well as the behaviour of revered Muslim heroes who merely imitated the Prophet's example and implemented Quranic commandments. So, while many innocent common Muslims would not mind restoring a place of worship to the Hindus, the communal leadership is aware of its larger doctrinal implications, and refuses to give in. It should be stressed that what Hindus are demanding is not a full compensation, not revenge, not getting even. Getting even would take millions of killings and acts of slave-taking, acts of temple destruction and so on, and that would still not bring the victims of Islamic fanaticism back to life. So, getting even is out of the question. Revenge is still something else. It would include the destruction of the most sacred places of Islam, like the Kaaba. That plan has not been formulated either. The point in this case is merely a symbolic restoration of one or three ancient Hindu sacred places, a formal gesture. Even that, the Muslim leadership is not willing to make, so far.

3.4. Enactment of status-quo However, quite a number of individual Muslims have expressed their willingness to make a goodwill gesture and leave the Ram Janmabhoomi site to the Hindus. Most of them demand in return the enactment of a law fixing the status-quo for all places of worship as on August 15, 1947, or at least as on January 26, 1950. This demand has also been made, without any offer in return, by the militant Muslim organizations. Well, such a law does not immediately seem objectionable. Not that it exists in any secular country. It is the product of the Indian situation, where the Muslims have grabbed a whole lot of places of worship without being able to eliminate or even marginalize the pre-existent society. So now they face the threat that the victimized party demands restoration, and such a law protects them against this embarrassing eventuality.

Hindus have nothing to gain from such a law. Hindu temples up for dispute are very few. While Hindus historians have published long lists of mosques built on demolished temples, no-one has come forward with a similar list of Hindu temples. An impression has been created by the dishonest crowd of secularists that there are many Hindu temples that once were Buddhist. Well, let them start with pointing out where these temples are. Let them secondly bring up documentary or archaeological indications for a forcible rather than a mutually voluntary take-over. And let them show that there is an existing Buddhist community with a genuine use in taking over such a temple. I am sure that Hindus will not object, even regardless of whether the same procedure is applied to mosques that have forcibly replaced temples. The Bodh Gaya temple case, in which Buddhists and non- Buddhists have cooperated to restore this erstwhile Buddhist place of pilgrimage, has clearly proven this willingness on the part of the Hindu leadership. The British interference and the stubbornness of one temple priest have drawn out the process over several decades, but since 1953 the Bodh Gaya temple is functioning as the Buddhist shrine it originally was.16 Two facts about the Bodh Gaya temple case are particularly inconvenient for the secularist theory of Hindu-Buddhist antagonism. One is that a decisive role in the settlement was played by the "Hindu communalist" organization Hindu Mahasabha. The second is that the Bodh Gaya temple was never forcibly taken over nor destroyed by the Hindus. The Buddhists abandoned the place when they were exterminated by the Islamic invaders, around 1200 AD. It was lying there, deteriorating, even after a Shaiva monk order came to inhabit the domain in 1590. Only around 1880 did a Hindu priest move in to use the building as a temple, after efforts by the king of Myanmar to repair it were stopped because of the Burmese war. The priest was pressured by the British not to make concessions to the foreign (Lankan and, more seriously, Japanese) Buddhists who were working to revive this Buddhist place of pilgrimage. It was this priest's successor who would thwart all attempts at settlement, even when these involved Swami Vivekananda and Surendranath and Rabindranath Tagore. But the settlement won through. Hindus had never forcibly taken the place from the Buddhists, and yet (or should I say : and that's why) they have shown sensitivity to the Buddhists' attachment to the temple, and restored it as one of Buddhism's chief places of pilgrimage. If there are more such places (and the anti-Hindu crowd claims there are many), let these secularists put their evidence on the table. As a man of scientific temper, I will not forgive them if they repeat their allegation without substantiating it. You see, the case with allegations is simple : either you prove them, or you withdraw them and offer apologies. The secularists should not get away with doing neither one of these two.

Hindus have, until proof to the contrary, no temples to protect from historical claims, and so they have nothing to gain from a law fixing the status of places of worship. But since I don't think these buildings are really the point, I also don't think such a law would hurt the Hindu cause very much. However, it would be wrong to agree to the enactment of such a law as a quid pro quo for thehandover of the Ram Janmabhoomi site. Since you don't have to pay for what is yours, Hindus should not give anything in return for the Ram Janmabhoomi. And Muslims will show that their new respect for Hindu sacred places is genuine by not making it conditional. The enactment of a further status-quo should be considered on its own merits and not as a part of a deal.

3.5. International standards And that brings us back to the question : should the wrongs of history be righted? If international custom is anything to go by, yes. Right now, many court cases are being fought in the New World, by Native Americans and Australian Aborigines, to claim back ancestral sacred places and other property. Some are lost, some are won. Even in some of the cases they lost, it was a technicality or whatever else that came in the way, but the principle that the wrongs of history may have to be righted, was not questioned as such. And every case which the natives have won, is a moral support for the restoration of Hindu sacred places. In the Soviet Union too, many places of worship that were confiscated and turned into storing-rooms, offices and what not, are being given back to the religious communities. The fact that the victimized communities had managed to do without these buildings for so long, and the fact that now all these offices etc. had to be moved, was not taken as a sufficient excuse for keeping the status-quo. The situation in India is not fundamentally different from that in the Communist countries and in the New World. In each case, a wave of ideologically sustained rapine and destruction has taken place. The ideologies that gave a good conscience to the mass murders, ruthless oppression and thorough cultural destruction, are of the same stock. Moses taught the Hebrew people a religion which divided humanity in two : the Chosen People and the rest It divided space in two : the Promised land and the rest It divided time in two : the time before the Covenant (between Yahweh and His People) and the unfoldment of God's plan starting with the Covenant.17 For Moses, anything was allowed if it fulfilled God's plan of giving the Promised Land to the Chosen People.18 Fortunately, in later centuries, when the Jews had no political power left, they transformed their self- righteous religion into a strongly ethical religion with a mystical dimension and a pluralistic culture of Scripture interpretation through intellectual discussion.

However, the seed of Moses was still there, and it was taken up by Christianity. Christianity again divided humanity into Christians (saved ones) and Pagans (doomed ones). This automatically divided space into two : the Christian countries and the Pagan countries. But while the Jews had limited their ambition to the Promised Land, Christianity wanted to convert the whole world. As the New Testament had said, in seeming innocence: "Go and teach all the peoples". It also divided time into two: the time when the original sin reigned supreme, and the era of Jesus Christ, the Saviour, our Lord (marked as AD, Anno Domini, year of the Lord). Mohammed, who used to travel to the Christian city Damascus as an agent of his wife Khadija's company, brought monotheism and prophethood to Arabia. He divided humanity into two, the believers and the unbelievers. He divided the world into two: the Muslim-ruled countries, or Dar-ul-Islam, and the rest, called Dar-ul-Harb, the land of strife. Again, this was not meant as a permanent coexistence : the land of the believers had to inflict Harb on the Dar-ul-Harb until it could swallow all of it. Islam also divided time into two : the Jahiliya or ignorance, before the Prophet (peace be upon him), and the time of Islam, which will last until the day of Judgment. Marxism is the latest and shortest-lived offshoot of this lineage of closed and aggressive creeds. Its God is history, which is a one-dimensional version of the Christian-Islamic doctrine of "God's plan unfolding in history". It divides humanity in two: the progressive forces, who have history on their side (today: the proletariat), and the rest, who will be wiped out of history soon. It divides time into two: before and after the revolution. It divides the world into two: the Socialist Republics where the proletariat is in power and does its redeeming work of establishing classless society, and the rest, where the revolution is yet to take place. The one thing these three world-conquering creeds have in common, is their boundless self-righteousness in overrunning the societies of the non-chosen peoples. They have respected nothing of what was sacred to the Pagans, often not even their lives. Where these three have come in conflict with each other, they have not spared each other either, witness the Crusades and the Spanish Reconquista, the treatment meted out to the Christians in Muslim countries, the Armenian genocide, the wholesale persecution of (an already softened) Christianity in the Soviet block, the confrontations between the Chinese and the Uighurs, the persecution of the Communists in Khomeini's Iran. Each of them, in its prime, has (had) the unshakable conviction that it is bound to conquer the world, and that ultimately no opponent would survive to give testimony against its outrageous crimes. But what goes up, must come down. Religions that are not sanatana, ingrained in human nature and therefore age- old, religions that have a beginning, are also bound to end. There was no Christianity before Christ, no Islam before

Mohammed, no Marxism before Marx : therefore the creeds of Christ, Mohammed and Marx are bound to end. So if Hindus wait long enough, these thousands of mosques built on destroyed temples, will all fall back into their lap. They will be abandoned, or Muslim-born people will convert them into Pagan establishments themselves. The situation today is that Chrstianity is losing its teeth, and meteoric Marxism will be dead even earlier. In the ex-Soviet block, Marxism is not offering any resistance anymore to the comeback of whatever cultural or religious movements had existed in society. Not only the Christians and the Muslims, but also the Buddhists in the Mongolian republics are benefiting from Marxism's giving up. Christianity is gradually coming to face its history, and is having to cope increasingly with a cultural reaction from peoples who got subdued in the colonial period, but who now start questioning the history of their acceptance of Christianity, notably in Latin America and in Africa. While the missionary programme has not been given up, forcible conversions and other acts of violence against other cultures are out of fashion. Christianity is no physical threat anymore, and not even a cultural threat either for those who see through the missionary strategy. The situation is different with Islam. For a very clear example of the difference between Christianity and Islam today, consider the situation in the Soviet Union. Many of the erstwhile Soviet Republics want independence, or at least a stop to the Russian rule which the Soviet Union had effectively brought. In most cases, religion is strongly present in these independence movements. Now, in the Christian-dominated Baltic states, anti- Russian feelings have been voiced through demonstrations, painting over Russian signboards, and other such citizens' protest. In the Muslim-dominated Central-Asian republics, by contrast, Russian girls were stripped naked on the street and gang-raped, many Russians have been killed, and finally most Russians had no choice but to flee their homes and seek safety with relatives in the Russian Federation. This stark difference in behaviour between Christians and Muslims is not at all a coincidence. Now Indian secularists may intone their worn-out tirades of how this prejudice against Islam will vitiate the communal atmosphere. But I cannot help the verifiable fact that the Russians, India's big friends, have massively fled their homes in the Muslim-majority areas of their erstwhile empire. It is at the hands of Muslim re-assertion that they have received such a barbaric treatment that they saw no alternative but to flee. Islam has till today retained a lot of its medieval self- righteousness. While native Americans who claim back ancestral sacred places may have to confront economical interests, juridical technicalities or other small-human opposition against their demands, there is now hardly any ideologically motivated resistance against respecting their culture and their historical sensitivities. But in India, and in the countries which Islam has carved out of if, there is still a strong presence of

an ideological drive to islamize India, and to make this clear by wresting all kinds of real and symbolical concessions from the Hindus, and by refusing them any concession whatsoever in return. The symbols of humiliation that have been inflicted on the Hindus, are being defended. Therefore, unfortunately, it is only in a very crude material sense that the disputes over mosques built over temples is a raking up of past events. At the ideological level, the struggle is continuing today. That makes the demand for an explicit Muslim gesture of reconciliation and Wiedergutmachung all the more justified.

4. Ram Janmabhoomi and the courts 4.1 A non-mosque The juridical debate concerning the Ram Janmabhoomi site centres around two questions :

1. Can a court adjudicate in a matter concerning historical wrongs, dating to before the present political set-up, and extending far beyond the case at hand, which has acquired a symbol value in precisely this larger issue of righting historical wrongs? 2. If not, i.e. if the court can only deal with this at its material face value, as a dispute of ownership or of the right of access or use, then whose building is it? We will start with the second question. A very important element in the juridical debate is the actual status of the disputed place before the Hindu take-over in 1949. The Hindu side says that it was an abandoned building since 1936. They might, on top of this claim, invoke the principle that "if you have land and you don't cultivate it, it's not yours", a principle which several Muslims have mentioned to me as a fine example of how socially progressive Islam really is. The Muslim side says it was a full-fledged mosque up till December 22, 1949. 19

A mr. Hashim Kidwai has written that mr. Advani's claim that no namaz was offered in the Babri Masjid since 1936, a full thirteen years before the Hindu take-over, "is not based on facts". To substantiate his counter-claim, he brings up the most first-hand kind of evidence : "My father was posted at Faizabad as Deputy Collector from 1939 to 1941 and I, along with my mother and other members of my family, visited the Babari mosque in October 1939 and again in October 1941 and offered the Zuhar (noon) prayers there." I readily believe this man's testimony, especially because it does not prove what he wanted to prove. It proves that the Babri Masjid was still considered a mosque, and had not been transformed into anything else. In fact, it clearly prove that some Muslims still went there to offer prayers. However, the fact that someone who wants to prove that the place was still in use in 1936-49, merely says that his family went there twice (visiting it) in more than two years, and does not say that he saw with his own eyes that the Muslim community gathered there every Friday, is a strong indication that the place no longer was a community mosque in regular use. I have so far not seen any document that settles the matter in a conclusive way. But then, that is more to the disadvantage of the Muslim than of the Hindu side. If the Muslim community was effectively using the place, then in those thirteen years under discussion it should have produced some documents proving it.

20

In a memorandum of Muslim MLA's from Uttar Pradesh to the chief minister , not more is claimed than that prayers were offered until 21/12/1949 without any restriction. It is a fact that there was no restriction on offering prayers, but in all this happy unrestrictedness, how many devotees effectively came to pray? These MLA's are not even claiming that the place was the community mosque for a designated group of local Muslims, let alone proving it. In a comment on the VHP list of documents presented to the government of India (6/10/89), the 21 BMMCC again fails to make this full claim. Commenting on two documents which the VHP has included as supporting its case, two Waqf documents of 1940 and 1941, the BMMCC can only dismiss them as not very legible, and then quickly jumps to comment on the events of 1949 when"Muslims of the place were being subjected to harassment and prevented from offering namaz in the Babri Masjid". Reading not very legible documents is not going to convince many people. The long list of AIBMAC documents presented to the government on December 23, 1990, again merely contain proof that the Muslims had legal access to the place, not that it actually was their regular prayer-ground. The claim that the Babri Masjid was a normally functioning community mosque up till 1949, is also rendered unlikely by what happened just before the take- over. It seems that the appearanceof the idols on 22 December 1949 was not at all unannounced. Justice Deoki 22 Nandan Agarwala mentions, in an appendix to an open letter to the prime minister , that on 16 October 1949, group recitation of the entire Tulsi Ramayana started in different places in an around the disputed property in order to purify it, and the Ram devotees removed the remnants of the graves of the Ganj-i Shaheedan (Martyrs' place, the burial ground of the Muslim victims of the 1855 battle over the nearby Hanuman Garhi temple). If the place had been in regular use as a community mosque, this would have been impossible, or at least it would have occasioned serious riots. The course of Muslim participation in litigation over the site is also not really compatible with the continuous use of the Masjid up to 1949. If the Sunni Waqf Board was effectively managing the Masjid in 1949, why did it not immediately start litigation to reclaim its stolen property, especially since the theft would have interfered with the community life of the local Muslims in a very frontal way ? In fact, the Sunni Waqf Board only entered litigation in 1961, just five days before the twelfth anniversary of the take-over, on which date any claims became time-barred. Also, in its 1961 plaint, the Sunni Waqf Board is conspicuously silent about any details of an actual mosque management : who was effectively in charge of the Masjid as its mutwalli, if at all there was one ? When was the repair of the building (damaged in 1934 riots) by the British authorities completed, and when was namaz resumed ? The Waqf Board has nothing more to offer than the general assertion that namaz was offered both and after the said repairs. As we have seen, that statement is correct in the sense that the place was available for namaz, so that individual Muslims could go there, but so far not substantiated in the sense that it was used for regular community prayers. After the enactment of the U.P. Muslim Waqfs Act in 1936, the District Waqf Commissioner of Faizabad made a complete inquiry, and the fact that he really had to inquire again shows how non-alive the Masjid was. In his report (16/9/38), he does mention someone who was known as, and called himself, the mutwalli of the Babri Masjid. The man, Syed Mohammed Zaki, was a Shia and traced his ancestry and his job to Mir Baqi, also a Shia. However, he was an opium addict, unsuited for his duties, and this could be seen from the neglected state of the Masjid. So, according to this official Waqf report, the place was neglected; and apparently, nobody in the Ayodhya Muslim community was doing anything about it. And even after the report was submitted, and even after it was published in the gazette of the Sunni Waqf Board in 1944, 23 neither the Sunni nor the Shia Waqf Board stepped in to effectively take care of the Masjid.

Incidentally, it seems that the name Babri Masjid became the official term from this report onwards, as before it was mostly referred to as Masjid-i Janmasthan. What Shias and Sunnis did do, was to quarrel over whether it was a Shia or a Sunni mosque. Again, their argumentation centered around historical claims, such as that Babar was a Sunni, and that Mir Baqi was a Shia. It did not focus on the actual use of the mosque, claiming that the users were mostly Shias (c.q. Sunnis), or whether they did the Shia or the Sunni thing on the festival Muharram. The British court ruled, in March 1946, that it was a Sunni Waqf property, but that it had been shared by Sunnis and Shias, in the sense that there was no prohibition for either to use it. From a report dated 10/12/1949, by Waqf inspector Mohammed Ibrahim, it is clear that the official mutwalli of the Babri Masjid was systematically the nambardar (revenue collector) of the village Sahanwa, several miles away but still in the Faizabad district. This Shia functionary was automatically deemed to be in charge of the Babri Masjid, which otherwise did not have any manager of its own. But the Babri Masjid job was only nominal, and the mosque was not taken care of. The report also said that due to fear of the Hindus and Sikhs, nobody offered namaz in the Babri Masjid, and that travellers who stayed there for the night were abused and harassed by the Hindus from the near-by establishments. We should see this state of affairs against the background of the 1934 riots around the Babri Masjid, triggered by a cowslaughter. These riots made many victims and the building was seriously damaged. Several people were killed inside the mosque, which desecrated it in Muslim eyes. According to justice Deoki Nandan, even after the British had the building repaired, the Muslims did not come/return to effectively use the mosque, for fear of the Hindus, especially the martial monks of the three nearby Akharas (Nirmohi, Nirvana and Digambar). It is even disputed whether the Masjid was effectively used before 1934, and even before 1855. Dr. Harsh Narain has summarized an 1858 document by one Muhammad Asghar (demanding the removal of the Ram platform just outside the Masjid) : He has mentioned that the place of Janmasthan has been lying unkempt/in disorder (parishan) for hundreds of years, and that 24 the Hindus performed worship there. A second document that dr. Narain quotes, is a paragraph from a book by local Urdu writer Mirza Rajab Ali Beg Surur : "A great mosque was built on the spot where Sita ki Rasoi is situated. During the reign of Babar, the Hindus had no guts to be match for the Muslims... Aurangzeb built a mosque on the Hanuman Garhi... The Bairagis effaced the [Aurangzebi] mosque and erected a temple in its place. Then idols began to be worshipped openly in the Babari mosque where the Sita ki Rasoi is situated."So the grip of the Muslims on the sacred places of central Ayodhya was so weak that they couldn't even prevent the demolition of a mosque. In that context, mr. Surur's observation on the Babri Masjid may well indicate what it says, viz. that the Babri Masjid was abandoned by the Muslims and even sometimes used by the Hindus (until it was prevented, perhaps in 1855, or at any rate by the British from 1856 onwards). The testimony by the Austrian Jesuit Joseph Tieffenthaler, who visited Ayodhya in 1767, also 25 seems to be saying that the Masjid had been re-occupied by the Hindus. What is more, neither he nor, to my knowledge, any of the Muslim sources, mentions Muslim worship in the Babri Masjid. These are indications for what many common people in Ayodhya have told me : that the Babri Masjid has not been a real mosque for most of its history. With such a prehistory, it also becomes understandable that the local Muslim community in the 1930s and 1940s could have a mosque standing there and yet not use it. What kept them away, just like (according to the above mentioned sources) in the days of Nawabi rule, was the Hindu presence. The Hindus did not dare to defy the British rulings concerning the place, but were nonetheless strong enough to constitute a threat for Muslims who wanted to assert too much of a presence.

As against the strong indications that the mosque was not really functional, it is reported that there is one very authoritative witness to the contrary still alive today : Maulvi Gaffar, described as "the Imam of Ayodhya's erstwhile Jama Masjid... The last time he had led the Friday prayers at the Babri Masjid was 41 years ago, on December 22, 1949. Then the idols appeared and the District Magistrate K.K. Nayar asked him to suspend activities in the masjid for three to four weeks, while an inquiry was made. The 90-year old Imam says he is still waiting to resume his 26 vocation." Of course, this testimony is presented in a very secularist paper, and I have found out by now that secularist journalists have no scruples at all about wrongly describing or misquoting their interviewees. Compared to the testimony of Waqf and Court documents, that is still no reliable counter-proof. In fact it is rather strange that the BMMCC in its reply to the VHP presentation of documents, does not mention this testimony. So far, to my knowledge, this testimony has not brought up by the pro-Babri side in any context where hard (challengeable and verifiable) proof is required. Yet, judicially the Babri case may stand or fall with the proof that it was a regular mosque up to 1949. After all, the Court Order of the Civil Judge, Faizabad, of March 3, 1951, based its decision to guarantee the Hindu plaintiff the right of worship in the building, partly on the information that it had not been used as a mosque since at least 1936 : "It further appears from the copies of a number of affidavits of certain Muslim residents of Ayodhya that at least from 1936 onwards the Muslims have neither used the site as a mosque nor offered prayers there... Nothing has been 27 pointed to discredit these affidavits..." If the man described as the erstwhile Imam did not go to court at that time to contradict the statements by his fellow Muslims, well, then I would doubt he really was the Babri Masjid Imam. Until the judge's assumption is disproven, this must count as the official version : on the strength of local Muslim testimony, the Babri Masjid was not in regular use since at least 1936. If any firm counter-proof had come up by now, I guess we would have seen it : the pro-Babri faction has enough media at its disposal to present the strong points in its case. Nevertheless, to conclude the discussion of the status of the Babri Masjid just before its conversion into a Ram Mandir, I cannot say that either side's case is as yet 100% convincing. There have certainly been individual Muslims offering namaz in the Babri Masjid in the forties, but from the available evidence it seems that it was not a regular mosque functioning as the real community centre of the local Muslims. Apart from the factual question of the effective status of the disputed building in 1949, a judicial settlement of the dispute would have to base itself on technicalities like Waqf (and other trusts) property jurisprudence and the division of the domain in three parts with different ownership titles. 28 I will not go into those here. Before the Court could go into those technicalities, it had, however, to decide first whether the Sunni Waqf Board's plaint was not time-barred. It was filed five days before twelve years after the Hindu take-over. Now, for suits of declaration, a limit of six years is prescribed, but for suits of possession, the limit is twelve years. But it must be more complicated than that, because at the time of writing, the matter has still not been decided. The decision had been announced for October 31, 1990, but it was once more postponed. Meanwhile, there are doubts about how independently the judiciary apparatus can still function in the present circumstances. When justice K.M. Pandey ordered the locks removed from the Mandir gate, on February 1, 1986, many secularists said that this was a Congress-sponsored 29 quid pro quo with the Hindus in return for the infamous Muslim Women's Bill. That is of course a very serious allegation against the judge. What did happen, is that the Congress government first asked the VHP to file a petition to get the locks removed. When the VHP refused, the Congress moved one of its own people to file the petition, which was granted by the judge. This did not require any bribing or otherwise influencing of the judge : the argumentation of the petition was such that a positive Court ruling was virtually assured.

Shortly before the Kar Seva, the same judge was refused a promotion by the Union law minister at the insistence of U.P. chief minister Mulayam Singh Yadav, against the advice of the senior judges, which is normally followed. Mulayam, in the middle of his propaganda and military buildup to prevent the Kar Seva programme, justified his veto on the ground that justice Pandey is a communalist. Lawyers and judges have protested against this interference. If a judge can be punished by the executive power for the contents of his Court rulings, then that is an intolerable breach of the separation of the legislative, executive and judiciary powers, one of the cornerstones of a modern democratic polity. The secularists, champions of modernity against obscurantism, have in this case condoned this Ancien Regime practice by their silence. They have not stood up to remind Mulayam that, according to their own earlier opinion, justice K.M. Pandey had only acted on government orders. In January 1991, when Mulayam and the central government had become critically dependent on Congress support, and Congress did its best to placate the Hindu electorate as much as possible, 30 justice K.M. Pandey was given his promotion after all. The essence of the Muslim position in the judicial debate has been that the de facto ownership since 1528 creates a title, no matter whether the acquisition then was legitimate or not. However, this title by accustomed possession only counts if the de facto possession went unchallenged. If the victimized party continues to claim its stolen property, even if the existing power equations don't permit restoring it, then de facto possession does not create a valid title. And it is wellattested that the Hindus kept on claiming the site as much as the situation permitted. So, even if the matter is treated as purely a title suit over some real estate, the Hindus do have a leg to stand on when they claim the Ram Janmabhoomi site. But of course, this dispute is not really an ordinary title suit.

4.2 Disputed competence of the judiciary The more fundamental question in the debate on the juridical dimension of the Ayodhya, is whether the issues involved can at all be adjudicated by a law court charged with checking legality in terms of the laws of the Indian Republic founded in 1947 and endowed with a Constitution in 1950. The VHP has rejected the authority of the Courts in this matter. The Babri Masjid groups have opposed this stand and demanded that the VHP abide by the Court verdict. But in October 1990, Imam Bukhari of the BMAC has also declared that if the court ruling goes against the Muslim demands, then he will not accept it, and an agitation against the verdict will be 31 launched. Of course, the VHP have a point when they argue that their opponents are in no position to lecture them about abiding by Court verdicts. First of all, there are a number of articles in the Constitution which are not being implemented, and of which the implementation is not even actively demanded (often opposed) by the secularist parties and critics. Among them: 1. Article 15, prohibiting discrimination, which is effectively thwarted by the separate religion-based civil codes, and by the almost unbridled imposition of reservations in recruitment for government jobs; moreover, this Article is violated by Article 30, which gives to minorities the right to establish and administer educational institutions of their choice, but forgets to grant the majority the same right - unique in world history; it is also violated by Article 370, giving a special status to Kashmir and effectively giving a number of privileges to Kashmiris denied to other citizens.

2. Article 44 mandates the establishment of a common civil code, which Muslim organizations refuse (they demand the scrapping of this Article), and which went out of reach for a long time when the Congress government gave in to the Muslim demand to overrule a Supreme Court verdict and enforce Shariat rulings on divorcee maintenance through legislation. 3. Article 48 wants the state to enact prohibition of cowslaughter; Kerala, West Bengal and Nagaland have not passed any such act, and in several other states the act is openly 32 violated ; India is in fact a beef-exporter. Coming to the issue of abiding by court verdicts, we find the record of the parties other than the Hindu communalists has not been all that impeccable. Some examples :

1. Beru Bari was a district bordering on East Pakistan, awarded by Radcliffe to India. When

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6.

7.

Pakistan minister Liaqat Ali wanted it, Nehru obliged. The Supreme Court struck down the agreement, but Nehru made his captive parliament overrule the verdict, and ceded the territory. Similarly, the Supreme Court verdict in the well- known Shah Bano case was overruled by a law, in order to appease Muslim fundamentalist agitation. When Indira Gandhi was convicted for using unfair means in the elections, she organized demonstrations in which the mob clamoured for physical action against the judge, and she shouted: "These are my people and my judges". V.P. Singh, champion of value-based politics, faced with the possibility of the Supreme Court striking down the implementation of the Mandal report, declared that he would have it implemented anyway. When some leftists demanded a ban on the Shilanyas ceremony in Ayodhya, and on the Ram Shila processions, the Supreme Court dismissed the demand, arguing that these activities are but an exercise of the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution, and that even the threat of riots does not nullify constitutional rights, since it is the duty of the governments to protect the exercise of constitutional freedoms against such threats of violence. Nevertheless, the secularist/Stalinist intelligentsia has been shouting scandal that the government did not ban the Shilanyas and the processions, and has been deflecting attention from the Supreme Court's upholding the constitutional rights which Hindus also have. In their comments afterwards, they have kept on attacking Rajiv Gandhi for not committing contempt of Court by taking the unconstitutional step of proclaiming a ban (the sweetest thing for a Stalinist mind) on the Shilanyas. A petition to ban mr. Advani's rathyatra from Somnath to Ayodhya was dismissed, since there was nothing illegal about it, Yet the secularists have kept on demanding the ban, and finally Laloo Prasad Yadav, chief minister of Bihar, has ignored the judicial decision and arrested mr. Advani. In spite of a High Court ruling upholding the pilgrims' right to have a Parikrama around Ayodhya, even in the heat of Kar Seva, the U.P. chief minister Mulayam Singh Yadav has effectively made it impossible. Moreover, he had the canopy over the Shilanyas spot 33 removed against Court orders to preserve the status- quo. A Human Rights Society team released a report on December 14 in Delhi, in which it contended that the U.P. government had violated the Allahabad High Court orders by effectively preventing the 34 Parikrama. This constituted an encroachment on the Hindus' religious rights.

So, if the VHP wants to disregard a judicial ruling on Ayodhya, it is in more or less good company. But then there is still a difference. While the above-mentioned secularists have disregarded or violated Court orders without disputing the competence of the Court in the matter concerned, the VHP disputes that any Court can have any authority in this matter. On December 18, when it seemed that the government was willing to let the decision depend upon the archaeological evidence, which went in favour of the Hindu claim, a Hindu religious leader still insisted that no consideration except the Hindu belief should count Sri Sugunendra

Thirtha Swami of Puthige Math (Udupi) declared that "archaeological proof should not clinch the 35 Ram temple issue". After all, suppose Babar had been more careful and removed every trace of the temple he demol- ished: then the Hindus' position would remain equally justified, yet the archaeological evidence would not be taken as going in their favour. So, the Hindu belief alone should suffice as a ground for leaving the place to the Hindus. The demand to put this item of belief above the authority of the courts, is in my opinion not so much a display of principled non-secularism, as rather a display of mistrust in the Indian state. Hindus expect the state not to respect Hindu beliefs and Hindu sacred places. They know that, ever since Indira's favouringcommitted judges, the judiciary is also not what it used to be. They expect that the state will consider other things more sacred and important than the Hindu sacred places : among them, the Muslim title to the site, acquired through force by the invader Babar, and never annulled by the British colonizer. However, formally the VHP's and the abovementioned Swami's stand is non-secular. It does not want to submit a decision to the secular authorities. Yet, a piece of land being A's rather than B's property is a secular matter, isn't it? Well, that is precisely the point. In the Hindu view, the piece of land is sacred. It is the deity's 36 property. Decisions concerning it are therefore decisions with a religious dimension. Now, as secularism means a divorce of state and religion, the state should not interfere with religious affairs. I am not sure this would be convincing to a secularist, but it certainly has logic. Some of the Babri Masjid advocates, notably Syed Shahabuddin, have said that a Masjid is Allah's property, but that Allah doesn't want it, and doesn't answer prayers offered in it, if it was built on disputed land. Of course, Islamic Scripture has never had any objection to building mosques on sites disputed by Kafirs ; but if mr. Shahabuddin wants to play the tolerant Islam game, we should join him and compel him to be consistent (instead of the tactical changes of position he and other Babri advocates have been making). So, Allah doesn't want the Babri Masjid, which has irrefutably been built on a site stolen from the Hindus. With Allah's help, this non-secular approach to the dispute yields an unambiguous solution and relieves the secular judges of an unpleasant case.

5. Ram Janmabhoomi politics 5.1 V.P. Singh and Ayodhya The centuries-old struggle over the Babri Masjid - Ram Janmabhoomi came in a critical phase on November 9, 1989, when the first stone of the Ram Janmabhoomi Mandir was laid, in a grand Shilanyas ceremony. The astrologers who had chosen the time, had clearly picked a very auspicious stellar configuration, for on the very same day, the Berlin wall was broken. Jay Dubashi wrote : "While a temple was going up in Ayodhya, a Communist temple was being demolished five thousand miles away in Europe" If this is not history, I don't know what is.37

The actual construction had been announced for February, but then the VHP leadership decided to give the new prime minister V.P. Singh, who at that time enjoyed a lot of goodwill, four months time to work out an amicable agreement among all the parties concerned. During those four months nothing was done. At least, that is the impression among the public. Later, one of V.P. Singh's aides was to come out in defense of his boss saying that a lot of consultations had taken place, but that a compromise was just not possible. And it is true : no compromise is possible between the demands of the Vishva Hindu Parishad and those of the Babri Masjid Action Committee and the Babri Masjid Movement Coordination Committee. In July 1990, well after the four months' grace period had elapsed, the VHP announced it would start temple construction on October 30. On August 7, V.P.Singh announced that his government was going to implement the recommendations of the Mandal Commission Report, giving 27% reservations in government jobs to the so-called Other Backward Classes (i.e. Castes). It was a surprise move, for which he had not even consulted his allies, the BJP and the Communist parties. The move was calculated to divide all other non-caste-based parties along caste lines, to attract the massive OBC vote bank (and prevent it from being hijacked by legitimate OBC leader Devi Lal), and last but not least, to divide the Ram Janmabhoomi movement. Prime Minister V.P. Singh really did seek a compromise solution for the Ayodhya dilemma. Behind the screen, he had worked out an arrangement on October 15 to 18, which was divulged only after it had fallen through, by Arun Shourie 38. The plan was that the disputed area would be acquired by the government. For further decision, it would be divided in the structure itself and the adjoining land including the Shilanyas site. The structure itself would be referred to the Supreme Court for determining its character. On the adjoining land, the VHP would be allowed to start building the Mandir. Since part of the land was private property, it could only be acquired through the Land Acquisition Act procedure, which would take at least three weeks even in an emergency formula. However, it could be acquired immediately under a special Ordinance. On October 19, by 3 p.m., the formula was agreed upon by several ministers and leaders of the BJP, VHP, RSS. Then, V.P. Singh had a meeting with the Muslim leaders. So, at 5 p.m. he told his aides he had changed his mind : all the land considered disputed before the Allahabad High Court would be referred to the Supreme Court, and there was no question of handing over the Shilanyas area to the VHP. His law officer explained to him that once the government has acquired the land, all disputes about the land titles would end, so no further decision on the land surrounding the structure itself was needed. Nevertheless, that night the Ordinance came, without anything of the distinction between the structure and the surrounding land, which the prime minister himself had worked out and agreed upon with the VHP leaders.

The VHP felt it had been taken for a ride, and was furious. Nevertheless, the land had been acquired, so perhaps it was a very small step in the right direction (that is what L.K. Advani had to say about it). But the Muslim leaders, whom the prime minister had already tried to appease with his unilateral change in the Ordinance, were not appeased enough. That's the way it goes with appeasement policies : the concession made is never the final concession. By October 21, they realized that this acquisition of property claimed as Waqf property could be a precedent for more such take-overs, and they didn't want to take any chances. So they called on the prime minister. What happened there behind closed doors can be deduced from the outcome: the Ordinance, issued in the name of the President of India, was withdrawn. Arun Shourie has made the point that V.P. Singh gave in twice to the pressure from such secularists as Imam Bukhari, when they threatened V.P. Singh with the prospect of the Muslim vote bank deserting him the way it had deserted Rajiv Gandhi in 1989. One might also wonder if this agreement between the government and the BJP/VHP, which must have been in preparation for some time, has not also influenced the Ram Janmabhoomi campaign. Could it be that when in September, the BJP threw its full weight behind the VHP campaign, and to an extent even took it over, it acted on the understanding that the government would allow the start of the temple construction from the Shilanyas site? At any rate, this is the story of one of the most impressive episodes in the Ram Janmabhoomi movement. BJP president L.K. Advani set out on a Rathyatra from Somnath to Ayodhya, where he would join in the Kar Seva, the actual bricklaying of the temple, on October 30. The trip took him through Gujarat, Maharashtra, a tip of Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Delhi. Everywhere the popular response was massive and enthusiastic. No riots took place. In some places, caste riots that had been triggered by the Mandal plan, subsided. It seems that when Hindus utter the name Rama, they forget their differences. From Delhi, Advani took the train to Bihar, and resumed his Rathyatra. Even in the sensitive tribal belt, the response was enthusiastic and not tainted by riots. But as Advani came nearer to the Uttar Pradesh border, the political fever was rising. Mulayam Singh Yadav, chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, had announced he would arrest mr. Advani as soon as he would enter the state. At the same time, behind the scene, he was challenging prime minister V.P. Singh to intervene. The latter finally obliged, via his political friend Laloo Prasad Yadav (Mulayam, while still a fellow partyman, was fast turning into a political enemy), the chief minister of Bihar. In the early morning of October 22, i.e. after the Ordinance plan had fallen through, L.K. Advani was arrested.

The BJP reaction was prompt. The party wrote to president Venkataraman that it withdrew its support from V.P. Singh's minority government. It also announced an all-India strike (Bharat bandh) on October 24. With the fall of the government now a certainty, the ruling Janata Dal fell apart. Dissidents led by Chandra Shekhar and Devi Lal, soon joined by Mulayam Singh Yadav, formed the Janata Dal (Socialist). V.P. Singh insisted on proving his majority in the Lok Sabha, on November 7, knowing that only a rump of some 90 Janata Dal MPs plus the Communists would support him. Chandra Shekhar started working out an arrangement for a JD(S) minority government supported by the Congress-I. For the first time, a government had to step down for its antiHindu policy.

5.2 Mulayam's Emergency rule and Kar Seva Meanwhile in Uttar Pradesh, chief minister Mulayam Singh Yadav was playing it rough. He pre-emptively arrested all leaders of organizations involved in the Ram Janmabhoomi movement. In order to prevent Kar Sevaks from going to Ayodhya, he suspended all public transport in the state, blocked roads, and imposed curfew in a number of cities. House-to-house searches for hiding Kar Sevaks were carried out, the borders were sealed, and massive numbers of Hindus (as well as a number of Muslim Kar Sevaks) were jailed. The numbers cited vary between one and eight lakhs, which is a lot more than during the Emergency or the Quit India movement in the whole county. On October 30, when according to Mulayam's boast, no bird would be able to fly into Ayodhya, thousands of Kar Sevaks broke through the police defenses thanks to their sheer numbers (not through force of arms : hardly any policeman got hurt). A gate was actually opened by policemen, who later justified this action by saying it was the lesser evil in the circumstances, otherwise many people would have been killed. Some Kar Sevaks climbed the domes and planted saffron flags there. The structure got damaged a little bit, far less than what the crowd could have done if it had really wanted to demolish it. Gradually, the police forces regained control and drove the Kar Sevaks out, arresting many, and killing about 10, others cite figures from 5 to 50. On November 2, the Kar Sevaks came back. As they were sitting or standing in the narrow lanes near the Janmabhoomi site (secularists say they were slowly moving towards it), the police opened fire. According to press reports, it skipped the normal procedure of first warning, lathi-charge and teargas, shooting in the air, and ultimately shooting at the legs. Most of the dead bodies had bullet wounds in the head and chest. Well, hitting the legs without hitting the heads may have been difficult as the security forces were shooting from the rooftops.

The death toll is a matter of dispute, as many of the bodies have been carried off in Army vans, and unceremoniously disposed of in an unknown place. The papers said 9, or 17, or 25 at most. The Chief Minister said 16, and stuck to it. The official Home Ministry figures39 for the communal violence in 1990 mention 45 as the total death toll in Ayodhya, which implies that less than 30 got killed on November 2. But many local people, including eyewitnesses, say that several thousands have been killed. The BJP appealed to the president to depose Mulayam, and cited the figure of 168 people killed. Some days after, the VHP claimed it could substantiate a death toll of about 400, or as many as were killed by general Dyer at Jallianwala Bagh. It has been briefly mentioned in a few press reports that some of the bullets found in dead or wounded Kar Sevaks' bodies, were not of the kind the security forces normally use. Some people infer from this, that Mulayam or someone else who has a say in the deployment of the security personnel, had allowed minority snipers to take up positions and join in the shooting. It sounds a bit fantastic, but given the high criminalization of politics especially in Bihar and U.P., it is not entirely impossible. Then again, it is hard to imagine that legitimate security men would accept it and that none of them would have leaked out the precise facts, which we would have heard by now. The prevalent explanation for the merciless shooting, is that the security men wanted (or had been told) to make up for their weak performance on October 30. That is not entirely convincing. It certainly does not explain why the prescribed steps before an actual shooting were not gone through. One can understand the police immediately resorting to shooting when it is attacked. But here, no-one has claimed that the Kar Sevaks were attacking the police and threatening their lives. Could it be that the security men had received orders to be purposely ruthless, as a show of strength on the part of the Chief Minister ? Many Muslims seem to have appreciated his tough stand. Communist Chief Minister of West Bengal, Jyoti Basu, had insisted that he be tough and unflinching. As Jay Dubashi has observed, with a Communist Chief Minister, not hundreds but thousands would have been shot. At any rate, the Chief Minister would regret his ruthlessness. He became overnight the most hated man in Hindu India. With the split in the Janata Dal, he had to seek Congress support. The Congress, feeling it was massively losing popularity because of its non-opposition and now even support to Mulayam, started to put pressure on Mulayam to tone down his anti-Mandir stand, and to make goodwill gestures towards the Hindus. Even after a month of climbing down, Mulayam was still too controver- sial for Congress, and Rajiv Gandhi expressed the desire that Mulayam step down. Only because the Congress party was divided on the issue and very afraid of elections, could Mulayam stay on.

The general change of atmosphere made Mulayam suggests that a Mandir be built by the government, starting from the shilanyas site, but in such a direction as not to come in the way of the Masjid. That the Hindu claim was justified, even anti-Hindu politicians had come to concede.40 The question for them became: how, where and by whom can the temple be built without really antagonizing the Muslim ? Rajiv Gandhi wrote a letter to brandnew prime minister Chandra Shekhar, to suggest that the historical and archaeological evidence on whether the Masjid had indeed replaced a Mandir, be considered as a decisive element in the Ayodhya solution. In practical terms : if experts agree that a Mandir had been destroyed to make way for the Masjid, then the government should treat the disputed site as a Hindu site. Still vague enough, and yet a remarkable departure from the earlier anti-historical position that the courts should decide (which meant that the issue had to be treated as purely an ownership dispute). The government then invited the AIBMAC and the VHP to come forward and present the evidence for their respective cases. On December 23, the VHP submitted a carefully prepared argumentation full of exact references to authentic material, with 28 annexures. The AIBMAC submitted nothing but a pile of documents, with no explanation of how it proved what. Most of these documents were just recent newspaper clippings, statements of opinion by non-experts and outright cranks, and Court documents concerning legal disputes emanating from the situation created by force in 1528, totally irrelevant to the question what was on the site before the Masjid was built. On January 6, both sides submitted rejoinders to the other party's evidence. At least, that was what had been asked of them, but only the VHP had done so, The AIBMAC had nothing to offer but an even bulkier pile of documents without any proof value whatsoever. Since the AIBMAC had not even challenged the VHP documents with a formal rebuttal, the objective position was that it conceded the validity of the VHP evidence. Both the press and the Babri activists, who till a month before had been decrying the VHP's "suppression of history in favour of myth" etc., now started downplaying the importance of the historical evidence. As N. Kunju put it : "History obscures, not clarifies."41 Syed Shahabuddin, conveyor of BMMCC, declared that regardless of the evidence, the title suit had to be decided as such by the Allahabad High Court, even if the government would ask the Supreme Court for its opinion on the historical evidence. Apart from an admission of weakness on the historical evidence front, Shahabuddin's demand was just tactics : the more forums deliberating on the issue, the more chance that one of them would go against the Hindu demand ; and if all of them go against the Muslim position, the Committees can always launch an agitation, as in the Shah Bano case. He also said he would not allow the rival AIBMAC to concede the Masjid. The AIBMAC itself declared

that it would only concede the Masjid if proof was offered that Ram was born on that exact site. Short, faced with the evidence that the Masjid had indeed forcibly replaced a Mandir, they just raised their demands and made it clear that this evidence talk was for them just a tactical device to keep the Hindus busy with everything except building the new Ram Janmabhoomi Mandir. But at least they had effectively conceded what everybody had known all along : that the Babri Masjid was one of the thousands of mosques built on destroyed Pagan temples. With the scholarly contest about the historical evidence yielding only a firm historical conclusion, but not the concomitant political consensus to leave this Hindu sacred site to the Hindus, the matter was again down to its bare essentials : a power struggle. On the ground, the VHP had taken to softer tactics. After the killing on November 2, in which many sadhus had also died, the feeling among at least the non-VHP leaders of the movement in Ayodhya itself, was to tread slowly and to avoid more of this mass martyrdom. Hinduism has no cult of martyrdom (to avoid the Islamic term shaheed, the Sanskrit word hutatma, "sacrificed self", was used), and prefers to advance without this waste of human lives. There were rumours that the Bajrang Dal had prepared a hit list of culprits for the massacre, who would have to be punished (after the Khalistani example). The rumour apparently sprung from a pamphlet in which the officers directly responsible for the massacre were mentioned by name. But it turned out that no police officers with those names existed. This ridiculous pamphlet incidentally does show to what a miserably low level even a movement for a just cause can stoop. The propensity to indulge in silly and reprehensible rumours is of course encouraged by the stress on emotionalism (quite different from the normal Hindu cool) and the lack of factual information and ideological education of which the Ram Janmabhoomi movement has suffered on some occasions. Anyway, I have asked Vinay katiyar, Bajrang Dal leader, what the truth was of this hit list story : did activist Hindus think that a need for armed struggle had arisen ? He told me : Where is the need for hit lists, for revenge ? Mulayam will be boycotted by the people. We have the people on our side. It is only when you cannot count on the support of the people, that you have to take to assassinations. So, let them live, let them feel the anger of the people. We have no intention of turning murderers into martyrs.42 Some days after the massacre, the Hindu leadership in Ayodhya decided to organize a Satyagraha, with one thousand people courting arrest every day, from December 6 till January 15. But, as more people than one thousand per day volunteered to participate, the total number of people who courted arrest in those forty days was over two lakhs.

Meanwhile, on the political front the wind was turning. In different quarters, the mood was increasingly in favour of hijacking the Janmabhoomi movement rather than suppressing it. Alright, let the Mandir be built, but let us build it and take the credit. The Kar Seva campaign's material success on the ground might have been limited, but that change in the mental atmosphere would be decisive for the further development of the issue. No matter who would lay the actual bricks of the Ram Mandir, the credit for that change of mood in favour of the Mandir certainly goes to the Ram Bhaktas who were there in Ayodhya in the autumn of 1990.

5.3 Reactions in neighbouring countries In November 1989, Muslims in Bangla Desh destroyed more than 200 Hindu temples, on the pretext of reacting against the Shilanyas in Ayodhya. The government agreed to pay for the repairs of 10 of them. I have no information on how much it has paid already. Moreover, during this anti-Hindu violence, many women were raped, some people killed and many wounded, and many shops looted and burned down. In November 1990, another forty or fifty temples were razed or burnt down in Bangla Desh. Or at least, those are the figures given by the secularist press. The Hindu-Buddha-Christian Oikya Parishad, the Bangla minorities' association, reported that in the a village in Chittagong district more than fifty Hindu women had been raped, two killed, and that hundreds of temples had been damaged or burnt down. Both the opposition parties and the Hindu-Buddhist- Christian Unity Council of Bangla Desh have alleged a strong government involvement in the communal violence. They pinpointed ministers and leaders of the ruling party as having instigated the communal violence. More : "We directly blame the president for these heinous anti-human incidents... they were staged in a planned way under a blueprint in co-operation with law-enforcing agencies."43 But the government indulged in the same anti-communal rhetoric as the Indian governments usually do : president Ershad declared that"the glorious tradition of communal harmony would be preserved at all costs and trouble- makers indulging in anti-social activities would be dealt with severely".44 And it even got praise from the Indian secularists : "President Ershad acted firmly in handling the riots... The fact that Hindus were free to organize a protest march shows that the government had placed no curbs on such demonstrations."45 I think it shows in the first place that Hindus had reason to protest. You see, the secularists are like the followers of Big Brother in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (a parody of Stalinism). When Big Brother has raised the prices, they hold a demonstration to thank him for lowering the prices. And when

a Muslim government organizes pogroms against the Hindus, the secularists thank it for keeping communal harmony. But Bangla Desh has not returned the compliment. On the contrary. General Ershad gave speeches attacking "a neighbouring country"for "hatching a conspiracy" and "inspiring destructive activities"etc. So far, no problem. But his deputy prime minister, Shah Moazzem "went a step further, questioning the identity, religion and citizenship of the people behind the disturbances [in opposition anti-government strikes]... Giving a call for resisting the designs of a neighbouring country, Shah Moazzem almost incited communal violence by calling upon people to identify the particular community, which, he said, is very easy."46 Meanwhile, "the opposition parties, the United Minority Council and independent groups of lawyers, professionals and teachers have accused the government of organizing communal violence last month to distract the ongoing opposition movement". In Pakistan too, Muslims used the Ayodhya news as an occasion for templeburning, rape, murder, and looting. The Indian secularist papers highlighted the Pak army intervention in Quetta (Baluchistan), in which two Muslim rioters were shot dead. However, in Dera Murad Jamali, "the police was unable to control the mob", which ransacked fifteen shops belonging to Hindus and set a temple on fire. Little was said about the large-scale outbursts in sindh. In Latifabad and Hyderabad , at least three temples were destroyed, in neighbouring Siroghat the Rama Pir temple was looted and set on fire, etc. Islamic student organizations also took the occasion to attack a Christian school and church in Peshawar. Of course, Pakistan didn't take this as an occasion for being criticized (in fact, official India has only reacted to the Pak interference, but, as always, it has failed to criticize the persecution of Hindus). Rather, it was on the offensive, constantly feeding its citizens gory stories of a mosque being demolished and Muslims being oppressed by India's Hindu government. So Pakistan lectured India about human rights, religious freedom, secularism. The Senate Committee on Religious and Minority Affairs took serious note of the desecration of the Babri Masjid in India, and referred to the Liaqat- Nehru pact, which promised safeguards to the minorities in both India and Pakistan. Adds commentator Aabha Dixit : "The committee, however, maintained a deafening silence on the need for Islamabad to fulfill its part of the obligation."47 To the credit of the secularist People's Union for Civil Liberties, it must be said that they have protested against Pak interference :"The Pakistani leaders must clearly understand that theirs is a theocratic state where religious and other minorities are denied fundamental freedoms including the freedom to worship..."48

In Nepal, the Hindu kingdom, some five Hindu temples were burnt down by Muslim gangs, who had probably come over from Bihar. No official protests from any side have been reported. Some secularists have made a confession : "The trouble, both in Bangladesh and in Pakistan, might have been averted if the media had not played up the Ayodhya incidents in highly provocative and exaggerated tones." 49 Not that journalists have suddenly become modest and self-critical : these Indian journalist are just blaming their Pak and Bangla colleagues. However, it is they themselves who are most to blame for precisely those undeontological practices they mention. They themselves have highly provoked Muslims into action by telling them that a mosque (in fact mosque architecture functioning as a Hindu temple) was about to be demolished (relocated, was the BJP/VHP plan). And they themselves have exaggerated, to say the least, by describing the Hindus as extremists and even fascists, who systematically start riots against the wretched Indian Muslims. The disinformation on which the Pakistani Muslims have acted, was not only there in their own papers, but just as much in the Times of India or the Illustrated Weekly of India. The following is quoted as an example of distorted reporting in Pak papers : A wave of anti-Muslim riots has engulfed all corners of India these days and more than 50 cities are under curfew. Despite this, however, Muslims are being killed mercilessly...50 In India, this is something of a standard secularist column phrase on riots (see ch.11). And Aabha Dixit adds a comment on Pak reporting : The headlines only refer to the desecration of the Babri mosque. There is never a mention of the Hindus who fall to police bullets. Replace headlines with editorials, and this describes the situation in Indian secularist papers. It is not only the papers who have broadcast lies about Ayodhya. They were hand in glove with the secularist political establishment. As V.K. Malhotra, BJP national secretary, remarked : "The responsibility for what has happened in Pakistan and Bangla Desh is entirely that of the Union and U.P. governments. They have been making so much anti-Hindu propaganda on this issue that those countries are getting all the excuse for this."51 Incidentally, for those who believe in SAARC and in Indo- Pak friendship, it may be interesting to hear the comment of Abdul Qayyum Khan, the president of Pakoccupied Kashmir. He said the controversy was "paying the way for a movement [in India] for an independent and liberated Islamic country within India".52

6. Communalists and their communities

6.1 Hindu Society In many press reports, it has been said that the Ayodhya conflict is a conflict between the Hindus and the Muslims. Upon closer inspection, that may not be entirely accurate. JNU historian Bipan Chandra has often stated that the religious community is really a fictional entity which in people's consciousness only blurs the real-life categories like socio-economical class. The sense of being a member of a religious community such as the Hindus or the Muslims is merely false consciousness, fostered by leaders who want to use the masses for their own social and political ambitions. While I do not subscribe to this Marxist view, I do recognize that in many cases the claim ofcommunal leaders of being their entire community's mouthpiece, is false. Thus, it is very doubtful that the agitation against the 1985 Supreme Court ruling in the Shah Bano case, i.e. against a Muslim divorcee's right to alimony, was an expression of the wishes of the 50% women in the Muslim community. And the Congress government's decision to give in to this agitation was reprehensible not only for being a case of minority appeasement, but also for treating the vocal group of fanatical Muslims as the real representatives of the Muslim community , and ignoring the countercurrent of women's organizations and intellectuals (including cabinet minister Mohammed Arif Khan). So in the Ayodhya case, to what extent can we say that the agitation on both sides is supported by the communities concerned? On the Hindu side, I find it striking how almost every person I questioned, has shed all shame of expressing his support for the Ram Janmabhoomi cause. Many people who in 1989, when questioned by this foreigner, still took care not to sound too involved (by calling it a false problem, a creation of the politicians, or by adding to their basic support to the cause a criticism of the VHP people etc.), now simply say : "Well, I am a Hindu. Of course I think the Mandir should be built." The shooting of several hundreds of Kar Sevaks on November 2 has of course radicalized many half-hearted supporters. Most of the people who panic about secularism in danger and write grim articles against the Janmabhoomi campaign, are only Hindus in name. Many of them are practicing communists, and most of them belong to the Western- educated elite who are convinced that Hinduism is India's biggest problem. They are still a rather small minority among the Hindus. What is harder to assess, is how many "Backward" Hindus, who have supported V.P. Singh and Mulayam Singh Yadav in their championing of the Backward Caste cause and the Mandal Report implementation, at heart supported these leaders on the Ayodhya issue. Most of my contacts with Indians have been in an urban setting, so my impression about the rural public opinion is not first-hand. But for what it is worth, I share the opinion of some journalists that many rural people who support the Mandir, would vote for Mulayam or V.P. Singh anyway, because of their stand on Mandal; which conversely means that the electoral support by Backward Hindus for the Janata Dal should by no means be taken as a head count of anti-Mandir opinion. If both the Janata Dal (S) and Congress were so afraid of elections after V.P. Singh's fall, it was because they knew that this time many people were going to vote for the Mandir party, and against the undecided and Masjid parties. Even after some papers reported that many villagers who declared they would vote for either Janata Dal because they wanted the Mandal recommendations to be implemented, eventhough they were just as much in favour of the building of the Mandir, the secularistparties did not want to take chances. The support base for the Mandir is larger than the BJP electorate. It is a fact that Advani's Rathyatra brought out far more people than Mulayam's rallies for secularism, even when all the communist and Muslim fundamentalist organizations systematically attended the latter, and even

while the state machinery had been used to mobilize for them. There is simply no honest doubt that the Ram Janmabhoomi movement had become a genuine mass movement, the biggest in Indian history, and not just an artificial creation for the BJP's political gain. The reason why most of the common Hindus could be mobilized for the Ram Janmabhoomi cause, is not that the Hindus have become so fanatical. On the contrary, it is because they perceive that the building of the Mandir and the relocating of the existing structure is a very reasonable and justifiable project. They all know that Muslim rulers have brought immense suffering over the Hindu population for destroyed, no fanatic needs to tell them that. And they have heard that the disputed place is in use as a temple since 1949, that it is functionally not a mosque at all, so the rule that any other community's place of worship should be respected just doesn't apply. They do not see why anyone should object to their replacing the existing structure with proper Hindu temple architecture. They consider it an entirely internal affair of the Hindu community, and they perceive the attempts to stop them as yet another aggression against Hinduism by its enemies.

6.2 The Muslim community On the Muslim side, the picture is less solid. And it is less solid, because it does indeed take fanaticism to uphold the Babri Masjid cause. The Muslim leaders' position is, in effect, that Hindus cannot take back any of the thousands of places of worship that have been stolen from them, but that they themselves can take possession of a flourishing Hindu temple, standing on a spot which the Hindus consider sacred, simply because it has been a mosque more than fifty years ago. The common Muslim, even if not informed about all the details of the matter, senses that this position is not equitable. That is why many ordinary people in the Muslim community are quite ready to leave the disputed site entirely to the Hindus, in exchange for more communal peace and a guarantee that no functioning mosques will be demanded for take-over by the Hindus. The most outspoken defender of Muslim agreement to the building of a new Mandir on the disputed site and shifting of the Babri structure, has been Indian Muslim Youth Conference president Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi. He declared : "It is the duty of every nationalist Indian to protect the birthplace of Lord Rama to save India's honour, prestige and cultural heritage.... Anti-national and communal activities of Muslim fundamentalists are a blot on the entire community... It is the 53 duty of all nationalist Muslims to expose such designs and accept the truth." He led a number of his organization's members into participation in the kar Seva, and some of them even into Mulayam's jails. It is also reported that two journalists, S.A. Naqvi and Tanveer Haider Usmani, president and vice-president of the Kanpur Press Club,"were arrested here today, together with some other Muslims, when they were going to Ayodhya for the proposed Kar 54 Seva". In this category are also the numerous Muslims belonging to the BJP and even to the Shiv Sena, including mr. Advani's chauffeur during the Rathyatra, and BJP-leader Sikander Bakht, who flagged off the Rathyatra at the Somnath temple. But there are also many anonymous Muslims, some of whom I talked to in teastalls or on trains, who are, in different degrees, willing to make the asked-for concession to the Hindu attachment to the disputed site. And some Muslims write to the papers to express what they think of it. Mr. M.N.H. Siddiqui from Lucknow proposes that "Muslims themselves should shift the mosque... Ram temple should be constructed in that place and Muslims should volunteer to contribute something to it as a gesture of goodwill... Amendment be made in the Constitution to the effect 55 that the status quo of 1947 be maintained..." Abdul Moin from Lucknow writes :"All Muslims agree that namaz cannot be offered if the mosque is built on disputed land or by demolishing the temple... What is the harm if the mosque is shifted

brick by brick to some other place? For a building can be shifted but not a birth place... We should agree to shift the mosque to some other place and thereby maintain peace and brotherhood in 56 our country and show the world our secular credentials." Ahmed Zakaria is quoted by Farzana Versey as saying : "There is absolutely no question of our identity being submerged. The Babri Masjid committee does not represent all Muslims. How can two or three people decide ?" And Farzana Versey, apparently summing up mr. Zakaria's opinion, adds : "The issue is not the mosque. Most Muslims would not mind giving it away, but what after 57 that ?" There is some apprehension that a concession will be a sign of weakness and will make the Hindus more aggressive. But the acceptance of the Hindu character of the disputed site is in itself not deemed unreasonable. Replying to another letter-writer, mr. Azhar Ahmed Ansari from Meerut writes : "He is mistaken in believing that the Muslim minority values the existing structure in Ayodhya. The fact is that the Muslim masses set no store by this dilapidated edifice since its utility as a mosque is extremely doubtful with the presence of numerous idols... Although most of the icons are mutilated, they nevertheless remain what they are : an anathema to Islamic theology, ruling out namaz in their presence. The Muslim masses have begun to understand this situation as also the fact that no namaz has been offered here in the memory of any living person. As many as 18 Muslims hailing from Ayodhya and Faizabad have submitted an affidavit before the High Court bench hearing the Ram Janmabhoomi case, that the Babri Masjid is of no use to the followers of Islam since it 58 contains icons." Mr. Rafat Sayeed does not like to be pressured into handing over mosques, but "as the mosque has been made out to be a symbol of an unpleasant past and humiliation, as Abu Nadeem suggests, let an exception be made and the masjid shifted and rebuilt in an orderly manner under 59 expert guidance." Mr. Shad Kidwai advises his fellow Muslim : "I Invite all thinking Muslims to gift the Ayodhya mosque to the Hindus... Our magnanimity at this critical juncture will usher in an era of understanding and will, I am convinced, evoke an equally warm response from all thinking Hindus. But Muslims should justifiably demand a constitutional guarantee that the nature of all 60 religious places as on August 15, 1947, will not be allowed to be altered." A similar proposal has 61 been made by Rasheed Talib , which seems to have earned him the wrath of some Muslim 62 leaders. And finally, there is none other than Asghar Ali Engineer, who has written : "The Muslims, in my 63 opinion, should show magnanimity and [make] a noble gesture of gifting away the mosque..." The proposals made by these Muslims are not far removed from the one made by L.K. Advani on 64 13 August 1990. He suggested that Muslims leave the site to the Hindus, and promised that in return he would persuade the VHP leadership to even renounce its demand for the hand-over of the disputed sites in Mathura and Varanasi. Advani's own supporters were not too happy with his proposals. One of them said : "You are saying to the Muslims: give us Ayodhya and then you can take the rest of India." The VHP later declared that it could not agree to this give away of two sacred places, and BJP leader Rajmata Vijaya Raje Scindia said that mr. Advani had no authority to make such concessions on behalf of the Hindus. While the demand for the return of all the thousands of places of worship forcibly taken by Muslims is voiced only by an extremist fringe in the VHP and Bajrang Dal, the attachment to the three places specially dedicated to Shiva (the Kashi Vishvanath in Varanasi), Krishna (his Janmasthan in Mathura) and Rama is non-negotiable for most activist Hindus. Even so, while Advani offered to renounce all claims, no matter how justified, to any disputed place beyond this one Ram Janmabhoomi, his offer was spurned by Syed Shahabuddin. He said

that first raising the demand to three temple hand-over as a compromise was just an old merchant's trick. As if the demand for the return of these sacred places is new and just a bargaining chip : the Hindus have rebuilt and reclaimed the Krishna and Shiva temples (as well as other demolished temples) many times, until Aurangzeb imposed the structures standing there till today. After independence, the demand for the handover of these three places was made in Parliament on September 1, 1961 by the Jan Sangh leader Balraj Madhok (who was to reiterate it 65 in the same forum in 1968), even before the VHP came into existence. The demand for three temples was itself already very modest compared to the thousands of temples-turned-mosque which the Hindus could claim (it was, moreover, coupled with an offer to pay for the building of three fine mosques nearby). So, Shahabuddin's reply had in reality nothing to do with bargaining chips and merchants' tricks. The real reason for refusing any deal on the disputed temple sites was more probably this. Since the Quran does not say that Muslims should make compromise with the Kafirs, Shahabuddin and other Muslim leaders who have a "Muslim India" in mind, could not but refuse every concession. It reminded the Hindus of that scene in the Mahabharat : the Pandavas offer the Kauravas the whole country except for five villages, whereupon the Kauravas declare they would not grant them even a speck of land the size of a pinhead. Of course, as Krishna pointed out to the Pandavas, with such self-righteous and intransigent fanatics, no compromise is possible. They have to be defeated. This boundless self-righteousness on the part of certain Muslim leaders is bound to confirm the negative image that Islam has in the Hindu mind. The continued Muslim intransigence represented by a Shahabuddin genuinely angers many Hindus. And when the confrontation, which communalist leaders keep preferring to any kind of compromise, materializes into riots, it is the common Muslim, not the communalist leader, who is bearing the consequences. If only for his own safety, if only for some peace with his neighbours, the common Muslim is not averse to compromise. He is willing and able (with the open-mindedness which is a remarkably strong trait in the common people in India) to see the Hindu side of the controversy. But these conciliating voices in the Muslim community have not been heard at all. Not by the V.P. Singh government, which has treated BMAC leader Abdullah Bukhari as a high-powered cabinet minister (the "Sarkari Imam"). Not by the government of Chandra Shekhar, who is closely linked with BMMCC leader Syed Shahabuddin. Certainly not by Mulayam's Uttar Pradesh Ministry, counting among its members BMAC co-founder Mohammed Azam Khan. Nor even by Rajiv Gandhi's Congress Party, whose spokesman M.J. Akbar uses the secularism plank as just 66 another forum for the anti-Mandir and anti-Hindu campaign. What is far worse is that the secularist intelligentsia have joined the politicians' effort to black out the conciliatory current within Muslim opinion, and have broadcast that very perception which is basic to the fanatic leaders' stand, viz. that "Islam is in danger" and that absolutely no concession to "Hindu communalism" can be tolerated. The whole jeremiad of Muslims being a poor and persecuted community, of communal peace (i.e., for the ordinary Muslim, his own safety) standing or falling with the Babri Masjid, of Advani being a fascist out to destroy the Muslims, all this press hysteria was exactly what the Muslim communal leaders wanted the common Muslim 67 to hear and believe. The opinion of some Hindu authors , that secularist rhetoric is effectively a some screen behind which the Muslim communalists can steal a march, stands vindicated. Fortunately, human nature is stronger than even Islamic fanaticism. When Chandra Shekhar formed his Cabinet, he kept several portfolios to himself, intending to give them to somewhat controversial friends. Who would be among the lucky ones ? The answer came in the form of a letter by Syed Shahabuddin, published in Indian Express on December 13, 1990. He wrote:"The law protects the Babri Masjid even if it was constructed on the site of a temple after demolishing it, but in the interest of communal amity, as a one-time exception, the Muslim community is ready 68 to make the offer as a moral gesture, in accordance with the Shariat." Here also, the question is

legitimate whether he can really speak for "the Muslim community". Nonetheless, it is fortunate that Syed Shahabuddin seems to prefer a ministerial post to the lost cause of Babri Masjid. However, one Muslim's temporary human weakness could not suffice for bringing the entire Muslim side to accepting the Hindu rights to the Janmabhoomi spot. With two rivaling Masjid Committees around, any concession would only be branded as a betrayal by the other committee. So, actually making a concession was very difficult, but even if made, it would not bring conciliation, since the other committee would not endorse it and continue threatening agitation if the Babri structure were touched. So, even when after 2 November 1990 nobody in his right mind presisted in denying the Hindus the right to their sacred place, a decisive fraction in the Muslim leadership (supported by a decisive fraction in the secularist intelligentsia) continued to insist on confrontation. The arrangement which had seemed to be in the making, was forgotten and Syed Shahabuddin resumed his more familiar hard-line tirades. As with the Kauravas, no compromise with the Muslim fundamentalists.

7. Press reporting on Ayodhya 7.1 Reporting on Kar Seva On October 30,1990 thousands of Kar Sevaks moved to the disputed place in Ayodhya. They had somehow sneaked through the impediments which chief minister Mulayam and his security forces had put in their way. In fact, the saga of how the people did it, is the stuff movies are made of. Hiding in jungles, swimming across the river at night, being caught and then escaping from prison to move on to Ayodhya (as firebrand BJP MP Uma Bharati did, making herself unrecognizable), it must have been quite an adventure for the people who did it. However, this adventurous aspect of the Ayodhya development has not been given much attention in the press. In fact, what was lacking rather systematically from the reports, was an 69 attempt to see the events from the Kar Sevaks' side. In some places, attention was given to the political assessment of the events from the BJP and VHP leadership's viewpoint. But mostly, Indian journalists identified with the governmental or the law- and-order viewpoint. On the evening of Kar Seva day, Doordarshan gave a totally streamlined news bulletin. It said nothing of the storming of the building, nor of the climbing of the domes or the planting of the flags, nor of the damage done to the surrounding wall, nor of the way the police had managed to drive the people back. It declared that no Kar Seva had taken place, that the police had full control, that they had to control a violent mob, that this violent mob hadtried to climb the domes and had tried to plant flags on top of them. And it showed a heretic film shot of the Babri Masjid still standing there, unharmed. Then, an extremely boring queue of political leaders came to declare that communal harmony must be maintained at all costs. From a statement by a BJP spokesman, the part on communal harmony was shown but not the actual BJP view on the Ayodhya problem. Finally, a lot of attention was given to human chains for communal amity in Delhi and Kerala. One sweet is delicious, but a bagful of them is just nauseating. Fifteen minutes of this communal harmony mantra was just insupportable, atleast in a news bulletin. In no free democratic country is the news ever so blacked out by streamlined propaganda. Although the message drilled into the viewers' heads was a rather harmless one, the news programme was formally a purely

Stalinist show. This replacement of news by government advice to maintain communal harmony 70 was of course for the viewers' own good. Now the scandal is that some newspapers, which normally champion the right to information, actually supported this round of censorship. In a column titled Responsible Censorship, Rajdeep Sardesai called the Doordarshan version, including the statement by V.P. Singh,"blatant 71 untruth". What a stern condemnation, you think. But then he continues and starts justifying this lie for the people's own good, "to shield viewers from the increasing potency of Hindu nationalism". Those people who had "expected [Doordarshan] to telecast Kar Sevaks climbing the walls of the Babri Masjid" and who "expect Doordarshan to be just a dispassionate observer of events", have understood nothing of despotic secularism. "They insist that the viewer's right to know should not be interfered with in any way. Such a line of thought is a victim of some diffused libertarian doctrine where the right to know survives only in unvarnished, absolutist form. However, transporting and adapting such western concepts to the Indian scenario is unrealistic..." This twisting of concepts to justify despotism, concludes by claiming that censorship was necessary to "prevent our right to information from spreading mayhem in the country", because "on an emotive temple-masjid issue that threatens to polarize the nation the electronic medium cannot allow the people to live through symbols and inflammatory images". So this censorship has prevented riots ? One wouldn't say so, judging from mr. Sardesai's own remark:"That the possibility of communal violence erupting was great has been proved by subsequent events."Without accepting his implied assumption that the subsequent riots engineered by Muslim communalists in Aligarh, Hyderabad and other places were consequences of the Kar Seva, I do notice that mr. Sardesai's "subsequent events" have not merely proved "the possibility of communal violence". They have proved that this communal violence was going to take place even after Doordarshan censorship. Everybody knows that Doordarshan is telling "blatant untruth", so rumors become the chief source of information, and they are usually a 72 lot more "inflammatory" than a reliable and accurate news bulletin would have been. On the newspaper front, there have been some more startling events. When seven local U.P. dailies published realistic estimates of the death toll on November 2, instead of Mulayam's "sixteen", all issues were rounded up from the bookstalls, and a number of scribes and editors were arrested. Moreover, during the Kar Seva week, journalists in U.P. were continually harassed and prevented from doing their job. The Press Council, the Delhi Journalists' Association, the Himachal Pradesh Working Journalists' Union, and many other journalists=92 organizations' Union, and many other journalists' organizations, have strongly protested against this attack on the press. On the other hand, some organizations and ad hoc platforms have condemned the U.P.papers for giving "highly exaggerated figures" and otherwise "inflammatory" reporting. In other works, they repeated the U.P. government justification for its anti- press measures. Another startling fact is that the English-language papers refused to come up with the correct figures of the Kar Sevaks killed in police firing. In the afternoon of November 2, I was visiting someone who has connections with a well-known daily. He called the office and was told by one staff reporter that the death toll was already 125. Now, if a reporter of a secularist paper says 125 got killed, no one is going to make me believe that the number is less than 125. Yet, the following day, the headlines of the same paper put the death toll at 17. I have inquired about the massacre among many people in Ayodhya. Common local people, including eyewitnesses, said invariably that thousands had been killed : two thousand, five thousand. I guess that even eyewitnesses were not in a position to count very accurately. However, the different accounts given to me by hospital personnel, policemen, Hindu activists, converge to a death toll of about 400. The official death toll of 45 for the different days of shooting together is quite untenable, considering that the VHP cremated 76 bodies, of which the ashes were taken in procession through India, while some bodies had been taken in procession through

India, while some bodies had been taken for cremation by the families, and many more had been collected and taken away by the security forces (three trucks full, according to VHP sources). The figure of 168 which the BJP gave the day after, gives the correct order of magnitude, but probably on the low side. So, if some papers stick to figures below 20, they are just telling lies. Some of them have been so adamant in their misinformation campaign that they refused to mention any other figure even when quoting from speeches by BJP or VHP people, replacing"500 were killed" with " a number were killed". Yet, it seems no one has had the courage to file a plaint with the Press Council against this blatant misinformation. On the contrary: two months after the massacre, the Press Council has condemned the dailies that gave three-digit figures (even if as low as 120). Mani Shankar Aiyar has tried to ridicule Uma Bharati's concern for the Ram bhaktas killed in 73 Ayodhya, arguing that the "real issue" is: what were they doing there is the first place? After all, they wanted to break the law and demolish the "mosque", didn't they? And if you want to demolish a mosque, you deserve to be killed, don't you ? Several press people I talked to, defended the shooting with the same argument: after all, the structure had to be saved "at all costs". The point is not merely that these people overlook the fact that normally the Kar Sevaks could have been driven away with far less killing, and the other fact that the VHP had declared it had no intention of demolishing the structure. The point is that they are deadly serious when they declare that hundreds (or for them, at least, some twenty) of human lives are worth less than secularism, here embodied in the brick structure. This means that they contend that bricks can be the embodiment of some mental projection, some god (in this case : Secularism, the Merciful), which is the very principle of idolatry : a material object becomes the archanavatar (worshipincarnation) of a spiritual reality. But their idolatry is of the barbaric type: this embodied principle of theirs sometimes requires human sacrifice. The JNU historians had once scornfully written that the Hindu view is better expressed by the openness of the Upanishads than by "worshipping 74 bricks". But who is worshipping bricks now ? Who is bringing human sacrifices now to an idol of brick ? If you keep this dispute in its proper historical perspective, the ruthless anti-Hindu and proslaughter stand of the secularist press becomes only logical. They defend killing not just for the sake of a piece of property protected by the law of the land: when the police is communalized and guilty of atrocities. Here, they defend killing of unarmed people suspected (against the VHP's own assurance) of intending to "demol- ish" a masterpiece of the Muslim campaign to exterminate Hinduism. I must grant them consistency : it is indeed logical that mass killing is resorted to in order to honor and protect this brick idol of anti-Hindu fervour, built for the god of Jihad by a mass-murderer. To be sure, there are press people who honestly and in good faith disbelieve the established historical fact that the Masjid had forcibly replaced a Mandir. They don't realize that the Masjid is a product of the most cruel and violent communalism. They really believe it is an innocent mosque stolen and singled out for demolition by Hindu fanatics, and that it must be defended as the nation's last stronghold against a Khomeini-like religious dictatorship. A meta-press is needed to inform these misguided press people.

7.2. Foreign press reporting The foreign press has not added any extra facts or perspective to the reporting on Ayodhya. It has mostly copied the bias of the Indian press. Time Magazine gave a not too unbalanced report, but quoted two of the JNU historians without telling its readers that these are not neutral

academics but highly involved parties in the controversy. Newsweek had done the same at the time of the Shilanyas. Then, it had quoted Romila Thapar as saying that "the BJP may be more interested in cow protection than in people protection", without anyhow putting this heavy allegation in perspective or hearing the BJP's own stand. This time, Newsweek gave an unbelievably biased report. It simply did not mention the shot-out against unarmed Kar Sevaks on November 2, following the Indian secularists' line that you should grant the Hindus nothing, not even their martyrs. But it did mention a selected part of the Gonda carnage, a colorful description of the murder of Muslims in Kanje Mau (Gonda), concealing the fact that this carnage had started with an attack on a Hindu procession. This reporting on a riot without telling how it erupted, is like starting the history of World War II with the Allied aggression in Normandy or the bombing of Dresden. Of course the bombings of Dresden and Hiroshima were unjustifiable war crimes, but they are judged less harshly because they were part of a war effort which had been forced on the Allies by the Axis powers. Normally, any report on a conflict, no matter how summary, relates how it began, and who started it. If this is not done and one act of violence is presented in isolation, then that is a case of wilful distortion. About the dispute itself, the foreign press has not re- layed the Hindu viewpoint at all. Most papers and weeklies have at no point informed their readers that the disputed place is functionally not a mosque but a flourishing Ram temple. It has continually given the impression that the Hindus want to take a mosque (often mistakenly called a Muslim "sacred place") from the Muslims, the way Jewish fundamentalists have wanted to take the mosques on the Temple Mount from the Muslims. In fact, it is the BMAC and BMMCC who want to snatch a sacred place from the Hindus, but hardly any foreign reader has been informed of this. On the whole, the foreign press has taken exactly the same attitude (distortions and concealment and all) as the secularist press in India. I have never seen before that all the papers for weeks on end reported something that was so diametrically the opposite of what was really happening. This is at first sight very strange. The Western readership has no love lost for Islam. It is not only that Muslim terrorists have killed quite a few Westerners, or that they have persecuted and put to flight many of the remaining Christians in the Muslim world, or that they continue to threaten Israel (with which most Westerners keep sympathizing). The distrust is deeper. Compare the uneasy reaction of Europeans when they see a woman in burqa on their streets, with their pleasant surprise when they see a woman in sari: that tells the story in a nutshell. The Westerners' natural sympathy would be with the Hindu rather than with the Muslim side. Yet, almost all the Western papers have chosen to blacken Hinduism almost as thoroughly as the secularist Indian press has done. The first reason is that the Western correspondents in Delhi just don't know very much, and also don't feel the need to find out more. Their work is not considered important by their editors, because India is still perceived as a backward and economically unimportant country. Western correspondents in Delhi are very lazy. I have been to some press conferences concerning this Ayodhya affair (which involves principles, has generated an unprecedented mass movement, and has toppled a government),and not met any foreign press persons there. In Ayodhya and in the offices of those very people that could give authentic background information, again I did not see any foreign correspondents. I don't know what they tell their employers, but I can testify first-hand that they are not doing any journalistic work here, except for copying the Indian English-language papers. The second reason is that they very uncritically swallow that version of the facts which happens to reach them. Since they hang out a lot with the westernized clique that controls the media, education and the government, they don't know better than that those people's viewpoint is authoritative.

Here, one cannot fail to notice the utter failure of the Hindu movement to present its case. They could have sent a bundle of copies of relevant articles to the foreign press corps, as well as some relevant books, like Hindu Temples : What Happened to Them by Arun Shourie and others. The VHP leaders have not even thought of the importance of publicizing their case. Rather, with their Janmabhoomi campaign they have unintentionally managed to blacken Hinduism in the face of the world. They have not cared to check whether they were getting their message across. Their 75 movement has behaved like a dinosaur with a lot of muscle but little brain. The third reason why Western correspondents have sided with the Nehruvian Babri Masjid advocates, is that they still entertain the colonial attitude that those backward Hindus have to learn the European civilized ways that Nehru so far-sightedly tried to transmit to them. In the wake of the Leftist-inspired wave of political anti- colonialism of the last decades, a cultural anticolonialism has come up, a sympathy for other cultures (which was new : Leftist anti-colonialism, following the arch-colonialist Karl Marx, meant protest against the too slow westernization of the Third World). But that only concerns those cultures which have been beaten to near-death (in the New World), or those of which we are economically or physically afraid (Japan, Islam). When the last remnant of a Native American tribe wins a court case to reclaim ancestral burial ground, everybody sympathizes. But when a culture really and substantially asserts itself, not in terrorist attacks or export surplus, but in its intrinsic otherness, then the old colonial bias turns out to stand unshaken. This anti-native and pro-westernizing bias is quite systematically present in India reporting. It generally takes the from of gross misrepresentation of Indian culture. For example, time and again those correspondents write to the homefront that there are stillmany dowry deaths. Now everybody knows that dowry deaths typically occur in the westernized circles (the dowries concerned are seldom the traditional jewels, but mostly video- machines etc.): they are not a traditional phenomenon that still exists, but are a typical case of the perverting and poisoning of a 76 native custom by the invasion of Western consumerism. I will refrain from giving some names of Western correspondents who after years in Delhi didn't know the first word of Hindi or any other native tongue, and consequently limited their background information gathering to some talks with the anglicized elite, not realizing that the latter has been cultivating an utter ignorance about Indian culture for decades. But I do want to point out that the result is a very derogatory style of reporting, reflecting not only journalist's prejudices, but also the anglicized elite's utter contempt for their indigenous culture. Meanwhile in the Western news studios, indologists have been invited to comment on the communalism issue. But those people are steeped in art history (like publishing books about Hindu temple architecture without even mentioning that most samples are only indirectly known since the Muslim rulers destroyed them) and similar ancient stuff, and they too have the Times of India as their only source for contemporary news. Moreover, with all their orientation towards culture, they positively dislike Hinduism, or an innocent Gandhian kind of Hinduism, and they readily buy the secularist story that an assertive Hinduism is not the "real Hinduism". Finally, there is one more kind of India-watcher or India-fan in the West, with a typical and remarkable attitude to the Ayodhya affair: the "seekers". Some people staying in India for spiritual things, and who were told that I was writing about this Ayodhya affair, immediately came out with their superior scorn for such unspiritual quarrels : "What are those Kar Sevaks going to Ayodhya for? To lay the second brick?" What these people should realize, is that the society which has allowed ashrams to flourish, has only survived because it also had a martial component. Why are they not going to Afghanistan for yoga? because Hinduism in Afghanistan got militarily defeated and annihilated . Because Islam, which in their own woolly world-view is just as true as any other religion, has weeded out the kind of Pagan practices that they come to India for. If there is a part of the world left where the gurus

can continue their traditional, it is because Hindus have fought. It is a non-violent part of the same martial tradition, that today Hindus are asserting themselves in Ayodhya.

8. The misuse of history 8.1 Caught in the act of distorting history The Ram Janmabhoomi/Babri Masjid issue has highlighted several more fundamental problems which will have to be dealt with decisively. Perhaps the most important one is the intellectual dishonesty which dominates India's official ideology and its arena of public debate. One area where this dishonesty has been having a free ride during the last several decades, is historywriting. A case in point is the JNU historians' statement on Ayodhya, published in November 1989: The Political Abuse of History. 77

In a reply to the JNU professor' statement, Prof. A.R.Khan has exposed a number of attempts at distortion and deceit in their statement. I may cite the simplest and clearest case: they try to pass off the fact that Babar's diary doesn't mention the Ayodhya temple demolition as proof that it never took place. While this reasoning correctly presupposes that mentioning temple destruction would be perfectly coherent with Babar's enthusiasm for pious acts of Kafir persecution, it disregards the fact that the pages reporting on the relevant months have been lost. This fact of the missing pages is well-known to anyone familiar with the subject. But instead of admitting that Babar's own testimony is lost, they pretend that his absent testimony warrants some conclusions. 78

In their re-reply to Prof.Khans critique, they had on choice but to admit that Babar's testimony is just not available. Nevertheless, in a newspaper column one of them, Harbans Mukhia, has re79 employed the discredited argument once more. The secularist Muslim writer Asghar Ali 80 Engineer has also used it , but I will give him the benefit of the doubt: he may have naively trusted the authority of his "eminent JNU historians." Another attempt at distortion, in the context of Muslim rulers' patronage for Hindu instutions is pointed out by Prof.Khan as follows:"It may be noted that in the first two evidences the authors have deliberately concealed the fact that both the diwans [ prime ministers] were Hindus. [By contrast], while mentioning about the gifts by the officials of the Nawabi court to Hindu priests (in their third evidence), they have not forgotten to state that the officials were Muslims. This not only 81 amounts to concealment of evidence but also distortion of evidence." I would concede that this selective highlighting of useful elements in the context of a polemic is not all that outrageous if it occurs once. But in the case of the JNU historians, it forms part of an over-all pattern of wilful misrepresentation of the facts. A.A. Engineer's book on the Ram Janmabhoomi affair, Babri Masjid Ram Janmabhoomi Controversy, is merely a collection of newspaper columns on the subject, or rather a selection, for the above mentioned pertinent critiques by dr. Harsh Narain, A.K. Chatterjee and Prof. A.R. Khan (historians equal in rank to the JNU statement signatories), as well as the relevant articles by Arun Shourie, Ram Swarup, Sita Ram Goel and Jay Dubashi, have been carefully omitted, eventhough they had been published well in time for inclusion in mr. Engineer's anthology. The only two pro-Hindu articles which he has designed to include, both published in the RSS paper Organizer, were selected for their containing a few weak arguments and poor comparisons, which he then takes on in his introduction. Where of course he does not offer any criticism to the JNU historians' statement nor to any other article included in his volume. As a presentation of the

debate, mr. Engineer's book is on a par with the JNU professors' presentation of the historical 82 facts :it is a distortion. The secularists just go on upholding the statement of their JNU friends as the definitive scientific judgment on the matter. Two weeks after Harsh Narain's article had been published and had disproven the Janmabhoomi myth concoction thesis, the Illustrated Weekly decided to publish the already well-publicized JNU statement once more. Even after A.R. Khan's reply had exploded the objective and scientific pretence of the JNU historians, the whole secularist crowd kept on quoting the eminent historians. More than half a year later, the leftist paper Mainstream still quotes them 83 as "several eminent historians whose professional honesty nobody questions." Well, I for one do question their professional honesty.

8.2 Some recent myths When Romila Thapar tries to make gullible readers believe that Mahmud Ghaznavi only 84 desecrated temples for their wealth , she must know (assuming, as all her quoters do, that she is competent historian) that Mahmud is revered by the Muslims as a devout Muslim, that he calligraphed Quran text "for the benefit of his soul", and that he actually refused a huge ransom which Hindus were ready to pay if he agreed to give back an idol, instead of breaking it. Mahmud preferred breaking idols to selling them, even if that meant foregoing wealth. So her theory of Mahmud's economical rather than religious motives is at best an unscientific imposition of Marxist dogma upon the facts of Indian history, otherwise a deliberate lie. She is of course in the good company of Jawaharlal Nehru, who declared that "as a matter of fact, Mahmud was hardly a religious man. He was a Mohammedan, of course, but that was just 85 by the way". And he in turn only followed the lead given by Mohammed Habib and the Aligarh school of historians, who tried to whitewash Islam by blaming external and personal factors for the crimes to which Islam had prompted its champions. In the case of their purely concocted grand theory of pre-Muslim persecution of Buddhism by Hindus, we see our leftist historians throw all standards of source criticism to the wind. Such is their eagerness to uphold this convenient hypothesis, and their care not to endanger what little supportive testimony there is. After all, from the millennia of pre-Muslim religious pluralism in India, there are not even five testimonies of such persecution, so these few should be scrupulously kept away from criticism. Therefore, the fact that the very first testimony of Pushyamitra Shunga's alleged persecution of the Buddhists dates from three centuries after the facts, is not treated as a ground for some caution with this evidence. Nor is any alternative interpretation of his alleged behaviour (e.g. that his anger was not directed against Buddhism but against the corruption that was overtaking the monasteries) being explored, the way all kinds of mitigating explanations are invented for the Islamic crimes. The allegation is simply repeated, and amplified, in all secularist history-books. Hsuen Tsang's contention, from hearsay, that the Shaiva king Shashank had persecuted Buddhists and felled the Bodhi tree, also goes unquestioned. Yet, his story is just visibly untrustworthy : he claims that a replanted sapling of the Bodhi tree (which, from his story, must have been felled only a few years before his own arrival) miraculously grew overnight into a mature tree. Remember that secularist historians reject myths and irrational beliefs? What Hsuen Tsang got to see with his own eyes was a tree far bigger than a recently replanted sapling could have been: an indication that the tree had never been felled in the first place. Yet, so many secularist history books go on declaring that "fanatical Shashank felled the Bodhi tree", in 86 defiance of proper historical criticism.

When it comes to dealing with the history of persecution and temple destruction by the Muslims, secularist historians throw all regard for hard evidence to the wind and replace it with a purely deductive (which is typically medieval) approach : Islam is tolerant, therefore the destruction and persecution cannot have taken place. Thus, Sushil Srivastava writes :"It has been contended by the British observers that the desecration of the Hindu temple at Ayodhya was undertaken to extend Islam in India. This contention clearly indicates that the destroyers of the temples were religious fanatics well versed 87 in the dictates of their religion." The contention is well-founded: many Muslim conquerors, including Teimur and Babar, quoted from the Quran in their announcements and descriptions of their jihads. Many Muslim rulers were encouraged into jihad by court clerics whose knowledge of the Quran is above suspicion. But mr. Srivastava knows it all better: "However, the Quran clearly states that prayers offered at a contentious place will not be accepted. A mosque constructed on the site of a temple would definitely be a contentious place. Thus, the whole purpose of constructing a masjid on the site of a mandir would be self-defeating... In this context, I would like to advance my view that it is highly unlikely that even the contentious mosques in Varanasi and Mathura are located on the exact sites of temples. Near the location of a destroyed temple, possible ; on the same spot, not likely." Mr. Srivastava's hair-splitting about whether a mosque is built on top of or just next to a destroyed temple, is quite beside the point. Especially for the people who see their temple destroyed, it doesn't make the slightest difference. Moreover, his totally undocumented theory is purely deductively based on a book he clearly doesn't know at all: the Quran. Whatever ban on building mosques in contentious places there is in the Quran (i.e. none) or at least in the Hadis, exclusively concerns conflict within the Muslim community, or with a community with which it has a treaty (like the Jews in the first Medina years). The Quran in no way forbids the taking or destroying of Pagan temples. To put all doubts concerning the absolute non-respect for Pagan places of worship to rest, it will suffice to point out that the Kaaba itself is a "contentious" place of worship, taken from the Arab polytheists who strongly resented this, and Islamized by breaking all the 360 sacred idols in it. Mr. Srivastava's purely deductive (also called dogmatic) position leads him to disregard wellknown hard evidence. The contentious Gyanvapi mosque (as well as many others) visibly stands on the place of a Hindu temple : the latter's walls are partly still standing and form part of the mosque's wall. But our secularist historian unstoppably goes on deducing : "Could a devout Muslim like Babar, knowledgeable of the tenets of the Quran, have allowed such a faux pas as the construction of a mosque bearing his name at the spot where an important temple had existed ?" For secularist true believers, such rhetorical questions clinch the issue.

8.3 Disregarding the evidence 88

A fresh case of utter disregard for hard evidence is the central argument of the reply by the 89 inescapable JNU historians to dr. S.P. Gupta's archaeological arguments for the pre-existence of a temple at the Babri Masjid spot. Dr. Gupta had written that the pillar-bases and the glazen ware can be accurately dated; and of course, with the available archaeological high-tech, as well as with the knowledge of art history, they can. But the JNU historians simply disregard the dating and declare that the fact that the pillar-bases were found in the upper layer, "would certainly not make them as early as the eleventh century since the uppermost levels would be comparatively recent". Well, compared to the Valmiki or the Ram era, from which nothing was found during these excavations, unless Ram is put later than the eighth century BC (a fact noted with satisfaction by the JNU historians in their well-known statement), the eleventh century is rather

recent. It depends on very local factors whether old objects can be found just below the surface rather than deep down ; the sheer depth at which an object is found, is not a dating method. They themselves do not come up with an alternative scientific dating method, even while dismissing dr. Gupta's results. As for the pottery, of which dr. Gupta says that it "can be firmly dated : some belong to the thirteenth, some the fourteenth and some the fifteenth century", they have no comment on his dating methods, but assert : "This style of pottery first comes into use in Persia and therefore cannot date to an earlier period in India". Actually, the JNU historians just haven't done their homework on this count. What only appeared in Iran in the fifteenth century, was a specific type of glazen war, china, but less refined kinds of glazen ware had been around since the eleventh century. The JNU historians even assert : "Thus the evidence of the pottery would point to the bases being constructed not earlier than the fifteenth century and possibly even a later period." That later period would then be when the Babri Masjid was already standing there, but in JNU historiography there is nothing against the co-existence of temple and mosque right on the same spatial location. Anyway, they go as far as deducing the age of the building from the age of the pottery. That means that if you have a computer in your house, this proves that your house cannot possibly be older than the manufacture of the computer. And all this funny JNU argumentation is based on the non-motivated disregard for the scientific dating of the pillar-bases to the eleventh century and the pottery sharves to the thirteenth to fifteenth century. Either they should have accepted those datings, or they should have shown the method by which they were obtained, to be unsound. 90

In a lecture just after the publication of the JNU historians' reply, dr. Gupta has explained : "Several of the temple-pillars existing in the mosque and pillar- bases unearthed in the excavations conducted in the south of the mosque (although in the adjoining plot of land) show the same directional alignment. This will convince any student of architecture that two sets of material remains belong to one and the same complex. Secondly, the archaeological history of Islamic glazed ware in India goes back to the eleventh century, not the fifteenth ; in the fifteenth only a particular type of glazed ware was brought to India. Here at Ayodhya one kind of Islamic glazed ware was even a local imitation of the thirteenth century. Therefore, when we observe that here we recovered Islamic glazed ware of different periods, from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, from below the floor level of the mosque, we are telling the truth of archaeological discoveries." One point of progress was that in this round of the debate (December 1990), the JNU historians already had to admit that there had been a building there. And that is new. In their well-known statement they had declared : "So far, no historical evidence has been unearthed to support the claim that the Babri mosque has been constructed on the land that had been earlier occupied by a temple." Now, the interesting thing is that the archaeological findings on which dr. S.P. Gupta has reported in the article to which the JNU historians have replied, date from years before their original statement. What is more, one of the main sources for their statement was Prof. B.B. Lal's report on the same findings, in which it is, clearly though briefly, stated that remains of a pre91 Masjid building had been found. When they said there was no archaeological evidence, they were bravely lying. The noted indologist Iravatham Mahadevan, also editor of Dinamani, in a lecture in Madras on 4/12/90, has drawn attention to the fact that while the JNU pamphlet starts off by citing Prof. Lal's conclusions on the ancient settlement issue, though without mentioning him by name, it is surprisingly silent on his other major finding -- that a temple (or at least some building) had existed at the Masjid site. Mr. Mahadevan squarely held the JNU historians guilty of what they try 92 to lay at the door of others : "political abuse of history".

8.4 Historians arguing ad hominem The JNU historians in their reply try to escape by stating that it is B.B. Lal who changed his version of the findings. They quote his report : "...the site was again occupied around the eleventh century A.D. Several later medieval brick-and-kankar lime floors have been met with, but the entire late period was devoid of any special interest." And they comment : "These earlier statements contradict his present claim to having found the pillar-bases of what may have been a temple at the site, a claim recently made by him in the RSS magazine Manthan (October 1990)". These earlier statements rather prove that there was a building on the spot. Even this earlier report in no way excludes that this building"may have been a temple", especially considering its location. And in the Manthan article, B.B. Lal does not claim anything new, and does not positively state that it must have been a temple : this cannot be proven from the pillar-bases, only from other types of evidence, such as the use of the black pillars in the Babri Masjid. B.B. Lal has not changed his stand at all. The evidence that a building was replaced by the Babri Masjid was there in his earlier report, on the basis of which the JNU historians had claimed the nonavailability of any archaeological indication of a pre-existent temple. The JNU historians stoop so low as to insinuate that Prof. Lal is distorting evidence to suit certain political compulsions : "Could it be that the requirements of VHP politics have occasioned this new claim ?" And also : "One wonders why, if there was any such evidence, B.B. Lal is only revealing it now. Could it be that because of the politics of the Janmabhoomi, it is being claimed as fresh evidence ?" And that from historians who themselves have distorted evidence in order to satisfy certain political compulsions : apparently a case of what psychologists call projection. Dr. Mahadevan's remarks on the Ayodhya affair and against the JNU historians, have received support from another archaeologist, Muhammed K.K., deputy superintending archaeologist of the ASI Madras circle. He writes : "...Mr. Mahadevan's comments were really an objective analysis of the archaeological data. I can reiterate this with greater authority, for I was the only Muslim who had participated in the Ayodhya excavation in 1976-77 under professor Lal...I was at the Hanuman Garhi site, but I have visited the excavation near the Babri Masjid and seen the excavated pillar bases. The JNU historians have highlighted only one part of our findings while suppressing the other." He adds that destroying mosques to right historical wrongs is wrong, but :"Ayodhya is as holy to Hindus as Mecca is to Muslims. Muslims should respect the sentiments of their millions of Hindu brethren and voluntarily hand over the structure for constructing the Rama 93 temple." Another top archaeologist who has come out against the JNU historians' high-handed intervention in the archaeological debate, is Prof. K.V. Raman, head of the Madras University Archaeology Department. Noticing that the most vocal ones among the JNU historians are not archaeologists or even specialists in medieval history, Prof. Raman reiterates that the report published earlier was not the complete report and focused mainly on the period presumed to be that of the Ramayana. So the question is merely whether Prof. Lal has recorded his recently divulged findings in the so far unpublished report : "When Lal says he has indeed done so, I see 94 no reason why anyone should doubt him on that score." The JNU historians also try to raise suspicions against Dr. Gupta :"In his excavation reports, B.B. Lal mentions those who excavated along with him, and curiously, despite his insisting that he was part of the team, the name of Dr. S.P. Gupta is conspicuously absent." Well, what an allegation. Do the JNU historians really think that dr. Gupta would risk his academic reputation by making a false claim of having participated in this research ? They themselves of course can get away with blatant lies, because they are shielded by a politically motivated press against any criticism that would threaten their eminence. But real scientists do not count on such exemptions. The fact of the matter is that Dr. Gupta was involved in the research as an observer, and that in his article

against which the JNU historians sent their reply, he has merely claimed that he "was for some time connected with the research work done at the site", which is impeccably truthful. In his lecture, Dr. Gupta has replied to the JNU insinuations : "In 1975-76 our primary aim was to find out the antiquity of the site, and not the temple. Hence the brief reports did not mention it. It is common knowledge that when we excavate, we record everything we find and all of them appear in the final report. That is why we are extremely sorry to see the oblique attack on us as if we are 'planting' evidence now which never existed before. But then finally, does it really speak highly of my friends to tell people that I was not present in the excavations ? Ask the director of excavations, he will say that since I belonged not to the Archaeological Survey of India staff but to the National Museum, I could not be designated as a regular member of the team, I had the status of an 'observer'. But then what ?" The unacademic attitude of these JNU historians, who 95 are stronger in character assassination than in historical method should make it clear to their critics that there is no reason to feel inhibited when it comes to exposing them. They really deserve to be shown up in public as the impostors they are. For the rest, the JNU historians' latest attempt to wriggle out from under the inconvenient evidence, is just pitiable. For instance, they state that the presence of the pillar-bases just next to the mosque is no proof that there are more of them underneath (why not demand excavations underneath to settle that uncertainty ?). Their suggestion is, in effect, that there stood a small building with only a very few pillars there (on an elevated spot overlooking the temple city), just next to an empty spot where later the Masjid was built. Apart from being one more ad hoc theoretical construction incoherent with all we know, this is another case of hair-splitting about the exact location, which disregards the central point (that remains unaffected by their hypothesis) that a pre-existent building was demolished and that it has made room for the Babri Masjid. Moreover, if the pillared building was only standing next to the Masjid site, why wasn't it left standing ? The entire JNU argument is a patchwork of such untenable ad hoc constructions.

8.5 Broadcasting distortions For all its untenability, the secularist version of history does manage to get amplified continually in the press. The historical debate in Indian Express in the first week of December 1990, which allowed the readers to hear both sides and to make up their own minds, was ignored by most papers, and what much came through, was a systematical distortion. The Times of India gave no coverage to dr. Gupta's findings, but invited other scholars to air their 96 counter-opinions. In an article with the misleading title "Ayodhya may be Buddhist site" , they announce that Prof. R.S. Sharma "has strongly dismissed the validity of evidence regarding the existence of an eleventh century Ram temple at Ayodhya". When you read on, you find that he really only denied that it was a Ram temple. Disregarding the presence of distinctly non- Buddhist symbols like the trishul on the black pillar- stones, he opines that remains of a Buddhist temple were used in the Babri Masjid. So, at any rate there was a building, and it was a Kafir temple. Further down the article, a Prof. V.N. Mishra, director of Deccan College in Pune, is also quoted as saying that Dr. Gupta's findings are inadequate and unconvincing, but again this turns out to merely refer to the status of the building as a Ram temple (on the doubtful ground that no contemporary Ram temples in Uttar Pradesh have been found), not to its existence or its religious 97 or even its specifically Vaishnava character. What the readers did not get to read, is that Prof. Mishra is a prehistorian, not at all involved in research concerning the pre-Babri period, and that he was not really interviewed but gave his

outsider's opinion casually during a group conversation, not knowing that his opinion would be printed on the Times of India front-page. He has expressed his indignation at these undeontological methods of quoting people without telling them beforehand, and moreover 98 misquoting them. It just goes to show what unscrupled vipers these secularist journalists are. That Ayodhya was a chiefly Buddhist town, is an information which Prof. Sharma has taken from the Chinese travellers Fa Hsien and Hsuen Tsang. He cites Hsuen Tsang's highly slanted figures without any critical sense (at least according to the Times of India version of the interview) : Ayodhya had one hundred Buddhist and ten non-Buddhist temples. That the historically attested Jain temples alone already add up to ten, does not seem to make him more cautious in dealing with Hsuen Tsang's highly partisan (and in some places just fabulating) report. At any rate, nobody had ever doubted the Buddhist presence in Ayodhya. But that is not the point. The point for the Times of India's Arvind N. Das is, to bracket or even replace the facts of Muslim destruction of Hindu places with a postulated Hindu destruction of Buddhist places : "The historical evidence of the flourishing of Buddhism at Ayodhya and the existence of the Babri Masjid on a mound, typical of the remains of Buddhist stupas in Mohenjo-Daro and elsewhere, provides strong indication to historians and archaeologists that indeed the archaeological remains found in Ayodhya could well belong to Buddhist monasteries which were destroyed by Brahminical onslaught."(this is apparently the journalist's own insertion, for further on in the article, we see Prof. Sharma suggesting it was a Shaiva temple) Here, we are facing a central item in the secularist disinformation campaign : the theory that all religions (which the Marxists plan to weed out), with the possible exception of Islam (the protosocialist religion of equality and brotherhood), were all equally intolerant and given to persecution. Or in the newer and somewhat less anti-religious version : all religions except Hinduism are basically tolerant, but they have been persecuted by the Brahmins and that is why Brahminism has come to dominate India. To support this theory, all kinds of fantastic exaggerations and pure lies are launched. Thus, the Economic Times manages to rhetorically ask :"If the Hindus want to demolish mosques which were built on temple sites, should Buddhists ask for the rebuilding of Nalanda University which 99 the Hindus destroyed ?" Now, everybody with some education should know that Nalanda University was destroyed in the wake of Mohammed Ghori's conquest of North India. To be more precise, it was destroyed and its staff and students exterminated to the last by Mohammed Bakhtiyar Khilji in 1200. It is not Hinduism but Islam that "banned Buddhism from its homeland". But what to make of this misdirected allegation : is it utter dishonesty or utter ignorance ? Either way, it is actively or passively part of a disinformation campaign concerning Hindu history, perversely calculated to make Hindus feel guilty for the kind of crimes Islam perpetrated against them, thus to paralyze and pre-empt criticism of Islam and similar ideologies.

8.6 "They were all fanatics" As a result of the sustained disinformation campaign that blames Hindus for the destruction of Buddhism, we see Mrs. Savita Ambedkar claiming that the Ram temple was a Buddhist 100 stupa. This is obviously impossible : a stupa is a massive structure, not a pillared building like the one that must have stood on the pillar-bases at the disputed site. But I guess she genuinely believes it herself, in keeping with the theories of her late husband, a non-Nehruvian but equally anti-Hindu thinker. Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar's historical writings on Hinduism, Buddhism and the caste system are so full of mistranslations, misinterpretations, and emotional distortions, that it really makes one feel sorry for him, even if it does not mar his memory as the chief framer of India's Constitution. Dr. Ambedkar's merits lie else- where, and his theory of a millennia-long Buddhist- Brahmin struggle as the chief determinant of India's socio-political life in pre-Muslim times would have been mercifully forgotten, if there had not been on the one hand casteist

politicians who elevate to the rank of dogma every word Ambedkar has written, and on the other 101 hand the Nehruvian historians who have an interest in spreading the same version of history. 102

Mrs. Ambedkar could have been saved the embarrassment of her utterly unfounded claim , if the prominent Indian historians had done an honest job of debunking the Ambedkarist version of history (which is very much a "myth claiming the legitimacy of history", and "used for political purposes", against which the JNU historians normally take out crusades). Instead, they have ensured that the myth is now spreading into the collective consciousness via schoolbooks and newspapers. Another approach to blur the stark contrast between Muslim intolerance and the general Pagan tolerance, is to admit the fact of the temple destructions, adding that all ancient conquerors asserted their authority by destroying temples, and that Muslim temple destruction was just an application of this general rule. Thus, Partha S. Ghosh writes :"It was a common practice in ancient and medieval times, when the concept of sovereignty was not so well-defined, particularly in territorial terms, to assert one's sovereignty over a region by destroying the religious places belonging to the faith of the earlier rulers and then by building one's own on their ruins. It was 103 primarily a political activity and had little to do with religious faith as such." If it was a common practice, it should be easy to verify. But when you go through ancient history, you find almost nothing of the sort. On the contrary, you find that systematically the gods and religious places of even enemy peoples were respected. In feudal China, the ruling house of a defeated state was not be exterminated, even if its survival meant a political risk : the religious reason for this taboo was that family's ancestral gods had to continue to be worshipped, which only their descendants could properly do. Ch'in Shih Huang violated this rule, and that is one of the reasons for his utter condemnation by the Confucian tradition. There is in Chinese history one case of alleged religious persecution for purely economical reasons. In the eighth century, a Tang emperor abolished all Buddhist monasteries. They had been exempt from paying taxes, but through donations and legacies, they had become big landholders with enormous revenue, which was all escaping the public treasury. So, the monasteries were abolished as a strictly institutional measure. The monks were not put to the sword, or forbidden to practice and teach Buddhism. It was simply not a case of religious persecution, which is a phenomenon quite alien to the entire Chinese civilization. The Romans, when they conquered a city, took care not to offend the local gods, and payed a visit to their temples. When they occupied Israel, they took care not to break the Jews' taboo on depicting animal life : of the legions, only those with a tree (rather than an animal) symbol in their standards were posted in Jerusalem. The few religious persecutions in the Roman empire were indeed politically motivated. When the Christians and the Jews, egged on by apocalyptic preachers, expressed their belief that the end of the empire was near, refused to pay respects to the emperor's statues, and even rose in armed rebellion, they were indeed suppressed and persecuted. When Caesar occupied the Celtic West of Europe, he found that the Druid class was the backbone of this society (the parallel with the Brahmins in the perception of the missionaries is quite exact) : therefore, he persecuted the Druids. However, that campaign had no religious dimension for Caesar: in his description of the Celtic religion, he mentions the Celtic gods by the names of their Roman equivalents, for he understood fully well that there was no fundamental but merely an ethnic difference between the Roman and Celtic religious traditions.

So, whereas the secularist historians claim that religious places were systematically destroyed as a symbol of political sovereignty, in fact the few cases of such destruction took place when the religious centres were effectively centres of political power or rebellion. The rule was respect for priests and temples, but this rule was made subordinate to the rule that centres of political resistance to the empire have to be broken. As a religious centre, the Second Temple in Jerusalem was never destroyed; only when it became a centre of rebellion, the Romans overcame their "superstitious fear" or respect for the alien god that lived in this temple, and moved in to destroy it. Of the hundreds of religions that have existed in the Roman empire, hardly a handful have ever been the object of persecution and temple destruction. In pre-Muslim Indian history, we again see that after victory, kings systematically went to perform sacrifice in the temple of defeated opponents. And we know that Ram sacrificed to Shiva, the god of his enemy Ravana (after killing Ravana, he also put a member of Ravana's family on the throne, as was the ancient Hindu custom). In fact, with the massive evidence of respect for all temples and all gods, we are still waiting for the Nehruvian historians to come up with the very first example of a Hindu king who "asserted his sovereignty over a region by destroying the religious places belonging to the faith of the earlier rulers". Even Pushyamitra Shunga, of whom it is unreliably said by a very non-contemporary source that he had Buddhist monks killed, allowed Buddhist universities to flourish in his kingdom. Even he is not described to have demolished temples on the occasion of his political take-over, his alleged 104 acts of persecution are ascribed by his detractors to purely sectarian fanaticism. The one apparently reliable report of religious persecution in pre-Muslim India, about the Tamil king Kun Pandya (Arikesari Parankusha Maravarman, 670-710) who had Shaivas killed, then converted (under the influence of his wife's guru Sambandar) and had Jains killed, is also not linked to any assertion of political authority : he was already safely in power. So, the sweeping allegation of a common practice of temple destruction as a symbol of political self- assertion, is not based on the facts of history, and goes against abundant evidence to the contrary. A historian who proposes this theory, violates all standards of historical method, and must be deemed either incompetent or dishonest. But even if such a general rule had existed : the Muslim pattern of temple destruction does not conform to it. When a Muslim ruler conquered another Muslim country, he did not go and destroy the chief mosques. Never, Conversely, Muslim rulers often had temples destroyed when their rule was firmly established and not in need of any assertion. For instance, the Christians of Damascus were at first allowed to keep their cathedral (itself a converted Pagan temple), under the general conditions imposed on zimmis (protected Jews and Christians). However, the Muslim clerics couldn't stand the sight of this proud non-Muslim building, and demanded its conversion into a mosque. The Christians payed huge ransoms in order to be allowed to keep their church, but finally the Caliph gave in to the pressure and had the church converted into a mosque. Financially he lost on it, and politically he didn't need it : the reason for the Muslim take-over of this place of worship was of a different nature, neither economical nor political, but theological. When under Muslim rule, rebellious princes or generals had used mosques or Sufi centres as head-quarters of their conspiracies, this never led to the destruction of these places of worship. When these places housed wealth, still they were not plundered. But thousands of temples that did not house any conspiracy nor for that matter any wealth , were nonetheless destroyed. If Aurangzeb needed a symbolical act of destruction to assert his authority, why was he not satisfied with destroying only the most important temple of Varanasi, why did he destroy so many of them ? The theories that Muslim rulers plundered only for wealth, or only to assert their authority, have holes in them on all sides. The far simpler explanation, corroborated by all the available documents, is that they had a theology of temple destruction, and that this led them to a behaviour pattern unknown in Pagan

cultures : proportionate to their military might and to their fervour in the faith, they systematically destroyed Pagan temples. It didn't matter whether these temples had any riches in them or any political significance : in every case it was a scripturally ordained act of great merit to weed out Paganism by destroying Pagan temples and centres of learning, as well as by killing or forcibly converting the Pagans themselves. If we accept this simple and well-attested fact, then secularist scholar Partha S. Ghosh can get a straightforward answer to his question : "Do we ever look back to rationalize why after all there are no ancient Buddhist temples in North India when Buddhists had ruled the country for several 105 centuries ?" Yes, why ? Why are there absolutely no Buddhist temples left in Afghanistan, in Turkestan ? Nor Brahmin or Zoroastrian or Manichaean temples, for that matter ? This secularist scholar does not seem to know that the Buddhist monasteries and universities were destroyed and exterminated to the last, in India just as well as in Central Asia, by none other than the Muslim armies. So, the answer is that, while Buddhism had been partly reabsorbed into Hinduism, and had partly continued as a separate tradition under Hindu dynasties, the Muslim conquerors finished it off totally. So, mr. Ghosh may be the Director of the Indian Council of Social Science Research, but as an independent scholar I am not impressed by such titles and positions. His view of the history of religion and persecution is thoroughly flawed. But then, maybe he can't help it, because it seems he picked up his views on history from the JNU "eminent historians whose professional honesty nobody questions". And so many more innocent young people are equally being misled by the Nehruvian (i.e. Marxist plus nationalist Muslim) history distorters.

8.7 Up against undeserved authority Intellectually, these Nehruvian historians and pressmen stand thoroughly discredited. But they have power positions in the media and in the education and research establishments, so they still manage to black out criticism and alternative opinions. A recent example of their power is the nomination of a successor to Leftist Muslim historian Irfan Habib as head of the Indian Council of Historical Research. The expected choice was Prof. G.C. Pande, former vice-chancellor of two universities. But the secularist intelligentsia launched a campaign against him : "RSS connections 106 loom large" . It is said that Irfan Habib contacted the Shahi Imam, who in turn had a chat with his friend V.P. Singh, prime minister. At any rate, G.C. Pande's name was scrapped from the list of candidates. This is also one more example of the unscrupled connivance between secularists and Muslim communalists. The status and pretence of these Nehruvian historians should be openly challenged, as has been 107 done by Prof. A.R. Khan in his rejoinder to the JNU historians' well- known statement. All secularists have tacitly agreed to absolutely ignore his shattering reply to the eminent historians' 108 pamphlet. They know they have been beaten at the intellectual level, but they use their power over the public arena to ensure that these challengers remain in the margins. In their re-reply to Prof. Khan's critique, the JNU historians wrote haughtily : "Mr. Khan's misrepresentation of our views on these matters is, we presume, not a deliberate attempt to malign us, but due rather to an unfortunate lack of familiarity with historical sources and an 109 inability to comprehend the language of our argument..." In other words: whatever your arguments, you can't prevent us from authoritatively putting you in the role of a pitiable nitwit. Personally, I think I do comprehend the language of their argument. But unlike Prof. Khan, I also do advocate a deliberate attempt to malign the Nehruvian historians. Not the kind of maligning that they themselves indulge in, taking their cue from Lenin's own advocacy of lies and disinformation as weapons in the revolutionary struggle. Not throwing swearwords at people, not

stigmatizing them with a label (except those they give to themselves, like secularist), not trying to suppress their opinions. On the contrary, the stress in a genuine intellectual debate should always be on the contents of people's arguments, no matter what label they have come to carry. A careful scrutiny of their statements and historical theories is all that is needed to expose them and explode their eminent status. This scrutiny may also take into account their record of academic support for (i.e. conferral of respectability on) the classic lies of Communism : the murder of thousands of Polish officers in Katyn, long blamed on the Germans with support from historians ; the secret protocol in the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact, allotting the Baltic states and Eastern Poland to Stalin (a Belgian Marxist historiandenied the protocol's existence in the very week when the glasnosted Soviet authorities published its full text); the economicalsuccesses of Stalin and of Mao's Great Leap Forward ; the Chinese historical claim on Tibet as well as on some Indian territory ; and others. What about, for instance, the rather different treatment meted out to Mahatma Gandhi in the successive editions of JNU historian Bipan Chandra's work on India's independence struggle : could it be that the change in the partyline and Moscow's increasing regard for the Mahatma, rather than new research findings, was responsible for the shift ? All this should be checked. Just a factual record, something like "From Katyn to Ayodhya : Leftist historians' record of support for politically motivated lies", would go a long way in undermining their totally undeserved hold over the intellectual arena. The way they have obtained and handled their power positions also deserves some scrutiny. Take the case of the project allotted by the government to the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR), about the history of the freedom struggle in 1937-47. As The Week has reported, this project was started in 1974, and should have resulted in the publication of 10 volumes by 1984. The first volume was published in 1985. It was prepared by non-Marxist dr. P.N. Chopra, and branded as unsaleable (though it fetched Rs. 2 Lakh in royalties) by the Marxist-dominated review committee. Chopra was hounded review committee in 1987, as too sympathetic to Congress and not interested enough in the trade unions' involvement. He explains : "I could not be a party to suppression of historical facts. That was why they turned against me." But more intriguing than the predictable fact that the Marxists were intolerant of anyone not toeing their line, is the fact that after sixteen years and Rs. 2.5 crore, only two volumes were completed (of which only one was published), and that by a non-Marxist member. According to a press report, the list of people involved in this expensive project contains the top names in secularist historiography : Prof. R.S. Sharma, first chairman of the ICHR ; dr. s. Gopal, who was in charge of the project under Prof. Sharma's tenure, and remained "its chief editor for over a decade without producing a single line"; Irfan Habib, AMU historian and ICHR chairman ; Prof. Bipan Chandra and Prof. K.N. Panikkar, who, with six others, were appointed in 1987 when dr. Gopal had resumed the charge of the project, with the promise to the government of finishing by 31 December 1991. The promise was not kept and the government decided to call off the whole project, in spite of Prof. Habib's reportedly high-handed attempts to get yet another extension. This is how The Week explains this strange lack of productivity of these lavishly sponsored Communists :"Right from the beginning, ICHR has been in the hands of Communist historians. They had more than an academic interest in the period under study (1937-47), since the Communists are accused of betraying the freedom struggle and of siding with the British during the Quit India movement. Their idea apparently was to get the project shelved so that they could 110 bury their past, or interpret the period from the Communist angle..." Now that the money has been wasted, it is certainly a good thing to shelve this project of publishing ten volumes of Communist history falsification. At any rate, such adventures should be investigated and given some well deserved publicity.

And then, the falsehood of the grand secularist vision of Indian history should be exposed. As a concrete starting-point, their facile way of equating the numerous cases of persecution by Muslim rulers with the handful of similar acts by Pagan rulers, should be exposed. Thus, the way Romila Thapar equates Mahmud Ghaznavi with Harsha of Kashmir (twelfth 111 century) as being both temple plunderers , can be shown up to be in gross conflict with the contemporary testimonies about the two. Of Ghaznavi, it is well-attested that he was a devout Muslim, that he refused ransom for an idol, that he deliberately committed numerous acts of sacrilege in Hindu temples with no profit whatsoever attached, and that he of course never plundered mosques. By contrast, Harsha plundered temples of his own religion, Hindu as well as Buddhist. He did not demolish them, or force Brahmins to eat beef or Buddhist monks to have sex, or any other deliberate act of sacrilege. For Harsha it was purely a matter of filling the treasury, and for Mahmud it was a matter of humiliating and destroying Paganism. This conclusion is inescapable from the contemporary reports about Harsha and Mahmud. Romila Thapar's explanation that Ghaznavi's behaviour was essentially the same as Harsha's, can only rest on an utter incompetence in reading the source material, or in a deliberate attempt to distort history. What is more, if at all one wants to compare Harsha's behaviour with that of the Muslim rulers, one should face the connection that the contemporary historian Kalhan explicitly makes. Commenting on Harsha's temple plundering, he writes :"Prompted by the Turks in his employ, he behaved like a Turk". At face value, that seems to confirm the Nehruvians' equating of Harsha's and Mahmud's behaviour. Yet, the Nehruvians historians gloss over it (and we know by now that there is a system in their glossing-over), because on closer analysis, it seems that Kalhan does not make a detailed distinction between desecrating a temple by plundering it (as Harsha did), and desecrating it by more precise (and non-profit) acts of sacrilege, such as hanging a cow's tongue around an idols' neck (as Mahmud did). Kalhan is simply saying that the very idea that a temple need not be respected, was borrowed by Harsha from the Muslim Turks. These already had a well-established reputation for temple desecration, and that is a fact to which the Nehruvian historians prefer not to draw the readers' attention. For another example, Harbans Mukhia should not be allowed to get away with his statement that "the demolition of temples in enemy-territory was symbolic of conquest by the sultan... many Hindu rulers also did the same with temples in enemy-territory long before the Muslims had emerged as a political challenge", for which he gives as proof : the above-mentioned Harsha of Kashmir, and Subhatavarman (Paramara king 1193-1210) who attacked Gujarat and destroyed 112 many Jain temples at Dabhoi and Cambay . While the latter could be an illustration of the destruction of temples in enemy-territory (though no reason for singling out Jain temples is even attempted), he did not act this way "long before the Muslims had emerged as a political challenge": much of North India had freshly been conquered and thousands of temples destroyed by Ghori and Aibak. And Harsha also was already under Muslim influence, as stated explicitly in the contemporary report, and moreover, he didn't plunder in enemy-territory but in his own kingdom (an early example of the now-prevalent Hindu cowardice rallying against Hindu institutions and following the Muslim lead). So, here we have a case of a history professor who does not realize that the proofs he cites have hardly any logical connection with the thesis he proposes; or who is so assured about hiseminence that he doesn't expect readers to notice the faulty reasoning. From a criticism of the Nehruvians' behaviour in such case studies in religiously motivated persecution and destruction, we may then move on to the more general statements about religion as a determinant in shaping India's military, political and social history. Let us consider, for instance, the profoundly mistaken view that"monotheism [i.e. Islam] implies equality". Like several 113 Aligrah historians, Harbans Mukhia has propounded this view in the context of explaining Islam's role as a social reform movement, giving a lead to many other secularists in academe and

in the press. This view is so visibly untrue that one cannot really imagine an intellectual propounding it without some ideological compulsion overruling his intelligence. Obviously, monotheism does not abolish the differences in the universe. The Pagan world-view was aware of the different realms of nature, the different levels of integratedness from the atoms up to the Whole, and indeed also the differences within humanity. Each phenomenon was represented by personifications of its typical characteristics, so the plurality of the cosmos was represented by a plurality of gods. Now, the postulate that all these personifications or gods are to be forgotten and that only Allah is to be worshipped, does not make any difference for the plurality in the cosmos and in society : plants and animals are still different realms of nature, and rulers and commoners have also not merged. In the monotheistic Jewish society, there were still kings, priests, traders, free servants and slaves. In Christianity, a stratified feudal society was sanctified by Christian theologians . The Christian concern for social action is a recent invention, made necessary by the finding that in Europe the working-class was attracted by atheist socialism, and that in Asia the strategy of first converting the elite was a total failure, so that a way to the hearts of the lower classes had to be devised. So, there is nothing intrinsically equalitarian in monotheism. Relating the concept of equality with conceptual monotheism may be a somewhat complicated intellectual exercise which a Marxisttrained mind is not ready for, so eminent Prof. Harbans Mukhia may be forgiven this lapse. But the postulate that specifically Islam is a religion of equality, is an ideological and totally unhistorical concoction. From a history professor, this cannot be accepted. The first case of sharp inequality fostered by Islam that comes to mind, is the Islamic treatment of women. While equality in the most modern sense between men and women was never the rule anywhere, at least women used to enjoy more freedom and autonomy in most societies than they do in Islam. At this point, Muslim apologists have come up with the unbelievable contention that in tribal Arabia, it had been even worse than in Islam ; which is readily disproven by the case of Mohammed's first wife Khadija, who had inherited a trading company of which she herself was in charge, with Mohammed as her employee. The apologists' contention that polygamy under Islam was in fact a progress compared to pre-Islamic pagan society is altogether untenable. A Muslim man can have 4 wives plus X concubines : compared to what can 4+X be a decrease? The traditional, non-modern justification that this polygamy provided the best security to the numerous widows (who must have become especially numerous in the high-intensity warfare which 114 Mohammed newly introduced among the Arabs) , was a more reasonable explanation. For a second example of inequality, Islam is in world history the absolute champion of slavery from European slave-traders who shipped black slaves from Africa to America, mostly bought these slaves from Arab slave- catchers. One of the first things the Belgian king Leopold II had to do in his Congo colony (though not out of any noble motive), was to defeat the Arab slave115 catchers. This was as late as the end of the nineteenth century. But even today, some Muslim countries tolerate the outright practice of slavery. In 1989, reporters found out that hundreds of children belonging to the black non-Muslim Dinka tribe in Southern Sudan were being sold into slavery, after the army of the Islamic government had slaughtered their fathers. In Indian history too, many lakhs of Hindus have been sold into slavery. Forcing Kafirs into slavery was of course a common practice. But even among Muslims, the master-slave relation existed. The only case where slavery was abolished, was where a Muslim was slave to a Kafir. Since Islam is a doctrine of domination, it could not tolerate that a Kafir 116 lorded it over a Muslim.

It is significant for the boundless arrogance which Islam inculcates in its proponents, that Islam is now being advertised as a religion of equality even among the black Africans. "Islam is the religion for Africa", colonel Kadhafi proclaimed in a speech in which he promised support to the South-African blacks; even when the South- African word Kaffer (nigger, but even more derogatory), is simply the Islamic term Kafir, which was applied to the black slaves by the Arabs and borrowed by the later European colonizers. And nobody dares to go in and remind those Africans of what the Muslim have done to them, the way the lower castes in India are continuously being fed anti-Brahmin history. But the point is, while one cannot blame the Muslim propagandists for painting a rosy picture of the religion they try to sell, we now see eminent historians spreading this utterly untruthful item of propaganda, in books which are required reading in many universities. They even lecture others and call them communalists if they don't swallow these Islamic-cum-Nehruvian lies. In another important respect, Islam is even more antithetical to equality. We will not bother about the superiority which the Arabs feel vis-a-vis the non-Arabs (as when Kadhafi lambasted some Quran interpretation by "someone who is not even an Arab", meaning Khomeini), nor about the inequality between Ajlaf and Ashraf (vulgar and noble), between Sheikhs and Sayyids and other such subdivisions in the Muslim community : these are just human phenomena of differentiation to which no heavy conclusions need be attached. The one crucial inequality which Islam has brought is the radical and absolute inequality between Momins and Kafirs, believers and nonbelievers. This is a very central point in Islamic theology. Humanity is divided into two : the Momins are bound to go to heaven, and in the lower world should lord it over the Kafirs, and these are bound to go to hell forever, and in this world may be subjected to all kinds of injustice. For a hundredfold testimony of this persistent doctrine of absolute inequality, it suffices to check the true untailored sources of Islamic doctrine, the Quran and the Hadis. It is against those sources that the claims of Islam as a religion of equality have to be checked. The claim for Islam as a religion of equality will then stand utterly disproven, because authentic facts are more eminent than even the JNU historians. Once the support of the Nehruvian historians to such utter falsifications of history is tackled and exposed, they have no chance of saving their reputations or even the hold of their theories over the public arena. They have gone too far in their distortions of history, so they are very vulnerable. If they have held out in the role of oft-quoted "eminent historians" for so long, it is only due to the slackness and timidity of the Hindu intellectuals. Only because of a configuration of forces peculiar to India have the anti-Hindu historians been able to completely dominate the scene. In most free countries, they would have been exposed long ago. Take the case of veteran Leftist historian Prof. R.S. Sharma. In the Ayodhya debate, he has played a fairly prominent role, with his book Communal History and Rama's Ayodhya, published in December 1990, with his interviews and public statements on the matter, and with his participation for the Babri side in the VHP-BMAC discussion on the historical 117 evidence. That he has in his writings totally ignored the abundant documentary evidence, has not stopped the press from citing him as a great authority. But what does the international historical scene think about him ? The Dutch historian and indologist Andre Wink writes, referring to Prof. Sharma's chief claim to fame, his book on Indian Feudalism in the early medieval period : "R.S. Sharma's Indian Feudalism has misguided virtually all historians of the period... Sharma's thesis essentially involves an obstinate attempt to find 'elements' which fit a preconceived picture of what should have happened in India because it happened in Europe (or is alleged to have happened in Europe by Sharma and his school of historians whose knowledge of European history is rudimentary and completely outdated)... The methodological underpinnings of Sharma's work are

in fact so thin that one wonders why, for so long, Sharma's colleagues have called his work 118 'pioneering'." In a world where the wind of free inquiry blows, Marxist dogmas cannot hold out for long. They have been abandoned, except in those places where an artificial authority is attached to them by a partisan intelligentsia. From his high pedestal, Prof. Sharma could afford to disregard the"very few authors whose work effectively addresses the feudalism thesis in a critical manner", and he "appears to have been in no mood to take heed of criticism levelled at his work". This disregarding and ignoring of counterevidence is tactically the best way to prolong your dominant position (which is why this tactic was adopted by most secularists in the Ayodhya debate): it denies publicity and respectability to the critic's alternative thesis. But to the progress of science, this upholding of dogma and suppression of debate is detrimental. According to Prof. Wink, the effect has been this : "Under the impact of the feudalism thesis the historiography of the period is still in utter disarray." On the Ayodhya issue too, popular and governmental perception has been brought into utter disarray by the concerted efforts of a small but powerful group of committed Hindu-baiters, including the same Prof. R.S. Sharma, who have hammered into the public consciousness a suspicion against the well-attested facts of the matter. With all their eminence and authority, they actually managed to turn facts into myth and concoction. But as you can see from the comment of a competent outsider, the authority which these Hindu-baiters enjoy, is highly undeserved and based on something else than scholarly merit. So, in my opinion, the dominance of these Nehruvian and other Hindu-baiters need not last much longer. Their eminence will go down as soon as the debunking of their central myths has come centre-stage in the intellectual arena (which means that an issue-centered critique will suffice to do most of the job). And that can go unexpectedly fast, there are plenty of occasions at which the readers are interested enough to pick up an alternative thesis, if only it gets competently presented to them. For a promising example, Meenakshi Jain has done an admirable job of debunking a number of cherished misconceptions (consciously spread in the colonial and missionary interests) concerning the caste system, as part of a debate in Indian Express triggered by the Mandal 119 Report. While casteist politicians will go on for some time to use these misconceptions in their rhetoric, the intellectual questioning of the (widely prevalent) anti-Brahmin and anti-Hindu casteist 120 view of Indian history has started, and it is bound to affect every caste-related debate soon. Another recent myth which is easy to debunk on the strength of the authentic texts, is that Buddhism and Jainism were social reform movements and reactions against Brahminism. Buddha and Mahavira were religious critics of the ritualism of some Brahmins which had degenerated to mere form, with the spirit lacking (which is a very ordinary development in traditions and societies after some time). But they didn't claim to bring anything new, they merely restored the spirit which some Brahmins had become too uninspired to uphold. Buddha is quite explicit about merely walking the same path as all the Awakened ones before and after him, entirely in the sanatana spirit. Both Buddha (Awakened one) andMahavira (Great Hero of selfconquest) were long-established titles before Gautama and Vardhamana came to carry them. Both revivers of Vedic spirituality were positively uninterested in social reform. While Brahmins played a role in society and codified social order in Dharma Shastras, these Shramanas (monks) concentrated entirely on Moksha, liberation of consciousness, and they considered worldly 121 concerns, such as social reform, as foolish waste. Once this Marxist-inspired myth of Buddhism and Jainism as social reform movements gets debunked, the authority of those who publicly identify with this myth will also be questioned. The same counts for other such myths, artificially created by politically motivated people : once the myth goes its proponents lose their aura of authority. While a scrutiny of the individual record of

the big-mouth secularists may be useful as long as this debate remains as nasty as it is now, it is the issue- centered criticism which will blow the secularists' authority away very soon. The myth of Brahmin oppression, the myth of Buddhism as a social reform movement, the myth of the Buddhist-Brahmin power struggle, the myth of the economical motives for the Muslim conquests and destruction, the myth of the non-existence of an indigenous and nation-wide Hindu culture, the myth of the social reforms brought by Islam, the myth of Hindu-Muslim amity, the myth of Nehru and of India as a a nation in the making, the myth of the Composite Culture, the myth that communalism is a British creation, all these myths are bound to give way once a substantial number of Hindu intellectuals apply their minds

9. Secularism and India's integrity to them in a serious and scientific way, and then use the availab

9.1 Separatism and anti-Hinduism In the present context, the link between history-writing and actual politics is extra-ordinarily strong. Witness the crucial role of the Aryan invasions theory in the secularist and casteist/Ambedkarist ideologies, as earlier in the missionary and colonial ideologies. In fact, I can not think of any situation in world history where history-writing was so intertwined with both longterm political philosophy and short-term political equations. This is partly because an unusually large chunk of India's history is fundamentally under debate, either because it has not yet been mapped (so many unknowns may be decided on overnight once the Indus script is conclusively deciphered), or because it has been questioned for ideological reasons even while wellestablished (like the denial of Islam's utterly destructive role). Nowhere else can so much be read into history according to one's ideological compulsions, because nowhere else is so much history so undecided and disputed. This link between the two, history and politics, works in both directions. Secularism as a political philosophy is intellectually dependent upon the secularist version of history. Conversely, once secularism as the official state ideology is fully discredited, secularist history- writing cannot survive for long. Now in fact, Nehruvian secularism as a political philosophy has effectively lost its credibility. It has proven worthless as a national motivating force and as a moral framework, judging by the many forms of corruption at every level. It has proven unable to create a secular national unity (Bharatiyatva, Indian-ness). Secularists go on lambasting the Ram devotees that with their Janmabhoomi demand they cannot expect the minorities to remain in India, that they are driving the minorities to separatism. This contention unfortunately draws an objective outsider's attention to the fact that these minority separatisms are already there. There are Muslim, Sikh, Communist and Christian separatist movements who carry on an armed struggle against the Indian secular republic. The Dravidian movement in Tamil Nadu has, after the Chinese invasion in 1962, decided to limit itself to demands within the Constitution, and to drop its separatism ; however, with the DMK talking of the need to go back to the roots, and depending on the outcome for the Tamils in Sri Lanka, it might reassert its separatist tendencies. It is significant that it was Annadurai, the least anti-Hindu among the Dravidian leaders (he supported the RSS in putting up the Vivekananda Rock Memorial, against the Christians) who called off the separatist programme. There are also Dalit fringe groups who demand a separate Dalitastan or Achootistan. Some of these groups are militantly atheist (like the Dravidian movement), some are Christian-or Muslimleaning, some profess Buddhism of the Ambedkarite variety. The one thing that all these separatist movements without exception have in common at the ideological level, is their hatred of Hinduism. Every separatist movement in India is an anti-Hindu movement.

In fact, as I write this, the papers report on pamphlets being spread among the tribals in Gujarat, demanding for a separate tribal state Bhilistan, as well as for five more tribal states in other parts of India. And what is the punch line in the pamphlet ? Exactly : "We are not Hindus". Of course, the number of tribals rallied behind this demand may not exceed a handful, but the point that separatism in India invariably implies anti-Hinduism is certainly corroborated. The Hindus may profess secularism as much as they want : for their enemies they are still too Hindu. And their enemies will try to separate from them from the very day they feel strong enough to do it, in order to create a Pakistan, a Khalistan etc. Secularism, which is purely a negative ideology, which merely divorces one of the strongest motivating forces in an individual's life from public life, is proving incapable of overcoming these separatisms. I am not saying that all minorities ipso facto harbour separatist tendencies and will invariably launch a separatist movement if strategically given a chance. The Parsis or the Jains are not going to start their own Khalistan agitation, I am sure. The ordinary members of the Christian community, everywhere where it is living mixed with other communities (i.e. except in parts of the Northeast), have a constructive attitude and are, as far as I can see, increasingly being absorbed into the mainstream. Among the Sikhs too, the separatist movement can still not claim a majority of the community as supporters of the Khalistan cause. And among the Muslims, it is only in Kashmir that they massively support separation from India. I have to agree with the remark of some secularist, that the Muslims who stayed behind in India in 1947, in a sense "voted for India with their feet". All I am saying is that those who are bent on creating a separate communal state, will want to do so regardless of whether the Hindus call themselves Hindu or secular. Therefore, V.P. Singh missed the point when he declared on Doordarshan (with an explicitness that bordered on incitement) that, if the Hindus claimed the Ram Janmabhoomi, there was no ground for stopping the Sikhs from demanding Khalistan, and other such separatist demands. The separatists have not waited until the Hindu mobilization for Ram Janmabhoomi to start their anti- India movement ;nor will they call it off if the Hindus call off the Janmabhoomi campaign.

9.2 Secularist-separatist nexus The nexus between the anti-Janmabhoomi demand and anti- Hindu separatism, has been worked 122 out more closely by Tavleen Singh in her article Apocalypse Soon. Let us take a close look at her analysis and prediction. She starts out by mentioning the opinion, fairly common in Pakistan, that India should be partitioned once more, and a big chunk of the North given to the India Muslims. Since Ayodhya, she thinks that this prospect has acquired a grim chance of materialization. After all, the VHP Hindus have become so fanatical that they think : "We will have to get rid of these Muslims. They must be kicked out and sent to Pakistan, after all it was made for them." So, on the Hindu side, we have strong words. On the Muslim side, according to Tavleen Singh, the radicalization has already gone a big step further. Just a week before, the Muslim Personal Law Board has issued a religious sanction to fight, if necessary, for the Babri Masjid. "All God-fearing Muslims will consider it their religious duty to participate in the new jihad. This would lead automatically to the internationalizing of the dispute... If the mosque is knocked down, [not only Pakistan but] many an oil-fat Arab country would be only too willing to come to the defense of the faith." What is our secularist commentator implying ? That India should let its policy on Ayodhya be sidetracked at the Muslim countries' gunpoint ? Politically, it is a concession (i.e. a reward and an encouragement) to threats of coercion and aggression, if the Ayodhya or Kashmir policies are made dependent on the assent of mujahedin either inside India or in the Muslim countries. Strategically however, it is very useful and timely, that an unsuspected secularist points to the

danger of jihad. While Hindus would be politically justified in ignoring such undemocratic and terrorist threats, in terms of strategy they should think twice before provoking a reaction for which they are not prepared. When the Shilanyas ceremony took place, thirty-five Muslim countries have protested. At that time, there was no call for jihad. If we add pan-Islamic solidarity to the call for jihad, then India is in for some serious trouble. However, at the time of writing, no Islamic country has voiced any threat against India. So far it is only the secularists who have tried to intimidate the Ram Mandir campaigners with threats of international Muslim retaliation. As part of the same effort, they have also been accusing the Ram activists of endangering the safety of the Hindus in Muslim countries. This effectively means that, in the secularists' perception, those minority Hindus are really hostages, and the secularists are supporting the antiJanmabhoomi demands of the hostage-takers, the Muslim majorities in Pakistan, Bangla Desh, Malaysia. "Be good, otherwise something very unpleasant will happen", so the secularists say, repeating the canonical line of hostage-takers. Even if those countries with Hindu minorities are Islamic republics, they still have laws against looting, arson, temple- destruction, and rape and slaughter of citizens even if these belong to the minorities. Moreover, India has treaties with Pakistan (inherited also by its partial successor state Bangla Desh) concerning the safety of the minorities. As for actual jihad from Muslim countries against India, there are international treaties (as well Nehru's famous "five principles of peaceful co- existence", accepted by the Non-Aligned Movement to which many Muslim countries belong) prescribing respect for a nation's sovereignty, and guaranteeing non-interference in internal affairs, and non-aggression. All these safeguards against aggression on Hindus and India are a juridical reality. However, in the present discourse, our secularists have exchanged these realities belonging to the level of Right, for the logic of brute Power. They choose to treat the situation not in juridical but in strategic terms. Maybe they are right. But then it implies that "the friendship with the Arab countries that Nehru so wisely built", which in the spring of 1990 had seemed to hold out against Pakistan's attempt to rally support for its claim on Kashmir, is not resistant even to the Ayodhya affair, i.e. the relocation of one non-mosque. What kind of friendship is this, where a sovereign act can get punished with jihad ? To say the least, this is not a tribute to Nehru's international legacy by his otherwise devout followers. This jihad will also (if not primarily) come from inside India : "Even on a domestic level, there are likely to be serious problems. So far, we have been spared Muslim terrorist groups, at least outside Kashmir, but for how long ?" Tavleen Singh even quotes a Muslim leader saying : "Once Muslims feel that the state is not going to protect them and they are on their own, it is only a question of time before they start doing what the Sikhs are doing in Punjab. As it is, when we visit a town after a communal riot, people say : if the police wasn't there, we could take the Hindus on." It is an interesting though experiment, what Tavleen Singh presents here. Some people will say that already the riots are mostly started by Muslims and that they too are a form of terror. Even if that is true, there is still an essential difference with a real terrorist campaign : there is no welldefined and persistent demand animating each of those separate instances of violence. What would the explicit objective be around which an all- India Muslim terrorist campaign would rally ? Does she really think that this miserable non-mosque is a sufficient occasion to get such a terrorist campaign going ? Then Tavleen Singh assesses the Sikh reaction. In Amritsar, she talked to a lot of Sikh militant leaders, who almost all of thembrought up the Ayodhya issue. Incidentally, I know

decent anti-fanatical Sikhs who would get killed if they went near Tavleen's militant friends, merely because they call terrorists by their proper name. In November 1990, the Sikh terrorists have issued orders to the press, one of these being that no negative terms like terroristcan be 123 applied to them. It struck me that most secularists in the press are not affected by the death threats issued to journalists who don't fall in line, because they already use the terrorist-friendly (or at least neutral) language. It does not in the least surprise me that Tavleen Singh is on such good terms with the militants. After all, the main plank in the separatist and the secularist platforms is the same : We are not Hindus. So, the militants told her that "they felt now that the struggle for Khalistan was entirely justified because if the minorities in India could not even be ensured protection for their places of worship then Indian secularism is nothing but a lie". This statement calls for some serious comment. Let me point out first of all that no place of worship of any minority is threatened by the building of the Ram Mandir. The place has already been a functioning Hindu temple since 1949. If at that time it was a functioning mosque (which is very doubtful, see ch.4.1.), then a minority place of worship was not properly protected at that time, in 1949, the glory years of Jawaharlal Nehru. But now that it is a Hindu temple of long standing, the whole affair really concerns a simple architectural reform entirely internal to the Hindu community. It is the fault of press people like Tavleen Singh, that people inside and outside India have come to believe that a mosque is threatened. As the Chinese philosopher Confucius has pointed out, we can only begin to set the world in order, if we call things by their proper names. This whole Ayodhya problem would not have existed if secularist politicians and intellectuals had called the disputed building a non- mosque and an effective Hindu temple. Because that is what it is : a building containing idols is by definition not a mosque, and a building not used for namaz is in effect not a mosque. But a building where Hindus come to worship idols, is called a temple or Mandir. But now the damage has been done. With their false language, the secularists have convinced crores of people that the Ayodhya dispute is a struggle between majority Mandir and minority Masjid. So, the militants think that the minorities are under threat. The second damage that has been done, with full co- operation of the secularists, is that the status of Sikhism as a separate religion has become firmly established in the minds of many Sikhs. This separate status is entirely a British fabrication, later amplified by Sikh who, like many Hindus, had come to think that being a Hindu is a shameful thing. The Sikhs have always been one of Hinduism's many panths (sects). The claim to being a separate religion, which is now being propped up in many anti-Hindu books, has been conclusively disposed of by Rajendra Singh Nirala, an ex-granthi who came to realize that what the Akalis told him was not the same as 124 what he used to recite from the Granth. Nonetheless, it is the secularists, including Khushwant Singh (thedirty old man of Indian secularism), who have been championing the Sikhs' right to preserve their communal 125 identify. As if any Hindu has challenged that right or even just asked them to drop their distinctive ways : it is not Hindu pressure, but the impact of modernity that was making Sikhs shed those outer emblems that constitute their distinctness. It is again the secularists who, with their anti-Hindu propensities have laid the blame for Sikh separatism at the door of those Hindus who restate the demonstrable historical truth that Sikhs are nothing but a Hindu sect. Assimilative communalism, they call it. When Hindu historians point out the radical and irreducible difference between Hinduism and the closed monotheistic creeds like Islam, they are dubbed communalists; but when the same people point out the radical sameness of Sikhism and other varieties of Hinduism, then for that they are again dubbed communalists.

Anyway, the situation today is that the armed representatives of the Sikh community (remark that Tavleen Singh only quotes militantSikhs : in the strategic assessment they are indeed the ones who count) consider themselves a separate non-Hindu minority, and identify with the Muslim communalist viewpoint on Ayodhya. They don't want to see anymore how many times the name 126 Ram is reverentially mentioned in the Guru Granth Sahib , and what horror Guru Nanak has expressed at Babar's Islamic acts of mass slaughter However, it is yet something else to suggest (as they seem to do) a causal relation between the Ram Janmabhoomi movement and the fact that "they felt now that the struggle for Khalistan was entirely justified". The contention that the Ayodhya events could add one percent to their 100% dedication to the Khalistan cause, is nothing but rhetoric. If the Hindus give up their Ram Mandir, the Khalistani terrorists will not fire one bullet less, let alone give up their demand for Khalistan. Before the Ram Mandir became hot news, they already felt justified in killing dozens of people every week, for Khalistan. Postulating a causal link between Ram Janmabhoomi and Khalistani terrorism, is just a ploy to lay the blame for their communalist crimes at someone else's door. And of course, the secularists, from V.P. Singh to Tavleen Singh, rhetorically support them in their ploy.

9.3 Victory through more concessions ? Passing the buck from the machinegun-wielding communalists in the Khalistani camp, to the Ram campaigners with their tridents and Ram hymns, Tavleen Singh writes : "Ironic, isn't it, that those who believe that Ayodhya has become the symbol of Indian nationalism and that Hindutva is virtually synonymous with patriotism, could well be responsible for dividing the country once more." Ironic, isn't it, that those who lecture others on being responsible for dividing the country, and who declare that secularism is virtually synonymous with patriotism, are effectively giving the armed separatists a good conscience by putting the blame for their communalist crimes on people who merely want to renovate their own Ram temple. By now, the reader should understand fully why Tavleen Singh is such a welcome guest in militant circles. The Khalistani terrorists say : If you can have your Ram Mandir, we must have our Khalistan. And Tavleen Singh says : If you really want your Ram Mandir, you should be ready for Khalistan. The terrorists don't talk in terms of rights, but in military power terms ("facing the consequences"). Tavleen Singh helps us think about the matter in those same terms. Tavleen Singh's pious advice to the Janmabhoomi activists is this :"A temple built beside the mosque would be a far more powerful symbol of Indian nationalism than a temple built in place of a mosque." Well how utterly ignorant. In the 18th and 19th century, the Hindus worshipped Ram on a platform just next to the Babri Masjid. That didn't stop the Muslims from attacking the nearby Hanumangarhi temple in 1855. The Hindus accommodated themselves with the mosques that replaced the Hindu temples in Mathura and Varanasi, by building a temple next to them : that didn't stop the Muslim League from creating Pakistan and committing countless atrocities on the Hindus. When in 1905 the Akalis threw out the "Hindu" idols from their Gurudwara, Pandit M.M. Malaviya refrained from even protesting, and built a new idol temple next to it. That didn't stop the Akalis from developing into a separatist movement. So, one more Hindu concession, viz. building the new temple next to the existing structure, is certainly not a "powerful" symbol. It may be nice, it may be harmless, but it is by no means powerful. India is full of examples (not mere symbols) of Hindu accommodation, but that has not stopped the separatist movements from multiplying and hardening their demands. The Indian Constitution is a mighty case of Hindu accommodation to some minorities' demands for privileges, but that hasn't stopped the Khalistanis from burning it, nor has it stopped the Babri Masjid movement from calling for a boycott of Republic Day 1987.

If the Muslims would finally take their turn at making concessions, and agree to let the Hindus build their Mandir, and then build their own Masjid next to it, that would indeed be a powerful symbol of Indian nationalism. But Tavleen Singh is fooling someone if she thinks that yet another Hindu concession is going to 127 mollify any armed separatist. Such people have only respect for strength. In fact, even ordinary people have more respect for strength than for pliability. All these cries of"We are not Hindus", which are mostly coupled with separatist demands, are partly the result of the over-all image of weakness which Hinduism has continued to acquire during the last few centuries. Nobody wants to belong to such a weak community with so little self- respect. The day Hinduism shows strength, all these separatists will proudly declare : "We are Hindus". They will even shout at each other: "We are better Hindus than you". Summing up, we must thank Tavleen Singh for not pontificating about secular principles, and for rightly pointing out that this is fast becoming a matter of strength more than of principles. Guns are pointed at India, or rather at Hindu India, and if Hindus don't behave nicely, they will justify Khalistani terrorism and provokeMuslim terrorism, and then "we need to be prepared to deal with the spread of the AK-47 on an undreamed-of scale". What does this state of affairs have to say about four decades of secularism ? Apparently, something has gone wrong. Let us take a closer look at that peculiarly Indian variety of secularism. We need to plunge deep into fundamentals and initiate a thorough diagnosis, because this patient is gravely ill.

le channels to speak out.

10. Secularism as it is 10.1. Its definition To start with the beginning, Indian secularism was borrowed from Europe. There, secularism meant that society took the freedom to organize itself without caring about the dogmas of the Churches. At the intellectual level, it meant that thinkers took the freedom to independently formulate insights regardless of their conformity with Church teachings. This included the freedom to frontally criticize these Church teachings. In the modern times when it became a political term, secularism meant basically : freedom from religion. But then it did not mean a state-enforced freedom from religion. It was not totalitarianism, the freedom of the authorities to meddle in people's intimate beliefs or commitments. Freedom means having the options to take something or to leave it. The communist effort to weed out religion has never gone by the name of secularism, it was called totalitarianism. So, secularism rather means freedom regarding religion : the freedom to take it or to leave it (freedom without a choice between alternatives is hardly freedom). By guaranteeing this freedom, secularism subjects the adherence or submission to the tenets of a religion to individual choice. Secularism recognizes the logical priority of the individual's choice to follow a religion, to this religion's actual claim on the individual's adherence. By placing the free choice of the individual above the duties or dogmas imposed by religion, secularism has done enough to emancipate man from religion. Man can choose a religious view

or commitment rather than having it imposed on him. In that sense, secularism does not mean anti-religious activism. It only means subjecting religion to human choice, which was revolutionary enough in the European context of Church power trying to impose itself. Since the individual's freedom of choice regarding religion or Weltanschauung was made the norm, the state authority was bound to neutrality in these matters. Imposing any view of the ultimate, including atheism, was precisely what the state was prevented from doing by secularism. Yet, some Marxists in India have called this simple concept of state neutrality regarding religion a non-modern concept of secularism. They think the state should actively 128 campaign against religion. If any concept of secularism is non-modern, it is the feudal concept that the people are not capable of thinking for themselves, and that a priesthood should be empowered to drill the new world view (such as atheism) into them and to persecute and otherwise fight any alternative views. What is modern, what is the essence of modernity, is not the belief that a certain belief system should be imposed on the people by the state ; on the contrary, it is the confidence in human freedom, in free exploration, in man's capability of learning for himself from his own experience. So, secularism as a political term means : neutrality of the government in religious matters. That is all. Secularism does not mean that the state promotes one belief system, it means that the state limits itself to guaranteeing the individual's freedom to find out about these matters for himself. That at least is the correct meaning of the term "secularism" as it has historically developed in the West, in a period when individual freedom was considered the topmost value. If one chooses secularism as a component for a state system, it remains to be seen how this fundamental concept is worked out in the details of a secular Constitution, but that state neutrality and respect for the individual's intellectual and religious freedom should be the spirit of such a Constitution, is certain. About the origin of the term, this much should be known. The Latin word saeculum, exactly like the Hebrew word olam ( Arabic alam), means : time cycle, eternity, era, world. From era, the more common meaning century is derived. For Sanskrit equivalents, one would think of kalpa, and of samsara. As a synonym for secular, the word temporal is sometimes used ; as its antonym, spiritual or eternal. These terms have entered the modern languages mostly via Church parlance. Originally, "secular" as a political term does not imply non-religion, or freedom from religion, or any specific attitude to religion whatsoever. In fact, the source of the term's political meaning is a case of Church terminology. Among priests, regular priests are rule- bound, i.e. monastic, and fully dedicated to spiritual life, while secular priests are worldly i.e. involved in world-oriented ortemporal duties, especially as parish priest. Both are religious, but regulars have a spirit129 oriented and seculars a world-oriented life. In its acquired political meaning, secularism, being a doctrine concerning the state, leaves any spirit-oriented choices to the individual, and limits the state to pursuing world oriented objectives. Secularism does not limit the individual who is left free to pursue religion, with the state guaranteeing this freedom. Secularism limits the state, and prevents it from espousing other causes than its worldly functions. Secularism limits the state's authority over the individual to the 130 latter's behaviour, and refuses it access to his mind. In a larger context of civilizational philosophy, we may criticize the essentially individualistic character of this historically developed, visibly European secularism. But for the time being, if at all one wants to practice secularism, I think this is the sane and genuine variety, as opposed to

the existing alternative, the totalitarian attempts to weed out religion from people's minds and private lives. Dictatorship is an unrestricted (as opposed to a restricted, esp. by democratic feedback) claim on people's lives. Totalitarianism is stronger, it is a claim on people's minds. The demand voiced by a section of the Indian secularists, that the state be used in order to spread atheism, is the product of a totalitarian mentality. It is moreover a clear aberration of the modern concept of secularism as it has historically taken shape in Europe. So to the extent that there is no conceptual apparatus outside the modern Europe- originated thought categories, secularism should be defended in its genuine European sense, against the Stalinist perversion ofsecularism that still has quite a following in India.

10.2 Hindu secularism Concerning secularism, there is however another discussion going on : is it true that Hindu 131 culture is intrinsically secular? Not only many Hindu leaders, even Javed Habib, one of the BMAC leaders, is no record as saying : "India has survived as a secular nation because the 132 majority is Hindu." And is there not within Hindu tradition an alternative, if not superior or more adapted, type of secularism? When we say that secularism is in a sense a very individual-centered doctrine, we must realize that that is not a very alien thing to Hindu culture. While Hindu culture historically has its basis in a strong community structure, with joint family, gotra, jati, varna, as grades of integration between the individual and society as a whole, in matters of religion it has always been individualistic. There is no regular group gathering in temples prescribed in Hindu tradition. Of course, there are social rituals surrounding life events like marriage and cremation, and religious festivals, and for these the community congregates. But the innermost and actually religious level of Hindu culture is an individual affair. And it could not have been otherwise. Action and ritual may be community affairs, but the basis of real religion is a culture of consciousness, and consciousness is individual. In Islam and Christianity, any concept of consciousness culture is very marginal. Of course, when saying prayers with genuine intent, people are in fact practicing a kind of bhakti yoga. These Pagan elements that treat religion as a matter of individual mental experience, are unavoidable and in fact indispensable in any religion, because they spring from man's intrinsic religious instinct. In Christianity these elements of a culture of inner life have sometimes appeared, but the stray occasions of Christianmysticism have never developed into a systematized tradition, because the Church opposed it. The Church correctly saw in this culture of consciousness an implicit Pagan doctrine of liberation from ignorance through meditation, contrary to the Christian doctrine of salvation from sin through Christ. Islam too knows of consciousness culture only through the Pagan infusion of Sufism. Doctors of Islam like Al- Ghazali and Ibn Taymiyyah correctly rejected mysticism as unfounded in the Quran and the traditions of the Prophet : these don't teach any technique of access of the individual to a spiritual reality, but on the contrary claim for the Prophet a sole and final intercessory status between God and man. All that Islam wants its followers to do, is to perform certain actions (saying prayers, giving alms, participating in jihad), it does not at all focus on any culture or exploration of individual consciousness.

In Hindu culture, even in its most unsophisticated popular forms, this focus on individual consciousness is always there. No group prayers, one's religious experience is one's personal affair. Therefore, the concept of leaving religion to the care of the individual, with no authority above him empowered to dictate beliefs or religious practices, which in the West constituted a cultural revolution called secularism, is nothing new to Hindu culture. This is not an idealization but a firm reality : no matter what the"evils of Hindu society" may have been, subjecting the individual's freedom of religion to any public authority is not one of them. No wonder that Voltaire, who strongly opposed the Church's totalitarian grip over men's lives, and may count as one of the ideologues of secularism, mentioned the religions of India and China as a model of how religion could be a free exploration by the individual. So, religion is a personal affair. The Hindu state has no right to forbid or promote any religious doctrine (the way Ashok, the hero of the Nehruvians, is said to have promoted Buddhism). And religious organizations have no say in political decision-making.

10.3. Marxism and secularism Marxists reject as non-modern the Gandhian conception of secularism as "equal respect for all religions" (about which, seech.10.6). And they defy Mahatma Gandhi where he said that secularism should mean "equal respect, not equal disrespect, for all religions". The Leftists' version of secularism quite certainly intends "equal disrespect for all religions". Indian Leftist intellectuals (I am not aware of the existence of leftist proletarians in India) do advocate a deliberate policy of eradicating religion from the people's consciousness. You do not hear a lot of this long-term project, but occasionally yet another Platform for Secularism (or Action Committee, or People's Rally, etc., for Secularism) is set up, and then they announce their demand that religious TV programmes be banned, that any presence of religious symbols or texts at state functions be banned, that use of state buildings for any religious event be banned, that religious education be banned from schools set up to impart secular education, etc. Since Marxists dismiss freedom as a bourgeois- liberalist illusion, they don't feel inhibited in making bans and suppression their central demands. Of course, the Marxist programme of using state power to eradicate religion is, in the countries 133 where it has been practiced, a memory of horror as well as an outrageous failure. It is totally objectionable and we will not waste any more paper on it. However, we do have to deal with the rationale for this intention, which gives them a good conscience in advocating an all-out government campaign against religion. The Marxists start from Marx' perception that religion is an anti-rational superstition from the primitive age, and an opium of the people which prevents men from living in reality and emancipating themselves. Let us start with the opium part. It is quite correct that religion, like drug-taking, is practiced in order to have a certain mental experience. And it is a fact that people spend a lot of time and money on arranging for such mental experiences. A missionary told me that he has a very hard time to extract from the villagers one Rupee per month for the upkeep of the village well, but when someone comes from the city with a video-set and some films, they can all take out five Rupees to spend a Sunday watching films. A mental kick is worth a lot more to people than the necessities of humdrum existence. That is why people can spend vast sums on a Durga Puja or some such religious festival, only to throw the Murti into the river at the end of the festival.

But the difference is that religion, in its best sense, is not a benumbing drug. Religious 134 consciousness is not amnesia, forgetfulness. It is quite the opposite, it is an awakening. In its more profound dimension, it is an awakening to the inner reality. In its more outward dimension, the festivals and rituals, it is an awakening to and a celebration of the world's time-cycles and lifecycles, an explicitation of participation in the world order (the Vedic concept of Rta). It is a very successful and time-tested way of giving colour and meaning to our existence. It breaks through the grey and prosaic life that the Communists want to impose on us. But the Marxists think that religion is an evil, because it is anti-reason ; while reason is a good in itself, which moreover emancipates man by equipping him with the intellectual as well as technological means to determine his own destiny. Now this notion of reason and religion stems from a specifically European situation, that conditioned Marx' thought about religion. The fact that Indian Marxists have simply transposed Marx' limited view to the Indian situation is just another example of how dogmatic Marxists generally are. It also shows how utterly ignorant the Indian Leftist (and generally secularist) intelligentsia is of India's home-grown religious culture. "Know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." That is what Saint Paul said, borrowing it from many Pagans before him. It was an injunction to practice religion. And yet, it could be the motto of 135 Reason. What Saint Paul meant with this dictum is a different chapter, but fact is that Pagan religions saw themselves as a culture of truth, as an exploration, as an experience, not at all as a belief in a set of dogmas. By the time Marx was writing, the dominant religion taught man something very different from seeking out the truth for himself. The Protestants (to which Marx' family formally belonged) as well as the Jews (of whom Marx' father used to be one, before conversion for careerist reasons) extracted their doctrines from Scripture. Reason was to be used in interpreting Scripture, but it was not radical and autonomous. The Catholics paid much less attention to Scripture, but were subject to Church tradition and the doctrinal authority of the Holy See ; Catholic philosophy was equally barred from being a radical and autonomous exploration by Reason. It is a Christian curiosity that religion connotes authoritative Church teaching, or Scripture teaching, and therefore implies belief. That is why, in the European Enlightenment context, the dichotomy secular/non-secular has come to connote rational/non-rational, or reason/belief. For instance, secular morality is usually taken to mean "morality not based on scriptural belief, but rationally founded in the human experience". However, it must be stressed that this connotation of secular/non-secular with reason/belief results from a Christian peculiarity, viz. the appropriation of the entire spiritual as well as ethical domain by the Church, sole guardian of Salvation. A second typical element that made religion as Marx knew it, into an opium, was this notion of the Hereafter. While many cultures have believed in a life after death, some even in an eternal such life, it is typical for Christianity (as opposed to even Judaism) that this afterlife was treated as the hour of truth, as the life that really matters, and of which the quality depends on your conduct (sometimes taken to mean passive acceptance of your position and obedience to the worldly authorities) in this finite time in the lower world. So, in order to bring man back to the verifiable reality of this life, and in order to make him fully use and explore reason, the belief in infallible Church dogma or in infallible Revealed Scripture had to be abolished. Since no religion was known to Marx except the anti- rational belief systems based on Revelation and Dogma, the struggle for Reason and against belief in Dogma and Revelation, seemingly became a struggle against religion. In that context, secularism could be seen as more than a separation of politics and religion, not as the best way of letting the two domains flourish on their own terms, but as an offensive of anti-religious reason against antirational beliefs. The secularization of the state was then not seen as the full realization of the desired separation of politics and religion but only as a step in an ongoing offensive against religion: from a full control of religion, via a secularized state, to a full destruction of religion even

in the private sphere. If religion is an evil, why stop at chasing it from the public domain ? It should be destroyed altogether. To restore the term secularism to its fundamental meaning, we have to take it out of this peculiar perception determined by the European context. And we hasten to add that while secularism is an established and unchallenged value in European culture today, the perception that religion as such is an evil, is limited to certain ideological groups, and by no means considered an integral part of secularism. Christians, among them the dominant Christian-Democratic parties, have fully accepted secularism as a state doctrine. This is of course due to the influence which humanism has had on modern Christianity. Hardly any Christian today believes he should impose his doctrines on others through state power.

10.4. Real secularism through real religion Secularism is fundamentally not a matter of reason versus belief. Because religion is not intrinsically a matter of belief. The demand that you believe that Jesus was the Saviour from original sin, and that He was resurrected, and that He was God's only-begotten Son, or the demand that you believe that Mohammed was Allah's final spokesman and that the Quran is Allah's own word : these claims on human assent and belief, even though they have grabbed a major part of the world, and even though they have become synonymous with religion in the minds of many millions, are a caricature of religion. In the vast majority of religions that have existed in humanity's history, beliefs were never a defining element. Of course, people had their beliefs. But that did not put them either inside or outside the community. Religion was not so much a matter of doctrine (which in turn should not be reduced to belief), but of practice. There is on the one hand the exploration of consciousness, which as such was mostly limited to a class of adepts. This could involve an unsystematic seeking of visions, as by taking hallucinogenic drugs, or it could be developed into a systematic discipline. This was all a matter for experience, not for dogma. There is on the other the outward aspect of religion, ritual. What our modernists decry as empty ritual was not so empty at all. It was a very effective way to order life, celebrate the cosmic cycles, and consecrate the community. As dr. Schipper, the Dutch sinologist and practicing Taoist priest, has stressed, ritual is not a 136 symbolic representation of a specific doctrine. Of course, philosophically-minded practitioners may choose to shape ritual so as to physically reflect certain cosmological conceptions. But that is not the point of ritual. By far the most people in world history who have participated in rituals, had little idea of any cosmological or otherwise doctrinal content of the ritual, and yet it performed its function impeccably. A new religious movement, back in the old days, meant not a new doctrine, but a new ritual. So, treating religion as a hotchpotch of beliefs that have no place in a reason-oriented society, that should therefore be thrown out of the public arena, and ultimately also chased out of the private sphere, is based on a crude identification of religion with the crude belief systems of Christianity and Islam. It is only when we discard these narrow ideas about religion, when we broaden and deepen this understanding of religion, to encompass more rational and humanist religions than those two which happen to have conquered the world, that we can have a correct understanding of secularism. It is their utterly superficial notion of religion that has made the secularists devise such a crude and despotic kind of secularism. But are there then no objectively negative and harmful beliefs which a secular state should actively endeavor to weed out ? It is a fact that in the lower stretches of religion, which is a muchencompassing human phenomenon, you find very base superstitions and practices (like witchcraft, but I add that this meaning of the term does injustice to the historical witches, women

who had kept a lot of pre-Christian lore alive, and were consequently blackened in Christian preaching and writing, and burned at the stake). Where such things come in conflict with public morality, health and the law of the land, the state has to intervene on purely secular grounds. But when it comes to "weeding out superstitions" from people's minds, then the secular state has to stand aside and leave it to educators in the broadest sense of the term to transform popular consciousness. Thus, I don't believe the Indian state should wage a campaign against superstitions like the belief that the Creator of the universe has spoken through a prophet, or the belief that a section of humanity has a God-given right to lord it over the unbelievers, or the belief that there is merit in attacking the unbelievers that their religious practices. Even if these beliefs have terrible consequences in the secular filed, like Partitions and riots, it is not the duty of the state to campaign against them. Such superstitions which are in flagrant conflict with scientific universalism, should be dealt with by intellectuals, and the state will have done more than its share if it does not impede the broadcasting of their criticism of these superstitions. The state should just refrain from banning books eventhough they hurt the feelings of those steeped in the said superstitions. It should refrain from pressurizing or boycotting or prosecuting people who perform their legitimate task of educating people concerning such superstitions. It should refrain from imposing history-distortions on schoolbooks, i.e. from concealing the truth about the evil effects of such superstitions. (That the Indian state is so far not secular enough to refrain from this sabotage of the intellectual struggle against superstition, is shown in ch. 12)

10.5 Secularism and Chaturvarnya The doctrine that the realm of thought and the realm of power have to be scrupulously separated, is not an 18th- century European invention. It is abundantly present in the Indian tradition. It is implied in a doctrine and an institution which no-one dares to mention without putting on a grimace of horror and uttering shrieks of indignation : Chaturvarnya, usually mistranslated as the caste system. I may briefly repeat that there is a radical distinction between the division of Hindu society (as of some disappearing tribal societies) in endogamous groups (castes or jatis), and the idealized division into four colours (varnas), which historically has come to be superimposed upon the actual division in castes. Within the varna ideology one should make the distinction between its 137 historically acquired hereditary dimension and its fundamental categorization of the social function into four groups, each with its own duties. So, when I mention varna, please don't start fuming about Brahmin tyranny and the "wretched condition of the downtrodden". What I mean is the distinction between four functions in society : Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya and Shudra, quite apart from the way in which the personnel for these functions gets selected or the way they treat each other. It is a fact of life that "the apple does not fall far from the tree", that children have a statistical tendency to resemble their parents, not only in appearance but also in aptitudes. This trend is strengthened by the traditional social setting, in which children would automatically receive training in their parents' professional skills, in the family business. Nevertheless, the relation between parents' and children's aptitudes is only statistical : there are plenty of cases where young people have a genuine desire for a different kind of profession. Therefore, the Bhagavad Gita says (apparently against a swelling trend to fix profession on birth) that not birth, but aptitude or quality (guna) determines one's varna. The Buddha too said that moral conduct and mental

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disposition, not birth, determined who is a Brahmin. So, the division of human society in four varnas is distinct from its fixation into a hereditary caste system. Another important component of the varna ideology, is the strict separation between the activities of the varnas. In the discussion of indigenous Hindu secularism, we should draw attention to the separation between the two authority-wielding varnas, the Brahmins and the Kshatriyas. In the Varna ideology, the Brahmin is the man of knowledge, whose authority is intellectual and universal : truth does not change with crossing borders. The Kshatriya is the man of action, whose authority is political and subject to limitation in time and space: his authority lasts a legislature and is limited to a state. The idea of separation between these two varnas can ideally be understood as a separation between the secular domain of action and politics, and the non- secular domain of knowledge and spirituality. Like the separation between the three powers in the modern democracy (legislative, executive and judicial), this separation between the domain of power and the domain of the Word 139 must be welcomed as the best way of letting the two domains flourish optimally. The separation between the domain of government and the sphere of thought is not a matter of universal consensus : its antithesis is Plato's notion of the "philosopher-king". This notion is contradictory as well as utopian (which is why the thoroughly realistic social philosophy of Hinduism rejects it), and the philosopher Karl Popper correctly saw it as the ideological core of totalitarianism and as an "enemy of free society". Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo have sometimes described social and political developments in varna terms. Thus, feudalism was Kshatriya Raj, capitalism Vaishya Raj, and 140 communism Shudra Raj. Even in all those countries where no jati system exists, varna categories can be meaningfully applied. For example, modern problems can be described as a mixing-up of caste activities or attitudes. Commercial gurus like Rajneesh are a mix of Brahmin and Vaishya (the profit-oriented varna), corrupt politicians are a mix of Kshatriya and Vaishya. For a poisonous mix of Kshatriya and Brahmin, a classic example is Jawaharlal Nehru. He acted as a Brahmin where he should have been a Kshatriya, and he wanted to use Kshatriya political power to push an ideology and destroy other ideologies, something he should have left to people 141 in Brahmin functions. 142

When the Chinese invaded Tibet, action was called for, a Kshatriya approach. Instead, Nehru philosophized that the Chinese felt strategically insecure, and that therefore their annexation of 143 Tibet was understandable. But understanding is a Brahmin's business, not the duty of a Kshatriya at the helm of a state. In his dealings with Pakistan too, he tried to "see their viewpoint also", and consequently made concessions of which millions of Hindus have suffered the consequences (handing over pieces of territory, stopping the reconquest of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir when it was succeeding, refraining from efforts to enforce the Pakistani part of the Nehru-Liaqat pact). The duty of a ruler is not to see the other party's viewpoint (in the political arena all parties are well capable of looking after their own interests), but to take care of his own people's interests. The 1962 Chinese invasion was the final demonstration that Nehru was singularly unfit to rule the country : instead of keeping an eye on strategic realities, he was indulging in his ideological trip of socialism and non- aligned "peaceful co-existence". This incurable sleepwalker could have made a fine editor of a secularist paper, or some such lower-end Brahmin job, but in Kshatriya functions like ruling a country besieged by enemies, his qualities were quite misplaced. So, the Brahmin and Kshatriya functions have to be kept separate. Rulers should not wage ideological campaigns, they should govern the country taking ideology-based realities as they

are. On the other hand, in a modern state, the ruler is constrained by a philosophy embodied in the Constitution. And his decision are influenced by a general framework of values and ideas. So there is also an intimate connection between ideology and polity, between Brahmin and Kshatriya. More precisely : there is a subordination of polity to ideology, though only to the extent that the exigencies of the political reality leave room for ideological choices. In a sense, that is the application of the hierarchical principle inherent in the varna doctrine : while there is equality in the sense that the actual groupings in society, the jatis, should have a maximum of internal autonomy (their own mores, their own judiciary), and that all people have different duties according to their varna, and need not be concerned with other people's duty, there is a hierarchy in the functions of the varnas. The Shudra (the worker who serves an employer, the artist who please an audience) is subordinate in the sense that he is employed by the other varnas. The Vaishya citizenry is subordinate to the public order enforced by the Kshatriya. And the Kshatriya rulers are, in framing their policies, subordinate to the Brahmin realm of literate culture and ideology. A policy necessarily stems from a social philosophy, which in turn is integrated in a larger world-view. it is in this functional co-operation that the different social functions (varnas) of thought and government, are co- ordinated into a larger social order.

10.6. Sarva Dharma Samabhava The slogan "Sarva dharma samabhava", or "equal respect for all religions" is not a part of Hindu tradition, it is a recent creation of Mahatma Gandhi. One may of course argue that it is in the spirit of Hindu tradition. But that is precisely the question : does "equal respect for all religions" really sum up traditional Hindu secularism? We need not go into the exact meaning of the word dharma here. The Mahatma wrote and thought largely in English, and the original phrase is the English one, so dharma merely figures as a translation of religion. What he meant, was in effect: equal respect for Christianity Islam and Hinduism. Now, some people take this to mean that all religions are equally true. It seems the Mahatma himself has on several occasions put it like that. Latter-day cults like the Baha'i and the Ramakrishna Mission in its new non-Hindu colours, declare that all Prophets, as well as their messages and Scriptures, are "equally true". Of course, this is rank nonsense. The utterances of prophets are just as much statements on which logical operations are possible, as anyone else's statements. Of course, where they use metaphors and other figures of speech, that special type of language has to be taken into account, just as when non- prophets use such language. but effectively, even prophets' statements can be true and untrue, and if that is too hard to swallow, let us at least agree that two prophetic statements can be in conflict, or logically irreconcilable. When Krishna says that it is always He who is the object of devotion, no matter what the form of the mental and physical focus of worship may be (such as gods and idols), he is in logical conflict with Mohammed who declares that Allah does not tolerate other gods beside Himself and wants idols to be destroyed. These two cannot be true at the same time. Either these many forms are fit for worship, or they are not. Now, one might try to be clever and say that at some higher logical level, a synthesis of two opposites is possible. Alright : God's unity and God's multiplicity through many forms are indeed compatible, are two ways of looking at the same thing. But the point in exclusivist doctrines is precisely that this synthesis is rejected. Only one viewpoint takes you to heaven, all the others,

and especially syncretistic attempts to associate idolatrous viewpoints with the strict monotheist viewpoint, lead straight to hell. When two prophets give an opposite opinion on the same question, one can still say that both were not really talking about the same thing, because the cultural circumstances were different. Thus, some founders taught non-violence and non-killing, including strict vegetarianism, while others exhorted their followers to kill and gave the example themselves, and sanctioned animal sacrifices. But then, what is prophethood if it is so determined by cultural circumstances ? If the one and eternal God had one plan for humanity and wanted to teach it his one religion, why is He sending a Mahavira teaching absolute non-violence to one place and a Mohammed teaching war to another place ? It seems there is something wrong with the notion of prophet as an agent sent by the one God. One may distort history and say that the Indians to whom Mahavira preached were less warlike than the Arabs to whom Mohammed preached. This does injustice to both peoples, but mostly to the Pagan Arabs, who were far more humane in their warfare than the Prophet ; but let us now suppose it is true. Then what was the point of God sending prophets, if He just gave the different peoples what they already had ? He sent the Prophets precisely to change things. So, if He could, through Mohammed, make the Arabs give up idolatry, totally alter the position of women, and other such drastic changes, why didn't He also order them to become vegetarians as He had done to the Indians long before via Mahavira ? The answer is that Mahavira wasn't God's spokesman. His insight was human, and he never 144 pretended more than that. Anyone can see for himself that getting killed is an occasion of suffering, so it is something one should not inflict on other sentient beings : that is how nonviolence can be thought up without needing God's intervention. And the state of Liberation or Enlightenment which Upanishadic teachers taught, was always presented as a state which everyone can achieve, not as something which God has exclusively given to this or that chosen prophet. The truth is universal, and to the extent that religions hold up this universal truth, they can be said to be true. But what constitutes the difference between religions, is mostly the way and degree of putting other things than the universal truth in the centre. Some religions take the natural aspiration for truth in their followers, and then channel it towards peculiar and exclusivistic doctrines that have little in common with the universal truth. Let us drop this pipe-dream that all religions are equally true. We may say that the spiritual aspirations in human beings, regardless of the culture they happen to be born into, are equally true. But the belief systems that feed on this basic human urge for universal truth, often by miseducating and misdirecting man towards non- universalist beliefs, cannot at all be said to be equally true. It should be clear that "Sarva dharma samabhava", if interpreted as "equal truth of all religions" oversteps the limits of secularism as a doctrine of the state, unconcerned with the internal affairs of religion : it is a far-reaching statement about the nature of religion itself. It is moreover an untenable statement. It is, on top of that, at least in most of its formulations, far from religiously neutral : it rejects the Hindu humanist conception of religious teachings (as being products of the universal human consciousness), and espouses the Islamic prophetic conception of religious teachings (as being God-given messages). Finally, it discourages critical thought about religion, and is thus opposed to the scientific temper. So, this doctrine of the "equal truth of all religions" is not really helping anyone. We better discard it. Both the line taken by the Communists, that all religions are equally untrue and deserve equal disrespect, and the line taken by the sentimentalists, that all religions are equally worthy of

respect because equally true, do injustice to the fundamentally human character of religious culture. The human intention behind a given religious practice is worthy of respect. But the belief systems and concomitant moral codes are open to criticism, like any human construction, and some of them may be discarded, even while others may stand the test of experience and remain sanatana, forever. So, there is no apriori equality between religions. It is a different matter that people believing in superstitious doctrines still deserve equal respect with the people whose insight is more advanced. In that sense there should of course be "equal respect for all religions". To conclude this reflection on the "equality of all religions", let us mention the view that secularism is really a synthesis of all religions. Secularist Mahesh Jethmalani agrees with the BJP view that a common civil code for members of all religious communities in India is a legitimate demand of secularism, but he agrees on the basis of an unusual interpretation of the term: "The [uniform civil code] is in keeping with the needs of a modern Republic. It is devoid of Hindu ritualism and is rational in the extreme. It is religiously neutral, in that it calls upon the Hindu as much as the Muslim to eschew traditional ways of life in the interests of a new 'national religion' 145 which synthesizes the best from all the religions in the land." It goes without saying that our secularist's bias is showing. On top of his explicit exclusives against Hindu ritualism, there is his stress on synthesis, which very word is enough to enchant a 146 Hindu, but incapable of arousing a Muslim's interest. This synthesis of the best of all religions is a make-believe, which is held up to fool Hindus, but which the members of a number of religions will scornfully reject, because it would go against the exclusive claims which constitute the basic identity of their religions. Moreover, our secularist's utter superficiality and non- comprehension of religion is showing. As Mahatma Gandhi understood well enough, in spite of his prayer-sessions with readings from different Scriptures, one religion (in his case Hinduism) is quite sufficient to guide an an individual all through life. A "combination of religions" is as nonsensical as two suns shining in the sky. What is possible is one broad-minded religion which can assimilate new forms : one Sanatana Dharma which is intrinsically pluralist, and can appreciate new accents (as on brotherhood and 147 social service ) proposed by other religions. But a synthesis of the doctrines that everyone makes his own Liberation through yoga,, that Jesus has brought Salvation once and for all, and that you get a ticket to Heaven by affirming that Mohammed is the final Prophet, is simply nonsense. Synthesis implies the rejection of the rejection of synthesis. So it means the rejection of the exclusivist claims of Islam and Christianity. I agree with our secularist that synthesis and a "new national religion" are the solution. That "national religion" is age-old, it is Sanatana Dharma. But this Dharma is sanat kumar, eternally young, so it is indeed new, especially to those who are under the spell of secularism and have blacked out from their consciousness this age-old heritage. The most surprising thing about Mahesh Jethmalani's secularism, is that it is quite the opposite of a separation of state and religion : it has the ambition of creating and promoting a religion through state arrangements like the common civil code. In my secularist homeland, we have a uniform civil code, but no one there is fantastic enough to see it as a stratagem in a larger project of floating a new religion. In fact, we think it is none of the state's business to create, destroy, promote, discourage, or indeed to synthesize a religion. We think it is none of the state's business to "call upon [members of the different religions] to eschew traditional ways of life": those ways that are in conflict with the law, are simply forbidden, and all others, traditional or not, are simply left to the people's own choice. The secular state is not making any call to eschew any ways of life whatsoever. A truly secular state is by definition not a despotic state. It does not choose or devise or synthesize a religion for you. It is a self-restrained state. That is why the Nehruvian socialist

doctrine of a hungry state, with state initiative and state guidance, has naturally combined with a perverted and despotic kind of secularism.

10.7. Dharma The official Hindi term for secularism is dharmanirpekshata, i.e.dharma-neutrality. Critics of Nehruvian secularism say the correct translation would be panthanirpekshata or sampradayanirpekshata, i.e. sect- neutrality. Of course, sect-neutrality is an indispensable component of secularism. Perhaps the secularist translators wanted to add another component by preferring the term dharma- neutrality. The word religion, in most European languages, can be both an uncountable and a countable 148 substantive. As an uncountable, it means "the religious dimension", and leaves any sect-wise or belief-wise contents to that religious dimension unspecified. As a countable, it means "a religion", "a set of religious doctrines and practices", "a sect united around common doctrines and practices". As a translation of both these uses of the term religion, westernized Indians have employed the word dharma. As an example of the countable use, the well- known Gandhian slogan sarvadharma-samabhava means "equal respect for all religions". "A dharma" here means "a religion". By contrast, the expression Dharma Rajya uses dharma as an uncountable. it is, however, not normally rendered as "rule of religion" but as "rule of righteousness". And that opens the discussion of the exact meaning of the term dharma. Dharma means : that which sustains. Every singular or composite entity has its own dharma, its swadharma. All the composite classes to which an entity belongs, have again their own dharma. Thus, an individual his dharma, which is partly specific to himself, partly in common with the family he belongs to : kula-dharma. This in turn is partly in common with the jati to which the family belongs : the jati-dharma. In the varnaideology, every jati is categorized under one of the four varnas, so the jati-dharma will partly be differentiating from the other classes within the varna, and partly be the common dharma of the entire varna. Further, all varnas, and all classifications of any kind, ultimately share in a universal human dharma, manava- dharma. And this in turn is part of the over-all cosmic dharma (the cosmic ordered pattern, for which the specific Vedic term is Rta). Let us give another example that has nothing to do with traditional Hindu society. Every individual cow has her own dharma. While partly individual, it is largely a common dharma of the cow species : the biological characteristics and functions that define the cow's role in the larger ecosystem. The cow dharma is partly specific, partly in common with the mammal dharma (skipping several intermediate classifications), which is again partly mammal-specific, partly in common with the all-vertebrates dharma. The vertebrate dharma is partly the all-animal dharma, which is partly specific and differentiating from the plant dharma, and partly the common dharma of all living beings. Thus, self- regulation and procreation are the dharma of all living beings, but the animal dharma involves breathing oxygen while the plant dharma involves breathing carbondioxide. Materially, one's dharma is the actualization of an inner programming (primarily, but not exhaustively, the genetic programming). Formally, it is the playing of a role within the larger ecosystem, in interaction with all the other entities with their own allotted dharmas.

This inner programming which determines one's dharma, is called guna, quality, characteristics, or more uniquely swabhava, own nature. In lower species, this programming is exclusively biological, i.e. mostly genetical and partly environmental. In man, one section of the environmental factors, called learning or education, gains immensely in importance. So, an individual's guna is partly uniquely individual, partly in common with his family, tribe, etc. through genetics as well as through a common environment (common experiences), and it is partly a matter of learning (a directed programme of experiences), and to that extent it is in common with those who go through the same learning. The integration into the larger system is an automatical affair in the lower species. In man, it is in large measure a matter of conscious assent to what is consciously perceived as one's role in the larger whole. In lower life forms, as in machine, dharma is the actual functioning of a norm, the fact that processes do not take place at random, but conform to and preserve a given order, e.g. the thermoregulation processes which preserve a constant body temperature in mammals, or the maintenance of the optimum population level of a given species within a given ecosystem. In human society, it is partly that, because man participates in the general biological laws ; but partly, the human dharma is a conscious participation in the actualization and the upholding of a system of norms. To that extent, the manava-dharma is not merely the actual functioning of an inbuilt norm, but the conscious acceptance and fulfilling of one's duty. So, for the individual human being, dharma primarily means duty. Dharma means the acceptance and fulfillment of one's duty, i.e. the behaviour and occupation corresponding to one's place within the system. For society as a whole, it means the integrative system comprising all individual and group duties. it is the social order which is upheld by the conscious participation of all members. Now what does this have to do with religion ? Hindu social philosophy recognizes four goals (purusharthas) in human life: Kama (pleasure), Artha (gain), Dharma (duty) and Moksha (liberation). It is clear that religion in its strictest and highest sense, as the individual's spiritual life, belongs to the fourth aim, liberation. The inner spiritual process, the freeing oneself of bondage through purification of the mind, is directed towards moksha. Then where did dharma get to be associated with religion ? The dharma is the norm system which ideally regulates all human activity. Man's life is ordered by the social as well as by the larger cosmic order. Now, there is a specific category of activities, which have no other use or function, except to explicitate man's integration in a social or cosmic order. For instance, one ordering of human society is the division in age groups. Every primitivesociety has rituals explicating this ordering dimension : the rites of passage from one age group to the next. For another instance, one dimension of the cosmic order, is the division of the year cycle in seasons. The starting-points of the seasons may be defined astronomically (solstice, equinox, full or empty moon), or through atmospherical or terrestrial events (end of the harvest, first rain), but at any rate, they divide the year into different stages, each with its own characteristics and concomitant human activities (its own dharma), which altogether form a cycle or recurring totality. The celebrations at each of these fixed points of the year cycle, have no other function but to explicitate this aspect (of unity through a differentiation into different phases each with its own dharma) of the cosmic order. Celebrations and rituals are an essential aspect of dharma. One can be born, become a man, start living with a woman, exchange this life for the next, all without any pomp or ritual. It can be done : animals do it. but it is not done. Precisely because man is a conscious being, he wants to give conscious expression to the different phases that make up a cycle, and to the different functions that make up a society. That is one of the reasons why people wear job-specific uniforms. That is the reason why children are baptized, why diplomas are handed out in a big ceremony, why couples are wedded in great gathering of friends and relatives, with a specific ritual, why another ritual is gone through to say farewell to someone who has died, etc.

So, in that sense, rituals and celebrations are the most human component of our participation in the social and cosmic order, of our dharma. Take for instance, the Holi festival. Holi is first of all a spring celebration. The exuberant ritual of throwing paint at eachother and not sparing eachother at all, is a variety of the standard elements of spring rituals the world over. In some places in Europe, on the first real spring day, i.e. when the sun is out and it unmistakably feels like spring, youngsters from upper-storey windows pour buckets of water on unsuspecting passers-by. The logic is that on the first day of spring, people need to wake up from their winter slumber. So, spring rituals like Holi are shocking and unrespectful. On top of that, it seems that Holi also has a varna connotation : it is the day of the Shudra varna, when the class of people who habitually get their hands dirty, are free to draw the other varnas into a celebration of their own part in society. Similarly, Raksha Bandhan ("bond of protection", the day of the thread) is the celebration of the Brahmin varna, Vijayadashami (victory day) of the Kshatriya varna, and Deepawali (apart from being a typical autumn festival, with candles to get through the dark months) celebrates the Vaishya varna. So, every function in society gets explicit expression on a specially reserved day. This is how dharma, the system of duties, gives rise to rituals and celebrations, the things that we often categorize under the heading religion. So, dharma, or duty, in its broader sense implies also the activities that explicitate the world order, the useless rituals and celebrations, which from the outer or public part of religion. Modernist bores, of course, are against all this waste of money and especially of time. Under their pressure, some religious people have tried to de-emphasize the role of rituals and celebrations, and stressed the religious dimension of useful work: "Work is worship". But the modernists can't be appeased with this defensive excuse, so in a recent seminar in Delhi, they countered it with an extended slogan : "Work is worship, but worship is not work". So, it is time to explain to these people that the value of these rituals and celebrations resides in the very fact that they are not work, that they are meant not to be useful. They are a popular way of directly tuning in to the larger order, of explicating the order of which our activities are implicitly a part, of strengthening the awareness that makes the daily treadmill of useful work meaningful. This expression of awareness of the world order constitutes the difference between animals, who simply obey and fulfill this order, and human being, who consciously participate in it. Anyway, we have established that dharma basically means dutyand "participation in the social order". In the broader sense, it means all the customs and rituals that give expression to this social order, to its values and norms. In a broad sense, we could call thisculture. The purely nonfunctional, expressive and ritual part of it, can be called religion, as long as we don't forget that there is a deeper, inner dimension to religion which is not concerned with the world order, but on the contrary with moksha (i.e. unconcern with the world). From the basic meaning, we may derive the meaning : the virtue of being conscious of and faithful to one's duty. And since duty is defined relative to the world order, this can be re-worded as : the virtue of respecting and upholding the world order. The common translation of this derived meaning is righteousness. Thus, Dharma Rajya is "rule of righteousness". That is what Ram Rajya, Ram's rule, is supposed to epitomize and symbolize. The same meaning, we find in Dharma Yuddha, the "war of righteousness". Some people, very ignorant or inspired by anti-Hindu motives, translate this as religious war. And then they conclude : see, you Hindus, you also have this concept of crusade or jihad. In reality, the "war of righteousness" is not a jihad at all. Dharma Yuddha means firstly a chivalrous war, a war in which a number of rules are observed, a war in which the world order is respected, as opposed to the all-out war in which anything goes as long as it results in victory. Secondly, it can be stretched to mean (but this is non- classical) a war in defense of the world order, against those violate and threaten this order. Dharma is concerned with people's conduct (achaar), not with their belief or opinion (vichaar). Therefore, a Dharma Yuddha is by definition never directed

against unbelievers or "heterodox believers", but exclusively against people who through their actions break the rules and arrangements that constitute the world order. In this connection, the Mahabharata, and especially its episode known as the Bhagavad Gita, is sometimes mentioned as containing the Hindu doctrine of "Religious War". In reality, the Gita is explicitly not about a war between Believers and Unbelievers, between Chosen ones and Doomed ones. For instance, Dronacharya is equally attached to the Pandavas as to the kauravas, both have been his pupils, but because of his specific secular status, he is duty-bound to fight on the Kaurava side. It is purely worldly events that had pitted the two camps against eachother, not a theology. The Kauravas had violated the order by breaking an agreement with the Pandavas and remaining irreconcilable in their unrighteous position. They had not refused to accept some belief system, they had merely violated a secular agreement. After that, honour and the secular interest of their family force the Pandavas to take up arms. This is now their duty, as Krishna reminds the wavering Arjuna. The religious element in the Gita pre-battle discussion is, that the capacity for doing one's secular duty is grounded in an insight into the true nature of the Self, who is a foreigner incarnated in this world, and not affected by the worldly situations in which he finds it his duty to operate. So, the concepts of "dharma" and "religion" overlap only partly. The term dharmanirpekshata becomes a bit absurd or even sinister when it turns out to say "duty- neutrality" or "righteousnessneutrality" (though it applies accurately to the utter corruption in which Nehru's secular socialism has plunged the Indian state). The absurdity really comes out when we translate it as "valuesystem-neutrality". You just cannot have a polity without a value-system that sustains the unity and integrity of the whole. Even secularism implies something of a value-system. So, if we start from the uncountable use of the word dharma (righteousness etc.), we have to reject dharmanirpekshata as the translation for the Western concept of "secularism". Let us consider the countable use : one dharma, two dharmas, etc. As we have seen, this use of the word exists. There is the soldier's dharma, the sweeper's dharma, the schoolboy's dharma, etc. There is the individual dharma, the occupational dharma, the family dharma, the tribal dharma, and of course the state dharma. So there are indeed many dharmas. Every entity has its own duty or value system, based on its definition, its characteristics, its place in the larger whole. The state too has its own dharma. The state's dharma is not at all neutral, it is very specific. It is different from the school dharma, from the prison dharma, from the village dharma. To illustrate its distinct dharma, the state, like every entity, has its own dharma-typical celebrations. In a Saint Thomas school, they celebrate Saint Thomas feast. In a family (at least in the West), they celebrate every member's birthday. In a village, they have a celebration upon completion of the harvest. And the Indian Republic celebrates Independence Day and Republic Day. So, in a world of many dharmas, the secular state too has its own dharma. There is no room for any dharma- neutrality. Let us use the words in their proper meaning. Secularism is sectneutrality, sampradayanirpekshata. This term at once expresses the opposition to sampradayikta, sectarianism (or communalism). This precise and unambiguous translation also clinches the issue regarding yet another term proposed as the equivalent ofsecularism : Lokayat. This term means worldliness. It was the name of an ancient school of thought, mostly known as thematerialists. One could say they were atheist and even anti-religious (the two are not synonymous, cfr. Buddha's atheist religion), but they were just as much a sampradaya, a sect. And materialism and atheism are just as much belief systems as theism, monotheism, pantheism and the rest. By contrast, secularism is not a belief system. It is merely a political arrangement that separates the state from sects and belief

systems. So, regarding the Lokayat-sect, both ancient and modern (the Leftist sampradaya), and regarding the atheist belief system, the secular state has to kept strict non-commitment and neutrality.

11. The riots 11.1 Reporting vs. comment "The 'progressive' people in this country show a remarkable eagerness to see communalism even in the most harmless observations of [Hindu] religious leaders, while overlooking such outrageously communal and provocative statements as the one made by the former government official Syed Shahabuddin, that contact with the Hindus debased the Muslim, or the one by Syed Abdullah Bukhari, the Imam of the Jama Masjid in Delhi, that the Muslims would resort to a civil 149 war." This observation by Subhash Chandra Sarkar is quite correct, and it explains the peculiar features of press reporting on communal riots. The progressive pressmen attribute every riot to "Hindu communalism raising its ugly head", while justifying or explaining away the undeniable cases of Muslim communalist violence. When reading the press reports about communal riots, one should make a distinction between two stages of riot reporting. The day after a riot breaks out, the press will just write what happened, in some detail. The report will be a little bit blurred by the obligatory usage of nondefinite terms for the communities involved : "As members of one community passed through an area dominated by another community, stones were thrown at them", etc. But the experienced reader can mostly understand who is who. However, the editorials devoted to these instances of communal carnage are not interested in the details of the matter, and in their effort to allot guilt and suggest remedies, they often implicitly start from a riot scenario which is totally unsupported by the factual details that appeared in the first report. The autumn of 1990 has offered some striking examples of this recurring press phenomenon. For instance, about the Hyderabad violence of December 1990 there could be no doubt whatsoever about who was the aggressor and who the victim. The violence was, according to press reports, started by revenge action of Muslims against the police, for killing an influential Muslim goonda, Mohammed Sardar. This man was a convicted murderer, and while free on parole, he had killed a policeman, and gone underground. When the police caught up with him, 150 he was killed in an exchange of firing. This encountertriggered a wave of stabbing by people belonging to the same community as this Mohammed. Not only in Hindu-Muslim terms it is very clear who started, but also in miscreant-police terms: the first victim was not the Muslim goonda, but a policeman. it is not thepartisan anti-Hindu police who killed the victims for whose murder Mohammed Sardar was convicted, it was not they who killed the policeman that was killed by him, and it was not they who started the stabbing. Moreover, while in many riots Muslims take the initiative but then lose it to the more numerous 151 Hindus, here it was the Muslims who were on the attack all through the weeks of violence. The Statesman reported : "An unusual feature of the current clashes was the heavy toll inflicted on the majority community, forcing many of them to flee their hearth and homes south of the Musi, which were immediately occupied by members of the minority community." The inserted comment that heavy suffering on the part of the Hindus is unusual, is of course based on secularist estimates. The report continues: "House-to-house searches in the [predominantly Muslim] old city yielded a rich haul of weapons, imported from the north."

But in the same issue, the editorial has heard nothing of Muslim attacks, Muslim goondas, Muslim arms caches. Under the caption Spark from Ayodhya, it writes : "If the trouble in Aligarh followed the stabbing of a policeman [by a member of an unnamed you-know-which community], it is not yet clear what caused the eruption in Hyderabad. Nor is it worthwhile any longer to look for 152 specific reasons since a focal point already exists." The focal point is (guess once) the BJP/VHP's "cynical, vote- catching policies relating to the disputed shrines in Ayodhya". If one would believe the columns in the national English- language press, Mr. Advani's Rathyatra has left a trail of bloodshed. But when one turns to the actual reports of the riots, this very serious allegation turns out to be totally contradicted by the facts. During the Rathyatra, which was underway for about a month until it was stopped on October 22, there were some riots in Karnataka, and many very serious riots in Uttar Pradesh in the first state, Advani had only tipped the North-East corner on his way from Maharashtra to Andhra Pradesh, in the second he had not set foot at all. Now, those who are biased and perforce need to blame Advani, can say that at least he created the atmosphere that led to the riots. But then they should explain how he managed to cause riots five hundred miles distant from his Rathyatra, and none in its vicinity. Where he could personally impress his atmosphere on audiences, there was no violence, but where it was only a distant echo, it would have moved people to utter barbarities like those that took place in Gonda, U.P.: a strange explanation. To my mind, it would seem that such an explanation does not spring from thescientific temper which secularism seeks to inculcate, but rather from a political compulsion to blame the Hindu campaign at any cost and/or to shield the real culprit.

11.2 Inspiring and starting riots A far more logical explanation for the non-occurrence of riots in or near the Rathyatra, and the large-scale occurrence of serious riots in Uttar Pradesh, is this. For the common Hindu, the passing of the Ram Rath was a joyous religious event, perhaps compounded by a sense of relief or even victory because it announced the symbolical righting of the centuries of persecution inflicted by Muslim rulers upon the Hindus. At any rate, it was a happy affair that sweetened the atmosphere rather than create bitterness and violence. Moreover, mr. Advani in his speeches called on all Indians to celebrate and to cultivate harmony. That his speeches were not inflammatory, I know for certain even though I heard not one of them : mr. Advani has many enemies who watch him for discrediting mistakes, and if he had made any objectionable statement, it would have been splashed across the front pages. It may be true, as some papers have written, that some local BJP leaders did make inflammatory speeches. but at least the starring speaker called for peace and harmony, and the very invoking of Ram created a positive atmosphere good enough to yield the actual result that no riots place. By contrast, in Uttar Pradesh the ubiquitous public speaker was chief minister Mulayam Singh Yadav, a man with an impressive crime record (highlighted in Illustrated Weekly after the 1989 elections, but now forgotten thanks to his uncompromisingsecularism), who gave very inflammatory and confrontationist speeches : "Not even a bird shall be able to enter Ayodhya", for"We will crush them". The power of the word was demonstrated once more : while the man who called for self-restraint and harmony had a peaceful Rathyatra, the man who called for 153 confrontation, got confrontation. In spite of unprecedented police deployment and curfews in many towns, riots broke out. A recurring scenario, in conformity with the general pattern of Hindu-Muslim riots in the twentieth century, was that Hindu processions, especially the Ram Jyoti processions, were attacked when passing through Muslim- dominated areas. These attacks were largely a materialization of all the fiery curses that Mulayam in his mass rallies had cast upon the Ram processions. In many cases,

the Hindus retaliated by attacking any Muslims they could find, which unfortunately were mostly innocent bystanders. Or villagers who got involved in a riot in town went back to their village and attacked the Muslims they could find there (that was the scenario of the huge Bhagalpur carnage of 1989, this repeated on a smaller scale in Gonda). However, it seems it was not only by the power of the word that those riots got going. The Gonda riot started when actual bombs were thrown at a Hindu procession. According to press reports as well as the report by a BJP fact-finding team, at least one of them had been thrown from the local Janata Dal office by people working for Munnan Khan, the local MLA. This man is a friend of the chief minister : with the latter's support, he was elected in 1989 as an independent candidate (though a JD member) against the official candidate of the anti- Congress combine (a BJP man). After people had been killed in this unilateral attack on the procession (officially six ; according to Congress MP Anand Singh, one hundred), mutual fighting broke out. And still later, some Hindu hotheads took out revenge parties to Muslim quarters outside the city. Many papers have, in their final overview of the riot, consciously blurred the first stage of the Gonda riot, and highlighted the last stage in order to absolve the Muslims and put the blame on he Hindus, i.e. on the Janmabhoomi movement, i.e. on L.K. Advani who was far away. Consider this report in the Times of India :"The procession numbering about 5000 people was wending its way through the narrow streets of Colonelganj shouting some slogans which could be deemed provocative in an atmosphere of tension, when it was attacked with stones, bombs and other missiles. The attack allegedly began from the roof of the Janata Dal office, according to 154 some shopkeepers whose shops were gutted." This suggests that slogan-shouting on the part of the processionists has causedthe violence. But of course, bombs are not picked up and thrown in an emotional reaction to inflammatory slogans, as too many journalists would like us to believe. Bombs are quite certainly purchased or made beforehand, and a bomb-attack is definitely premeditated. In fact, on rooftops not even loose-lying stones are that readily available for impulsive acts of stone-throwing. It is very clear to an unbiased reader that the Gonda carnage has started with a pre-meditated attack on the procession. Going by the original newspaper reports, some Janata Dal miscreantsaffiliated with Muslim party leaders were the aggressors, and the processionists were the victims. However, it is in the nature of aggression that the victims get the blame. Thus, a rapist will usually say that the girl had asked for it, that she had provokedhim. Here too, it is not stated simply that the processionists were attacked. Rather, it is said in goonda-speak, approvingly broadcast by the secularist press, that the procession has provoked violenceand caused riots. In the same newspaper report, mention is made of an earlier incident: "It all began with a girl being teased by anti-social elements owing allegiance to one Talukdar Khan." Even for this earlier stage of the communal conflict, the paper does not hide what side started. And then it goes on to say that "the other side was provoked and mobbed his house", without specifying how exactly they were "provoked" by the Muslims, upon which "he drew up plans with his supporters 155 to attack the procession on September 30". So, at every stage of the escalation, you see Muslims starting, Hindus merely reacting, and Muslims pre- planning large-scale violence. And it is not me who says so, I read this in the reporting of secularist newspapers (though not on their Opinion page). These are indications from unsuspected sources that members of the Muslim community take a disproportionately large part in starting communal violence.

11.3. Received wisdom on riots As a foreigner, I have no access to certain archives, much less to police records. But going by the riot information generally available, I do find that there is truth in the received wisdom that

1. a clear majority of the riots are started by Muslims, 2. a clear majority of the victims are Muslims, at least in the final count 3. a clear majority of the victims shot by the police (not including the Kar Sevaks) are Muslims; the police in most of these case claims self-defense against attacks by mobs or snipers. To start with an unsuspected source, Mufti Mohammed Saiyid, Home minister, made a statement on communal riots between January and April 1990. It lists nine riots, with their causes. The 156 monthly Muslim India reproduces the list , but omits parts of the stated causes of five of the riots, e.g.: "Clash between anti-social elements...on black marketing of cinema tickets". This leaves the reader guessing what was omitted. The causes of two other riots are stated in the wellknown indeterminate terminology: "Alleged misbehavior with a girl of the other community". but the two remaining riot causes, the only ones clearly saying which community was attacked (and leaving little doubt as to which community attacked), are these : "Stoning of Holi procession passing a place of worship", and "Alleged murder of the president of VHP, Kheda District, by persons belonging to other community". One might of course start blaming any possible (I hasten to prefixalleged) provocative slogans uttered by the processionists and by that local VHP leader; but normally, people who start the violence, like throwing stones or committing murder, are held responsible for these acts, and at least partly responsible for the reactive violence which they may trigger. It is humanly quite feasible to listen to objectionable and insulting slogans without having a knee-jerk reaction of throwing bombs. It is a free human decision to react with violence. At worst, slogans can be a reason for violence ; given human freedom, they can never be the cause. This take excuse of the provocative slogans leading mechanically to stone-throwing and worse, is used routinely by biased reporters. For another example, on October 30 there was a riot in Bijnor, with officially 14 people killed, others say 55. A procession with about 100 women members of Durga Vahini had gone out to the Ghanta Ghar area. "There they raised communal slogans, 157 resulting in stone-pelting and bomb-throwing." This cheap excuse for a pre-planned bomb attack is even contradicted by other information in the same article. Superintendent of Police Praveen Singh arrested Municipal Chairman Javed Aftab Siddiqui, alleged to have masterminded the riot. District Magistrate Ramesh Yadav confirmed that the violence was instigated by J.A. Siddiqui. This case proves that newspapers keep on blaming the slogan-shouters even when it is crystal-clear from their own information that the violence was premeditated and engineered by the other side. Let's hear some examples of newspapers inadvertently reporting that Muslims have started riots, in late 1990. On October 29,"members of two communities indulged in heavy brickbatting, stabbing and exchange of fire. The whole trouble started when Kar Sevaks shouting antigovernment slogans burnt the effigy of the chief minister, mr. Mulayam Singh Yadav [so far, no158 one hurt], and members of the other community objected to this." In Lucknow, BJP people "marched towards Moulviganj shouting slogans. Seeing the frenzied mob advancing towards them the members of the other community took up positions and pelted 159 stones and missiles, resulting in a violent clash." In Bulandshahr, near Aligarh, a bomb factory was discovered when it exploded, due to uncareful handling of the precious factory output. Since many riots, including the big ones of Bhagalpur and Gonda, have started with bomb attacks on processions, many Hindus believe that Muslims have

started to manufacture bombs illegally. That may not be a communalist prejudice, for the owner of the factory, who died in the explosion (with three of his friends wounded) had at least a Muslim 160 name. In the same mohalla,"nine countrymade bombs and a huge quantity of explosives were 161 recovered". An article titled Anatomy of Carnage reports: "In Ganj Dundwara in Etah, the spark was provided by a minor injury to a Muslim girl caught in a melee of 100-odd two- wheelers escorting BJP MP 162 Uma Bharati." So, this says that the Muslim girl had not been attacked, not even while Uma Bharati was whipping up communal passions, but then the Muslims retaliated to this non-attack by attacking the Hindu crowd. And in Hyderabad, "the latest about of violence broke out after a leader of the Majlis- e-Ittehad-ul-Muslimeen (MIM) was injured on December 5 following a private land dispute. Within minutes of his admission into hospital - [it] was not serious -- MIM supporters killed a Hindu traveling in an autorickshaw." So, the dispute was neither communal nor serious, and then Muslims made it communal and serious by attacking and killing a non-involved Hindu. While this article lists a number of riots that had a precise local cause, the whole wave of violence is attributed in one sweep to, of course, Ayodhya : "There is no denying that the flames of communal hatred which scorched the towns of Uttar Pradesh and Hyderabad were the consequence of state impotence in responding to the message of revenge and hatred that echoed with every frenzied call for a Ram Mandir at Ayodhya." BJP leader V.K. Malhotra has aptly ridiculed this facile allegation in a speech in the Lok Sabha :"The country has witnessed 2500 riots between 1950 and 1990. Godhra city had communal riots in 1947, 52, 59, 61, 65, 67, 72, 74, 80, 83, 89 and 90. Were all of these caused by the Rathyatra ?" He pointed out that those who were painting a grim picture of the minorities being massacred, were doing a great disservice to the country and giving it a bad name. The fact was that 90% of the people killed in Hyderabad were Hindus. The riots in Delhi (Sadar Bazaar, on November 14) had been engineered by Muslims, as even the Shahi Imam had admitted (even while the report by the Leftist IPF had sophisticatedly blamed economical rivalries and the Congress163 I). In Sambhal (Moradabad, U.P.) all those killed were Hindus, and yet the BJP was being blamed. Mr. Malhotra also reminded his colleagues that the ex- chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, Chenna Reddy, and Andhra opposition leader N.T. Rama Rao had said that the BJP had had no role in the Hyderabad riots. That M.J. Akbar, spokesman of the Congress fact-finding team (some called it a fault-finding team), kept on blaming the BJP, only added to the widespread suspicion that a Congress faction had fomented the riots in order to make Chenna Reddy step down and make room for a Chief Minister more agreeable to the party leadership. The same explanation has also been given for the October riots in Karnataka, which had equally forced a Congress Chief Minister to step down. On the U.P. riots, Mr. Malhotra said that they had been caused by the inflammatory speeches delivered by the Chief Minister:"It was he who had asked Muslims all over the state to were these 164 irresponsible utterances that caused the trouble in that state." We may conclude that the whole business of blaming Hindu organizations and political parties has little to do with the actual responsibility. While this dirty and futile game may be forgiven to politicians, it is unacceptable from newsman and independent intellectuals. But it is not only the automatical blaming of the Hindutva organization that has lost its credibility. The blaming of politicians in general only touches the surface of the problem. It is quite possible that the Congress has used communal riots in order to get its own Andhra and Karnatka chief ministers replaced; and if is not true, at least some other party-political ploys are surely behind some of the riots. But then, that is only possible because a riotproneness already characterizes the communal co-existence in India. The unscrupled and cynical use of communal friction by politicians is bad

enough, but this problem is just a parasite on the more fundamental problem: the communalism inherent in India's Hindu-Muslim relation.

11.4 Muslims and the police The mutual enmity between the Muslim community and the police is a well-known feature of India's communal friction. Both parties say the other one always starts. This is what newspaper reports say:"A head constable was killed in an assault in Mirzapur area [of Ahmedabad] while a brother of a constable was stabbed to death in Gomitpur area. Another person was also killed in 165 stabbing... The head constable was stoned to death by a group of rioting mob..." Whatever the name of you- known-which community that stabs and stones policemen and their family members: at any rate, the police clearly have a point when they claim they are often put in a situation of pure self-defense. In the Hyderabad violence,"police were finding it difficult to enforce curfew in the lanes and bylanes of the [predominantly Muslim] Old City. People on the roof- tops were pelting stones on the police. On Friday morning, about 200 people gathered... at around 11a.m. and began pelting stones at the houses of members belonging to one [i.e.Hindu] community, besides indulging in stabbing, looting and torching houses and shop. to quell this mob,police opened fire...resulting in the death of one person and injuries to three others. In view of the seriousness of the situation, police clamped curfew at around 12.30 p.m... By this time, nearly 15 persons had been 166 stabbed." In Aligarh, "miscreants spread the rumour that two constables had been stabbed by AMU student". These terrible rumour-mongers fortunately had it all wrong: "Senior officials, however, said that the two constable were only beaten up with hockey sticks". Ah, so the aversion of Muslim students for policemen is not that bad after all. Even more reassuring is the explanation given by the AMU vice-chancellor, prof.M.N.Farooqi: "The students have formed vigilance groups. One such group stopped two or three constables when they were entering the university 167 in plain clothes. And a fight ensued." After stating that the AMU vigilance groups routinely beat up people dressed in plain clothes, he doesn't add what would have been the procedure if they had been in uniform. Stabbing instead of hockey sticks? In fairness, Hindu students of BHU have also taken on the police, albeit only with some stonethrowing, and only after beingprovoked by a ban on the demonstration they wanted to take out against the Aligarh killings. A lathicharge was enough to control the situation, and on one got killed. In Aligarh however, the situation must have been very grim for the policemen, for they went to the unusual length of not resuming duty on October 13, after their two colleagues had been attacked. These attacks had by far not been the only ones, and now the policemen were not even allowed to defend themselves anymore. That at least is pro-Muslim. "So he has ordered us not fire on them even as we are being attacked by them every day. We can't even fire in self-defense." The 168 policemen even quoted him as saying: Go die, but don't kill. A BJP spokesman said that the violence in Aligarh had started when a Friday mob [i.e. coming from the mosque] assaulted a policeman and snatched his rifle. "The violence spread to other areas of town including AMU, which has always been a hotbed of communalism." The BJP spokesman, J.P.Mathur, also alleged that in Badaun two boys were caught throwing a bomb at a mosque and turned out to be Muslims: a genuine case of provocation. He also reported that a murderous assault had been made on BJP MP Uma Bharati, known for her fiery Ayodhya 169 speeches.

Another version of the Aligarh eruption says that on December 7,"some youths came out of a mosque after the Friday prayers and confronted a PAC picket in the Kotwali area. From all accounts the PAC overreacted, and thus began an orgy of violence..." Thus ? We have not been told anything precise about how it began. What does confronted mean ? Further on in the article, about the same incident we read that " when the PAC men were confronted by the Muslim youths, they first fired plastic bullets but resorted to firing when three of their men, including the 170 senior superintendent of police, were injured." This makes sufficiently clear that the PAC had a point when they invoked self-defense as a legitimate ground for firing. Nevertheless Muslim leaders and secularists go on blaming the police Local Congress leader Haji Nooruddin said :"Had the police shown a little more restraint, the slogan-shouting youths would have dispersed without any major damage." From the reports, it is clear that the Muslims youths attacked the police. But even if Haji Nooruddin is right in equating this attack with mere, we may remind him that according to Muslim and secularist commentators, slogan-shouting mechanically and irremediably (and therefore, excusably)provokes bomb- throwing or other lethal reactions. So these Muslim youths who confronted the police, even if it had been with mere slogans, should not complain ; just like the Hindu processionists who get killed by Muslim bombs without any secularist editorial to weep for them. Janata Dal leader Ajit Singh reportedly charged the PAC with collusion [with the Hindus] and has questioned its presence "in a cent per minority locality in Aligarh". And he attributed the violence to Uma Bharati's speeches and L.K. Advani's Rathyatra. With that"he indirectly admits that the 171 minority community was provoked to attack first", comments reader Sahil Brelvi. And he adds a report of another riot : "I was in Bareilly on December 7 and the facts ascertained from authentic sources and reported widely in the local newspapers point to a pre- planned mischief by the minority community, in collusion with the Janata Dal and the Left parties to teach a lesson to the VHP. The trouble started immediately after Friday prayers when the mob fanned out on a killing spree in all directions shouting jihad. One crusadersnatched the rifle of a policeman on duty signaling the trouble and punitive action by the police." If Muslim bomb-throwing has to be glossed over on the ground that it was provoked by slogans, then why all this uproar about police action which, after all, has merely been provoked by jihad ? So, rather than blaming the police, mr. Ajit Singh and many other secularists should answer mr. Brelvi's questions : "Why the communal trouble starts on Fridays after jama prayers, as in Aligarh, Hyderabad and elsewhere ? How can the police succeed in flushing out the illegal arms and check the attackers without being posted on the troubled spot ? Why is it that illegal arms are mostly recovered from minority areas ?" M. Brelvi also makes short work of the reports blaming the PAC :"Not long ago in Meerut, the earlier reports of PAC 'excesses' in Maliana on the minority community were found baseless, when handgrenades and bullets with Pakistan Ordnance Factory markings were recovered by the same PAC." And this is what happened in Kanpur on December 12 :"In a major flare-up on Wednesday, armed mobs came on the roads in curfew-bound areas on Chamanganj and Beconganj following provocative speeches on loudspeakers mounted atop some religious places, and mounted an attack on a police picket at the Phoolmati trisection and surrounded the Heerman ka Purwapolice outpost. According to [director-general of police] dr. R.P. Mathur, the police personnel facing the threat of being lynched or murdered, opened fire resulting in the death of 172 four rioters and dispersal of others." So it is true that the police has killed Muslims. The statistics will correctly say that more Muslims than Hindus got killed : four to zero (though elsewhere in town some Hindus got stabbed to death). Yet, they have no one to blame but themselves. So, there is no truth in the picture given by secularist commentators, that the PAC decided one day to start a genocideagainst the poor and defenseless Muslim community. That is not to say

173

that police crimes and atrocities have never occurred. But they cannot completely explain the systematic attack on the PAC by Muslim goondas on the streets and by secularists in the press. A better explanation can be found in the statement by a Muslim leader to Tavleen Singh : "Once Muslim feel that the state is not going to protect them and they are on their own, it is only a question of time before they start doing what the Sikhs are doing in Punjab. As it is, when we visit a town after a communal riot, people say : if the police wasn't there, we could take the Hindus 174 on." The militant Muslim want the PAC out of the way, to have their hands free. And this is what Imam Bukhari has said : "We will look after ourselves. Let there be a direct confrontation between communal forces. The world will witness the battle, but let the police forces 175 keep out." A section of the Students Islamic Movement (SIM) threatened direct action if a fresh 176 attempt was made to touch the Babri Masjid. Syed Shahabuddin declared that he couldunderstand the young Muslim who had told him : "Let us blow up this bridge, let us do 177 something. If the state can kill us, we have the right to rebel against it." On December 18, 1990, prominent members of the Indian Union Muslim League submitted a memorandum to the Prime Minister, demanding, among many other things, the disbanding of the PAC and the constitution of a special anti-riot force with 30% Muslims. This more-thanproportional grip on the police is really the punch line. The demand to just get the police out of the way (voiced by Imam Bukhari and by Tavleen Singh's spokespersons) will not be readily conceded, so the next best thing is to get a friendly police. Of course, Muslim demands for a more-than-proportional reservation in a number of sectors of society were a central feature of pre178 independence Muslim League politics, and we know to what it has led. 179

N.S. Saxena has devoted a two-part article to Riots in U.P. the questions. He attacks the cheap explanations and cheap solution proposals that are being repeated again and again in the press as well as on the Lok Sabha floor. Thus, no matter how crude and inflammatory the rhetoric of Mulayam may have been, it has not pushed the number of riots and riot victims spectacularly higher than in other years. Under Mulayam's predecessors, U.P. was about equally riot-prone. Similarly, Advani's rathyatra, if at all a factor, has also not managed to make much of a difference. After all, U.P. was already riot-prone under the totally different administration in unpartitioned British India. If we look for other factors that are now falsely mentioned as decisive, but that have not made a difference in the past, we see that in the ten years preceding independence, the percentage of Muslims in the U.P. police was 30 to 35%, and yet there were hundreds of riots every year. The insecurity among Muslims was so big that they opted for the creation of Pakistan. In the communal-riot-free year 1970, Muslims formed only 2% in the PAC. SO, the solution for communal violence lies not in a communalist recruitment policy (reservations for Muslims in the police). The most immediate need is that all people guilty of communal violence in any of its stages be brought to book without exception. If riot-mongers do land in jail, they may not start again, and it may deter their colleagues. Also, riot investigation reports should be taken serious, instead of ending in a drawer. On the basis of real impartisan investigation (instead of these partisan fact-finding missions with their all too convenient conclusions) and court proceedings, fingers must also be pointed at the culprits behind the scene. The cloud around the communal identity of both killers and victims should go. Now, everyone thinks his community has suffered worst. There are even Muslims who believe that riots are mostly started by Hindus, and Muslim communalists actually stage dharnas to protest the communal violence which they themselves have fomented, without feeling ridiculous. At any rate, the truth must be told, the causes of the riots diagnosed without secretiveness, and the culprits should bear the consequences through judicial prosecution.

11.5. Who starts ? One phase of the 1990 Aligarh violence was the attack on a train on December 8. "Four passengers were killed when a 600-strong mob stopped the Gomti Express at Daud Khan near Aligarh, stoned the train and set on fire the Second Class bogey in which the passengers were 180 traveling. Five passengers were also injured." The unofficial death toll was eleven. I have it from one of the passengers in that ill-fated train, that the attackers were a Muslim mob. Papers reported tellingly that an earlier attack on a train had been attempted "close to a Muslim 181 locality". The violence on November 7 had started, according to a Frontline report, with "an attack on a group of people bound for Etah from the house of Manawwar Hussain, ex- chairman of the Nagar 182 Palika, and from a nearby Masjid. A similar incident was reported on November 16". The police has lodged a criminal case against mr. Hussain. We may as well continue to read this report :"On December 4, the motorcade of the BJP MP, Uma Bharati, who was supposed to address a public meeting, was reportedly attacked from the house of Manawwar Hussein... Trouble started again on December 7 when some PAC men were attacked by a group of people belonging to the minority community while returning from a masjid in the Upper Court area. One of them snatched the rifle of a PAC jawan and stabbed him. The jawan's colleague who tried to save him, was also attacked. Bombs were reportedly thrown on the PAC men who retaliated by opening fire killing some of the assailants. The news spread like fire and clashes between the two communities began." The same report quotes the vice-chancellor of AMU, Mohammed Nasim Farooqi, who traces the violence to the Ram Janmabhoomi issue :"It is wrong to say that the minority community had a hand in the violence. Why should they be insecure when they are in the mainstream of public life ?" He mistakenly links riot starting with the secularist concept of "insecurity among the minorities", 183 as the standard explanation if not justification for all kinds of anti-social behaviour. Instead of denying the proven facts of the Muslim initiative in every single round of the Aligarh violence, he should question his own dogma (now contradicted by the facts) that the secure Aligarh Muslims are incapable of starting riots ; this at least is what a man of scientific temper would do. This report I have been quoting, was published in a secularist paper, and the reporter is in sympathy with the anti-PAC elements, as will be clear from the italicized words: "The people's hatred for the PAC knows no bounds. They have been demanding for a long time that the PAC be removed". But PAC men aver that once they go out the town would go up in flames. "The PAC's presence is as good as its absence', said one of the saner elements in the town."Our reporter, K. Kannan, thinks that the aversion against thecommunalized PAC has somehow remained uncommunalized, and that it is the people who want them to go. In fact, it is just the Muslims and the secularists who want to expel or disband the PAC. So, here we have one more case of a press report giving facts that just don't allow any other explanation than that Muslims started the violence, and yet it ends with supporting the Muslim demands and blaming the police. While such a single case does not give a conclusive picture of who is most riot-prone, it does prove the tendency in the press to gloss over Muslim violence and to blame those who get blamed by the Muslims be they the police or L.K. Advani. Let us formulate a working hypothesis for further research. Not using any esoteric information, just carefully reading the newspaper reports, I think there are strong indications that riots are in a majority of cases started by Muslims, often after Friday prayers ; that Hindus commit large-scale reactive violence, mostly against weaker and less organized Muslim communities; and that the

high incidence of confrontations between police and Muslims is also often started by Muslims, so that the police perceives its own action as self-defense. These provisional conclusions are based on a limited number of cases. So they can be amended once positive proof for alternative generalizations is offered (but not earlier). However, these few riot reports and comments have furnished some striking cases of blatant distortion sneaking in on the way from news to views. When the report left no ambiguity about Muslims having started a riot, still the editorial (or even the peculiar terminology in the riot report) would blame the Hindus or the police. If taken seriously, the systematic blaming of the Ram Janmabhoomi campaign for all the riots should make us very happy. Because, if all the riots are caused by this one factor, then that means that there are no longer any riots being caused by all the other factors that used to cause riots in the past. So, most riot factors have been eliminated : remove this one Ram factor, and there will be communal harmony. Unfortunately, the secularistblame Ram explanation has little to do with the real forces behind the continuing communal violence in India.

11.6. Riot strategy As for the latter-stage attacks by Hindu goondas on innocent Muslim villagers, which took place in the huge riots of Bhagalpur 1989 and Gonda 1990, both in reaction to the initial attack by Muslims on a Hindu procession, these are equally hideous crimes as the original attack on the procession. But the responsibility for this stage of violence is shared with those who created the entire riot in the first place. For, there is a system in the seeming madness of Muslims starting a riot in which they know Muslims will be killed. Syed Shahabuddin has once rhetorically asked how people could believe that riots are most often started by Muslims, when in fact substantially more Muslims get killed in riots than Hindus. Indeed, such suicidal behaviour needs a good explanation. The paradox only exists when we accept Syed Shahabuddin's communalist assumption that it is the Muslims who get killed in riots. In reality, there are two very distinct groups of people involved: those who start riots, and those who bear the consequences. Goondas have of course their own imponderable reasons for creating trouble. But the assumption we must make in order to make sense of crimes such as the communal riots, is that those who commit them expect some real benefit from them. Now the benefit that communalist politicians may expect from a riot in which people of their own community get killed, is quite substantial. It makes the ordinary people, who have no specific animosity against people of the other community, perceive the latter as the enemy. You thereby strengthen their feeling of being a community, in which the members have to depend on each other against a hostile environment. This can go as far as a physical migration from mixed neighbourhoods to pure ones. Moreover, you make them feel they need a strong protector: in politics the communalist MP or MLA, on the ground his goonda gang. This scenario is not a hypothetical construction. It has been staged on a very large scale in 1946, when the Muslim League felt that it was not yet sufficiently supported by the common Muslims, and that the Hindus had not yet unambiguously conceded Pakistan. To convince the former that only the Muslim League and Pakistan could protect them, and to terrorize the latter into the big concession, the Muslim League government in Bengal organized a mass killing of Hindus (the Direct Action Day). They knew fully well that the Hindus would end up retaliating by killing innocent Muslims. Upon which more Muslims would kill Hindus, etc. The important effect was that Muslims suffered at the hands of the Hindus , lost all faith in co-existence with them, and joined

hands with the communalist leaders. The pogroms against the Hindus caused a lot of deaths 184 among the Muslim population, but for the Muslim League this brought resounding success. This scenario is being repeated on a small scale in many of the communal riots in independent India. When in these riots Muslims get killed, it is at least partly owing to a design by another class of Muslims. What makes creating riots even more attractive, is the sympathy you get for them from secularist politicians and intellectuals. When the Muslim League killed thousands of Hindus in Calcutta, Congress leader Jawaharlal Nehru looked the other way. But when Hindu workers staying in Calcutta fled to their villages in Bihar and started killing Muslims there, the same Nehru proposed to bomb those villages from the air. When Hindus got killed, he didn't move a finger, but the killing of Muslims was enough to blow off his Gandhian facade and make him demand indiscriminate killing. When mass killing accompanied the Partition, mass killings which both sides equally committed, and for which the ultimate responsibility lay with those who had wanted Partition in the first place, communist writer Bhishma Sahni wrote the novel Tamas, in which the Hindus are painted as the villains. When today Muslim goondas create a riot in Bhagalpur or in Gonda, the secularist press will obscure this beginning (in both cases bombs thrown from Muslim establishments at Hindu processions) and highlight the ensuing Hindu part of the violence. Some M.J. Akbar will poignantly describe the suffering of some Muslim villagers, and then blame the atmosphere created by the Rathyatra in some distant town, without even mentioning that the riot started with a pre-planned armed attack on a Hindu procession. That is how the secularists assure communal riot-mongers double fun : first the proper aim of the riot is achieved, and then on top of that, your very enemies are covered with abuse for provoking the riot. Not only do you gain on the propaganda front, the press may even come out in support of your demands. For some time, Muslim communalists have demanded a ban on processions. More than 95% of religious processions are Hindu processions anyway, for processions are a thoroughly Pagan practice which in Islam can only be a heterodox oddity. Now, on 14 November 1990, Muslim communal groups together with Sikh communal groups took out a demonstration through Delhi's Sadar Bazaar, and went violent, killing several people. Oddly, the next day several editorials opined that this spate of violence proved the need for a ban on processions. The violent demonstration was a sadbhavana yatra, agoodwill march. It was of course no procession, in fact it had nothing to do with religion (it was neither a Sikh nor a Muslim festival, and they don't have common festivals anyway). And yet, the secularists have made it an occasion for support to the Muslim communalists' long-standing demand for a ban on Hindu processions. With its distorted representations of communal riots, with its guarantee to Muslim communalists that they will never get the full load of exposing and condemnation which they deserve, the secularist press, for all its bla-bla about communal harmony, is effectively giving a measure of encouragement to riot-fomenters.

11.7. A case study in riot comment For one more example of secularist analysis of the riot problem, let us take a look at the article 185 Making a Lebanon of India? by Prem Shankar Jha. The article's object is to show that the more compromising position of the new Chandra Shakhar government towards the Ram Janmabhoomi campaigners, has been the cause of more communal riots than V.P. Singh's and Mulayam Singh Yadav's confrontationist policy had been (P.S. Jha had been V.P. Singh's spokesman). It advocates a hard stand against the Ram Janmabhoomi movement and all that goes with it.

"For four years, the VHP has sown the wind of communal hatred. We are now reaping the whirlwind. In a sustained blast of propaganda, each and every real or fancied grievance of the Hindus has been pulled out of the closet and aired till it has begun to look respectable." For almost a century, Muslim communal groups have been articulating their demands mostly in terms of grievances. If four years can make us reap a whirlwind, what about forty years, or ninety ? For more than a thousand years, every Muslim has been drilled in the belief that all non-Muslims are his enemies, that he should fight them, because Allah has said so dozens of times in the Quran and the Prophet has set this example. If four years of propaganda can make us reap a whirlwind, what about a thousand years ? Here come the real or fancied Hindu grievances. Referring to an article by mr. K.R. Malkani, member of the BJP national executive, mr. Jha sums up : "India was partitioned on Muslim insistence. India is having to spend thousands of crores of rupees every year on defending itself against 'Islamic' Pakistan. Every census shows a Muslim population growth well above the national average. They would not agree to a uniform civil law, commended by the Constitution. The Muslim would not agree to the relocating of a mosque or grave -- to widen a road or right an old wrong -- something common in Muslim countries. And on top of all this, they are complaining all the time." This propaganda it is, that has been causing communal riots, according to mr. Jha. Actually, each of the contentions made by mr. Malkani, are pure fact. Of course India was partitioned on Muslim insistence, no amount of history-rewriting can change that. Of course this partition and the immediate invasion by Pakistan in Kashmir, has forced India to spend a lot on defense. It is a fact verifiable from the census figures that the percentage of Muslims has been constantly rising since 1881, in British India, in Pakistan, in India, and in Bangla Desh, in each of 186 these states and in each decade without exception. It is a fact that the leaders of the Muslim community, supported by many secularists, have defended the Shariat as the sole Muslim personal law, and go on refusing the implementation of the constitutional recommendation of a common civil code. It is a fact that in at least one case, the Muslims have been refusing the relocation of a mosque structure. And it is a fact that they are complaining all the time, witness the papers of each of the Muslims parties big and small. In this complaining, they are supported by secularists like mr. Jha. Further down he writes : "Muslims too have their grievances against the majority community, several of which have far more substance than those articulated by mr. Malkani." Personally, I think that mr. Malkani has not even mentioned the most serious grievances of the Hindus. Anyway, let's hear those of the Muslims. Muslims are poor, under-represented in the bureaucracy, the armed forces and the private corporate sector, over- represented in unemployment, and very vulnerable to the effects of riots when self-employed as craftsmen or shopkeepers. These are grievances, but are they "grievances against the majority community" ? Where Muslims live together with other communities, they are often the poorer community, even if they are in power and declare an Islamic republic. In Malaysia, the non-Muslim Chinese are far better off than the Muslim Malays. In Egypt, the Copts are a prosperous business community, though they often live in fear of the poorer Muslim majority. Muslim poverty in India is largely due to factors unrelated to the Hindus, such as large families, little education (these two are related), and the fact that many rich Muslims in 1947 chose Pakistan. It is a socialist mistake that economic inequality is the "fault" of the government (here assumed to be a largely Hindu government). The educational backwardness of the Muslims is again not the fault of the Indian Constitution and laws, which give all due safeguards and even privileges, it is not the fault of other communities. But the educational backwardness itself is the single largest factor in the Muslims' underrepresentation in the bureaucracy and the corporate private sector, and their high

unemployment rate. That it is not the Hindus who keep the minority underrepresented in any sphere, can be proven from the situation of the other minorities : Sikhs are quiteoverrepresented in government and army posts, Christians in education, Parsis and Jains in business. That Muslim shopkeepers are very vulnerable during riots, is a fact. It also counts for Hindu shopkeepers. But I agree with mr. Jha that Muslim craftsmen and traders have been singled out for attacks and destruction of their trade equipment in many communal riots, the motive being more economical than communal. Now the riots themselves. Mr. Jha says that Rajasthan hardly knew any riots until October 1989. The blame is of course on the VHP. They came in with their propaganda "in preparation of the centenary year of dr. Hedgewar, founder of the RSS", so before 1989. They were followed by Muslim activists who "began to sensitize the Muslim masses of the threat that the Ram Janmabhoomi posed to their religion". Can you believe it ? This secularist is repeating, without any distancing or questioning, the BMAC claim that Islam is in danger due to the Ram Janmabhoomi ; a danger to which the Muslim masses have to be sensitized. Anyway, these Muslim activists began arriving as late as 1988. And by the time they were all there, in 1989, the communal riots started. Then mr. Jha sets out to disprove the Hindu assumption that nine out of ten riots are started by 187 Muslims. He gives the list of communal clashes between 1 p.m. of 29 October, and 6 p.m. of 30 October, a time-span of 29 hours. No doubt he carefully selected a time favourable to his case. He could have chosen any of the days of the Hyderabad carnage, or any Friday, to disprove his own suggestion that Hindus are more riot-prone. But no, mr. Jha wants to pull our attention away from those more representative occasions, and towards this one day when he counted more Hindu than Muslim violence. In different places in Karnataka, four Muslims were attacked, one of whom died, some Muslim property was set on fire, an attempt to damage a mosque was stopped by the police, and an Idgah was damaged. A one-sided struggle, indeed, but no proof that Hindus are just as good at starting trouble : communal violence had been going on in the state, not too intense but rather widespread, for most of October. Mr. Jha has merely selected a time when it was the Hindus' turn. In Andhra, a person was assaulted, and a workshop belonging to aMuslim was burnt. Since Muslims are named as such, can we make an inference about the religion of the person ? Further, a Muslim was killed and an Idgah and a Dargah attacked. Then follow a number of explosions and acts of arson not specified as to community, which experienced readers tend to see as a strong pointer in a certain direction. In Jaipur, a Hindu succumbed to his injuries, stones were thrown at a mosque, a Muslim was assaulted, a Muslim's shop set on fire. Alleged BJP/VHP workers set four (empty) State buses on fire. A Muslim was stabbed and two Dargahs desecrated. In Ahmedabad, police had to open fire, killing a Hindu. A mosque was damaged, two Muslims set on fire, of whom one died. In Baroda, two bodies of Hindus were recovered. "Two Muslims were Killed and four injured in police firing", an event bracketed with an anonymous "spate of stabbing, mercifully not fatal" (the toning- down and the anonymity are unmistakable pointers). Elsewhere, "the police had to open fire on another mob, and one Hindu was killed". When Hindus get killed, it is because the police had no choice but to fire on the mob. But when a Muslim gets killed, it is a different story : "No one needs to be reminded of the outrage committed on Muslims by the PAC in Meerut, Bhagalpur, or now in Aligarh". About Aligarh, I have fairly complete information, and it is quite clear that the PAC was the target of unsolicited attack by Muslim mobs on several occasions.

I cannot check the correctness and especially the completeness of this overview of a day of riots. Though following the national press closely, including the paper in which mr. Jha's article appeared, I have not heard of a number of these incidents. But I have heard of ten or so more people killed (and an unknown number injured) in communal violence during the 29 hours under consideration, in a very well-known incident : the shooting of unarmed Kar Sevaks in Ayodhya by the infantry of the ruling secularist sect, around noon on 30 October. In spite of mr. Jha's attempt to conceal it, most victims on his chosen day were Hindus, not Muslims. Apart from that, one cannot fail to notice that mr. Jha's interpretation of what happened and the terminology he uses, are far from neutral. "Throughout the weeks that preceded the Kar Seva, the pattern had remained unvarying from day to day. While miscreants of both communities were active, the majority of the attacks took place on Muslims. There was a pattern to the sustained provocation: mosque were attacked, Idgahs and Dargahs desecrated, provocative and insulting slogans shouted, until mayhem broke loose." Like so many times before, a secularist builds up this pre-riot crescendo, all the way up to the provocative slogans stage, and then disappoints the reader by hiding in a cloud of impersonal vagueness :Mayhem broke loose. What does he have to hide ? If the slogans were provocative, does it mean that they effectively provoked violence ? In that case, the implication would be that the violence came from the other side. And that is precisely what so many riot reports suggest : when Hindus appear in public and do something that some Muslim care to considerprovocative, they get a violent welcome. And in fact, mr. Jha almost concedes as much. If not in October, then certainly in December. He says that the Muslim youth "have slipped the leash of their elders, and decided, as they see it, to defend themselves. The lumpen and the criminals belonging to the Muslims have therefore come into their own. That is why the death toll is so high now. For unlike October, both sides are now [mid-December] indulging in retributory murder." According to mr. Jha, the reason for the increasing resort to armed struggle among the Muslim youth, is that the unflinching defense of the Babri Masjid by V.P. and Mulayam, had been replaced with a policy of "compromise with Hindu communalism". Chandra Shekhar was in effect pressuring the Muslims into giving up the Babri Masjid, or so it seem to these Muslim youngsters. And now that he was working out a compromise, rather than taking a 100% pro-Muslim and 100% anti-Hindu stand, the country will have to face the consequences :"Worse, far worse, is yet to come. Hot-heads among the Muslim youth are already saying that the only way to deal with the PAC is with AK-47s. They are talking of dying with honour rather than waiting to be extinguished. The search for Ak-47s may well have begun, and the first signs of a link-up with Sikh extremists have already appeared." So, the Janmabhoomi campaign is not taking India towards Ram Rajya, but towards "another Lebanon, Cyprus or Ethiopia, a country torn apart by unending civil war". Incidentally, the comparisons are telling. In Lebanon, the civil war started as an attempt by the Christians to stop the progressive take-over of their country by the Palestinians (who had tried this before in Jordan, but had been driven out). In Cyprus, it started with a Muslim demand for a partition and a largerthan- proportionate piece of the territory, which they got, by force. Ethiopia is more complex, involving Communist as well as Muslim separatism in Eritrea and a decade of Communist misrule and oppression. But let us mention the more straightforward case of Sudan, which mr. Jha somehow overlooked even though it is as much tormented by communal violence as Lebanon is. In Sudan, a Muslim majority in the North has imposed the Shariat on the non-Muslim South. Faced with this Islamic oppression, the non-Muslim Dinkas and other peoples in the South want a separate secular state. With Lybian aid, the Muslim North fights an all-out war to keep the South down. When Muslims

are in a minority, they want partition; but when it is a non-Muslim minority that wants a separate state, the Muslim rulers don't let their booty escape. What is the practical conclusion of this article ? Does it condemn the people who take up arms because they don't like a political compromise on Ayodhya worked out by a democratic government ? No, it wants the Hindus to make the concessions demanded by those who threaten with Ak- 47s. Mr. Jha writes in his conclusion that "the only way to tackle communalism is to tackle it head on, never, never compromise with it... Compromising with the aggressor gives him legitimacy... Thus, paradoxically, compromise hardens positions, increases self- righteousness, and raises the level of violence in society." I agree with him, but for me that implies the opposite of what it implies for him. He thinks it means no compromise with a basically non-violent massmovement for the symbolic redress of an old crime, systematically inflicted on Hindu society by invaders who came with the medieval equivalents of AK-47s. For him, it also means a preemptive compromise with those who may take to the AK- 47 in the near future, in order to deal with the police force and the majority community. In my opinion, an essential part of any successful anti- riot policy is that no compromise whatsoever is made with those who start or threaten riots. If they find they can extract concessions by starting or threatening riots, they are encouraged to continue and perfect this strategy. It must be made clear to riot-mongers that their strategy will not yield them anything. The Shah Bano decision, the ban on The Satanic Verses and other books, the non-recognition of the Hindu rights over Ram Janmabhoomi, have all been obtained by Muslim extremists by means of actual or threatened agitation. All these concessions to extremist threats have encouraged the same extremists to continue stoking violence for new demands. In autumn 1990, they knew perfectly well that riots would be used by the secularist press to blacken the BJP/VHP and to intensify its opposition against the Ram Mandir. When we see who gets systematically blamed by the press and the politicians for any and every riot, then we know who has no objective interest in fomenting riots. And when we see who gets all the sympathy, and the support for their demands, whenever riots occur, we know who has an objective interest in continuing the riots. A very good illustration is the next and very important demand of the Muslim communalists : a larger than proportionate reservation for Muslims in the army and the police. With every clash between Muslims and the PAC, we see secularists plead for the disbanding of the PAC, and the granting of reservations of the Muslims (the minorities, as they say), either in the existing forces or in a new anti-riot force, amounting to some 25% or even 30%. In other words, we see those who started the carnage in Bhagalpur '89, in Gonda '90, in Aligarh '90, in Hyderabad '90, being rewarded with secularist support for their demands, and more support with every riot.

11.8. Hindu riots For good measure, I must not let the Hindu riot-mongers go scot-free either. In the typical riot cases where Hindus merely react to attacks by some Muslims, it is certainly possible to keep the quantity of violent revenge at a lower level than is now the case. If the Hindu organizations, when a communal crisis breaks out, immediately apply themselves to limiting the damage, immediately move in to calm people down and to effectively prevent the anti-social elements in their own ranks from attacking Muslims, then the death toll could be far lower. I have so far never heard from a Hindu activist being thrown out of these Hindu organizations for irresponsible and violent behaviour. Yet, such miscreants certainly exist, and if the RSS etc. fail to stop them or to formally punish them, these organizations are co-responsible.

A plea which these Hindu organizations often make, is that goondas with no affiliation to the VHP, RSS or BJP, merely use the riot, after others have started it, to get their share of looting and 188 raping. I cannot judge in what percentage of the cases that this was what happened , but suppose that it really goes like that. Even then a determined move to restore order and discipline within all sections of the local Hindu community would make a substantial difference. That this is not being done on anything like a sufficient scale, is clear to me from the fact that the apologetic 189 literature of the RSS, while making a rather strong case for this organization's non-riot-prone character, does hardly say anything about the constructive role they have or have not played in 190 the process of stopping the violence once it has started, or in the healing process afterwards. In my opinion, the virginity which the RSS spokesmen claim concerning the start of riots, and their unimpressive record (relative to their numbers and level of discipline and organization) in actively 191 intervening to stop violence against Muslims , are the result of one and the same fact concerning the RSS: it is not a militant organization of vanguard troopers (as they are portrayed by some secularists who like to clamour about Hindu fascism), but an organization of quite ordinary people, shopkeepers and schoolboys, who have no inclination to start real fights or to enter the battlefield once the fight has started, even as peace- makers. While RSS workers are killed by the dozens by the Khalistani terrorists (and/or by Pakistani provocateurs dressed as Sikhs), we never hear of any violent retaliation. This lack of retaliation is not just because of a policy of not aggravating tension between Sikh Hindus and other Hindus, but simply because the RSS doesn't have the capability to strike. Incidentally, this frustrates the Khalistani and Pakistani calculations : believing the secularist propaganda about the RSS as a fascist militia ready to terrorizethe minorities, they had hoped to get another Direct Action Daygoing, with mutual killing of common Hindus and Sikhs. Apart from reactive violence against Muslim attacks, the Hindu groups cannot disown some cases of unprovoked aggression on their own part. While the Rathyatra had been peaceful, mr. Advani's arrest was the occasion for a more grim and militant line of action on the part of BJP workers. In Jaipur, the Bharat bandh on October 24 generated a series of riots. As any communist or trade-unionist can tell you, a strike is seldom a collectively voluntary action. Most often, a motivated minority forces the strike on the majority. In the Bharat bandh also, the BJP workers went around the city to check that all the shopkeepers downed their shutters. According to their own explanation, a shopkeeper refused to comply with their demand that he close his shop, took out a gun and shot at them. And that was the beginning of a week of communal violence. If one analyzes the responsibility, one might say that the demand to close shop was an encroachment on the shopkeeper's constitutional rights : already more of a provocation than the legitimate though insensitive use of free speech to utter provocative slogans. That doesn't justify the use of firearms yet. The readiness to retaliate against the most defenseless classes among the Muslims, in reaction to well-planned Muslim goonda violence, betrays that trait stereotypically attributed by Muslims to Hindus : cowardice (not that the Islamic behaviour of throwing bombs at processions is all that courageous). But it also betrays two things about which the Hindu organizations can readily do something : despair, and a lack of education. It is out of despair that people attack just whoever they can get, feeling that they can not leave the Muslim attacks without a fitting reply. This irrational tendency to take revenge on just anyone belonging to the Muslim community, can only be cleared away through education. The short-term necessity in solving the riot problem is a more effective police force and most of all an effective judicial prosecution of the culprits (which implies breaking through the nexus of politicians and criminals). But the long-term necessity for reducing the communal violence is education.

I don't mean education with moralistic campaigns to tell them not to do such ugly things, sadbhavana yatras and human chains for communal amity : those things only convince the already-convinced, and they have no impact once a crisis breaks out. What Hindu leaders should teach their followers (and first of all imprint on their own minds), is that the Muslims are not to blame for communal violence. Even when it is established that a far more than proportionate amount of the communal violence emanates from Muslim quarters, it should still be upheld as dogma that he Muslim people are not to blame. "The Muslims" are just people like the rest of us, but they happen to be open to the influence of the Quranic ideology propagated by Islamic religious personnel. In fact, the common Muslim is hardly aware of Islamic theology. For him, being a Muslim means being what he himself is. And for his, the Muslim are not so much the followers of Mohammed, but simply the community to which he belongs. And he will intensify his bond with his community whenever it is in confrontation, offensively or defensively, with another community. Not because of a theology of Momins vs. Kafirs, but out of a natural tribal instinct. Unfortunately, there are leaders who take these common people with them, in actions inspired by this theology of which the common people know so little. The common Hindu has so often heard of or been confronted with Muslim violence, that he has come to associate Muslims with violence. On the other hand, he is taught by his leaders to only see the face value of this violence, not the ideology behind it. An RSS man told me that one day Guru Golwalkar gave a speech, saying that Mohammed was a great prophet, and that Islam is a great religion, but that, inconsequentially, the Muslims are big fools. What nonsense : the one thing that defines Muslims as a group, is their adherence to Islam and the Prophet. How can you make a collective allegation against the Muslims if you first praise that which makes them into one collectivity ? One should look for the reason for the apparently typical Muslim proneness to riots, in that which defines the Muslim collective identity, the Islamic ideology. It would have been more fair, and historically more accurate, to explain Muslim violence by saying that the Muslims are our brethren, but they or their leaders are mentally in the fangs of "Islam, that religion of jihad" created by"Mohammed, that prophet of icon-breaking". That way, you distinguish between the human and the ideological level, and then you can educate the people and make them see the key formula that will take the sting out of Hindu vengefulness against their Muslim countrymen : the problem is not the Muslims, the problem is Islam. Of course, once a procession is being attacked, it is too late to say to the crowd :"Hey, don't attack the Muslims, attack Islamic ideology". At that time, they are confronted with a physical enemy, and they will react physically. However, in the longer run, some education in comparative religion is the solution, or at least a central part of the solution. Today, Hindus have to swallow all kinds of negative image-building concerning Hinduism. Islam, by contrast, is depicted as a liberator from inequality, a religion of peace and brotherhood, and more such fictional terms of praise. But then, after being fed all these nice things about Islam, they find that their procession is being attacked by Muslims. This anomaly they cannot understand. So they are left to the immediacy of the situation, and even afterwards they cannot comprehend what happened, as long as they are not informed about Islamic doctrine. Well, some secularist Swami may tell them that all prophets are great, that it is only their followers who err. In fact, this sweet little lie is the worst contributor to the communal violence on the Hindu side : it is not true that the Muslims err and "mis-apply the teachings of that great prophet Mohammed". Most of them just follow the lead given by fanatical Imams, and these fanatical Imams can at worst only be blamed for not erring and fully applying the doctrine of the Prophet. So, Hindus should know that these Muslims are only sincerely applying the teachings of the real culprit of most of the communal violence in India : Mohammed.

There is every reason to tell them the truth about Islam. Hinduism should not be painted in rosy colours, but evaluated in a fair and truthful way. The treatment Islam receives, should be the same. Now, a fair and truthful presentation of Islam will include : the absolute inequality of believer and unbeliever, the boundless self-righteousness of the Prophet and the believers who imitate him, the crudely physical nature of the Islamic precepts (the complete lack of a consciousness dimension), the strongly political and anti-secularist objectives of Islam, and the logical absurdity of the very idea of prophethood. Once this distinction between Muslim human beings and anti-human Islamic doctrine is clear in people's minds, you can demand from them a Gandhian self-restraint in the face of terrible provocation. When your procession gets attacked, you will still not set the Muslims' shops on fire. This distinction between the ideas working through some people, who in turn can set entire crowds and gangs in motion, and on the other hand the people themselves, will make a crucial difference. Secondarily, the curbing of Hindu retaliation will also have its effect on the propagandistic and political front. At present every riot, regardless what the facts and who the victims, is held up as a proof of the rabid and fascist character of the Hindu communal forces who are stirring the communal cauldron. The secularist agitprops should be starved of every semblance of evidence. In this respect, it is better to get killed than to kill. Or at least, anything is better than to kill innocents. Against terrorists, using force is the most effective way to stop them, because it is the language they understand. But that job should be left to the legitimate security forces. This work at the level of thought should also deal with the communal attitudes that have crept into Hinduism during its confrontation with the Muslim onslaught. Islamic thought has deeply influenced the Indian intelligentsia, including champions of Hindutva. Thus, Dayananda Saraswati espoused monotheism, denounced idol- worship, and treated the Veda like a revealed, complete and final Scripture. V.D. Savarkar thought that Hindus have to borrow forms of organization and lifestyle from the Muslims in order to overcome them. He has been accused by the secularists (and with him, the entire Hindutva movement) of reducing Hindu identity to anus vs. them pattern of enmity against the Muslims. The secularists correctly denounce such an attitude, while glossing over the fact that this enmity is intrinsic to Islamic doctrine, and has only, crept into Hinduism reactively, during the long self-defense of Hindu society against Islam. Anyway, they do have a point when they perceive this enmity as a strong factor in the current activist Hindu identity. So, Hindus should weed out these Islamic attitudes of us against them from their thought. Their Hindu identity should not be centered around their attitude towards another doctrine, but on Hinduism's own genius and effectiveness as a cultural framework for social integration and 192 individual happiness. And they should not define people in terms of their communal identity, which is but the Islamic game of judging people on their being Momins or Kafirs, rather than on their merits. Unlike Islam, they should dis-identify and distinguish human being from the religion they profess ; so that, if ever the need arises, they can attack and expose Islamic doctrine without any mental or physical hostilities with the Muslim people. To sum up, the communal problem in India is largely the Muslim problem, or rather, the Islam problem. Islam is communal through and through, preaching a total abyss between its own community members and the rest of humanity. So, very generally, the cause of communal riots is Islam. The cure is Sanatana Dharma. It teaches that everything is generated by thought. While seemingly a difficult notion, in this context it is very easy to understand : the physical problem of communal riots is but the materialization of communal thinking. This communal thinking should be identified : its most potent and consistent form is the Islamic doctrine of the struggle between Momin and Kafir. Other communalisms like Sikh separatism and the anti-Muslim animus among

some Hindu people, are but the indirect effects of this Islamic doctrine. Then, this communal thinking should be removed through dialogue and education. No matter what law and order measures will further be needed before the age of communal riots is over, at any rate it is this work at the level of thought which will ultimately solve the problem.

11.9. Riots in Muslim countries In order to keep an assessment of riot patterns in perspective, we should compare with the situation in Pakistan and Bangla Desh. The general pattern there is :

1. Roughly 100% of Hindu-Muslim riots are started by Muslims. 2. Roughly 100% of the victims in the actual communal confrontation are Hindus. 3. Those few times the police intervenes, it does have the decency to stop the attackers rather than their fleeing victims, so the vast majority of those killed in police firing on the e occasion of riots, are Muslims. But like in India, the police often fails to intervene, which may get interpreted as a form of passive connivance with the majority community. The secularist theory that there is no ideological (as opposed to socio-economical) explanation for the different degree of riot-proneness between the different religions, and their denial of this very difference, both fall apart when called on to explain the riot pattern in the Islamic republics that used to be parts of India. If Muslims are not more riot-prone than Hindus, then why do you never ever hear of a Hindu attack on mosques in Bangla Desh, but a lot of the reverse ? Or, for that matter, why not Christian attacks on mosques, even while Christians do get their share of attacks and harassments from the Muslims? In these Muslim-majority countries, communal violence is a completely one-directional affair. Even when Muslims destroyed hundreds of Hindu temples on the pretext of protest against the Shilanyas in Ayodhya, there has not been any report of similar retaliation by the Hindus. We may safely say that in Bangla Desh, the Muslim participation in the starting of riots, is more than their percentage of the population : about 100% as against some 87%. In Pakistan also, even though Muslims form about 97% (including Ahmadiyas) of the population, they still manage to have an even larger share in the starting of riots. The secularist theory that whatever slight Muslim over- representation in riot-starting they are willing to concede, is attributable to the insecurity to which Muslims are subjected, can also not hold. Firstly, in India there are minorities who simply don't start riots (Jains, Parsis), or only few (Christians), and yet they are fewer in number than the Muslims and consequently moreinsecure. Secondly, in Pakistan, Bangla Desh and Malaysia they have Islamic republics, and still that doesn't stop them from maltreating the non-Muslims and attacking their places of worship on the slightest pretext. Moreover, within Pakistan there are also a lot of attacks by the majority Sunnis on minority Shias and Ahmadiyas, and that again cannot be attributed to insecurity. As a general rule, in communal conflicts the world over, you will find majorities attacking minorities, seldom the reverse. Have you ever heard of pre-1940 Jews attacking the German or Polish majorities in Central Europe ? Have you ever heard of the Coptic minority in Egypt attacking the Muslim majority ? They form about 6% of the population, but furnish 0% of the riots and other forms of harassment. And have you ever heard of the Hindu minorities in South Africa, the UK, Singapore, the US, starting riots ? But in India, you do see one of the minorities on the offensive even where it is clearly outnumbered. Even if their percentage of starting riots was only proportional to their percentage of the population, i.e. about 12% (and no secularist so far has been dishonest enough to suggest

this), then that would still be more than what minorities elsewhere, and especially in Islamic countries, would dare to do. It becomes hard to evade the conclusion that there is something in Islamic doctrine that incites people to non-integration and even violent struggle with their neighbours.

12. Book banning 12.1. Banning all that hurts In the same week when the Kar Seva was due, the speaker of the Uttar Pradesh Assembly, H.K. Srivastava, made a proposal to attack the problem of communal friction at what he apparently considered its roots. He wanted all press writing about the historical origins of temples and mosques to be banned. And it is true : the discussion of the origins of some mosques is fundamental to this whole issue. For, it reveals the actual workings of an ideology that, more than anything else, has caused countless violent confrontations between the religious communities. However, after the news of this proposal came, nothing was heard of it anymore. I surmise that the proposal was found to be juridically indefensible in that it effectively would prohibit history-writing, a recognized academic discipline of which journalism makes use routinely.193 And I surmise that it was judged politically undesirable because it would counterproductively draw attention to this explosive topic. The real target of this proposal was the book Hindu Temples : What Happened to Them (A Preliminary Survey) by Arun Shourie and others. In the same period, there has been a proposal in the Rajya Sabha by Congress MP Mrs. Aliya to get this book banned, in spite of the fact that about half the book had already legally been published in different papers. The police dropped by the printer and later the publisher to get a few copies for closer inspection. The really hard part of the book is a list of some two thousand Muslim buildings that have been built on places of previous Hindu worship (and for which many more than two thousand temples have been demolished). In spite of the threat of a ban on raking up this discussion, on November 18 the U.P. daily Pioneer has published a review of this book, by Vimal Yogi Tiwari, which I reproduce here in full. The book is a collection of articles written by Arun Shourie, dr. Harsh Narain, Jay Dubashi, Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel. It is perhaps the first endeavor on the part of scholars to dig from the graveyard of history the identity of some 2000 temples destroyed by the Muslim invaders and rulers. The book is not an exercise in rewriting history, but is an effort to present the facts and give a bird's eye view of the truth hitherto unknown. The book has as its subject matter not

only the Ram temple at Ayodhya but nearly 2000 temples throughout the length and breadth of the country which met the same fate as that of Ayodhya, Mathura and Varanasi. The revealing articles provide the readers with an insight into the history and nature of the problem the Hindus have faced and continue to face. The list of temples destroyed or desecrated helps to nail down the big lie, propagated by some historians, that Muslim raiders and rulers plundered temples only for the wealth. There may have been a few rich temples, otherwise most temples must have been as poor in the past as they are now. The book does not furnish great details for the simple reason that it is just a preliminary survey. Yet the facts are very revealing and go a long way in clearing the clouds of doubts which have been purposely woven around the facts. It lists some 2000 sites where temples were destroyed and mosques were built. Not only were the temples destroyed but even their material was used in constructing mosques at those places. This was plainly done to hurt the sentiments of the Hindus. "History is not just an exercise in collection of facts though, of course, facts have to be carefully sifted and authenticated as Mr. Sita Ram Goel has done in this case. History is primarily an exercise in self-awareness and reinforcement of that self-awareness. Such a historical assessment has by and large been missing in our country. This at once gives special significance to this book." By December 1990, a ban on this kind of historical writing seemed out of the question. By that time, especially after Indian Express published dr. S.P. Gupta's convincing article on the archaeological findings in Ayodhya, both prime minister Chandra Shekhar and Congress leader Rajiv Gandhi said the archaeologists should have a say in the Ram Janmabhoomi issue. Therefore, at least that one contentious Muslim construction was open to scrutiny. Still, just like Doordarshan censors out all news that could harm harmony, many secularists would like to ban all writings attributing any systematic misbehaviour to one community (except the Hindus, who can be unreservedly accused of instituting untouchability, forcing widows on the funeral pyre, and worse even, being communal). On top of that, they also want books that might hurt the feelings of a community, to be banned. The best known case where this was effectively done is, of course, Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. This book was banned in India immediately after its publication in England, as part of a deal with the Babri Masjid Action Committee to call off a Muslim march on Ayodhya. The book makes fun of a fictional character, Mahound (and of other people as well). However, the writer's contention that the story was entirely imaginative and fictional, is not sustainable. Mahound was a deformed version of Mohammed's name, used in Christian

polemical writings against the pseudo-prophet.194 The women in a brothel described in the book, bear the names of the wives of the historical Mohammed, in order to attract clients. There is just no denying that the writer is making gory fun of the Prophet. Nevertheless, is that a reason for banning the book? When some Hindus wanted a ban on the TV serial Tipu Sultan, for its glorifying and whitewashing a cruel fanatic who had destroyed temples and forcibly converted people, this was dubbed bigoted. Even the fact that it contained blatant distortion of history (which with some common sense can easily be distinguished from mere dramatization of history), was not counted as a sufficient reason for keeping it off the TV screen (which would still not be a wholesale ban). When some Hindus wanted a ban on Ambedkar's Riddles in Hinduism, for its pathetic allegations against Rama and Krishna, this was termed Hindu chauvinism. Even the protest against the republication of the book with state funds was to no avail, and the book has been ceremoniously presented to foreign visitors in the Ambedkar centenary year including Nelson Mandela. So, Hindu demands for a ban are to be ignored. But Muslim demands to curb free speech and freedom of artistic expression, should they be conceded? According to secularists, yes. Khushwant Singh defended the ban.195 M.J. Akbar defended the ban. Even Girilal Jain, then editor of the Times of India, defended the ban, arguing that otherwise it would only being a lot of riots and damage to property. The weekly Sunday published excerpts from the book, and was condemned for that by the Press Council, in November 1990. It consequently offered apologies to any readers who might have felt hurt.196 When the death sentence against Rushdie was pronounced by the Ayotollah Khomeini, on February 14, 1989, many secularists advised Rushdie to apologize and to withdraw the book. When people got killed in demonstrations against the book, the secularists blamed Rushdie, not the BMAC, not Khomeini, not their own implicit or explicit support to the anti-Rushdie agitation. And many secularists of the not too intelligent variety have tried to downplay the affair by arguing totally beside the point that the ban didn't matter much, since hardly any Indian can read Rushdie's English.197 The good thing discussion on Islam going. Especially Khomeini's fatwa made people ask: is this really Islamic ? Of course, some liberals, Muslim and nonMuslim, came out to say that the death sentence against Rushdie was unIslamic. You know, the tolerance which Islam inculcates, doesn't allow this, etc. But their misgivings about the fatwa were put to rest by competent authorities. Shortly after the debate was sparked, the Islamic Research Foundation published two Urdu books defending the fatwa : "JNU professor Maulana Mohsin Usmani Nadwi's Ahaanat-i Rasool ki Sazaa (Punishment for Criticizing the Prophet), and Maulana Majid Ali Khan's Muqaddas-i Ayat (The Sacred Verses).

Their point was very simple : in this case there is absolutely no scope for doubt, Rushdie must be killed. Firstly, he is effectively an apostate. In fact, he himself has said that much. He once described how he decided to break with Islam. He was still a teenager, and he went to a fast-food place and ordered pork pie and a portion of shrimps. Were they tasty! In a statement written months after the fatwa, from his Muslim". For him that doesn't mean he is an apostate, for he was made a Muslim as a child, and that doesn't count. But according to the learned Urdu authors, Rushdie is quite certainly an apostate. And for apostasy there is, on the authority of the Sahih Bukhari Hadis, only one punishment: death. But Rushdie has done far worse than just leave Islam. He has insulted the Prophet. Not that any of those Imans and Mullahs and Ayotollahs can be really sure of their allegation, they haven't read the book. But, in parenthesis, even secularists puke venom over books they haven't read. Mani Shankar Aiyar totally condemns one of Arun Shourie's books, and then goes on to declare that he has decided not to read it : "Shourie gave the final touches to the manuscript of his book on Islam, a work so vicious and perverted that every English speaking Muslim I know was outraged... I decided then to show my solidarity with secularism by not reading the book."198 As the late Ayatollah used to say: "It is not necessary to jump into the dungheap in order to know that it stinks." Rushdie has insulted the Prophet. And the Hadis say very clearly what the Prophet's line of action (forever to be emulated by every Muslim) is in such case. There were some poets and poetesses making sarcastic songs about him and criticizing his pretense of being God's messenger. Did the Prophet bring them to a court where they were given a chance to recant (as some legalistic Muslims say is the true Islamic procedure)? No, they were just mortally stabbed in the still of the night, each of them. They were unceremoniously assassinated at the personal orders of the Prophet. Therefore, our Urdu-writing Maulanas correctly conclude that it is perfectly Islamic to kill Rushdie.199 Indians may recall that such death sentences against people who have insulted the Prophet, have been carried out earlier this century: against Arya Samaj propagandists Swami Shraddhananda and Pandit Lekh Ram, and against Rajpal, the writer of the Rangila Rasool (more or less Playboy Mohammed). This was a book on the sex life of the Prophet and his wives, certainly insulting, and as a criticism of Islam rather beside the point, but understandable as a reaction against a similar vilifying Muslim pamphlet about Sita. These murders had the desired effect, for the Arya Samaj became less straightforward in its criticism of the Prophet. Rushdie, being a mere human being, and with no belief in eternal reward for martyrs, chose at long last to do that which seemed the best way of getting back into normal life: kneeling, renouncing theblasphemous passages in his book, and embracing Islam. On December 24, 1990, he came out with a statement: "I do not agree with any statement in my novel The Satanic Verses, uttered by any of

its characters, who insult the Prophet Mohammed or who cast aspersions upon Islam or upon the authenticity of the Holy Quran or who reject the divinity of Allah". Moreover, he promised"to witness that there is no god but Allah and that Mohammed is his last Prophet", to prevent the publication of further translations, not to bring out the paperback version, and "to continue to work for a better understanding of Islam in the world, as I have always attempted to do in the past". This turn in the Rushdie affair was partly the work of Hesham El-Essawy, described as a Muslim moderate, who is chairman of the Islamic Society for the Promotion of Religious Tolerance. Well, it is a telling illustration of religious tolerance in Islam: arranging for someone's embracing Islam in order to save his life. A perfect illustration of the general rule that Islam has mostly collected its converts by means of threats. However, the less moderate Muslim were not satisfied even when they saw Rushdie crawling in the dust before them. An Iranian paper and some Iranian clerics declared that the Ayatollah's fatwa is irrevocable. The British Muslim leader Kalim Siddiqui called on Iran to come and kidnap Rushdie and take him to trial in an Iranian Islamic court. In a reaction to Rushdie's conversion, the Delhi Iranian Embassy Press Attache S.H. Davisbara describes how Islam opposes slander and backing, and asks:"How can a religion which is so strict in safeguarding the reputation of ordinary people allow a Salman Rushdie to cast aspersions against its own Prophet? And if anybody does so deliberately, as the ill-fated author did, the punishment according to Islam is nothing but death. It is for the same reason that no Islamic scholar objected when Imam Khomeini ordained that Salman Rushdie should be killed. The fatwa, as it involves an extremely sensitive issue like the personality of the exalted Prophet himself, is by its very nature irrevocable. Recently the successor of Imam Khomeini, Ayatollah Syed Ali Khamenei, also has reiterated that the fatwa cannot be withdrawn. It should also be pointed out that fatwa do not lapse with the passing away of the issuing authority. It is punishment for a crime already committed and a warning to other potential wrongdoers."200 The Muslim Youth Movement of Britain also rejected any plea for pardoning Rushdie, unless some demands were met. Remark, the threat to kill Rushdie is not linked to his horrible guilt (and therefore irrevocable, as for Iran), nor to his apology and conversion (and therefore to be revoked), but merely to the fulfilling of demands. Promising to lift a death threat in return for concessions : this is pure terrorism. The demands were the following : 1. official recognition that Islam is the largest practicing religion in the U.K. (this is correct if Christianity is considered split into its different denominations); 2. withdrawal of all copies of the book from the bookshops; 3) a pledge from Rushdie that his book will not be produced anywhere in any manner ; 4)

enactment of a law that will protect Muslim religious sensibilities from future insults and abuse. Mohammed Siddique, the president of the Movement, declared :"Rushdie is misguided if he believes that his 'goodwill gesture' will appease Muslims. Until Muslim demands are met, there can be no peace." 201 Remark that a remark how a Muslim clearly spells out the Muslim attitude towards co-existence : "Until Muslim demands are met, there can be no peace." Do you need more explanation for the communal riots in India ? One secularist comment deserves mention. The poison is in a very little corner. G.H. Jansen, Times of India correspondent in Nicosia, writes that Rushdie's conversion "must have been very disappointing to the literati-glitterati of New York and London who so enjoyed springing to arms in defense of Rushdie and of 'freedom'."202 What are those quote marks doing there around the word freedom? It seems Mr. Jansen doesn't want the right to skepsis regarding Mohammed to be described as freedom. The bootlickers of Islamic terrorism are treading in the footsteps of the apologists of Communism, who use to dismiss freedom (whenever someone drew attention to its non-existence in Communist countries) as bourgeois-liberalist illusion.

12.2 Banning criticism of Islam Rushdie's book is by far not the only one that has been banned in the secular republic of India, on pretext of its hurting the feelings of a religious community. Let us mention first of all that, to create a semblance of impartiality, Rushdie's book was sent into exile in the company of a film that might have hurt the feelings of the Christian community : Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ, a film that attributes normal human sexual desires to Jesus. Not that any Christian had asked for this ban, but that semblance had to be created.203 In recent years, several books criticizing Islam and its role in Indian history have been banned. One of them is Richard Maxwell Eaton's Sufis of Bijapur 13001700 (Social Roles of Sufis in Medieval India), published in Princeton 1978, which debunks the pious fable that the Sufis were bringers of a tolerant and refined Islam and the pioneers of a synthesis between Islam and Hinduism. Another is Arvind Ghosh's The Koran and the Kafir (all that an infidel needs to know about the Koran but is embarrassed to ask), published in Houston. This book chiefly groups Quranic verses topic-wise, to give a ready reference overview of Mohammed's teachings. Then there is the Australian writer Colin Maine's booklet The Dead Hand of Islam. It consists of little more than literal quotes from Islamic Scripture. Nonetheless, to appease Muslim pressure, the publisher is being prosecuted, and the book has been banned. Incidentally, there was absolutely no trouble concerning his similar book on Christianity, The Bible : What It Says.

Banning a book for containing Quranic verses...Is this a first step towards banning the Quran ? And that, moreover, at the Muslims' own instigation ? Let's face it : the objectionable lines in Colin Maine's book, for which it was banned, also appear in the Quran and the surrounding Islamic canon. Why should Mohammed's big book be more equal that Mr. Maine's booklet ? A head-on call to judge the Quran by the same standards as other books, was the essence of Chandmal Chopra's famous Quran petition. Mr. Chopra had filed a writ petition in the Calcutta High Court in March 1985, seeking a ban on a book which incites to hatred and struggle against a group of people on the basis of religion. His petition lists several dozens of quotes from the objectionable book, unambiguously pouring contempt on, and inciting war against, a group of religious communities : the non-Muslims. It also quotes the book as pouring contempt on religious figures sacred to other communities, notably Jesus and Mary. The book is, of course, the Quran. The petition was dismissed by justice B.C. Basak in May 1985. A central point in the verdict was, that Courts cannot interfere with religious beliefs like the sacred and divine character of the Quran (in marked contrast to the secularist line on Ram Janmabhoomi, where Hindus are asked to allow Courts to overrule their religious beliefs). In 1986, a book was published containing the court documents, with a scholarly introduction by Sita Ram Goel.204 The introduction says that of course no ban on the Quran was ever intended (since Scriptures and Classics are kept out of the purview of censorship legislation, there was no chance of obtaining such a ban), but that attention had to be drawn on the fact that, while some allegedly provocative books are being banned, a book is widely circulated and studied intensively in thousands of state-subsidized institutions, which makes far more explicit calls to communal strife than any banned book so far has done. They solution is not to ban the Quran, but on the contrary to honestly read it and judge it for yourself in the light of reason. For this book, the Calcutta police arrested Mr. Chandmal Chopra on August 31, 1987, accusing him of entering into a criminal conspiracy with Mr. Sita Ram Goel for publishing the book with thedeliberate intention of provoking communal strife in Calcutta and West Bengal. His bail application was opposed vehemently by the public prosecutor. He was kept in police custody till September 8, so that the conspiracy could be "investigated without his coming in the way". Mr. Goel, "a co-accused still at large", applied for anticipatory bail. This was first postponed and then rejected. Mr. Goel had to abscond for a while to avoid being dragged to the Calcutta jail. While the verdict on the Quran petition had overstepped secular limits by declaring the Quran a revealed scripture (which is a claim beyond secular proof), and by taking great pains to prove that Islam is a religion of peace, now the police charge-sheet distorted the facts by calling the book's academic

language malicious andprovocative. At any rate, Mr. Chopra and Mr. Goel got caught in a long-drawn-out legal battle, though the book itself was not banned. Perhaps the most revealing story of a book banning concerns Ram Swarup's Understanding Islam through Hadis. This is an annotated topic-wise summary of the Sahih Muslim, one of the two most authoritative traditions concerning the words and deeds of the Prophet. The book was first published in the U.S., a secular and multi- religious country. In India also, the English original circulated for some time without inviting any governmental attention. But when the Hindi translation was nearing publication, something went wrong. The book was at the binders' workshop, which was situated in a predominantly Muslim neighbourhood. A neighbour must have spread the word that a book scrutinizing the Prophet was about to be offered for sale in the bookstores. The one chance for preventing the book from reaching any readers, was now. Suddenly, a crowd of people gathered around the binders' shop. They demanded the entire stock of the objectionable book to be handed over for burning, otherwise they would set the place itself on fire. The police was called. They made no attempt to disperse the crowd. Instead they summoned and arrested the printer and the publisher, and they made sure that everyone got an eyeful of the arrest show. They also confiscated the stock of the contentious book. Having thus placated the crowd, they released the printer and the publisher after 18 hours, but the copies of the book were not returned. They have not been heard of since, even though the book was not officially banned. In deference to a plaint by the Muslim neighbour, the Delhi administration has had two meetings in 1988-89, to consider whether the book was objectionable. Twice it was cleared. But the pressure for banning it was kept up. The Jama'at-i Islami paper Radiance, on the front page of its June 17, 1990 issue, carried a big caption : "Is this book not objectionable ?" Presenting some excerpts from Ram Swarup's book, it warned its readers :"Most parts of the book are concoctions and distortions as well as defamatory and derogatory to the Holy Prophet Mohammed (peace be upon him)". What concoctions and distortions ? The same front page quotes four of these objectionable distortions. Among them :"Mohammed saw Zaynab in half- naked condition and he fell in love with her."205 Well, maybe this is objectionable. But it is not Ram Swarup's concoction or distortion. The source is the Sahih Muslim, one of the two most authoritative Hadis collections. Ram Swarup has here and there added some sober and factual comment, but at no point does he come in the way of the Hadis text speaking for itself. If the Jama'at-i Islami wants to ban such information from being circulated in India, it should seek a ban on the Hadis as well as the Quran. If the Quran and the Hadis are allowed to be read and sold, we should all have the right to read them, shouldn't we ? And since there is no copyright problem,

we can even publish scholarly selections from them. The Jama'at-i Islami has, in all the years that the book has been available in bookstores, not sought a ban on Vinoba Bhave's The Essence of the Quran, a syrupy selection of all the nice and harmless verses from the Quran. But no, the Jama'at as well as other Muslim groups, and personalities close to the Janata Dal (either faction), have sought a ban on Ram Swarup's book. In September 1990, a court ruled that the book was unobjectionable. But the pressure continued. And come December 1990, a third meeting of Delhi administration officials revoked the two earlier decisions, and issued a ban on the book. It forfeited all the copies published or to be published in the future, on the ground that the book deliberately and maliciouslyoutrage "the religious feelings of the Muslims by insulting their religion and their religious beliefs". For the semblance of even-handedness, it also banned a non-descript book on Ramayana and Mahabharata, and took care to put the latter ban first in its official notification. No one is fooled, though. Arun Shourie has commented : "The forfeiture is exactly the sort of thing which has landed us where we are : where intellectual inquiry is shut out ; where our tradition are not examined and reassessed ; and where as a consequence there is no dialogue."206 An interesting fact about the Muslim reaction against Ram Swarup's book, is that Muslim leaders like the Radiance editor expect to get away with the lie that the embarrassing but faithful quotations from Scripture are really concoctions and distortions. It seems that the common Muslims do not know the Quran and Hadis from A to Z. Many of them readily believe their leaders' contention that Mohammed was above the behaviour ascribed to him by the Hadis and the orthodox biographies. Their reverence is directed towards a mythical Mohammed, who is different in character from the historical Mohammed as he appears through the Islamic Scriptures. And this mythical Mohammed of popular Muslim belief is slandered when the Scriptural testimonies about the historical Mohammed are quoted. The same discrepancy between the orthodox historical Mohammed, and the mythical Mohammed of popular belief was at the core of an earlier book-banning episode, dating back to the fifties. Muslims had staged a riot against the book Muhammad, by Thomas and Thomas, published by the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Bombay. The Nehru government rewarded them for their agitation by banning the book.207 According to the rioters, or their leaders, the book had defamed the Prophet. The book narrated how Mohammed had become frightened when the angel Gabriel came with the first revelation from Allah. He wanted to know whether he had been visited by an angel or a devil. He told Khadija what had happened, and she asked him to tell her as soon as Gabriel would visit him next. He did so.

Khadija bared her right and her left thigh turn by turn, and asked Mohammed to sit on each and see if the visitor stayed. Next Khadija bared her bosom and asked Mohammed to sit in her lap. Finally, she asked him to have sexual intercourse with her. Now the visitor disappeared. Khadija congratulated Mohammed that his visitor was an angel and not a devil. This story was by no means concoction and distortion. One can read it in the orthodox biographies of Mohammed. Ibn Ishaq, his first biographer, relates : Ismail b. Ibn Hakim, a freedman of the family of al- Zubayr, told me on Khadija's authority that she said to the apostle of God : O son of my uncle, are you able to tell me about your visitant, when he comes to you? He replied that he could, and she asked him to tell her when he came. So when Gabriel came to him, as he was wont, the apostle said to Khadija : "This is Gabriel who has just come to me". Get up, O son of my uncle, she said, and sit by my left thigh. The apostle did so, and she said :"Then turn around and sit on my right thigh". He did so, and she said :'Can you see him ?' And he replied :No. She said :'O son of my uncle, rejoice, and be of good heart, by God he is an angel and not a satan.' "I told Abdullah b. Hasan this story and he said :'I heard my mother Fatima, daughter of Husayn, talking about this tradition from Khadija, but as I heard it, she made the apostle of God come inside her shift, and thereupon Gabriel departed, and she said tot he apostle of God :'This is verily an angel and not a satan.'" These two paragraphs can be read by anyone on p.107 of The Life of Muhammad, published by the prestigious Oxford University Press, Karachi (first time in 1955, reprinted seven times till 1987). The book is an English translation by A. Guillaume of Ibn Ishaq's Sirat Rasul Allah (Biography of Allah's Prophet). The authors of the banned book had not distorted or concocted anything. Moreover, they bore no malice towards Mohammed. On the contrary, they were endorsing, after the orthodox Muslim fashion, that this episode proved the divine source of Mohammed's revelations. The average Muslim does not know what is written in the Islamic Scriptures. He shares the normal moral notions of his Hindu neighbours, and assumes that the Holy Prophet must have excelled in those virtues which he himself values. The Muslim politicians and theologians exploit his ignorance and mobilize him for street riots by ascribing to enemies of Islam what is in fact contained in their own Scriptures. And all this is being condoned by the secularists, who turn a blind eye to this deception and misguidance of the common Muslim, and to the attacks of Muslim politicians and theologians against out freedom of inquiry.

12.3 Secularism and book-banning When Ram Swarup's book on the Hadis was banned under pressure from Muslim fanatics, there was of course not a word of protest from the secularists. If in secular Europe, the pope speaks out against the Scorsese film on Jesus' temptations, without even trying to pressure governments to ban it, the European secularist press, as if to pre-empt any suggestion of a ban, makes it quite clear that there can be no question of anyhow restricting the public's access to the film.208 If people don't want to see it, let them not go see it. That is their freedom, like it is other people's freedom to go see it, unimpeded by papal or governmental bans. While secularism is a European import into India, I just don't recognize the secularism practiced in India. It so happens that I have grown up in one of the first countries ever to adopt a fully secular Constitution, Belgium. In my country, we think that secularism implies the freedom to learn, teach and practice a religion, and also the freedom to reject, abandon and criticize a religion. But in India, those who call themselves secular, combine a Stalinist propensity to ban religious education in (non-minority) schools, or to ban religious TV serials, with a bigoted propensity to ban books that take a critical look at religions. In both cases, they arrogate the right to decide for others what they can see and read, and what not. We think that secularism means : let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred ideas compete. But in India, the favourite slogan of secularists is : Ban it ! Listen here, friends : banning for secularism is like f...ing for virginity. We think we have a right to know about every aspect of life, including religion ; whether we want to practice it or to reject it, we have a right to full access to information. But in India, secularists are not satisfied with the freedom for themselves to know and find out : they support demands for the freedom to limit others' freedom of access to books and films. And their justification is that these books and films might hurt feelings and thus disturb communal harmony. Indian secularists declare that a critical orblasphemous book should be banned, because it may offend someone's feelings. Genuine secularists oppose bans because a ban offends our intelligence. And offended it is, by these inflated book-banners who claim the right to decide for us what we can read and what not. In Europe, we have come to protect our constitutional freedoms, and hardly any bigot will even think of either seriously campaigning for a ban or using violence to punish people who show interest in the material to which he objects. All right, there was a bomb attack on a movie theater showing the Temptation film. But the culprit was simply caught and put in jail. Nobody has suggested that we should ban the film in order to avert violence. If at all there is a threat of violence, then there are no two opinions about the duty of the state to uphold the constitutional freedoms, and to prevent terror-mongers from dictating who can see what.209

In India, by contrast, the secularists are systematically on the side of the terrormongers. They wee the first to support the latter's demand for banning The Satanic Verses. Terror-threatening bigots said :Ban this book, or else... And secularists echoed :"We must ban this book, or else..." But Indian secularists not only side with armed bigots ; there is also the Stalinist streak in them (incidentally, Stalin was an ex-seminarian). They not only want to ban what is objectionable andhurting to followers of some religions : they also want to ban what is sacred or at least valuable and uplifting to members of another religion. A great many secularists have blamed the Ramayana and Mahabharata TV serials for the "rise of Hindu communalism" and for the Ram hysteria.210 Of course, Ram was never that far away from the ordinary Hindu's consciousness, that the TV serials could have made much of a difference. Through Tulsidas' Hindi Ramayana, the common people in North India are thoroughly familiar with Ram, Sita and Hanuman, and they don't need TV serials to remind them. For the urban elites, it may have been a reminder of the culture they are in danger of forgetting. But for those secularists who have been completely alienated from their culture, these TV serials were anathema, and so, of course, they wanted them to be banned. Not that a ban would have been in the interest of peace and communal harmony. While most Hindus had no need of this TV serial in order to keep up their devotion for Ram, once it was there they avidly watched it. And they would have been very angry if its showing had been suspended. It might have led to some outbursts, who knows. At any rate, if you ban books in order to pre- empt Muslim riots, you should take the possibility of Hindus starting riots also into account (or do our secularists subscribe to the received wisdom that Hindus are less riotprone?). But that consideration for Hindus taking to the streets was not too prominent in the pleas for a ban on the TV serials. And they could have argued, of course, that such a Hindu reaction would have been the lesser evil, as the showing of the serials has been instrumental in the Ram Mandir campaign, which has encountered (triggered) enough violence. But I think it is time the secularists come out and admit that a ban onHindu TV serials is dear to them not because of the law and order situation, but because of the fact that these serials remind Hindus of Hindu culture. The basic objection of the secularists against the Ramayana and Mahabharata, both in their written and in their film versions, is that they are religious Scriptures of one community, and therefore their reading or showing should be limited to places and channels of Hindus only ; no state-owned TV station should be open for suchcommunal stories. Having attended some press conferences in Delhi, and having talked to some press people here, as well as to other classes of intellectuals, I am amazed to

see the crudeness in these secularists' understanding of religious and cultural matters. Most of them are nice and well-meaning people, but they are completely illiterate. They just don't have the education, or the power of discrimination, to distinguish between cultural epics like Mahabharata and Ramayana, and religious Scriptures. If at all you want a point of comparison in other cultures, perhaps Homer's epics Ilias and Odyssea might do : that was a common heritage of the Greek people, but not a revealed Scripture containing dogmas. Or, for a more provocative but quite accurate comparison, a good equivalent of the role of the Ramayana in Hindu culture is the role of the same Ramayana in Indonesian culture. The question has been put to the secularists several times, but they have not come up with any trace of an answer : if Indonesian Muslims can venerate Ram, why can't Indian Muslims, as well as Indian secularists, do the same ? The wellinformed Indonesians don't object to Ram as a communal character, as agod of one religion and therefore anathema to others. Another non-Hindu tribe that has given a warm reception to the Ramayana and Mahabharata epics, are the European film and theater audiences. Between 1985 and 1990, these epics have found their way to the public in Europe. They have been top of the bill at the Avignon theater festival. Peter Brooke's Mahabharata, though perhaps not sufficiently true to the original for Indian purists, has been applauded by the viewers, and has been shown on many TV stations also. The BBC has even broadcast the Hindi TV serials. While the comments on certain artistic aspects of these realisations may vary, the reviewers were unanimously impressed by the contents of these epics. The secularists in India like to portray themselves as the bringers of civilisation from the West to obscurantist India. Well, let them not fool anybody. In Europe, not one single critic has come up with the idea that these epics could somehow be communal. On the contrary, they have all stressed that these stories are about universal human values. Of course, with that quite proper assessment of these epics, any kind of a call for a ban on these film versions of the epics was totally unthinkable. Incidentally, it is time for me to reply to those indignated readers who might ask : who is this foreigner to comment on our affairs ? Well, since secularism was imported into India from Europe, and is now held up as India's only salvation by an Indian-born colonial elite, I do think I am competent to comment on what these West- oriented civilizers are making of our precious heritage of secularism. They are making a mess of it. As I have pointed out in chapter 10.4, there can be no correct understanding of secularism without a correct understanding ofreligion. If people are so illiterate as to treat the Ramayana as areligious Scripture (by which they imply dogma, authoritarian claims of infallibility, non-humanism) then their understanding of

both religion and secularism cannot but be defective. It is this conceptual confusion that keeps their conscience undisturbed when they shield fanatics in the name of tolerance and defend book-banning in the name of secularism.

12.4. Banning religion from school Apart from the subtle point that the Indian secularists lack the conceptual subtlety to do justice to either religion or secularism, there is a far more crude way in which they mess up the precious doctrine of secularism. It is this : they themselves are communalists. The secularists do not hesitate to support policies of discrimination on the basis of religion. One of these is the discrimination against Hinduism in the matter of educational institutions. This is ban of far greater weight than all the bans on books, films and Verses together. According to Bipan Chandra's classical definition, communalism is the belief that people who share the same religion, thereby also have common secular interests.211 An active communalism not only postulates that people who share a religion, have common secular interests ; it also grants them (or withholds from them) secular rights on the basis of their belonging to a given religion. Therefore, it is certainly a case of active communalism when we find the secular Constitution of India (which limits its own authority to secular matters), in its Article 30, guaranteeing the secular right to set up educational institutions of their choice exclusively to minorities, including religious minorities. This case of discrimination against the majority community is outright communalism.212 Yet, no secularist raises his voice against it. On the contrary, when pressed for an opinion, they support it. When Sadhvi Ritambhara, a pro-Janmabhoomi campaigner (a cassette of a speech of hers was banned), tells an interviewer:"Politicians appease [the Muslims] at every step, while the Hindus are taken for granted. We can't even teach our children our religion in schools", the interviewer replies : "But this is a secular nation".213 No, in these circumstances it is not a secular nation. Either secular means antireligious, and then all religion teaching should be banned from schools, also that of the minorities.214 Or secular means religiously neutral, and then the state should leave all the religions the same right to impart religious education in schools, including the Hindus. Passing off this communal discrimination assecular, is a very crude lie indeed. In Belgium, the secular Constitution gives any religious (or other215) community the right to found its own schools, which will be recognized and subsidized if they satisfy certain legal norms. They can impart religious education within the regular

class hours. In state schools, the curriculum comprises two hours per week of religious or moral education, with a choice between non- religious morality, or Catholic, Protestant, Jewish or Islamic religion. The secular philosophy behind this, is that it is not the duty of the state to either promote or eradicate religion. The state should be neutral and limit itself to regulating the genuine demand from the public for a reasonable dosis of the religious education of its own choice. A religiously neutral state : that is secularism. But in India, the secularists intend to put up an all-out fight the day Hindus take steps to abolish this constitutional discrimination against them. In my opinion, if the Hindus want to fruitfully use the energy which the Ram Janmabhoomi campaign has generated, they should direct it first of all to restoring justice in the field of education. Both the Arya Samaj and the Ramakrishna Mission have been fighting legal battles for recognition as non-Hindu sects, in order to safeguard their educational institutions. Their lawyers have thought up very specious doctrinal difference between the organization they represented, and Hinduism. Thus, the Ramakrishna Mission has been arguing that they have another God than the Hindus. Their great saint Ramakrishna was always perfectly satisfied with Kali, like millions of Hindus. Their founder, Swami Vivekananda, was the representative of Hinduism in the world parliament of religions in Chicago 1893. "Say with pride : we are Hindus", that is what Vivekananda said. Forsaking its roots, the Ramakrishna Mission goes begging in Court for a non-Hindu status.216 It may well be that both the Arya Samaj and the Ramakrishna Mission have been afflicted with the general shame of and depreciation for everything Hindu. Behind their Court plea for a non-Hindu status may well be a theological shift away from Hinduism (although they would have to make it a very big shift, because very diverse sects exist within the Hindu fold). Nevertheless, their official apology to their Hindu supporters is that minority status is the only way to escape government take-overs of their schools. Especially the CPM government in West Bengal has been ruthlessly using the constitutional discrimination against Hindu schools for justifying take-overs. But have these organizations appealed to Hindu society to come to their rescue? Have they launched, or asked politicians to launch, a campaign to end this discrimination ? Apparently they have absolutely no confidence in the willingness of Hindu politicians to take up even an impeccably justified Hindu cause. So, I think Hindu politicians should make this their number one issue. Article 30 is far more unjust and harmful than Article 370 which gives a special status to Kashmir. You can better lose that piece of territory than to lose your next generations. It is also a good exercise in separating the genuine secularists from the Hindu-baiters. The demand for equality between all religions in education

merely seeks the abrogation of an injustice against the Hindus, so it cannot be construed as directed against the minorities. It wants to stop a blatant case of discrimination on the basis of religion, so everyone who comes out in support of the present form of Article 30, will stand exposed as a supporter of communal discrimination. It is truly a watershed issue.

13. Facing the truth the only solution 13.1 Facing the past The chronic disease of communal riots is not going to end by all the talk of secularism and national integration. Some people in Indian politics and in the press seem to think that by repeating the mantrasecularism often enough, you will get secularism. But by sayingfood, food, food your hunger will not be satisfied. Rather, you will starve to death, or get bored to death by this insupportable repetitiveness. Superficial Sadbhavana bla-bla is not capable of stopping communal hatred. A minimum requirement for communal harmony is that 1. the historical and ideological roots of communal hatred are faced squarely, and 2. the general and theoretical insight into the roots of the problem are actualized by a formal acceptance of historical responsibilities. After 1945, the Germans have apologized to the Jews for what they had done to them. They also have payed huge reparations to the Polish, Russian and Jewish peoples, for them it was more than just a gesture ; but it is the gesture which we want to consider here. The Japanese needed till 1989 before they apologized to the Koreans. The fact that the Japanese occupation of Korea had ended since 44 years was not invoked as an excuse for just disregarding that unfortunate chapter in history. Also in 1989, the Soviet authorities have recognized their guilt in the Katyn massacre of Polish officers, and held a ceremony on the site with Polish leaders. In 1990, the Soviets have apologized to the Koreans for starting the Korean war in 1950, as well as for 217 shooting down the Korean airliner in 1983. In 1990, the American government has apologized to the Japanese who had pre- emptively been arrested and put in concentration camps during World War II, and payed a compensation in cash to the affected people still alive. On December 29, 1990, the Centenary of the Native Americans' last battle in Wounded Knee was marked with a ceremony in which the South Dakota governor offered words of sorrow and apology. It was the 218 culmination of a Year of Reconciliation. And the Dutch Reformed Church of South Africa publicly apologized to the blacks, and asked them for forgiveness, for the ideological support it had given to Apartheid. The way to make a new beginning goes via recognizing and formally terminating the faults of the past. The application of this principle to the Indian situation is crystal-clear; the Muslim community should come out and recognize the atrocities which its earlier generations have inflicted on the Hindus, and make a gesture of goodwill to formally terminate that chapter in history. Leaving the Ram Janmabhoomi spot to the Hindus, to do with it as they please, would have been just such a gesture. A very easy one, for it cost nothing. The Muslim community was not even in control of the place, all they would have to do was not to interfere in what already was an internal Hindu affair. The fact that even this easy goodwill gesture was not made, at least by the externally recognized leadership of the Muslim community, is a very sad thing. On a world-wide scale, the time is ripe for such a recognition of past mistakes.

The Christians are facing their past. Even in religion class in Catholic schools in Belgium, we gave attention to the gruesome part in Church history. In Latin America, the 500th anniversary of Columbus' arrival has sparked some serious reconsideration both within and outside the Church, about the role of Christianity in the wholesale destruction of all the cultures without exception in the entire New World. In Delhi, I have asked a Roman Catholic Father, head of an important institute, what he had to say about the acts of fanaticism perpetrated by many of his predecessors in the Mission. He said: "We are not uptight about it." While this past is by no means forgotten, the Christians have, by and large, accepted that in the name of Christianity very large-scale crimes against humanity have been committed. They now reorient themselves, making a distinction between the original spirit of Christianity, and the later aberrations. It is possible to live with the realization that the community to which one belongs, is or has been responsible for less than uplifting practices (Dante, the greatest of Christian poets, described how utterly depraved the Church had become in his time, and then added that to him it still remained the Church of Christ). So, it is time to face the truth. Judging by the glasnost in the Soviet block and in the Catholic Church regarding past crimes, the time is ripe to finish the glossing-over which the secularists have been practicing and propagating. The rosy presentation of Islam which the secularist press is feeding the public, should be debunked. In Europe there are also people, very few, who insist on denying the Nazi crimes, the genocide 219 on the Jews and the Gypsies. These people are called revisionists or negationists, and their stand is considered highly objectionable (France has even gone a little too far, in my opinion, by making it a punishable offence to deny the Nazi extermination camps). In India, by contrast, the negationists who deny the existence of the centuries-long jihad, in which a systematic oppression and slaughter of Kafirs was pursued, are calling the shots. Even if the Muslims themselves don't feel ready yet for coming to terms with their communal past (which may be humanly difficult, and should in no way be forced on them), that is no reason for secular intellectuals to stick to this negationist glossing-over. In 1987 the Japanese ministry of education decided to tone down the report of the Rape of Nanching (a massacre in China by the Japanese occupation forces in World War II) in Japanese history books. They wanted to put in a new version : this massacre was nothing special, it just happens in any war, it had nothing to do with Japanese national supremacism, and therefore it doesn't deserve any special highlighting. They did not intend much more than changing the proportions of this episode vis-a-vis the totality of the war. They were not going to deny that it had happened. Yet, China reacted angrily. The Chinese government filed a strong official protest against this rewriting of history, and Chinese communities in different countries held demonstrations in front of the Japanese embassies. 220

So, that is how particular the Chinese are about setting the historical record straight. Now, even if Japan ever whitewashes its entire role in World War II (which it does not consider doing at all), even if Chinese protests could not prevent such a development, then that still would not make any neutral historian, much less the Chinese themselves, rewrite their own history-books to absolve the erstwhile Japanese aggressors. But in India, we find the unbelievable situation, that not only Muslim historians and public figures refuse to face the truth about Muslim history : neutralsecular historians are also covering up and denying the crimes which Islam has systematically committed, and even many Hindus are denying the crimes committed against their own society. It is a matter of self-respect as much as a matter of respect for the historical truth, that Hindus face their own history and tell their children about the crimes of the closed creeds like Islam.

13.2. Islam and Nazism It may sound shocking to some people that I have compared the Hindu-Muslim relations with the Jewish-German relations of the Nazi period. While in Israel you get to hear more comparisons of Muslims with Nazis, in India it may still be unfashionable. I would like to point out that comparing people to the Nazis is not so uncommon. In fact, the communists call non-communists fascists all the time. In the communalism debate, the Hindu side has been bracketed with Nazism by all sorts of people, even by a smug bourgeois like Mani Shankar Aiyar (in several episodes of his Sunday column, where he considerably distorts German history to make it fit, see ch.14.10) or a preacherous do-gooder like Rajmohan Gandhi, as much as by rank fanatics like Syed Shahabuddin. Now, I don't have to distort history in order to make my comparison of Islam with Nazism. In very essential characteristics, the role of Islam in Indian history is the same as the role of Nazism in German-Jewish history. Firstly, both uphold an absolute division of humanity in a superior and glory-bound community, and an evil and hell-bound community. The Quran says dozens of times that the Kafirs are condemned in an absolute and eternal sense, whereas the Momins or believers are promised eternal lust in heaven. Nazism didn't have those otherworldly pretensions, but in this world the Jew was identified with everything evil, and made to suffer for it. This is just like Islam, which from its absolute and eternal division of humanity logically deduced their radically different status in the other world, and imposed a radically inferior status on the Kafirs in worldly matters also. Secondly, on the conscience-quietening bedrock of this divisionist ideology, they both set up a program for the total extermination of the inferior species. Here there was one difference : since Nazism postulated biological determination, and erroneously thought Judaism as a racial unit, there was no way out for anyone born from Jewish parents. Facing the sword of Islam, Kafirs had one escape : conversion. If they had been taken captive when fighting or fleeing the Muslim armies, even conversion could not save them from slavery, but at least it saved their lives in most cases. I estimate that the Muslim conquerors killed more than six million Hindus, the number of Jews 221 killed by the Nazis. Of course, they had a bigger number of victims to pick from, and they had centuries while the Nazis had a few years. But then, they didn't have the technology, nor the total control of the country. They didn't have the means to be as thorough. Among the systematic killers, like Ghaznavi, Ghori, Teimur, Babar, there was a clear drive to physically finish the Kafirs. Fortunately they didn't have gas chambers, but they had no inhibition in using all the killing apparatus at their disposal. The Bahmani sultans made it a point to kill one lakh Hindus every year. On top of outright massacres, there were several other ways in which the Muslim conquerors and rulers caused the death of many lakhs of Hindus. Many died a nameless death under the hardships of slavery. Many were made to fight in special infantry cohorts in the Muslim armies, 222 and systematically used for the risky and suicidal tasks. This absolute disrespect for the lives of the Kafirs was founded in Islamic doctrine. It was not an isolated incident, but part of a pattern that was also in evidence in other parts of the Muslim empire. The Egyptian-born scholar Mrs. Bat Ye'or has presented a collection of documents about the Jewish and Christian communities living under Muslim rule, and of whom Muslim apologetics 223 always boasts that they were treated better than minorities in Christian countries. In reality, they were often subjected to all kinds of harassment and humiliation, large-scale abduction of women and children, and occasional mass slaughter. As late as 1915, the Turks slaughtered

about 15 lakh Christian Armenians, more than one-fourth of the Armenian population, or a percentage close to that of the Jews killed by the Nazis. They never expressed regret or payed reparations. Hitler, when criticized by his aides about the extermination camps, explicitly invoked the Armenian genocide as a precedent. There are also smaller points of similarity. Before the extermination of the Jews began, the Jews were tolerated but they had to suffer a number of restrictions and humiliations, which correspond closely to the restrictions imposed on the Zimmis by the Muslims. A telling example is that they had to make themselves physically recognizable by wearing a David's star on the chest, just like the Muslims imposed the wearing of specific dress on the Jews in Morocco, the Christians in Egypt, the Hindus in Gujarat. Like the Muslims, the Nazis acknowledged an intermediate status between the Jews/Kafirs who have to be exterminated, and the Herrenvolk/Muslims who should rule the world. The Nazis did not want to exterminate inferior races like the Slavs, but they wanted them to remain as thirdclass citizens, with no say in power, wholly subordinate to the superior race. And the Muslims did not declare total war on the People of the Book (Jews and Christians), who could remain as thirdclass citizens, with no say in power, wholly subordinate to the Muslims. This is the heritage which the Muslim community has to face. It can be done. In fact it is only hard to the extent that you keep identifying yourself with those rulers who conducted such policies, and with the doctrines that inspired them. It can be taken as a glorious opportunity, to free one's community from those awful heroes and doctrines.

13.3. Seeing the bright side While some secularists are outright liars and conscious history-distorters, this falsified history has become so widespread that there is now a generation of intellectuals who genuinely believe that Aurangzeb was the unifier of India, rather than a cruel fanatic, or that Mahmud Ghaznavi plundered for wealth rather than to terrorize the Kafirs. In the case of non-historians, I will give the benefit of the doubt and assume that their whitewashing of Muslim history is in good faith. For instance, Mani Shankar Aiyar has said :"All [Uma Bharati] sees, knows or cares to know are Mahmud Ghaznavi, Aurangzeb and others. It is not germane to her world view that Islam brought brotherhood to the world and initiated the greatest self-improvement movement, a part of which 224 were Sant Tukaram, Namdev, Mirabai, Guru Nanak and Kabir." As for this brotherhood, the facts are that Islam practiced slavery on an unprecedented scale, and that its treatment of Kafirs was anything but brotherly (unless you think Aurangzeb's treatment of his broad-minded brother Dara Shikoh is normative). If the saints mentioned by Mani were that great, then the credit goes to Hindu culture, of which each of them was a part. Even Kabir, the only one among them with an unmistakable Islamic connection (an Arabic name), has never said that "there is no contact with the divine except through the Quran", which is essential in Islam ; he has said on the contrary that liberation is not to be found in Scripture (a stand always held up against Brahmins, but in fact more shattering for Islam with its total belief in one definitive 225 Scripture). I have it on good authority that Kabir's thought is Hindu through and through. The simplest proof that his contribution to Indian culture was un-Islamic, is that he was persecuted for his Kafir ideas by the Muslim ruler Sikandar Lodi. One well-known Indian journalist told me that "this Ram Janmabhoomi movement is finishing the tolerance which was brought into Hinduism by the Sufis like Kabir and Nanak". My God, what a distortion. First, the statements of tolerance in Hinduism can be found in pre-Sufi books like the

Rig-Veda and the Bhagavad Gita :"Let good thoughts come to us from all sides", or"The truth is one but the wise call it by many names", or Krishna saying that "Whoever invokes a deity by whatever name, it is Me he invokes". Second, it is a myth that the Bhakti movement owes a lot to the Sufi movement. If anything, it was the reverse. But by that, I do not mean, as secularists would hope, that Sufis took over a lot from these Bhakti saints : they didn't, in fact they scrupulously avoided Kafir influences. But Bhakti was a late-medieval re-statement of doctrines that had always been present in Hindu tradition. And its universalism and stress on direct experience had been expressed in the teachings of many sects, some of which had a following outside Hindusthan proper. It was there that they left traces which have reappeared in Muslim religious thought as Sufism. When Islam had overrun Iran and Turkestan, the local religions were exterminated, but they started a second life as the Sufi movement, which brought distinctly un- Islamic elements back into the official culture, but in Islamic garb. The original Sufis, like Jalal ud-Din Rumi, brought a lot of the open-mindedness and universalism of pre-Islamic culture back into the Islamized world. However, the later Sufis who came to India, were largely just missionaries, who may have practiced mysticism which was un-Islamic enough, and yet joined in the fanatical drive to exterminate Paganism, by conversion or otherwise. (For some authentic testimony, I could advise you to read Eaton's book Sufis of Bijapur, but with the secularists active or passive support, it has been banned). It should be stressed that what is worthwhile in Sufism, is the un-Islamic part. The consciousness exploration, the universalism, the commonality (or should I say: the communalism) with all creature, this is very nice but very un-Islamic, nowhere to be found in the Quran or the Hadis. The 226 orthodox doctors of Islam knew it well enough that this was heresy. But increasingly, Sufism was integrated into Islam, not to make it more humane, but to become less humane itself. And when Sufism reached India, it was not the stuff that could attract genuine saints like Guru Nanak or Tulsidas (who, perhaps because of his devotion to Ram, is absent from Mani Shankar Aiyar's list), or Kabir. It was these Hindus who gave some attention to the fact that Muslims too had devotion and a universal spiritual urge, and even in the face of Islam's fanatic challenge, these Hindu saints held high the banner of universalism. If I try to understand where these people get the wholly erroneous notion that it is Sufism that brought tolerance into Hinduism, I surmise they might be meaning the attacks on the socialintolerance of the caste system, which are attributed to these Bhakti saints (mis- termed Sufis). Well, that has to be looked into. To my knowledge, Kabir has only said that social differences disappear during the Bhakti experience. And the same thing counts for Guru Nanak, 227 and, for that matter, for Gautama Buddha. They were not social reformers. At most, they had to make certain social choices in the practical organization of their sect. It is the deep influence of Marxism, together with a total ignorance concerning religion, that makes it hard for people to see these religious teachers for what they were : teachers of a spiritual path. In Ambedkar I see no religious enthusiasm for the Buddha's teachings. All he does with the teaching of Compassion, is using it as a stick to beat Brahminism with: a complete subordination of the Buddha's spiritual message to Ambedkar's own political 228 compulsions. Another example of this essentially Marxist exaggeration of social concerns is the Sanskritization theory (which holds that lower castes adopted Brahmin ways to raise their status), where it says that some castes adopted vegetarianism for prestige reasons, off-hand denying the possibility that spiritual teachers convinced people of the intrinsic spiritual, ethical or health value of vegetarianism. So, While here I don't want to give my final opinion on the matter, it seems to me that the Bhakti saints were religious teachers rather than social reformers. I think the compulsion to see social

reformers everywhere in Indian history, follows from a Marxist prejudice, from an ignorance of religion as a field of experience in its own right, and from a far too grim image of the structure and living conditions in traditional Hindu society. The journalist I just quoted, also praised these Sufis for beingiconoclasts. Again, what he meant was probably that they went against obsolete or harmful practices, both at the social and the religious level. Well, very good of them. But what does it say about my secularist spokesman, that he praises people for beingiconoclasts? This : he is totally alienated from pluralist Hindu culture, and has imbibed the monotheist contempt for idols to this extent that he uses idol- breaker as a synonym for free-thinker. What he doesn't realize, is that an idol-breaker is by definition intolerant. Breaking something that is sacred to someone, is not a proof of free-thinking and open- mindedness at all. Breaking your own false gods of self- righteousness and sweet illusions, and giving up your own claims to dictate to others what to believe and what not, that is more 229 convincing proof of a free and positive mind.

13.4. Tolerance in Islam In spite of all the untruth in pro-Islamic myths that have recently been floated, it is all right that people try to see the bright side of Islam, be it in brotherhood or in Sufism. However, they should make sure it is the real Islam they are talking about, not some syrupy misrepresentation by latterday apologists or by self- deceiving Hindus like Vinoba Bhave (whose Essence of the Quran is nothing but a suppressio veri, and thus a suggestion falsi : it nicely keeps out of the reader's view all the most repulsive verses). Nobody has any quarrel with the private version of Islam that some people entertain, but general statements about the "tolerance (or otherwise) of Islam", should be checked against the real, official Islam. And even in presentations of Islam as tolerant, we may be facing not the heartfelt belief of an open-minded Muslim, but a shameless attempt at deception. For instance, I have heard Hindutva people sing the praise of Maulana Azad, for being a model of a tolerant Muslim. And they quoted him as saying that Hindu-Muslim unity was for him more important than independence, and that this was in keeping with the example of the Prophet, who had also made a covenant with the Jews in Medina. Well, the truth about this covenant of Mohammed with the Jews is that within a few years, two of the three Jewish clans had been driven out of Medina, and the third one was slaughtered to the last man. This statement by the Maulana only proves how dishonest he was, and that he counted on Hindus not knowing anything about Mohammed's career. The fact that Hindus quoted this statement with enthusiasm, proves that the Maulana's estimation of the absolute Hindu ignorance was correct. Two more recent varieties of the same tolerant Islam rhetoric, are the following. Asghar Ali Engineer writes :"It is too simplistic to put [Hindus] in the category of kafirs. It is neither doing 230 justice to the teachings of Islam nor to those of Hinduism." It does complete justice to both traditions to put Hindus in the category of kafirs. They don't recognize the prophethood of Mohammed nor the exclusive pretense of his chosen deity, Allah. That makes them non-Muslims. They also do not believe in any prophetic tradition, i.e. in people who are exclusive beneficiaries of divine revelation, from whom others have no choice but to borrow knowledge about the divine. On the contrary, they believe that everybody can attain the Awakened state which gurus have been teaching. They also reject the notion that the final truth is contained in one book : any book is merely an attempt to approximate in the terms of discursive or poetic reason the unspeakable truth, and it cannot be more than one viewpoint among others. Disregarding the essential difference between the role of Sutras and Shastras among the Hindus, and that of Scripture among the Jewish and Christian people of the Book, we might say that all of them at least use books in their religious practice. But what about tribals for whom writings and a

fortiori Scriptures are simply unknown ? By no manipulation can Asghar Ali Engineer recognize them as people of the Book. So they are unmitigated Kafirs, and have to be given a choice between Islam and death. That is the true tradition of Islam. And if Mr. Engineer wants to bring communal amity, he should not try to bring people in the people of the Book denomination, but repudiate the notion of Kafir (with its attached doctrine of killing or forcibly converting them) altogether. Considering Hindus or tribals as Kafirs is not just simplistic, it is anti- human and criminal. Until Mr. Engineer rejects the Islamic division of mankind into Muslims and Kafirs, with or without the intermediate category ofpeople of the Book, he is exactly as guilty of communal strife as the worst fundamentalist. Defeat him. Why does Mr. Engineer want to declare the Hindus people of the Book? The practical impact is, that they can become Zimmis,protected ones. That means, third-class citizens in an Islamic state. When he and the secularists want to shout abuse at Hindu Rashtra, they say it will be a theocratic state in which the Muslims will be second-class citizens, and they call that fascism. That same thing which they call fascism when they wrongly attribute it to Hindu Rashtra, is effectively accepted in the case of a Muslim Rashtra, such as Pakistan. I at least have never heard any of them refer to Pakistan as fascist. Muslim Rashtra is not only not called fascism: Mr. Engineer even seems to take it for granted as a political framework, and therefore he tries to secure a place for the Hindus in it by declaring them people of the Book, rather than just Kafirs who could not be tolerated alive. Well how generous of him. The category people of the Book is an arch-communalist notion, an integral part of a doctrine which divides humanity into Muslims or Momins (rulers and freemen, the first-and second-class citizens), Zimmi Kafirs (inferior third-class citizens), and non-Zimmi Kafirs (to be exterminated). I agree with the secularists that no compromise whatsoever should be made with communalism. Therefore I advocate an all-out intellectual attack on this distinction between Momins, Kafirs and Zimmis, the communalist doctrine par excellence. Asghar Ali Engineer continues his theological discourse as follows :"The holy Prophet, in his treaty with the Zoroastrians of Bahrain, recognized them as ahl-al-kitab (people of the book) though they are not mentioned in the Quran as such. No wonder that some Sufi saints like Jan- iJahan considered the Hindus too as people of the book." One more good reason to show no interest whatsoever in Mr. Engineer's little favour of including Hindus in thepeople of the Book, is the effective record of the treatment of the Zimmis. All right, in a generous (or maybe just tactical) gesture of the Prophet, the Zoroastrians of Bahrain were recognized aspeople of the Book; but where are they now ? Apart from a few thousand Zoroastrians living in abject poverty in a few villages in Iran, the Zoroastrians have been wiped out by Islam (only those who fled to Hindusthan have survived and prospered). If Sufis andmoderate Muslims want to recognize Hindus as people of the Book, they may have the same future in mind for them as for the Zoroastrians of Bahrain. The second recent example of a moderate Muslim trying to fool Hindus, is Maulana Wahiduddin Khan. He quotes from an Arabic book, so maybe the fault lies with its writer, though from a Maulana I would expect some familiarity with early Islamic history. He tells the following story :"Jama Masjid in Damascus built during the early period of Islam under Ummayad rule...saw its completion in 715 and is in existence till today. But in its early days, the Christians objected to a strip of land belonging to an old abandoned church having been annexed during its 231 construction". So, in the centre of the metropolis Damascus, there was an old abandoned church? The truth of the matter is that this church was a famous and celebrated cathedral. The Christians were people of the Book, so they became Zimmis and could, after the surrender of Damascus to the Muslims, keep their places of worship (though not build new ones). But, as already mentioned in ch.8.6, the

Muslims badly wanted to take over this big building, so the Christians had to bribe the Caliph in order to prevent the Muslims from taking it over, After decades of taking ever bigger bribes, the Caliph gave in to Muslim pressure, and had the cathedral transformed into a Jama Masjid. So, if moderate Maulanas tell you stories, don't believe them. But he continues :"A delegation of Christian Syrians, therefore, came to Umar the second...with the complaint that his predecessor had annexed a part of the church, having incorporated it into the building of the mosque." So, they risked trouble with the Muslim ruler for nothing but an old abandoned church, and that in an age when there was no need of creating communal friction in order to built vote-banks. Now we seek justice from you, they said. Umar ibn Abdal-Aziz promptly appointed Muhammad ibn Suwayd an- Nahri as the arbiter....The latter...arrived at the conclusion that the Christians were justified in their complaint. Then Umar issued orders for the part of the mosque which belonged to the church to be returned in its entirety to the Christians. However, this order was never executed, for the Christians had only intended to put Islamic justice to the test. When they found that it came up to the mark, they gladly announced that they were happy to donate this part of the church to the mosque. Conclusions: even in the story, the Christians don't get redress. This is explained as a voluntary gesture, but it must have been just as voluntary as Rushdie's embracing Islam. And in reality, the Christians were not even protected against the take-over of their cathedral by their Zimmi status. So, Pagans are not interested in recognition as people of the Book. They want moderate Muslims to stop denying the intolerance inherent in Islamic theology. They want them to give up the antihuman division of humanity in Muslims, Zimmi Kafirs, and Kafirs for whom there is no mercy. The fundamental intolerance and fanaticism of Islam are an undeniable fact. They can readily be proven from a large number of Quranic verses. Since quoting the Quaran may get this book banned, I will merely give the verse numbers, so you can check it for yourself. Islam promises hell to the Kafirs in Quran 3:85, 4:56, 5:37, 5:72, 8:55, 9:28, 15:2, 21:98-100, 22:19-22, 22:56-57, 25:17-19, 25:55, 29:53-55, 31:13, 66:9, 68:10-13, 72:14- 15, 98-51. Islam warms against mixing with Kafirs in Quran 2:21, 3:28, 3:118, 5:51, 5:144, 9:7, 9:28, 58:23, 60:4. Islam calls on Muslims to wage war against the Kafirs in Quran 2:191, 2:193, 4:66, 4:84,5:33, 8:12, 8:15-18, 8:39, 8:5960, 8:65, 9:2-3, 9:5, 9:14, 9:29, 9:39, 9:73,9:111, 9:123, 25:52, 37:22-23, 47:4-5, 48:29, 69:30-37. Islam encourages the war against the Kafirs by glorifying it in Quran 2:216, 9:41, 49:15, or by promising lust in paradise to the Shaheeds who die in such a war, in Quran 3:142, 3:157-158, 9:20--21. The Hadis is also explicit enough, and proves that Prophet put the Quranic injunctions into practice. However, defenders of the Faith have been trying to prove that Islam to tolerant. They have some very few arguments, and these seem convincing as long as they are not closely scrutinized (like 232 the Maulana's reference to the Medina covenant with the Jews) . One classic is:"There is no compulsion in religion" (2:256). Isn't that tolerant? Well, when people quote from the Quran to prove that Islam is inhuman and fanatical, the standard reply is :But you are quoting our of context. So, let us not make that mistake here, for the context is the key to the meaning of the text. If we read the whole passage, we find that it ends if by stating :But those who don't listen,... they are the people of the Fire, and will live forever in it. So, while not mentioning the duty of war against the unbelievers, the passage at least confirms that they will go to hell forever. The thrust of this passage is that Allah himself chooses who becomes Muslim and who doesn't. Not that the two options are equal: the Muslim will enjoy paradise, the Kafir will suffer forever in hell. But Allah says that the Prophet need not worry, since it is Allah who makes people convert. The larger context of this passage is that Mohammed is getting discouraged because the Arabs, like the Jews, ridicule his claim of Prophethood, so Allah gives him some confidence by assuring him that these care of by Himself. At any rate, this Quranic verse does not at all say that it is all

right to stick to another religion than Islam. Only by carefully keeping the context out of view, can it be presented as a statement of tolerance. The same situation explains Quran 10:99:"If the Lord had wanted, all people would have entered the Faith together." Will you then force people to accept Islam. But when he is weak, he gets revelations that Allah will take care of everything, even of conversations (an application of the Islamic notion of Taqdeer, fate or divine pre- ordination). The same thing counts for this other verse presented as proof of Islamic tolerance:"Unto you your religion, unto me my religion". (Quran 109:6) This appears in one of the earliest Suras, when Mohammed is still weak and unimportant. The Sura says repetitively that :"I do not serve what you serve, I will not worship what you will worship,...To you your religion, to me my religion". All it says is that Mohammed breaks with the Meccan religion, and that he doesn't want to have anything to do with it. He rejects allcomposite culture and proclaims the incompatibility of the prevalent religion and his own Islam. This sura is not yet a declaration of war on the Pagan religions of Arabia and of the entire world, but it is certainly a preamble to such a declaration of war. At that time, Mohammed could not yet afford more than such a formal distancing from the prevalent religion, because he was not yet strong enough for an all-our confrontation. Only by concealing the proper context, can one create the impression that Islam contains even one single positive injunction to tolerant co-existence and pluralism. So, let us not be fooled by two or three seemingly tolerant statements in the Quran. Once Mohammed was powerful, and had a free choice between tolerance and intolerance, he shed all tactical semblance of live and let live, and opted for persecution and mass-slaughter of Kafirs. In the Medina Suras, there is ample testimony of Allah's desire that Muslim make war on the Kafirs, and that they do not anyhow integrate and make friendship with them. We can safely say that the Quran does teach intolerance. Those moderate Muslims who deny this, thereby prove that they are apologists who put the interests of Islam higher than the truth. Expose them. However, it is equally a historical fact that people have outgrown the fanaticism present in the earlier layers of their tradition. When you read how Moses and Joshua exterminated the tribes that stood in the way of the chosen people, all at Yahweh's explicit command, you would except the Jews, the followers of Moses, to be ruthless persecutors of non-Jews. But in fact, for the last 233 fourteen centuries, the Jews have not persecuted anyone. Even today, now that they have a state, they are the ones who have guaranteed freedom of worship as well as free access to the sacred places of Judaism, Christianity and Islam (as well as Baha'ism) for the respective believers, in contrast to the earlier Islamic regime. If there is tension with the non-Jews of the area, it is not due to any persecution in the name of Yahweh of Moses. Even the Biblical justification for the Israeli hold over Palestine, is only put forward by a minority of religious fundamentalists: for most Israelis and for their secular government, it is merely a matter 234 if living in a sustainable state with defensible borders, which is a legitimate secular concern. So, if the Jews could grow out of the stage of bloody persecution, and develop a stable attitude of live and let live long ago, can the Muslims not do the same? The fact that so many Muslim apologists are saying that Islam is really very tolerant, raises hopes that, regardless of what the Quran says, they at least accept that tolerance is a positive value. Of the simple Muslims who think Islam consists of drinking alcohol or eating pork, this tolerance is not a problem. But for Muslims who know Islamic doctrine and Islam's exclusivist claims, it is a lot more difficult. And many seeming champions of tolerance and communal amity are at second sight only more sophisticated than their separatist brethren.

Take the case of those Muslims who opposed Jinnah and hiscommunalist demand for partition. While Aligarh was a hotbed of Pakistani agitation, the Deoband school advocated the gradual Islamization of the entire united India. The godfather of modern Islamic fundamentalism, Maulana Maudoodi, was one of the staunchest opponents of Partition. He claimed that the Muslims had a right to rule all of India. In fact, many Hindus are glad that India was partitioned. They argue that a Muslim population of 24% (now more than 30%) in united India would never allowed Hindu society to function, and would have created trouble until it was safely and totally in power. So if today moderate Muslims criticize Pakistan and the policies that led to Partition, I wonder if 235 there is not some pan-Islamist design behind it. At any rate, Maulana Azad, that moderate that would have given 50% of all power positions to the Muslims, with the rest to be divided between Hindus, Christians, Ambedkarites, and others. Short, Azad was in favour of a Muslim India. So, before the Muslim moderates can become credible, they will have to do better than their predecessors of the Azad generation, who, on closer inspection, turn out to be just as Muslimimperialist as the communalists. A very little gesture, by far not sufficient but a minimum proof of good intention, would be that they come out in support of Salman Rushdie. Now that the man has become a Muslim, this doesn't even require any deals Kafirs anymore. On December 28, 1990, Rushdie made an appeal to the Indian Muslims to come out and convince the Iranian leadership 236 to cancel the death sentence. So, far, I have not seen this little gesture from any influence to stop the oppression of the non-Muslims in Pakistan, Bangla Desh and Kashmir. The gentle scenario for the future is that Muslim leaders accept the value of tolerance and pluralism, and that they continue for some time to swear by the Quran even while effectively repudiating its intrinsic intolerance. Since crores of people have a sentimental attachment to the forms and names of Islam, the body of Islam will be kept alive for some more time, even while its spirit is giving way to the rational humanist spirit. The Hindu solution for Islam is not a dramatic mass-conversion, but a change in the spirit even while leaving the outer from intact. Allow the Muslims a stage of upholding the Quran rhetoric but claiming that it means something else that what it says. After that stage, the empty husk of Islam, with its Jihad phraseology and prophetic pretense, will be dropped easily. This is the approach which Mahatma Gandhi tried: respecting the Scriptural and organizational body of Islam, and trying to influence and charge its spirit. The Mahatma's failure should be studied, together with the success of the humanists in Europe who managed to create an intellectual climate in which Christians started outgrowing their exclusivism and selfrighteousness (and mostly also Christianity itself). One conspicuous difference is that the Mahatma never criticized Islam, while the European humanists did criticize the evils of Christianity. In order to encourage the monotheists to discover the value of pluralism and tolerance, it is necessary to make a clear diagnosis of their exclusivism an intolerance, and to be frank about it.

13.5 How to say it Since we cannot be fooled by the humanist pretenses of Muslim propagandists, we will henceforth be straightforward about the following established facts concerning Islam. Islam is an ideology based on an unreasonable claim to the possession of a unquiet and final revelation from the Creator of this universe. Islam makes a dangerous division in humanity between believers and unbelievers, and builds an absurd theology around it: for the superficial act of declaring or not declaring belief in Mohammed's presence at prophethood, the one half will enjoy eternal lust in heaven, while the other will suffer eternal damnation in hell. Islam preaches and practices the systematic oppression and persecution of the non-Muslims. Because of its belief that the Quran, the historically contingent product of Mohammed's own limited mind, is God's eternal and final

revelation, Islam prevents itself from adapting to new developments. It is bound to become backward, and it loses itself in outward details that do not have an authentic stamp ofeternity at all. All right, we reject Islam. And we can say to the Hindus that there is no reason at all to feel that Islam is somehow superior to Hinduism. On the contrary, Islam is a very defective ideology, very crude and superficial. It is also anti-humanist, since it makes the absolute distinction in mankind between Muslims and non-Muslims, who have a totally different status both in this world and in the next. Now, in this age, you cannot say those things to one group without another group also knowing about it, if at all you would want to proceed that secretively. How to say these things, knowing that Muslims are listening too? For all his tactical mistakes, Mahatma Gandhi essentially had a powerful vision, centered on two concepts: satya (truth) and ahimsa (non-violence). We have to say the truth about Islam, but in a non-violent way. We have to combine truthfulness about Islam with non-violence and even nonhurtfulness towards the Muslims. Being sensitive means: taking into account the way the other person will perceive things. So, let us imagine the situation of the Muslim regarding this discussion. Suppose you have believed that Mohammed was God's unique and final spokesman, and that his life is to be emulated in every way. And then you get to here people say, with an air of competence, that these revelations were only in Mohammed's head, that no sane person hears voices the way Mohammed did, that these revelations were very much centered around Mohammed's life situation and there is nothing universal and eternal (i.e. worthy of the eternal Creator) about them. In other words: all you have believed in, is a big mistake. Does that not cause a big crisis? It depends on whether you believe the skeptics or not. If you don't believe them, you may get angry with them. You may even issue a fatwa condemning them to death. But this anger will partly be determined by the presentation of the skeptical viewpoint. If someone express his viewpoint in a personal conversation, and also patiently listens to your objections, if will be easier to tolerate than if someone speaks scornfully about your beliefs or mocks them in public. If you are inclined to believe the skeptical viewpoint, you get into an inner rethinking of all the things that are somehow linked with the belief system. But once you get through that, it is a liberating experience. I have seen so many people of my generation, as well as some older people, go through this process of outgrowing Christianity. It is a very interesting experience. You just wouldn't want to have missed it. This large-scale process of people outgrowing the Christian belief system has seldom been the result of anti-Christian campaign. It has gone gradually, with people developing doubts and sharing these with friends, or with coming across books that opened up a different view on the life of the life of the soul. Where anti- religion campaigns in the Soviet block have failed, this gradually spreading of the spirit of free inquiry has severely undermined the hold of Christianity on the European mind. This is the way the hold of unwholesome Islamic doctrines over people's minds will have to be tackled. It is useless to propagandistically beat it out of them, it is even counterproductive. Look where Islam really lost it grip. Earlier in this century, people in countries like Iran and Egypt came under the influence of modernity, and gradually dropped Islamic ways and beliefs. They also rediscovered their glorious pre-Islamic past. This effect was stronger in proportion to the degree of education. There was no pressure on them to leave Islam, they themselves discovered that there are other things to life. Of course, we know that the process has been reversed in the seventies and eighties. But that is only temporary, because the relevant cultural factors at work in the earlier part of the century, are still there, and growing stronger.

As people are mentally or formally leaving a religion, you see the religion also opening up and listening to its critics. As people criticized Roman Catholicism, the Church itself changed : it dropped the Inquisition, the Index, the forced conversions, the intolerance of non- Churchmembers in Catholic institutions. It recognized the values of humanism, and corrected its social philosophy accordingly. In other words: the Church had ideologically been put on the defensive, and therefore it gave up its self-righteousness. Similarly, Islam has to be put ideologically on the defensive. One should not go from door to door telling an unwilling Muslim audience what you think of their Prophet. Let the Muslims discover for themselves what the rational and scholarly views on the Prophet and the Islamic doctrines are. Those who are interested, will certainly find out what is being said in the public arena, and within non-Muslim communities, there Islam should definitely be put on the defensive. Imagine the day when the fanatic leaders in the Muslim community notice:"On, people have found out that the Prophet taught something else than brotherhood. They know that the wars on the infidels have not been waged 'in spite of the Prophet's teaching of tolerance' but rather in fulfillment of the Prophet's injunctions. They have realized that the infidel society was not that much worse than Islamic society, and in many respects actually better."That day they are bound to lose some of their self-righteousness. When a thief realizes people are aware of his thieving designs, he will think twice before starting again. Today these Muslim fanatics bask in all the praises heaped on Islam, and enjoy all the self- criticism among the Hindus: all this merely vindicates their sense of divine mission. The day when Muslims join the humanist culture and freely express their uninterestedness in the claims of the prophet, and get supported by society at large, the fanatics will start doubting their case. At the human level, I am aware that at first it may be very painful for those people who have really devoted their lives to Islam, to find out about its not so divine and not so superior nature. I really feel for them. Giving up one's beliefs is harder in proportion to the part of one's life that one has invested in them. A Jesuit who, later in life, during his Bible research, started seeing that the Bible is really just a human creation, and that there is little God-given and eternal about the Christian teachings, morals and institutions, wrote in the epilogue to one of his scholarly books :"This has been a very 237 painful process for me. Finding out that one has wasted one's life on absurd beliefs..." Not that he regretted having come to this insight : the painful thing was that it had happened so late in life, that he had already missed so much because of the narrow Christian theological window through which he had experienced life so far. So, I can imagine that realizing the unfoundedness of one's fond belief in belonging to a superior part of humanity, chosen for rule in this world and eternal lust in the next, may create a bitter feeling. Not bitterness against those who helped you to wake up from your fond illusions (if anything, jealousy because they were free from this particular illusion before you), but a kind of bitterness against your own earlier gullibility. We may conclude that in exposing the falsehood and the inglorious record of Islam, we have to proceed in a dispassionate way, free of triumphalism, as gently as humanly possible.

"Hindu Fascism" 14.1. Hinduism, Hitler's mother? A Contention often heard in secularist circles, is that this Hindu revivalism is a form of Hindu fascism. Specifically, a BJP in power would soon reveal itself to be a Nazi government-- but then

it would be too late. I will not bother about quoting all the people who have made such allegations (there are many), and just deal with the substance of this allegation. Actually, there are two radically different allegation of Hindu fascism. One merely is an allegation against the current wave ofHindu communalism. The other one says, that Hinduism is intrinsically fascist. The best-known proponent of the latter theory is V.T. Rajshekar, who publishes the fortnightly Dalit Voice from Bangalore. He builds his views on Ambedkar's. But at the same time, he strongly subscribes to the theory that the Aryans invaded India, and instituted the cast system 238 to preserve their racial purity, much like the Apartheid system in South Africa. In fact, all his anti-Hindu views are put forward in ethnic and even racial terminology. The noncaste Hindus and the minorities are for him the oppressed nations of India, oppressed by the Aryan invaders who constitute the upper castes. Of course, the racial view of caste, a product of the British fascination for race theories, has been 239 240 debunked scientifically. Even Ambedkar rejected it. By now, the whole notion of Aryan invasions has come under fire. Western scholars start recognizing what many Indian scholars have since long pointed out : that there is not a single piece of proof for the whole theory, and that all the known relevant facts can just as well be explained with alternative and equally coherent theories. But since is lost on Mr. Rajshekar. He has published a book in the West, titled Dalit -- the Black Untouchables of India. On the cover is a photograph of, I presume, the writer. And the first thing you notice is : but this man is not black. He is quite a Caucasian, or white man, though slightly more suntanned than Europeans, but not at all a negroid type. And you start to realize : this man is a crackpot. In order to attract American Black support, or for other propaganda reasons, he makes the caste system into a racial issue. The rich white Aryan Brahmin invaders oppress the 241 poor black non-Aryan Shudra natives. Now this has a lot to do with Hitler. He too was a crank racist. While the reprehensible racism in South Africa is at least based on a actual racial difference between black and white, Hitler based his anti-Jewish racism on the erroneous notion that the difference between Germans and Jews is racial, which is biological nonsense. Moreover, he too had borrowed the concept of the Aryan race, which the British had developed in India, but which was totally alien to the Hindu tradition. Rajshekar has borrowed the same theory in the same place. He holds the same kind of crank notion that the difference between upper and lower castes is a racial one. So, Hitler-Rajshekar bhai-bhai. With them, everything gets drawn into racial categories. The only difference is that Hitler is on the side of the Aryan race, while Rajshekar is on the opposite side. Thus, in an article about the Israeli technician Mordechai Vanunu, Dalit Voice says that he is a Sephardic Jew (migrated from the Muslim countries), who are oppressed by the Ashkenazi Jews (migrated from Europe, and founders of Israel). When the technician revealed to the world some nuclear secrets of Israel, this was portrayed as an element in the ethnic struggle of oppressed (dalit) Sephardim against Zionist Ashkenazim, who also oppress the Palestinians. So it all fits : Dalits and Muslims should form a front against the Brahmins, therefore Dalits support the Palestinians, therefore they oppose the Zionists who are Ashkenazi Jews, and link up with the oppressed Sephardic Jews. But here the racist logic breaks down : it so happens that the hardliners in Israel, like many in the Likud Party, are precisely these Sephardim, who have fled Muslim countries and have no love lost for the Arabs, while the Ashkenazim are generally more liberal. This goes to show once more the nonsense of these racial conspiracy theories on which the Hitler and Rajshekars of this world feed. So, what remains for the enemies of Hinduism to dub intrinsically fascist about Hinduism? The caste system, of course. Even if it is not racist, it is not equalitarian and institutionalizes inequality

on the basis of people's birth (just like in racism). Therefore, the caste system is reprehensible. And therefore Hinduism is reprehensible (through a remote influence of Marxism, everything gets reduced to its social dimension, so Hinduism equals caste system). This matter is far too large and complex to decide in just one chapter, so I will limit myself here to some general remarks. Firstly, there is a distinction between theory and practice. This may seem an easy way out, often used by soft-Leftists when confronted with criticism of the implementation of socialist theory in the praxis of the Soviet system (But that is not the real socialism !). But the distinction is pertinent. On the one hand there were ideologues of the four varnas, the functions in society with their allotted duties and privileges, and they wrote Shastras in which they tried to fit reality into the scheme, complete with a slant in favour of their own caste. On the other there was the existing reality of jatis, roughly endogamous groups, roughly coinciding with occupations, but far more diverse and in motion than the crystalline theoretical framework of Chaturvarnya. Secondly, this social system did not exist in isolation. Thus, centuries of foreign domination must have had an impact on it. We can say a priori that when leading groups in society come to groan under the weight of foreign oppression, they themselves will weigh heavier on the lower groups. That would not be the case if the new rulers would engage in reform of the existing society, but the Muslims never did this (in spite of the new myths about Islam as bringing socialist reforms). A society that is put on the defensive, will harden and develop internal friction. Again it may sound like an easy explanation, but it is just quite plausible that a part of theinhuman traits of the caste system as recent generations found it, must be attributed to later outside influences like the impoverishing, brutalizing and demoralizing effect of Muslim rule. When we study its theoretical conception, we find that the caste system is quite the opposite of Nazism in essential respects. Let us think clearly about this very charged matter. In the caste system, we may distinguish the following components: 1. 2. 3. 4.

In society, different groups are recognized. These groups have their own mores and duties. Membership of a group is determined by birth. On the basis of their function, a ritual hierarchy exists between these group, which does not coincide with either wealth or actual social power.

The first point says merely that difference is recognized. This is not as evident as it sounds. Islam and Communism champion equality, which in practice means uniformity. The second point means that these groups are defined by the role they play in society, and that duties as also privileges are allotted accordingly. This does not mean that the higher ones grab all the privileges. Thus, one who has the duty to guide society by communicating knowledge, commits a crime when he is untruthful, or drunk, whereas these things are of no consequence when committed by a manual labourer. This allotting of duties also concerns the different agegroups. As any anthropologist can tell you, the distribution of duties among age-groups is one of the most evident features of tribal society. That is why the varna division is considered together with the division of life in stages, the ashramas, so that Hindu social philosophy is known as Varnashramadharma. While this recognition of different roles with their own duties and privileges is by no means a complete answer to every possible social question, it at least provides a framework which is perfectly true to universal human experience. The third point means that one's qualities are largely determined by birth. The most natural division of mankind, the two sexes, a division which brings with it a definite role, duties and privileges, is determined by birth. One's gunas of qualities, which determine one's vocation in society, are in turn partly determined by heredity. At this point Hindu society has hardened a statistical law, which generally makes people follow in their parents' footsteps, into a rigid steel

frame. In reality, an individual's swadharma (own duty, own way) may differ from that of his parents, and that is why the Bhagavad Gita (which is of course only one voice in the plurality of Hindu tradition) simply states that one's varna is determined by one's guna (quality, type), regardless of whether this guna is in turn determined by heredity, by environment and education, or who knows, by the stars at birth. Of course, this is a point where historically the divergence between theory and practice has become quite substantial. The fourth point is to modern socialists perhaps the most horrible : a hierarchy between the groups. Well, there is an undeniable hierarchy between social functions, even where an equalitarian law system has firmly taken root. Thus, an employee is equal, as a human being and as a citizen, to his employer; the work both do is equally indispensable; yet, the employee's work is by definition determined by the tasks his employer allots him. So, while there is equality between human beings, there is a logical hierarchy between functions. In that sense, the Vaishya function is superiorto the Shudra function. Similarly, a ruler, even while autonomous in his decisions (remember secularism), is dependent on knowledge and a social philosophy, but the thinkers who devise this intellectual and ideological framework, should be independent in their thinking, free from the rulers' interference. In that sense, the Brahmin function is logically superior to the Kshatriya function, even while rulers are more powerful and wealthy than thinkers. In my opinion, it is this logical hierarchy of social functions which the early ideologues of Varnashramadharma had in mind. It is but human that people with a higher function were also honoured accordingly. But in how far that was translated into a cruel anti-human inequality in actual village and city life, is another matter. It is too vast to go into it here. Suffice it to say that I have become a bit skeptical of the abysmally grim picture of the caste system which all of us have been fed, after actually living among Hindus of both high and low castes, and after studying the research done by modern-educated Indian scholars. As Meenakshi Jain has indicated, it is not because certain Brahmins were particular about not eating with other people etc., that other castes felt inferior or oppressed by this uptight and unprofitable kind of behaviour (much less inclined to imitate the difficult Brahmin lifestyle, as the Sanskritization theory would have it). In Catholic circles, like in religion class, we used to get some testimonies from the missions, now and then. When asked for examples of how horrible the caste system is, missionaries would always mention the distance Brahmins keep from the inferior non-Brahmins. But so what? For orthodox Brahmins, as I have known some in Varanasi, I myself am an avarna, and they will not have dinner with me. But I don't feel offended by that. If they think I am impure (and I am : I have eaten many a beef steak in my life), then that is their choice. I don't really care, and I think most Shudras in India's long history didn't care. But they did not not care in the intolerant way of the iconoclastic modernists, who like to trample on somebody else's rules and taboos : while they themselves did not observe the near-obsessive purity rules of Brahmins, they would not think of forcing Brahmins out of their purist seclusion. The effort to rewrite history and to see integration instead of separation and enmity as the norm of interaction between the different communities, should not be directed to the history of HinduMuslim relations (where it is gross distortion), but at the history of caste relations (where it is a correction of the extremely divisive picture created by the missionaries and colonialists). There was plenty of co-operation, amity and human concern across caste lines. On the other hand, as in other societies, there has existed oppression in Hindu society too. And this has been aggravated in the last few centuries by the decreasing prosperity, which in turn was due to Muslim oppression and plundering, to the disruption of India's economy by its forcible integration into Britain's colonial trade system, and to the victory of modern industry over the indigenous industries (which also affected non-colonies like China and Iran). Increasing poverty invariably increases social friction and oppression.

While rejecting the immensely black picture which the missionaries have painted of Hindu society, and which has been very much interiorized in the Indian collective consciousness and is still being reproduced by the self- proclaimed Ambedkarites today, we need not deny that oppression and misery existed. And it must have taken the shape of the social structure in force, which happened to be the caste system. No-one in his right mind is inclined to denigrate the efforts at "bringing the Backward Castes into the mainstream of Indian society" (to use the politicians' expression). On the stand taken by the Hindutva people on the caste system, see ch.14.2. Now, in essential respects the caste system is the opposite of Nazism. This counts not only for the idealized theory but even for the raw practice. First of all, this system is not at all centralized. The traditional Hindu society knows many layers of social organization : family, kula, upajati, jati, varna. Now, this layeredness of society, this devolution of many organizational functions to intermediary levels, is the strongest possible buffer against dictatorship and totalitarianism. When analyzing why the French Revolution quickly degenerated into a reign of terror and a dictatorship, Hegel state that it was the destruction of the intermediary levels of social organization which led to this polarization between the naked individual and the all-powerful state authority. The first task of totalitarian-minded people is to break down those organizational units which they cannot control. In Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, the protagonist of the narrative regains a measure of mental independence from Big Brother's total control, when he falls in love with some girl. Suddenly there is an emotional relationship, i.e. another form of human interaction than Big Brother's state, a bond which escapes Big Brother's control. These simple natural forms of human togetherness, like the family, the clan, the tribe, no matter what their drawbacks, are the strongest possible protection against totalitarianism. Traditional societies all had clans and tribes. With the building of empires, these lost some of their importance. But the atomization of society into isolated individuals who find nothing above them but the all-powerful state, is largely a modern phenomenon, and fascism is one extreme outgrowth of it. It is not only factually incorrect to attribute the characteristics of fascism to a traditional society like the Hindu society, it also gives proof of a total incomprehension of larger historical categories, like modern vs. traditional, hierarchy vs. totalitarianism. The unique thing about Hindu society is that it kept this tribe-wise and clan-wise organization even after setting up very large integrated state structures. By contrast, Mohammed, in his bid to form a state (after the admired models of the Persian and Byzantine empires), wanted to destroy these intermediary levels. Thus, he is not at all clan- and family-minded. While Confucianism, Judaism or Hinduism are very family-centered, Islam does not ordain family stability, but gives a man all the freedom to break up the family he started, by simply declaring to his wife: Talaq Talaq Talaq. Moreover, Mohammed explicitly wanted his followers to put the loyalty to Islam above the loyalty to the clan. One may consider this an element of universalim, rising abovenarrow loyalties. That is certainly how Muslim apologetics puts it. But the other side is that the primitive loyalty to the natural family unit merely gets replaced by another, more demanding narrow loyalty: to the Prophet, to Big Brother. All dictators like uniformity. The Spanish dictator Franco worked hard to destroy the linguistic diversity in Spain by suppressing the use of Catalan and Basque. Similarly, Stalin wanted to abolish all ethnicity and language diversity. These subnational identities were anathema to a centralistic dictatorial mind. It so happens that Islam too insists on uniformity, even in very small things. In world history, it is perhaps only the Mao outfit of the Chinese communists that matches the uniformity of appearance among Muslims. Women Should wear burqa, and men should trim their beards after the Prophet's example. This outer uniformity is expressive of an imposed

uniformity of behaviour and belief. I do not find this uniformist loyalty to the Prophet any more open-minded or universalist than the "narrow loyalty" to a tribe. There is reason for suspicion against people who need to trample upon natural loyalties before they can establish their brotherhood. It is like a scorpion, who lifts his prey up from the ground and then stings. These natural social units are the ground under people's feet, and if you want to enlist them in your own power trip, you have to take them out of these natural units, and make them vulnerable to your claims on them, by isolating them. It is quite possible to teach people universal values and awareness of the larger whole, without breaking open the existing divisions in society. Actually, calling clans and tribes a division conceals the fact that they are just as much units, levels of integration. Few buildings these days are built from one massive rock ; the normal thing to do is to integrate smaller units into bigger and yet bigger ones. The global civilization which we are building today, will not be made up of scattered individuals. Organizationally, it will be a hierarchy of intermediary levels of integration, a two- way combination of unity and diversity. The current revival of ethnicity throughout the world is just one example of man's natural resistance against atomization. The essence of Varnashramadharma, the social philosophy that allots different duties to differently minded groups of people, as well as to the different age-groups, and that allows communities to develop at intermediary levels between individual and state, is quite the opposite of the uniformization so typical of totalitarian systems.

14.2. Hindutva and the "evils of Hindu society" In the secularists' tirades, the Hindutva people are systematically portrayed as upholders of inequality and of all the evils of Hindu society. Remark : the very expression evils of Hindu society, which Nehru routinely used, is totally out of bounds when Hindu is replaced withMuslim or another community. The expression "the crimes of the Muslim conquerors", or "the evils of Muslim society" (like anti-modern backwardness, persecution of non-Muslims, slavery, the inferiority of women), are sure to provoke shouts of communal !There is also no one to describe the social problems in the West as "the evils of Christian society", as if all worldly problems can be reduced to the impact of the prevalent religion. In fact, the unity of Hindu society, and the promotion of the backward castes in the mainstream of 242 society, has always been a major plank of Hindu organizations like the RSS. In its literature , the RSS boasts of having received compliments from such non-communalist people like Mahatma Gandhi and Jayaprakash Narayan, for its entirely caste-free structure and working. Nonetheless, for decades after it was set up, it was mostly an organization of Brahmins and, increasingly, Vaishyas. It seems that recently, the caste-wise composition of the RSS is changing. According to a recent report, "much to the despair of the Marxists and secularists alike, it is not the upper caste that 243 dominates the Sangh's shakhas. It is ironically the middle castes and rising Dalits." An RSS member is quoted saying :"All our best attended shakhas are in the poor areas, not in the alienated middle class or rich upper caste suburbs or cities or towns. In simple words, the new Sangh Swayamsevak is mostly a backward caste or Dalit." So, the following analysis by Sunil Adam is just another Leftist lie :"The Muslims only serve as a negative target of Hindu consciousness so as to marginalize the contradictions of the Hindu

social order and at the same time maintain the social and political status quo, which is the actual 244 object of Hindutva." While totally denying the historical fact of the unprovoked all-out Muslim attack on Hindu society during centuries on end, and while reducing the thrust of the Hindutva movement to an anti-Muslim thrust, it repeats the classic Marxist fallacy of reducing everything to a matter of class (c.q. caste) contradictions. Moreover, it ascribes to the Hindutva movement an intention of maintaining the social and political status quo: this goes contrary to all statements of intention by the Hindutva leaders. Of course, we may be dealing here with the rhetorical trick of ascribing intentions to people : "You say that this is what you want, but it is not what you want. I will tell you what you really want."This is a venomous act of psychological imperialism : not even letting people decide for themselves what they intend. Unless of course you can prove from their actual behaviour that it is something else they want. But the burden of proof is on the accuser. So, the Hindutva movement is innocent of casteist conservatism until the contrary is proven. For establishing such proof, Mr. Adam will have to explain away all the anti-caste statements of Hindutva leaders (all eyewash ?) and all the testimonies that the RSS and affiliated organizations are indeed caste-free. But no, Mr. Adam gives no proof of anything. Assured that no-one in the arena will contradict him, he continues :"The economic and political mobility of lower castes is one of the factors that stirred the upper castes to resurrect the question of Hindu identity during the early eighties. In other words, for Hindutva to succeed it has to accomplish the twin and contradictory tasks of uniting the country's majority under the Hindu banner and also ensure that a majority among them accept their place in the social and political hierarchy prescribed by the pristine Brahminical religion..." Now, this is where Mr. V.P. Singh's decision to implement the Mandal Commission Report recommendations comes in. This Commission recommended that, after the Scheduled Castes and Tribes, who have been getting 22.5% reservations in recruitment and promotions in government service as well as in education (though these quota have not been filled up in many cases), the principle of reservation be extended to the Other Backward Castes (Classes, says the Report, but then it enumerates castes). V.P. Singh's decision was clearly meant to attract the Backward Caste vote (46% of the Indian population, according to an old census). It could at the same time split the Hindu vote, pitting high against low castes. Opponents feared that this split would not be limited to election day, and that Mandal would tear the whole social fabric apart. Enemies of Hindu society also looked at it that way. Said Prof. Rajni Kothari :"The Mandal Report has the potential to finish off the supremacy of Vedic Hinduism." The effect of the caste-based reservations would be, to strengthen caste identity (with opposing caste interest). But while in traditional society the caste system was a harmony model (this nicesounding term is a curse to Marxist ears), this newly strengthened caste consciousness would foment caste enmity. It would also frustrate the drive to unify Hindu society. As Mr. Adam says :"It is this [Hindu-unifying] scheme of things that the Mandal Report... is capable of upsetting. Whether the Hindu identity will submerge caste identity or vice versa will depend on which is a better agent of politicization, caste or religion. In other words, India today has the paradoxical choice of choosing between caste, which has a secularizing impact, and Hindutva which can lead the nation to an unknown destiny." Paradoxical indeed. While anti-Hindu pamphletry and rhetoric largely focuses on the horrors of the caste system, which is depicted as intrinsic to this horrible Hinduism, we now get to read that caste will break Hinduism. Caste is the evil of Hindu society, it is a hierarchy prescribed by the pristine Brahminical religion, but now we get to read that it has a secularizing impact. It is not only a logical paradox, or rather contradiction. There is also a moral contradiction in Mr. Adam's reasoning, which I would re-word as follows :"Hinduism is reprehensible because of caste

; because we want to kill caste, we want to kill Hinduism ; now, in order to kill Hinduism, we are going to strengthen caste." These secularists have been saying that they think they can use it as a weapon against Hinduism, they have no scruples in promoting it as progressive and secularizing. So, the Janata Dal people who have been decrying the Janmabhoomi movement as a threat to national unity, as well as the communists (from whom one had expected many ugly things, but not the promotion of a non-Marxist category like casteism), as well as most non- Congress secularists, have applauded the divisive Mandal plan. Anyway, while the secularists use every occasion to demonstrate how unprincipled they are except for their commitment to the destruction of Hinduism, Hindus need not unduly worry over the issue of caste-based reservations. Its impact would not be all that deep. In some southern states, large reservation schemes have already been implemented during the eighties. While it is said that these have harmed the efficiency of the administration, they have not spectacularly affected caste relations. And while it may be unfair against upper-caste people, it may have the beneficial effect of encouraging them to enter and develop the private sector, instead of settling for a life in the bureaucracy. If I may make a few blunt generalizations about caste, I would venture to say that the rise of the Backward Castes may well be a very beneficial development for Hindu society. When I look at the caste titles of the Communist leaders and of the most rabid secularists, I notice they are mostly high-caste people. The upper castes have intensely collaborated with the Muslim and then the British ruler, they are largely an alienated lot with little sympathy for their own culture and society. Some of them, in fairness, have fought until their back was broken. Others have simply prostituted themselves with the rulers for generations. By contrast, the lower castes have fought the Muslim invaders tooth and nail. Contrary to the modern myths of Islam bringing relief to the oppressed low-castes, they suffered badly under the Islamic onslaught : e.g. the lands the Muslim rulers took to set up their zamindari were mostly taken from these agricultural and cattle-rearing 245 castes. Moreover, thanks to their limited schooling, these low-castes have not yet massively imbibed all this pro-Muslim and anti- Hindu propaganda that passes as history in the school curricula. So today, the Backward Castes are not only the numerical centre of gravity in a democratic Hindu society, they are also less contaminated with anti-Hindu bias. With that, I have said more than enough in terms of caste considerations. The real work for revitalizing Hindu society has to be done by individuals, and these are found in any caste and community. Incidentally, the upheaval over Mandal has brought out a fact which should be rather embarrassing for the missionary propaganda. TheDalit Christians are low- caste people who have been lured into conversion with the promise of (1) eternal Salvation by Jesus Christ the Saviour, our Lord, and (2) freedom from the low-caste status as well as from poverty. These Dalit Christians held a demonstration in Delhi to demand reservations, on the plea that they are still as poor and low-caste as before conversion. The Ram Janmabhoomi movement has demonstrated, more than anything else, the fact that Backward Castes and Scheduled Castes and Tribes, in spite of all the ploys to wean them away from Hinduism, still very much identify themselves with Hindu demands, such as a symbolic restoration of the damage Islam has done. In the tribal belt in southern Bihar, Mr. Advani's rathyatra got a rousing welcome. The communal riots too show how the efforts by Muslim parties and by the anti-Hindu Bahujan Samaj Party to forge an alliance of low-castes and Muslims against the high-castes, are not having much of the desired result. In the Hyderabad riots, Muslims attacked a Harijan quarter, primarily because they expected these Harijans to be unorganized and weak. A local Harijan leader has confirmed this to me. Even more telling was the violence in Bijnor, U.P. on October 30. There, the District Magistrate confirmed to journalists that the violence had been instigated by a

local Muslim politician, and he added that the city was a stronghold of the BSP, but that the 246 communal riots had just as much pitted the Muslims against the Harijans. The Ghaziabad riot on 26 January 1991, with nine casualties, was nothing but an attack of a Muslim pro-Saddam 247 demonstration on Valmikis (a Scheduled Caste) who were celebrating Republic Day. . These incidents conform to a larger pattern in Indian history. Contrary to the fables of the lowcastes being sympathetic towards Islam, it is they who have always opposed it tooth and nail. Today in Pakistan, the large majority of the remaining Hindus are very poor Backward Caste people. If Islam is so good for them, and Hinduism so harsh, why have they continued to stick to Hinduism and suffered so much trouble and oppression by Islamic society for it? It is time we realize that the caste system has in fact protected Hindu society against total islamization, and that even low-caste people took pride in their caste so that they preferred their place in Hindu 248 society to absorption in the atomized Muslim community. So, the stand of the Hindutva people is not : Hinduism has sinned terribly by having this caste system, therefore it has to imitate Islam and abolish caste. It is rather :the caste system had its use sometime in the past, over the centuries it has come to carry a lot of unhealthy social equations and attitudes, and now it has become socially irrelevant and a factor of divisiveness, therefore it is time for us to abandon it.

14.3. Arya and Swastika A very crude kind of anti-Hindu propaganda, sometimes used by American Protestant sects in warning the youth against the dangers of Hare Krishna etc., points out that Hinduism and Nazism have a central symbol in common : the swastika. I have also heard the comparison from Ambedkarites who, taking V.T. Rajshekar's lead, systematically refer to Hindus as "Hindu 249 Nazis". For the latter category, it may be of interest to know that the swastika is just as much a central symbol in Buddhism, Ambedkar's chosen religion. In China, the swastika is known as a Buddhist symbol. Moreover, in the Aryan mythology of the post-Ambedkar Ambedkarites (if a teacher gets killed, it is by his pupils), the Hindus were invaders who destroyed the Hindus civilization, of which the Dalits are the legitimate descendants. Now, this pre-Hindu Indus civilization already used the swastika. The swastika is quite a sanatana symbol, not bound up with any nation or ideology. It is also found among peoples outside the Hindu sphere of influence. It is because of his fallacious doctrine of the Aryan race that conquered both Europe and South Asia, and because of a mistaken belief that the swastika was typical of the Aryan peoples, that Hitler adopted this symbol as a symbol of his Aryan state. But of course, the legitimate Aryans, i.e. the Sanatana Dharmins of whatever ethnicity or race, and of whatever sect including Buddhism, cannot be blamed for Hitler's misconceptions nor for Hitler's crimes that gave a bad connotation to this symbol. People who believe in magic, and in the independent power of symbols, infer from this primary belief, that Hitler's spectacular rise to power may have been due to the power inherent in the swastika. In a moralistic variant on this superstitious theme, some people believe that the evil which Hitler committed under the swastika flag, must somehow be inherent in the swastika symbol. And from there, as they keep on inferring, they start suspecting that some mysterious evil is inherent in Hindu culture. This reversal of the swastika's meaning, from a sign of luck (always depicted on the hand of opulent Ganesh) to a sign of evil, is somewhat like the story of the Christian image of the devil :

he is depicted with buck's horns, a clear reference to the horned god of Paganism (like the Pashupati on one of the Indus seals). The positive imagery of Paganism got integrated into Christian imagery, but then as the symbol of evil. Now that we are no longer bound by the compulsions of the missionary project, we may clear the horned god, as well as the swastika, of the evil aura with which outsiders have covered them. For Hindus who have migrated to the West, especially the U.S., there is a practical problem : if they display the swastika on the gates of mandirs, or other places, outsiders think that this is some Nazi outfit. Worse, people who have personally suffered under the Nazi regime, may feel painfully reminded. I think it is a matter of sensitivity to display those swastikas only in very modest ways, for as long as people who have lived through the horrors of the Nazi regime are with us. Meanwhile, the Hindus abroad should educate the public about the real meaning and hoary tradition of this symbol, so that some time in the next century the Swastika may regain its rightful place as a profound and timeless symbol, untainted by the accidental and misconceived association with Nazism. With all this talk about the misuse of the swastika, it may be useful to briefly restate its basic meaning. The word comes from su-asti,it be good, as in the Sanskrit greeting Pratah swasti, good morning. So, swastika means auspicious-maker or sing of auspiciousness. What the swastika visually depicts, is the solar cycle, be it during the day or during the year. It shows the circular movement at the four cardinal points : sunrise, noon, sunset, midnight ; or spring equinox, summer solstice, autumn equinox, winter solstice. As such, it is a shorthand for the Zodiac as well as for all macrocosmic and microcosmic cycles. It signifies the completeness as well as the dynamics of the Whole. Being primarily a solar symbol, it is normally (except in black-and-white print) painted in solar colours like red, saffron or gold ; while the Nazi swastika was black. Like the swastika, the term Arya, which is rather central in Hindu tradition and more so in Nazism, is in need of rehabilitation. Of course, the term does not indicate a race, but a quality of 250 character. When Buddha gives a short formulation of his teachings, he calls it the Arya Satyani, 251 the four Noble Truths. If the secularists have been inhibited about the use of the word Aryaas proving the Fascist character of Hinduism, it is partly because of this terminology used by Buddha, the hero of their mythical anti-Brahmin revolution. The term Aryan was used by the Nazis in opposition to the term Semitic. It so happens that both have 1. a primary linguistic meaning (the Indo-European and the Semitic language families), 2. a fallacious racial meaning (with Semitic standing for Jewish), and 3. a derivative theological meaning, derived from the language groups in which the main texts of two religion families have been written the Hindu tradition in the largest sense, and the Jewish-Christian-Islamic tradition. The Nazis used the terms in the second meaning, vaguely basing it scientifically on the first meaning. For the third meaning, they didn't have the brains not the philosophical inclination to go into it. Aryan and Semitic are shorthand for two radically differing approaches to religion. With "Semitic" are meant the religions claiming revelation from the one and only God. In primitive Shamanistic cults, there may be spirits speaking through the Shaman, but that is never a unique and definitive revelation from a unique Creator- god. Similarly, there were oracles where a god was supposed to speak through a human medium ; the point is that there were many of them. But the revealed monotheistic religions carry with them a typical fundamental doctrine that sets them apart from all other religions.

On the one hand, their God speaks to people at a specific moment in history, at a specific place, so that the beneficiaries or immediate witnesses are limited in number, certainly less than all of humanity. On the other hand, their God is the only one, so that all the other people on earth either have to get other revelations from this one God, or they are not getting revelations at all, except false ones from false gods. While the first option was theoretically possible, the Semitic religions have effectively chosen the second. This implies that humanity gets divided into two : those whom God has personally addressed, and those whom he has ignored. So, we get Jews and Gentiles, Christians and Pagans, Muslims and Kafirs. Of course, every tribe used to divide the world into the tribe and the rest. The tribe was home, the rest was unsafe and foreign. And every group identity, tribal or other, can give rise to hostility against other groups. As an application of this general rule, even religious group identity could be the basis of polarization and conflict. However, the polarization between the One God's Chosen Community and the rest of humanity was of a radically different nature than these ordinary group antagonisms. The tribal division was a division between people on an equal footing. The others had their own identity and interests, with which our own might sometimes be incompatible, but there was nothing intrinsically evil or wrong about them. We had gods, and so had they. Both of us worshipped the sun god, or the goddess of fleeting time who devours us all, or the Unknown god, with local accents and variations, but not radically different. For instance, in Homer's epic about the Trojan war, you see some of the gods sidewith the Greeks and other gods side with the Trojans. They shared the divine sphere between them. This basic equality is broken in the Semitic religions. There, one part of humanity has God on its side. That implies that whoever stands against it, stands against God, with no divine friends on his own side. There is now a fortunate part of humanity, and another part which is doomed and cursed. Religion in its public aspect used to be a unifying thing, a celebration of a cosmic oneness transcending the biological social and other differences between the realms of nature and the members of a society. Now it became a divisive thing, pitting the Chosen against the doomed. In this psychology, it is quite normal that all the non- human layers of the cosmos, who, just like the doomed part of humanity, were ignorant of God's unique revelation, were all deprived of their sacredness. The golden calf and other idols of the Gentiles were smashed. The sacred trees of the Pagans were felled. The holy cows of the Kafirs were slaughtered. And all this cosmos was given to Adam and Eve for their pleasure. Henceforth, a tree was nothing but timber Thus, the Semitic religions constitute a radical break with natural religiosity, which had always made nature share in the manifestation of the divine, and which had never thought of limiting the awareness of the divine to one community. In books written in a monotheistic cultural milieu, this revealedmonotheism is always portrayed as a great step forwards in the march of humanity. However, in real terms I cannot see one genuine advantage that has accrued to humanity thanks to the is revelation-based monotheism. It is said that this monotheism meant the end of superstition, of people praying to godlings for favours. But people have prayed to this new. One God for the same favours. Worse, is there a bigger superstition than the belief that you are specially favoured over the other part of humanity, and that God is on your side ? By contrast, the Aryan religious tradition has not pretended to be the special recipient of a unique divine revelation. The divine is manifest everywhere, be it in different ways and to different degrees. It is not excluded that some elements/times/places/animals/people are more sacred than others, but the difference is only gradual. There is a divine oneness of all entities in the

cosmos. If at all you want to give this outlook a philosophical name, you could say that roughly, it is monism. That means, the assumption or perception that somehow everything is of one essence. This Aryan tradition has found its classic formulation in the Sanskrit writings of entire lineages of human beings, referred to as Rishis. However, it is also present in Pagan traditions outside the area where Sanskrit was the language of culture. There are outward differences but a fundamental akinness with Pagan traditions the world over. If you analyze Pagan practices of ritual, sacrifice, incantation, you find the same presupposed attitude towards the cosmos : a basic awareness that it is one. This basic awareness will be present in the religious feeling of many a member of the Semitic religions. But there, it is overlaid with the doctrinal assumption of a fundamental and irreducible two-ness of the cosmos : on the one hand God and His chosen ones, on the other hand the godless remainder. The degree to which individuals feel bound by their formal allegiance to this doctrine, may differ widely. And we will not judge the individuals. But we may give an opinion on the doctrine of the One God who reveals Himself to/through a specific individual, has brought an absolute division of mankind in the minds of its adherents, and this mental division has in turn caused untold suffering in persecutions and holy wars. So, I cannot honestly compare the Aryan and the Semiticapproach, and neutrally say that they are merely different. There is an inequality between the two. I think the Aryan approach is fundamentally more wholesome than the Semitic approach. Because of this inequality, I think it is important to choose other terms for these basic doctrinal categories, than Aryan and Semitic. For, these terms also denote people. They may not denote races, as Hitler thought, but they do denote language groups, and people identify to quite an extent with their language. Moreover, these two types of religious outlook do not historically coincide with the said language groups. The Bible was written in Hebrew and the Quran in Arabic, while Jesus spoke in Aramaic (though his words were preserved in Greek translation), all three Semitic languages. Nevertheless, there was a lot of Paganism in this language area before revelation-based monotheism took over. It is often forgotten that the Arabs whom Mohammed tried to convert, were just as much polytheistsas the Hindus, and that they fought equally hard to preserve their Kaaba as the Hindus fought to repeat that the Jewish tradition lost the aggressive edge, which form the most reprehensible effect of the Semitic outlook, long ago. Conversely, in Aryan Iran, under the Sassanian dynasty, we see the Aryan religion of Zoroaster take on an equally exclusivistic attitude as is typical for the Semitic religions, complete with temple-destruction, idol-breaking and persecution of Manichaeans and Buddhists. Later, many Aryan-speaking people have been converted tot he Semitic creed of Islam. In Europe, most followers of the Semitic religion of Christ, are speakers of Aryan languages. In Africa and other places, the division in Aryan and Semitic has no linguistic (much less a racial) relevance. So, I propose to renounce the habit of using Semitic as shorthand for "revelation-based monotheistic" religions. The use of the wordArya as shorthand for Sanatana Dharma can continue, but one should be careful not to give secularist slanderers a chance of falsely associating it with the Aryan race nonsense. But before renouncing the Semitic habit myself, I will use the termSemitic one last time, in order to show how Nazism itself, for all its anti-Semitic rhetoric, very much fitted into the Semitic tradition.

As Girilal Jain has convincingly argued, Nazism was an extreme realization of the 19th century secular nationalism in Europe. This secular nationalism was in its general attitude towards mankind a direct heir to the Semitic legacy carried into Europe by Christianity. There is a straight lineage from Moses' Chosen People to Hitler's Herrenvolk (superior people). The radical division of mankind into the chosen insiders and the lost outsiders is very much present in this secular nationalism. A not-so-secular slogan of the impeccably secular Nazi state, written on the belt of the German soldiers, was : Gott mit unsp (God with us). This notion can be traced straight to Moses, from whom it had made a second lineage to Mohammed's jihad. Because of Hitler's dislike for Christianity, and because of some Nazi intellectuals' rhetoric involving the pre- Christian German mythology, many people, especially Christians, have 252 considered Nazism as a return to Paganism. That is a case of being fooled by a superficial semblance. In the Nazi ideology, the Germanic mythology had no place whatsoever. There was a certain flirting with themes from Germanic mythology since the mind-19th century at the latest, the best-known being Richard Wagner's operas (as there had been an exploration of Greek mythology since the Renaissance). So, by the time of Nazism, there were some artsy upper class people and some weird intellectuals playing with this ancient Germanic imagery, but there is no trace of any ideological influence from those fairytales on the actual political thought of the Nazis. Incidentally, today there is a new revival of Pagan religion in Europe. In Britain we have had the New Druids, both formal groups who claim to revive the ancient Celtic traditions, and individuals who explore whatever lore has survived, combining it with astrology, Oriental mysticism, and more such ingredients. This movement started in the romantic 19th century, in the same climate in which Wagner wrote his Ring der Nibelungen and Lohengrin, and it has continued with ups and downs till today. In Germany too, there is now a rediscovery of pre-Christian Germanic religion. Apart from the fact that these New heathens have to reconstruct this lost tradition from stray fragments and outsiders' testimonies, they also face the problem of this association of ancient Germanic lore with Nazism. But they manage to convince themselves and others of the utter superficiality in the Nazis' appropriation of this ancient imagery, and of the inherent tolerant and open- minded attitude of the Pagan civilization. In today's Germany, an estimated 20,000 people regularly participate in gatherings where the ancient or neo-ancient rites are conducted, most of them intellectuals with decent jobs. If we look at the basic points in the Nazi programme, we do not find anything there that can be traced to Germanic Paganism. Anti-Semitism (i.e. anti-Judaism) has nothing whatsoever to do with Germanic Paganism, it is a strong Christian tradition. Especially the Russian Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church in Hitler's Austria gave it implicit or explicit ideological support. Authoritarian political thought has nothing whatsoever to do with the Germanic tribal organization, which was largely democratic, with an elected king and a regular all-tribe assembly meeting. It had more to do with the secular organization of the Roman empire (which model had loomed large over the European polity all through the Christian period), which has also influenced the Church organization. The same Roman influence we find in outward forms like the uniformist discipline, the Roman salute and the fondness of grand parades. Secular nationalism, glorification of the state, genocide, racial purity and uniformity, all these essential ideological elements of Nazism have nothing whatsoever to do with the Pagan religion. Neither the Germanic Paganism, nor the Hindu Paganism with its swastika. It is important to stress this profound foreignness of Nazism to pre-modern Paganism, because once Hindus set out to rediscover the social philosophy and other elements of their own traditions, there will of course be some secularist ignoramus who will say that "this is just what Hitler did".

The Nazi kind of nationalism was also of the Semitic kind. Rather than seeing the nation as one step on the ladder in the organizational hierarchy, below civilization and humanity, and above regional, tribal and family units, it denied this gradedness. Instead, it divided the world in outsiders and insiders, thus in principle opposing itself to the rest of the world, and imposed uniformity on the nation, discouraging all subnational groupings. Again, this exclusivistic and uniformist nationalism is opposed to the Pagan outlook. The dominance of monotheism has strongly promoted that single most essential trait of the monotheistic mind : simplistic crudeness. For a well-known example, monotheists are idolbreakers : they are for God's unity, therefore they are against diversity. Their mental culture is too crude to see that multiplicity does not exclude unity, even while polytheists know fully well that there is one divine essence in all their gods (who anyway are all projections of the one but multifaceted human consciousness). Most modernizers these days are appallingly limited to black-and white categories in their thinking. For instance, in the present discussion of multi-level integration, they are of course for slogans like unity and integration, and therefore they are against any narrow and chauvinisticchampioning of region, sect, language group etc. Their only concept of unity is to raze everything flat, then there will be no more difference and disunity, so that will be the realization of unity, equality etc. This is Hitler's and Stalin's approach to national integration. Yet, real modern scientific thinking is gradual. It handles in-between categories (such as probability between certainty and uncertainty). This is formally a rediscovery of the old Pagan world-view. There is not just the absolute one God and the absolutely profane plural world, as in monotheism. There is a lot of life between the two. There is both sacredness and profaneness within the world, as there is both oneness and plurality within the divine. Similarly, there are inbetween levels between the individual and the state, with units who entertain a certain specificity rather than submitting to uniformity. A typically simplistic fallacy of the monotheistic mind is the one heard so often in the anti-Mandir rhetoric :"But Ram is everywhere ! Ram would be ashamed if he saw how attached you people are to something as profane as a spatial location and a structure of bricks !" Of course God is everywhere. And yet, there is a sanatana, ineluctable tendency in man to make the sacred present within the world, by consecrating certain parts of space and time, and demarcating them from the profane parts. We like to create difference, and make some places and some times special. Even the monotheists have had to yield to this natural tendency. Even though Allah is not in any place and time in particular, the Muslims have places of pilgrimage, festival days, a special day for prayer (Friday), a special month for fasting (Ramzan). The uniformizing monotheists can't help recognizing certain more sacred parts in space and time. So it is quite alright for Hindus to say : no, not any place will do, we want the one site that we have considered sacred since centuries. Sacred means : not just any. This Semitic simplistic crudeness, the same which prevents secularists from properly understanding the Ayodhya issue, is present in many modern unhealthy forms of nationalism, among them Nazism. They see their nation in isolation, as an absolutely independent unit, which on the other hand excludes all subdivisions within the nation. In a healthy international set-up, there are grades of independence, which are proportional to the grades of separate identity between ethnic and linguistic units. A case in point is "Khalistan". The Sikh community is distinct by its dress, and by its specific choice of Hindu scriptures and parampara. It is not distinct by language, for Panjabi (if at all it can be considered a language rather than a Hindi dialect) is also spoken by Hindus and Muslims ; and its scriptures are in Hindi, the language of crores of non-Sikh Hindus. It is not distinct geographically, for it has always lived mixed with other communities. It does not have a separate political history, for Ranjit Singh's empire was a state ruled by a Sikh, but by no means a Sikh state in which Sikhdom was shared by all or even the majority of the citizens. So, by the United Nations criteria for recognition as a separate nation, the Sikhs don't qualify at all. To the extent of

the distinctness of their identity, they are entitled to, well, cultivating the things that make up their identity, but not to a separate state. There has been a gradual increase of Semitic influence on the Sikh community during this century, or rather, on the Akalis who have set themselves up as the leaders. They have exchange the Hindu concept of God's oneness, through many forms, for the Semitic concept of God's unicity, inimical to all personified depictions orgoods. They have reshaped their gurus into prophets, intercessory mouthpieces of God, with guru Govind Singh as the "last and final prophet". These prophets have revealed the words that make up Sikh Scripture, and made the Sikhs into a "people of the Book". The chief influence is of course that of Islam, but the general depreciation for polytheism and idolatry which the British brought, has also played a role. It is no wonder that with this artificial Semitic identity, some Sikhs have developed a Semitic concept of nationalism, not admitting of any gradations. They began applying the crass simplistic reasoning of absolutizing their small measure of distinctness into a separate nationhood, and denying their internal differences and sub-identities for the sake of uniformity. They have a separate dress, therefore they have a separate identity, therefore they are entitled to an independent state. On the other hand, within their own community, they accept no differences and impose the Khalsa Sikh identity on the otherwise pluriform Nanakpanthi community : any Sikh who is not a Khalsa Sikh is not a real Sikh. Absolute cleavage with other communities and uniformity within the community, these are the essential ingredients of modern nationalism, generated in theSemitic cultural context of late- Christian Europe. For the sake of national integration in India, it is imperative to set the record straight, to reverse this process of absolutizing any minor difference in identity into a separatist claim to a nationstate. In the specific case of the Sikhs, the obvious fact should be made clear, that Sikh identity is integrated in a hierarchy of differentiation within Hinduism : it is a Bhakti sect within the broad Vaishnava tradition within Sanatana Dharma. In general, a theory of graded integration of distinct communities via a hierarchy of political levels that does justice to this distinctness should be evolved. That is the Aryan answer to a world-wide problem of plural- identity states, which has been aggravated by the Semitic absolutist approach.

14.4. "They killed the Mahatma" "It is extremely symbolic that Advani is the heir of Nathuram Godse who, in pursuit of what he was convinced was his duty to India, shot dead the man who had chanted the name of Ram all 253 his life till his last breath", writes M.J. Akbar. Many others make the same allegation, mostly more sharply. Before going into the facts of the matter, let us make the observation that today the name and especially the murder of the Mahatma are being exploited to the fullest by people who are crusading against that which was Mahatma Gandhi's first concern and loyalty : Hindu society. As is clear from the Mahatma's polemic against the Christian missionaries, he was first and foremost 254 a Hindu, who opposed all designs to destroy Hindu culture. And it was because he loved and served Hindu society, that he could take the freedom to criticize it. Those who criticize Hindu society and its defenders today, not as its well-wishers but as its enemies, and who do not hesitate to invoke the Mahatma's authority to prop up their Hindu-baiting designs before a population with an increasingly hazy memory of the Mahatma's real commitment, are traitors to the Mahatma's message. These people, from the shameless Jawaharlal Nehru down to his sycophants like M.J. Akbar, are in no position to lecture Advani about Gandhi the Ram bhakt.

Now,let us get the facts straight. In 1948, Nathuram Godse was an active member of the Hindu Mahasabha. Many workers and leaders of this organization were also members of the Congress, the party which Akbar in his article seeks to portray as the absolute antipode of the communal forces. Since 1925 there existed another Hindu organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which did not intend to be political. Godse, who was a Maharashtra Brahmin just like the founders of the RSS, had left this organization some time before he killed Gandhi, because he didn't find it radical enough. In 1947, the Mahatma's decades-long attempts to forge Hindu-Muslim unity ended in utter failure, when the Muslim League, supported by an overwhelming majority of the Muslim electorate, forced Partition on India. It should be a lesson for those who talk lightly of national integration and Hindu-Muslim unity, that even the Mahatma couldn't influence the Muslim community leadership. In the perception of millions of Hindus, especially those who had too flee their homes in what had suddenly become Pakistan, this Partition was very much the Mahatma's personal failure and responsibility : he had carried on a policy of concessions to the Muslims in order to appease their ever-increasing demands, and they had only become more arrogant in the process. As if to confirm their views, he went on a fast to death in order to force the Hindus and the Indian government into a number of concessions. Among them: the Hindu refugees who were staying in mosques in Delhi had to vacate them and find a place elsewhere, and the Indian government had to pay Pakistan's share of the treasury which the British had left, to Pakistan, a country with which it was actually at war in Kashmir. All his demands were meet, and he stopped his fast. This one-sided string of demands on the Hindus, and this masochistic habit of instilling guilt into his own community and swallowing all the Muslim crimes without protest, immensely angered many Hindus, among them Nathuram Godse. He couldn't take it any longer, for him the very name of the Mahatma made my blood boil. So, with the complicity of a few friends, he murdered the Mahatma. The Indian people, which was so angry with the Mahatma the day before, now re-installed him as the living saint they used to venerate, and as he was now dead, they made a myth out of him. A myth that contained the beliefs which the day before had been seen by everyone to lie shattered by reality. Conversely, there was a lot of violence against the Hindu Mahasabha. There was also large-scale violence against the Maharashtra Brahmin community to which Godse belonged, much like the anti-Sikh violence after Indira's murder (in both cases M.J. Akbar's Congress is generally believed to have actively fomented this violence). The great beneficiary of the Mahatma's murder was undoubtedly Jawaharlal Nehru. It marginalized the Hindu Mahasabha, and whatever other Hindu activist party existed, completely. Without the murder, Nehru and his Congress would have had to answer for he betrayal of the election promise that India would remain united, and for the immense suffering to which they were a party by accepting Partition.Now, he had an occasion to ban and possibly destroy what he hated most of all: the organizations which championed Hindutva. In this case, the fact that Nehru benefited immensely by the Mahatma's murder, will not lead us to 255 the conclusion that he must have been behind it. For, the principle that he who benefits must have committed the crime, only applies if people act rationally. Now, Nathuram Godse's act was anything but rational. Not only did he do the biggest possible damage to his own political cause. He also did not even punish the source of the Partition disaster that had angered him so much. If he had killed Jinnah, it would still have been murder, but it would somehow have been logical. But killing the Mahatma was like being beaten up by street toughs and then coming home and killing your father in revenge. It was quite irrational.

It is therefore quite improbable that the Hindu Mahasabha as such had a hand in the murder. In fact, Godse had been angry with party leader Savarkara for being too co- operative with the new Indian government. At any rate, the party leadership was not involved in the murder : that was the judge's opinion, when he fully acquitted Savarkar, whom the prosecutor for the state, at the express instigation of Nehru, had also accused of complicity in the murder. The party leader's non- involvement was so clear, that the prosecutor did not appeal against the acquittal. As is well known, Godse and his accomplice Narayan Apte were hanged, and several others 256 were sentenced to life imprisonment, of which they actually did some fifteen years. Now, what does L.K. Advani have to do with all this ? He has been a member of the RSS since decades. His party, the BJP, or at least its earlier incarnation, the Jan Sangh, was formed by RSS members who wanted to give a political dimension to the movement, in 1951. So, his party did not exist at the time of the Mahatma's murder, but the mother organization RSS was very much around (in fact, RSS chief Guru Golwalkar was one of the first to condemn the murder as a heinous crime, but that condemnation was of course so common that it couldn't prove much0. So the question becomes: is the RSS anyhow "the heir of Nathuram Godse", as M. J. Akbar wants us to believe ? After the murder, Nehru, who saw his chance, banned not only the Hindu Mahasabha but also the RSS, and jailed many RSS workers. However, the prosecutor could not find any trace of complicity, and did not prosecute any RSS man. So, in a juridical sense, the RSS had nothing at all to do with the murder. And M.J. Akbar and similar propagandists have to exploit people's ignorance in order to pass off their association of L.K. Advani with Nathuram Godse. Now, one could say that the RSS was co-responsible for the murder in the vaguer sense that they crated the atmosphere for it (the same way secularists today allot guilt for the riots). And it is undoubtedly true that the RSS was against Partition and therefore against the Partition managers, including the Mahatma. He had done so many fasts unto death to force Hindus, why had he not done one to stop the Muslims from partitioning the country ? This question lived in the minds of many Indians, and probably the RSS was vocal in expressing this anger against the Mahatma's passivity in the face of Partition. There is no doubt that they did their part in strengthening the anti-Gandhi mood in the country. But they did not create the atmosphere for Godse's act : Godse knew them since years and he was through with them. Godse didn't need the RSS (on which he looked down as being merely a culture organisation) to make up his mind about Gandhi and about how to punish him. There is quite a difference between demolishing the Mahatma's myth (a myth which M.J.Akbar's Congress Party continues to exploit even today) or criticizing his policies, and killing the man. The anti-Mahatma things which the RSS people said and wrote, were to my knowledge not more vicious than the anti-Advani propaganda which the secularists spread today (being a bigot, vicious, rabid, fascist, another Barbar, Jinnah, Hitler, etc.) And if tomorrow a lunatic kills Advani, we will not accuse the secularists of committing or even inspiring the murder. They may be proven liars, but that does not make them murderers.

14.5. Hindu nationalism "The Hindu communalists' claim to being patriotic is wholly suspect. The RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha have a shameful history of collaboration with the British, especially in 1942. Their support to the colonial state, unlike the communists', did not even have that redeeming feature or fig leaf : the choice of a lesser evil against fascism. It came from utterly despicable, base and 257 crass motives." Thus spake praful Bidwai.

Praful Bidwai repeats here a classic from the communist gallery of lies : that the communists collaborated with the British as a matter of choosing the lesser evil and first fighting fascism. It is simply not true that the communists joined hands with the British because they wanted to fight fascism. When England formally, declared war on Nazi Germany in 1939, the communists didn't move. Stalin had a pact with Hitler, and so the communists did not fight Hitler. It was only when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, that the communists joined the anti- fascist struggle. The communists' loyalty was not to India, not to Britain, not to the cause of anti-fascism, but solely to the Soviet Union. The only redeeming feature in the communists' collaboration with the British, was that it was part of their collaboration with the Soviet Union. Praful Bidwai writes an articles against communalism and accuses communalists of "utterly despicable, crass and base motives" for their collaboration with the British. So that must be his judgment about the Muslim League, which always consistently collaborated with the British, and which was wholly unconcerned with fig-leaves like the anti-fascist struggle. We may add that Bidwai's communist friends supported the Muslim League's Pakistan demand, and that they spied for the British and got many freedom fighters jailed. The Hindu Mahasabha had always been in the anti-colonial struggle. Its leader Savarkar had spent many years in a penal camp on the Andamans for complicity in anti- colonial murder. We may disagree with what he said, but as titles go, he had deserved his title Swatantryaveer (hero of independence). When he wanted Hindus to join the British army during the war ("Hinduize all politics, militarize Hindudom"), this was not a betrayal of the freedom struggle, but rather a potentially very effective strategy for obtaining quick independence. Savarkar's calculation was that after the war, the British would find before them a Hindu army, well-trained in the war against the Japanese, well-armed and well-organized, against which they would not even want to wage another colonial war. Why does Bidwai mention 1942, and not, say, 1944? Because in 1944 all parties including Congress collaborated with the British, while 1942 was the year of the Quit India movement. This movement was no doubt patriotic, but it was a great failure. It did nothing for independence, and it did not even achieve its real objective : bringing Congress back in the centre-stage of Indian politics. But at the same time, Subhash Chandra Bose was joining the Axis powers and organizing the Indian National Army to invade and liberate British India. Now, let's see who collaborated with the British against his own people. Jawaharlal Nehru declared that when Subhash Chandra Bose would set foot on Indian soil, he would fight him. That is, Nehru would collaborate with the British against the Japanese-backed Indian National Army. Taking our cue from Praful Bidwai, we must ascribe to Nehru "utterly despicable, crass and base motives". Anyway, what a strange exercise : dealing with the allegation that the Hindu activist parties are not India nationalists. I had thought that at least would be granted to them. It just goes to show howrabid (to use one of their favourite terms) the secularists' hatred for the Hindu communalists has become : they just kick around whichever way they can, now reverting to the more familiar allegation of national revanchism, irredentism (reclaiming territory on historical grounds) and narrow chauvinism. Let us consider these more familiar allegations, which would be an element in common with the aggressive nationalism of Germany, Japan and Italy in the thirties (and with that of China in 195062). Take irredentism : designs to annex territory based on historical claims. In some RSS publications, you see maps of Akhand Bharat, which are roughly British India : including Myanmar (Burma), but not including Afghanistan. So, it might seem they somewhere have a design to annex Myanmar one day. In fact, Myanmar was never a part of India, it was only the British who lumped the two together for a while. On the other hand, Afghanistan was a full part of the Hindu cradle up till the year 1000, and in political unity with India until Nadir Shah separated it in the 18th century. The mountain range in

Eastern Afghanistan where the native Hindus were slaughtered, is still called the Hindu Kush (Persian :Hindu slaughter.) It is significant that one of the very few place-names on earth that reminds us not of the victory of the winners but rather of the slaughter of the losers, concerns a genocide of Hindus by the Muslims. It seems that many people who champion the Hindu cause, do not have a good knowledge of Hindu history. But others do at least know of Afghanistan's having been a part of Hindu culture, for I have heard once, as an illustration of the expansionist ambitions of the Hindu communalists, that they want the shuddhi of Afghanistan. It was quoted by a secularist, with the suggestion : isn't that irredentist, and therefore fascist? Well, no. As long as shuddhi means the Hindu variety of conversion, there is nothing wrong with organizations like the Arya Samaj going to Afghanistan and performing shuddhi of the Afghans, that is, ritually leading them back into the Hindu fold. Of course, one doesn't see it happen just like that. But then, one doesn't see it happen after military conquest either. No cases are known to me of forced shuddhi, even in the heady twenties when Shuddhi and Tabligh movements competed for converts. Shudhi can only come after a conscious and free decision of the human being involved. On that condition, there is nothing wrong with the Shuddhi of Afghanistan. There are also, no doubt, some cranks who think that all countries with some Indian influence have to be brought together in a Greater India : Iran, Tibet, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia. But since some of the same cranks also believe that everything comes from India (my native tongue, Dutch, is said to have been brought by the Daityas), this Greater India would really comprise the whole world. Yeah, why not the whole world one big Hindu Rashtra? The thing is that such people, while politically totally unimportant, are somehow visible enough within the Hindutva movement, to give the whole movement a bad name. The one questionable and even objectionable element in the nationalism of Hindutva prophets like Savarkar and Golwalkar, as well as of Jawaharlal Nehru for that matter, is this 19th century European concept of a territorial nationalism. Savarkar defined a Hindu as someone for whom 258 India is both his fatherland and holyland . The two words are important in the definition : a Chinese Buddhist may consider India his holyland, but since he is not an Indian native, he is not a Hindu; and an Indian Muslim, conversely, is not a Hindu because his holyland lies in Arabia. Now, why tie the definition of Hindu to this piece of land? The Hindus in Bali, Guyana etc. are just as much Hindus as those in Bharat. One can migrate and yet retain Hindu culture. Of course, the name Hindu is really a geographical term (Hind is Persian for Sindh), but then the task for Hindu thinkers should be to free Hinduism from this territorial definition, rather than to confirm it. It is said that Shintoism is Japan's national religion (as opposed to so-called universal or imperialist religion). Alright, but Shinto does not mean Japan, it means the way of the gods. So, if you define a religion, you should say something about its contents, not just about its geographical location. "The way of the gods" may be still very rudimentary as a definition, but it says at least that it is a method or practice (a way) involving the divine in a kind of personalized way (the gods, as opposed to an atheist or nirguna system). That is more than Hindu, which means just of India. Savarkar put things upside down. He was a nationalist, pledging allegiance to this piece of earth now called India. But what is special about this country, so special that Savarkar builds a religion on it? There is nothing special about this country, except that historically it happens to be the cradle of Hindu society, and that society in turn derives its worth from its practicing and embodying a certain culture, Sanatana Dharma. It is because of Sanatana Dharma that this society is worth serving and preserving, and in turn it is because of Hindu society that Hindusthan is worth loving and defending. But this culture can be transplanted or re- created elsewhere, and then that other country is as much fatherland and holyland.

This territorial nationalism centered on Bharat Mata only confuses the issues before Hindu society. For instance, it occasions all this silly talk about Muslim Indians cheering for Pakistan in cricket games, and having extra- territorial loyalties to the area from which their religion was imported. But so what? The problem with Islam is not at all that it is foreign. The problem with Islam lies not in its geographical but in its ideological origins. The problem is not one of nationalism vs. extra- national loyalties, it is one of culture and ideology : an exclusivist antihumanist creed vs. a pluralist and integrally humanist culture. The Islamic problem is not one of loyalty to Pakistan or Mecca, but one of self- righteousness and intolerance. As long as the Hindu nationalists continue to define the Muslim problem as a problem of nationality, of "joining the national mainstream" and of "being Indian first and Muslim next", they are trapped in 19th century state nationalism, with all its puffed-up patriotic emotionalism. They are evading the confrontation between two incompatible ideologies/cultures, which no patriotism or loyalty to the state can unit. For instance, asking the Muslims to identify themselves as Mohammedi Hindus is not only very unrealistic, it constitutes a refusal to recognize the true (exclusivist and therefore averse to assimilation) character of Islam, in the name of a superficial Hindu nationhood. There is no good reason why Muslims or anyone else should direct his first loyalty to the Indian state. That state is nothing but an instrument to regular society and facilitate the citizens' fulfillment of their own life aims. If Muslims want to direct their loyalty towards an international religious community, they are free to do so, as long as they abide by the law of the land. The way forwards for the Hindu movement, is to redefine the problem in terms of ideology and civilization, and to address the challenge of Islam not at the level of ineffective emotional categories like loyalty and identifying with the nation, but at the ideological level. And when it comes to loyalty, this should not be directed towards such accidental matters as a territory or a nation in which we happen to be born, but towards the eternal values embodied in Hindu civilization. Hindutva ideologue V.D.Savarkar was a territorial Hindu, but culturally he was quite alienated. The well-known example: he advocated meat-eating and even meet-eating. Savarkar reasoned: if beef is more nutritious, then drop all the taboos, and kill cows for their meat. If seems many of his (formal and informal ) followers still think that the Hindus can only defeat the meat-eating Muslims if they give up vegetarianism. What nonsense this is: what are you fighting for if you believe that "in order to better defend Hindu culture, I have to give up Hindu culture"? If you think you have to forsake your culture identity, you only have this territorial identity left. And then, paradoxically, you arrive at the same point where the Nehruvian secularists are. They too advocate a culturally neutral, territorial patriotism. Both in the Hindu movements and in the anti-Hindu secularist movements, people are saying that you should beIndian first. What is this, being India? What is that, Bharatiyatva? Human beings are not different by the land they inhabit. They develop a certain distinctiveness by the value-system they practice, by the social ways that mould them, by the mental outlook that is instilled in them. So you can have a commitment to certain values. But a commitment to a certain piece of earth can only be superficial. And if this basically superficial attachment to this territory gets mystified, as happened with the secular nationalisms in some European countries, then the consequences are evil. Of course, when there is a football game, I want the team from my town to win. If it's an international game, I want my country's team to win. It would be a bit ridiculous to support the other town, the foreign country. So, that much territorial patriotism is alright. But one's basic commitment should be to more substantial things than that. A country can only acquire a value, and be an object of commitment, if it becomes historically linked with a substantial value. As long as India is conceived as culturally neutral, it is just a piece of land, not really worth any commitment. Forget about Bharatiyatva. The day when the world has one global culture, and that day is not too far off, these concept of territorial patriotism, of Indian-ness or American- ness etc. will only apply in football stadiums.

However, today the Indian state has an important function as the abode and defense of a culture which could hardly thrive otherwise. Since Hindu society is surrounded by Islamic and Communist enemies out to destroy Hindu culture, this state acquires a more than territorial importance. India is not culturally neutral, because objectively it is the only defense of Hindu culture against its enemies. So, as abode and defense of Hindu culture, this land and this state can count on the Hindus' allegiance and attachment. At this secondary level, nationalism becomes meaningful. That Savarkar, one of the foremost Hindutva leaders, could be so careless about Hindu culture even while defending it, is significant for the advanced state of self-forgetfulness that threatens to submerge Hindu society. And in this nationalistic and directed to Bharat Mata, than cultural and directed to Sanatana Dharma. If at all the nationalism in the Hindutva movement would develop fascist overtones (and I do not see that at present), it would be due to its not being Hindu enough, and being too secularnationalist. Compare with the relative unimportance of national borders in medieval Europe when it was all Catholic and unconcerned with nation-states. It was the larger religious and cultural idea (the Brahmin level) that could keep in its place the political idea of the state (the Kshatriya level). Similarly, a deeper knowledge and understanding of Sanatana Dharma would soon dedramatize and ultimately dissolve the problems of religionalism and sectarianism. For instance, Sikh separatism is based on externalities like beards and turbans, and on a defective and distorted understanding of Hindu and Sikh doctrine. If today Hindu politicians have to advocate a tough line in Punjab, and sending in the army, it is because they themselves (as well as all the traveling sadhus and other consciousness-raisers of Hindu society) failed to check the spread of ignorance and misconceptions about the Sikh tradition. Saying that India only makes sense as the eggshell in which Hindu society lives, and that India takes its identity from Hinduism, may not be the position taken by Savarkar, who put this the other way around, but at any rate it is the position considered Hindu communalist par excellence by the secularists. Yet, the position is wholly correct. But for Hinduism, there would not have been an Indian Union. Suppose that, as some foresaw a century ago, all Hindus would have been converted to Islam or Christianity. What would happen then, can be seen from such happy Muslim-Christian bhai-bhai countries like Lebanon, Cyprus, Sudan, Kosovo (Yugoslavia), Nagorny-Karabakh. The country would have been split at the very least into a Muslim North and a 259 Christian South. In the sense that Hinduism is the cultural reason for India's very existence, India cannot exist but as a Hindu Rashtra. Let us see what the secular alternative is. In a secular India, there is room for different religions, right? This pluralism is either a negative pluralism : we don't care, be whatever you want to be. In that case, you have a neutral state. That is the official position today, and it is not generating much enthusiasm. The minorities don't want it, because they feel threatened by majority rule. They fear that a neutral state regulated by majority vote, would uniformize at the expense of the weaker elements in the plural set-up. They allege that, against its own professing, the preserving of the minorities' identity is made an issue, and when the majority of the weak, an anti-democratic policy of championing the minorities against the majority is enforced. And so, everyone is unhappy. The alternative to this neutral pluralism is a positive pluralism. Underlying it, there is philosophy that positively gives a full-blooded foundation and justification to plurality. That philosophy exist : it is called Sanatana Dharma, and a state founded on it could well be called a Hindu Rashtra. In this state, the different components of the plural set-up are recognized as such. This state would be different from a uniform democracy, in that it would recognize plural subsystems. This recognition of plurality is, once more, the very opposite of fascism.

Integrating different units of identity into a large identity, is one of the foremost socio-political problems of today. And it is an issue on which the Hindu tradition has interesting approaches to offer. Since it is such a vast and important issue, I will limit myself in the following chapter to the one aspect of it that is highlighted at present in this discussion : minorityism vs. majoritarianism.

14.6. Majorityism The BJP has been saying that the government and some political parties indulge in minorityism. This means that they have promised or given special privileges to the minorities, chiefly the Muslims, in exchange for their political support. Two other reasons for thispampering the minorities may be " the approval of the Muslim countries, with whom Nehru and his successors established a special relationship (party made necessary by the Nehru-created Kashmir problem, on which a united Muslim front had to be prevented), and the satisfaction of a mental desire to be secular. In my opinion, the last factor, the mental cluster of secularism, the need to prove oneself non-Hindu and pro-minorities, is the most important one. The examples of systematic institutional minorityism cited most often are the separate personal law based on the Shariat, the special status of the Muslim-majority state Jammu and Kashmir, the immunity of minority schools and places of worship from government interference or take-over. Examples of occasional political minorityism are the numerous unequal treaties before independence between Congress and the Muslim league, the creation of a Muslim-majority district in Kerala by redrawing of district borders, the overruling of the Shah Bano verdict with legislation, the creation of a minorities commission (under the Janata government of which some BJP leaders were Cabinet ministers). These do not add up to a full oppression of Hindu society by the Muslim minority, but they do constitute real discriminations. Opposing this minorityism, the BJP has put forward the slogan :Justice for all, appeasement of none. This means that there should be no discrimination between individuals, between states, or between any intermediary levels of organization, on the basic of religions. Thus, instead of a Minorities Commission, there should be a Human Rights Commission, because members of the majority can have grievances too. Instead of immunity for minority schools, there should be immunity for schools run by any community. In fact, many members of the Constituent Assembly who voted this Articles 30 giving guarantees to the minority educational institutions, acted on the assumption that majority institutions would wrong, the Article should be reconsidered. A common civil code should be enacted. Articles 370 should be scrapped and Kashmir should be fully integrated. So, what the BJP demands here, is that the rules of democracy be applied without any exemptions or exceptions on communal grounds. To any democratic-minded person, this would seem quite unobjectionable. Not so to the Indian secularists. Of late, they have coined a new term, which should brand this democratic equality as really a component of fascism: majoritarianism. The right term to oppose minorityism would have been majorityism, i.e. espousal of the majority cause, but they chose the uglier majoritarianism. This is too bad for them, because the term can be analyzed as "espousal of the majoritarian cause", so not championing a (majority) community, hence communalism, but championing the majoritarian principle. And there is nothing objectionable in the majoritarian principle: it is the very working principle of our democracy. In fact, the secularists are quite correct in not describing the opposition to minorityism as majorityism. Opposing the favouring of minorities need not indicate a favouring of the majority, it may just as well stem for a concern of the working principle of the current from of democracy, viz. decision by the majority.

"The true test of a democracy is the justice that the minority gets in the system. The majority will 260 always get its share whatever the system", writes M.J. Akbar . With that, white minority rule in South Africa certainly passes the true test of democracy. M.J. Akbar implies that all struggle against minority regimes oppressing majorities was futile, since majorities cannot possibly be oppressed. But Hindus point out that they are really discriminated against in the laws of the land, and that minorities do get privileges which are unthinkable in most genuinely secular states. If we apply Bipan Chandra's definition of communalism, viz. attributing common secular interests to people on the ground of a common religion. then we must consider M.J. Akbar's statement as an application of communalist thought categories. There is absolutely no questioning of the religious rights of the minorities in India, so if Mr. Akbar raises issues involving the minorities, it must be non-religious issues, in which the category of religious community (minority) does not properly apply. >From the moment the religious rights of the minorities are guaranteed, any other talk of minorities is fundamentally communalist. Every single article of law not dealing with the exercise of religious community as a legally relevant unit of organization, is an element of communalism in the legal framework of the state, and should be repudiated in a truly secular-setup. A religious community is only a lawful category in strictly religious matters. In these, there is already discrimination against the Hindus. The state governments can (and do, as recently in Kerala) take over the management of Hindu temples, not of minority places of worship. They can (and do, as in West Bengal) take over school started by Hindu organizations. Apart from the secular aspects of education, there is religious discrimination against the Hindus in that the imparting of Hindus tradition is hampered, as well as the creation of a Hindu atmosphere in a school (e.g. through the selective recruitment of teachers, to which the minority schools are fully entitled). Both in the letter and spirit of the Constitution and in actual practice, Hindus as a religious community are discriminated against in matters of temples management and education. These discriminations are at least partly encroachments on the exercise n the exercise of the Hindus' constitutionally guaranteed religious freedom. Just imagine what rhetoric and agitation would be lunched if such discriminations had applied to the minorities. Then there is the matter of the separate civil code for the minorities. Marriage and inheritance laws are, perhaps on top of some sacramental dimension, quite secular matters. Recognizing and institutionalizing inequality between the citizens of India in these secular matters on the basis of their religion is definitely a case of constitutional communalism. Or rather, let us not be too harsh on the Constitution itself, for it does call on the law-maker to eventually abolish the religion-based law systems. It is political communalism on the part of the parties that refuse to implement the constitutional provision for the eventual enactment of a common civil code. It has been said, by commentators ranging from Girilal Jain to Mani Shankar Aiyar, that this common civil code should not be forced on the Muslims, that they should agree to it voluntarily, without any pressure being put on them to do so. As a matter of practical policy in the given situation, that makes good sense. However, as a matter of principle, the position that a common law decided on by a democratic majority, should not be imposed on an unwilling minority, opens the door for all kinds of minority veto rights that make a mockery of the democratic principle that decision are taken by majority vote. One can justify this position by saying that a minority's personal law is not the whole country's business, so that the relevant majority whose choice should determine the democratic decision, is not the majority of the entire nation, but merely the emerging in the democratic process within the community.

This reasoning would from part of a philosophy of multi community integration, in which as many powers as possible are devolved to the lowest possible level, in this case the religious community (since personal law is associated with religious commandments). This philosophy is currently gaining in relevance in a world which, with its increasing global integration, is discovering the socio-political value of decentralization: while matters of global concern are to be decided at the global level, national decisions should be retained at the national level, which in turn should not usurp decisions that can be taken at the regional level, and this in turn should devolve to the local level decisions that can be taken at that level. This decentralization trend (which is visible, for instance, in the increasing recognition of the substate regions as political units in the European Community) is linked with the modern small is beautiful philosophy, applied to political decisionmaking. Of course, this decentralization of power to the proper and lowest possible level, is akin to the decentralized structure of Hindu society, which always was commonwealth of (occupational as well as religious) communities. It is quite in the spirit of Hindu tradition, tough not in the spirit of the Constitution, to leave the Muslim community its personal law. The separate status for the state of Kashmir (Article 370) is again a discrimination in secular matters on the basis of religion, viz. its being a state with a Muslim majority. Nehru sycophants have tried to explain this irresponsible and communalist Article as follows:"The special problems of Jammu and Kashmir do not arise only out of the fact of its being a Muslim-majority state. It is also a state coveted by a foreign power which has thrice gone to war with India to capture the state,... whose territory is partly under hostile foreign occupation,... which is geopolitically located 261 in the cockpit of international intrigue." In fact, each of these problems can be reduced to this one fact that it is a Muslim-majority state and is therefore claimed by Pakistan under the terms of the Partition of British India. With a Hindu majority this would be radically different, and it would not even want the separate status granted by Article 370. Moreover ,none of the said problems justifies a separate status. On the contrary, in most countries they would lead to an extra strong integration into the Union, if not permanent central rule But our Nehruvian knows it all better: "It is with a view to addressing ourselves to these very special problems... that the constitutional device of Article 370 was evolved." If that is true, then we must recognize in all sincerity that this device has been ineffective. It has not stopped the Chinese from annexing parts of Karakoram and Ladakh, it has not stopped Pakistan from invading it twice more, it has not prevented the ongoing skirmishes over the Siachen glacier, it has not prevented the general spread of secessionism, it has not prevented the Kashmiri Muslims from practicing majorityism at the expense of the Hindu and Buddhist areas of Jammu and Ladakh and from hounding out the Hindu minority of the Kashmir valley, and it has not given private investors the confidence to go in and bring some genuine economical development. Short, in every geopolitical, communal and even economical respect, it has been an outrageous failure. But our Nehruvian spokesman remains, like his mentor, adamantly blind to the feedback from reality :"In the circumstances, the demand for abrogating Article 370 is totally misplaced. It would only result in the further alienation of the people of Jammu and Kashmir..." Firstly, subtract people of Jammu: they would welcome the full integration with India, either through the abrogation of Article 370 of through separate statehood for itself and Union Territory status for Ladakh. Secondly, subtract Hindus of Kashmir: they would gladly welcome full accession to India. But then, they have already fled to areas that are really India. Thirdly, why would the people of Kashmir feel alienated by integration? That seems a contradiction. It might be more accurate to say that Nehru has treated the Kashmiri Muslims like spoiled children, afraid to refuse them anything, so if you tell them now that they will get equal treatment with the rest, they become very nasty.

The blatant communal discrimination that guarantees the Muslim majority in Kashmir by forbidding non-Kashmiris to settle there, is also defended by our Nehruvian :"There is little practical scope for settling any considerable body of outsiders in the valley. What land there is, is already under the plough." By these standards, outsiders should be prevented from settling in 262 Bombay. Moreover,"there would not be many Indians from elsewhere in the country who would wish to actually settle there..." But abrogating communalist Articles is a matter of principle, of upholding the basic constitutional and democratic principle of non-discrimination, and is not dependent on just what number of people it will affect in practice. As BJP spokesman K. L. Sharma said :"Equal status to all states 263 and equal rights to all citizens is the BJP secularism." Moreover, as a political precedent, Article 370 affects millions of people, viz. those in states where separatist movement are encouraged by it and use the demand of the extension of Article 370 to their own state as a propaganda item or bargaining chip ("our ultimate concession short of independence"). Of course, it is not certain that the abrogation of Article 370 will make much of a practical difference for Kashmir itself in the near future. As long as the secessionist terror continues, and even for some time after that, not even the refugees will go back, let alone other. But at least the principle of India's integrity will have been restored. And it will discourage the secessionists in Kashmir and elsewhere, as well as the Pakistani agents, to see that India is reasserting its integrity on at least the level of legislation, that one level where terrorist created ground realities need not be taken into account and where principles can be upheld without compromise. The argument of the secularists against the allegations ofminorityism is that Hindus should be generous, and that they are not entitled to a persecution complex since their very majority makes it impossible for them to become the object of injustice. Moreover, the Muslims are a poor and wretched community who must be suffering a lot of discrimination otherwise they would not be so underrepresented in government jobs, business, the army, the universities: how can Hindus claim they are put at a disadvantage by this pitiable minority? As often, the secularists defend their case by confusing issues. There is a difference between suffering legal constitutional discrimination, and being poor. In the Islamic Republic of Malaysia, the Chinese are second- class citizens, legally discriminated against as being non-Muslims, yet they are very successful in business, and considerably wealthier than the Muslim Malays. If the Muslims in India are poor, it is not at all because of discrimination, as should be clear from the record of other minorities. If Sikhs are overrepresented in government services and the security forces, if Christians are overrepresented in education, if Jains are overrepresented in business, it is not because of preferential treatment by the law or by the executive. In fact, if we drop the false socialist parlance, these communities are not over-represented in the said fields, it is more accurate to say they are great achievers. And the Muslims, unfortunately, are on average poor achievers. That is almost entirely due to one single factor: their poor schooling. This factor in turn may be reduced to Islamic factors like large families, low status of women (keeping them uneducated and thus less able to teach their children and to create an education- friendly atmosphere for them), and stress on Quranic rather than secular studies. Short, the hold of Islamic orthodoxy over the Muslim community is by far the largest factor in Muslim community is by far the largest factor in Muslim backwardness (as well as 264 fostering its ghetto mentality). By contrast, while Hindus may be doing alright economically etc., they do objectively suffer legal discrimination. They are denied certain constitutional rights and guarantees, as well as many political favours, and that constitutes a real inequality even if it is not impoverishing. The secularist line that Hindus should bear discrimination without complaining, since there are worse things in life (such as this abysmal poverty which these wretched Muslims have to suffer), presupposes that Hindus have no sense of honour. It assumes Hindus don't mind being second-

class citizens, as long as they make a decent living. This presupposition certainly fits the stereotype, created in the centuries when Hindus were sharply discriminated against in the laws laid down by Muslim rulers. But that does not justify continuing legal discrimination. Moreover, on top of this undeniable political and legal discrimination, Hindus perceive a serious threat to the very existence of their culture and society, when they look across the borders and into the future. Their acute sensitivity to minorityism is strengthened by the perception that the minorities indulge in aggression against the Hindus wherever they get the chance, and that they are also growing stronger by the day. When you consider the population trends in the Indian Subcontinent, it seems inevitable that Muslims will make up 50% of its population in less than eighty years. Extrapolating the trends within India, it will be less than fifty years until the Muslims are again 24% of the population, the percentage which in the forties was enough to enforce Partition. Add to that the millions- strong illegal Muslim immigration into India, which will only accelerate as population pressure increases in Pakistan and Bangla Desh. So, the majority status of the Hindus is by no means guaranteed. Moreover, the so- called minority is in fact the Indian department of a world-wide movement, from which it effectively gets moral and financial support. It is no fable or prejudice that Muslims as a community have the highest birth-rate in practically every country where they co-exist with other communities. In some article that set out to debunk thispropaganda, three countries were cited as counter-examples. Unfortunately, the writer had not chosen his concocted examples very well : one of them was Lebanon. The cause of the civil war there, apart from the legitimate reaction against Palestinian take-over tactics, has been the fast rise in Muslim population, which rendered the earlier power division on a communal basis disproportional. The Muslims, now in the majority, want to abrogate the old power division and freely exert their majoritarian powers. The Christians fear that this will cause a speedy end to their age-old presence in Lebanon. In Pakistan, family planning is a joke. The responsible ministry is at present headed by a fundamentalist Muslim, Saddar Niazi, who boasts of being one of fifteen children. He has declared that the pressure for family planning was a holdover from the liberal secularism of Benazir Bhutto, and that he did not intend to implement the policies of a woman charged with 265 corruption and overwhelmingly voted out in the 1990 election. His stand is not exceptional, rather it is the rule among Muslim governments. At any rate, Pakistan's birth rate stands at 3.2%, almost the doubt of India's. Bangla Desh, the world's most densely populated country and perhaps the only Muslim country that ever seriously considered a family planning policy (apart from the moderate states Egypt and Indonesia, and in contrast to Malaysia, which has actively encouraged a high birth rate among its Muslims), today also has a birth rate markedly higher than India's. Both Pakistan and Bangla Desh consciously seek to solve their overpopulation problem at least partly by dumping excess people in India, where they can be useful for the long-term pan- Islamic design. Kashmir has been an eye-opener for the Hindus if one was needed. In the first part of 1990, more than two lakhs of Hindus, practically the entire non-Muslim population, were driven out from the Valley. Refugee Arvind Dhar testifies: "The aggression has been entirely one-sided. All central government employees (generally Hindus) were asked to leave their jobs, and those who did not were placed on a hit-list. One newspaper (Al-Safab) had a headline in March asking all Hindus to 266 vacate within 48 hours of face bullets". Predictably, secularists and Muslim communalists have joined hands to deny the propaganda that Kashmiri Muslims have unleashed a purely communalist campaign of violence against the Hindus. Some papers declared that it was actually the Hindu refugees who were "creating a

267

communal crisis" by fleeing to Jammu or Delhi. In their Newspeak, which calls terrorists militants, the refugees are called migrants, and it is an interesting illustration of the perversion of India's political parlance to see how even the refugees themselves have sometimes adopted this secularist-imposed usage. Syed Shahabuddin declared, along with some moderate Kashmiri Muslims, that the Hindus could come back to Kashmir, and that their property was being looked after by their Muslim 268 neighbours. But the first- hand information of refugee Arvind Dhar tells a different story:"All my movable property has been stolen and my house was burnt a month ago. But Mr. Shahabuddin says that migrants' property is being looked after. Bhushan Bazaz, president of the terrorist-sympathizing J&K Democratic Forum pontificates:"As far as the migrants are concerned, they should show boldness in returning to their native land. They committed a great blunder in migration... The migrants should take it for granted that they 269 will not be harmed, physically or emotionally, if they return to the valley immediately". It is worth quoting a reply: "By advising the migrants, many of whom live in squalor in camps mourning the death of their kith and kin, to 'return to the valley boldly, taking it for granted that they will not be harmed...', Mr. Bazaz is mendaciously suggesting that these hapless people have fled the Valley out of an imaginary fear at someone's instance. The naked truth is that the peaceloving and peaceful non-Muslims were forced to flee... when they found that the goodwill of their well-disposed but unarmed Muslim neighbours... was of no avail to them against the orgies of selective murder, rape and arson perpetrated by armed Pak-trained militants... Considering that even a few gullible migrants, including a lone woman, were recently gunned down within hours of their return, one wonders whether Mr. Bazaz's facile assurance of safety to migrants emanates 270 from his desire to fool the uninformed or to propitiate India-baiters in Pakistan". The kashmiri militants, Bushan Bazaz, Syed Shahabuddin, the Nehruvian defenders of Article 370, they are all, each in his own way, objectively part of the strategy of the anti-Hindu forces on the Kashmir front. The Kashmir Samiti has produced a report titled Riots in Kashmir, listing 85 temples destroyed in the valley, and claiming that 550 Hindus had been killed (630 with security men included; official 271 figure 495) in the Islamic purification campaign in 1990. And one cannot just blame Pakistan, for even a secularist paper admits:"There is no evidence to suggest that the average Kashmiri is fed up with the militants. Everywhere ordinary people are sheltering 'the boys fighting for a 272 cause". The common Muslims in Kashmir believe in the two-nation theory. After all, Islam itself instills the communal separateness in its followers. It is a communalist ideology through and through, and all the talk of Kashmiriyat as a bond between Hindus and Muslims have proven to be just wind as soon as the call for a separate Dar-ul-Islam was spread. In Pakistan, the dwindling percentage of 1% Hindus ekes out an existence in constant fear of the never-ending harassment=92s and attacks by the Muslim majority (which is untroubled by anyminoritism). A secularist paper, prudishly and secularly titling:"Ethnic violence drives Sinhis across the border", lets out the truth in the small print: "According to [refugee Sukh Ram], most of the Hindus are forced to desert their homes because of their religion. 'We are not allowed to pray 273 peacefully in the temple of celebrate Hindu festival=92s he said". 274

Moreover, at several places in Sindh, cremation grounds had been usurped by Mohajirs , funeral procession were attacked with stones, and women were not safe either. Pakistan Hindu leader Raja Chander Singh, who left Benazir's Pakistan People's Party to form the Pakistan Hindu Party, says that the Hindu migration to India is now (proportionally) bigger than during the Partition day:"The future of Hindus in Pakistan is very bleak... They are leaving because of 275 fear".

So the Hindus flee, and Pakistan likes it that way :"The Pakistani leaders... seem to be 276 encouraging Hindus to leave the country". A 16-year-old boy is quoted saying: "We all think here that Pakistan is a country for Muslims and only Hindusthan is the country for us Hindus". Perhaps this accomplished fact had better be faced: Hindusthan is the homeland and refuge for the Hindus fleeting Muslim states. Since India is not willing to defend the rights of the Hindus in the Muslim neighbour states, it should automatically grant citizenship to Hindu refugees (as Israel does to Jews). With all this persecution of Hindus by these poor wretched minorities, it is quite understandable that Hindus feel they should reassert their own democratic rights. They have done enough for the minorities by recognizing their democratic rights and religious freedom. Justice for all without any unequal appeasement of any religious community should be enough in a secular democratic state. But here they have to confront the watchdogs of secularism, who know it all better. A.S.Abraham writes: "The observes side of the coin of 'minoritysim' is that the majority is held is to the victim of discrimination by the state. To indulge the minorities is automatically to discriminate against the majority. On the other hand, 'majoritarianism' cannot, in this scheme, entail discrimination against the minorities because, unlike 'minorityism', which is an unnatural 277 distortion, 'majoritarianism, is natural and healthy". The last sentence is merely a scheme attributed to the Hindus by Mr. Abraham, as part of the old rhetorical trick: if you can't beat their argument, attribute to them a weak or stupid argument and attack that instead. The very term 'majoritarianism' is not a Hinduscheme, it is of the secularists' own making , coined as a swearword for religiously neutral democracy. It is obvious that to"indulge the minorities" automatically means discriminating against the majority. Privileges mean inequality, and if one party is more than equal, the other is less than equal. No-one would object to the minorities' right to open (subsidized) schools, were it not that the majority is denied this right. Today, this right is a privilege of the minorities and a discrimination against the majority. Of course, there is nothing objectionable or anti-national in this right of the minorities, so the discrimination should be abolished by extending the same right to the majority (incidentally, this discrimination, laid down in Article 30, is glossed over in mr, Abraham's column). For Mr. Abraham's brand of secularists, constitutional guarantees of religious freedom and nondiscrimination are not good enough:"The fact is that 'minorityism' inheres in the very idea of secularism." So, he concedes to Mr. Advani that the Indian secularists are indeed champions of minorityism. However, as a citizen of a fully secular state, I strongly object to Mr .Abrahams minorityist statement. I have never heard ofminorityism either as a term or as a concept somehow functional in our secular system. We do not give religious minorities a veto against decisions enacted by a democratic majority. Let us take the example Mr.Abraham himself gives. He concedes that "superficially, the Advani position looks unexceptionable", consisting of "reasonable demands for secularizing our affairs". However, it is not truly secular, for if it were, "then they would also have to stop demanding a ban on cow slaughter, which is a religiously motivated proscription that cannot be endorsed by a secular state". As usual, out secularists prove their point by mixing things up. There is a difference between the motives for which a state enacts a law (which in a secular democrat is not Scriptural authority but the will of a majority of the people), and the motives that make the people favour the enactment of this law (with which the state has no business: they may be religious motives as well as any other). The nice thing about democracy is that it allows for difference between countries. If a majority of the people in my country favor cow slaughter, then we can practice cow slaughter; and if a

majority in India opposes it, then the Indian state can ban it. Both countries adhere to the political form of democracy, but the contents of their policies are different, reflecting the different will of the respective nations. Democracy is a formal concept, it is a procedure of decision making, not 278 concerned with the contents of (nor with the motives for) the decisions. so if a majority of the Indian citizens favour a ban on cow-slaughter, then the secular state does not avail of a Thought Police to check out their religious or other motives or this political choice. A secular democracy merely registers the will of the majority and enacts laws and policies accordingly. At this point, there might be one limitation: unlike the Islamic republics, who ride roughshod over the religious rights of minorities, a secular state should safeguard the religious community in India that imposes on its adherents the duty to slaughter cows. So, from a secular viewpoint, no compromise whatsoever is needed, and nothing stands in the way of enacting a ban on cow slaughter, provided a majority votes for it. And at any rate, there is nothing objectionable, or threatening to the secular character of the state, in a citizens' initiative to create opinion in favour of such a ban. The Muslim League always objected to a ban on cow slaughter, and demanded a veto right for the Muslim community on every issue. Today, many Hindu politicians have interiorized this demand for a minority veto right, and don't ever dare to suggest a ban on cow slaughter for fear of provoking the Muslim veto. In a secular democracy, the veto right of a religious minority is limited scrupulously to those decisions that directly the exercise of their religious freedom. Banning cow slaughter is not among them, so the democratic secular republic of India can certainly enact a ban on cow- slaughter the day a majority of citizens decides in its favour. As Mr. Abraham himself writes: "A secular state, such as we are committed to building, is one in which the religious beliefs of its citizens are of no consequence to it. It regards them indiscriminately as equal citizens are of no consequence to it. It regards them indiscriminately as equal citizens under the law."More precisely: the religious beliefs of the citizens are of no consequence to the form (the procedure) of the decision-making, but they may of course be an element in the contents of the decisions, to the extent that the sovereign citizens choose to take them into account. Minorityism, by contrast, means that you give special legal rights and political favours to citizens on the basis of their professing certain religious beliefs (or rather, on their belonging to certain religious communities with political clout). Minorityism does interfere with the form of democracy. In India, while not overwhelmingly affecting the democratic policy, it does thwart the principle of equality in several domains. Mr. Abraham attributes the wrongs of minorityism to another ideology, invented by his own tribe for the sake of rhetoric, majoritarianism: "Just as 'minorityism' is indispensable to secularism, so 'majoritarianism' is its antithesis. To be 'majoritarian' is to want the religious beliefs of the majority to colour, indeed to determine, the values, goals and institutions... This is an agenda for theocracy masquerading as 'genuine' secularism." All decisions are determined by beliefs. To adapt an example from Indian tradition: if you believe the rope in the dark room to be a snake, your decision not to go in will have been determined by the belief that it was a snake, not by the reality that it was a rope. Instead of belief, we could better say more neutrally: perception. If a majority of the representatives of the people decide to have a state-run economy, then that decision has its roots in a belief or perception that such an economical system will be best suited to realize national goals (of which the choice again is based on the belief that, for instance, distributive equality is more important than wealth creation etc.). It is for the democracy not important whether this belief is correct. Observers of economical history may believe that the faith in a state-run economy is unfounded, but before this minority belief can democratically influence policy, they will have to persuade a majority to adopt this belief.

You cannot get out of this: in a democracy, decisions are made on the (issue-related) belief of the majority. One may deplore that these beliefs are often inadequate but it is beyond the role and the power of the state to help it; the thinkers and educators of the people have to raise the people's consciousness so that its beliefs become more adequate to reality. Non-despotic democracy can only register and translate into policy the actual perception of a majority of the people. So, by definition, "the beliefs of the majority do colour, indeed determine, the values, goals and institutions" of a secular democratic state. Sometimes, some of these beliefs are codified into a doctrine roughly called a religion. Well, the secular state has no business with that, as long as these beliefs do not interfere with the formal principles of the secular democracy itself. Thus, the Islamic belief that non- Muslims must be treated as third-class citizens and debarred from taking top government jobs, is intrinsically incompatible with secular democracy, and must on that ground be prevented from determining the institutions of the state. But legislatively acting on the belief that cows are worth protecting against slaughter, is quite compatible with secular democracy, even if a minority doesn't think that highly of cows. After all, imposing the order "Keep off the grass" in city parks does just the same thing as imposing a ban on cow slaughter in India. There exists a minority of people who don't believe parks ought to be equipped with healthy lawns. They don't mind healthy good-looking lawns, just like beef-eaters don't mind unslaughtered cows, but they believe that for themselves the freedom to take a shortcut across the lawn is more valuable. Others may respect the lawn, but they don't feel any duty to respect it themselves. Yet, nobody in a secular democracy objects to the imposition of the majority's respect for nice-looking lawns on this unrespectful minority. This imposition of a uniform behaviour on a population with non-uniform beliefs is unavoidable in government relative to public affairs, and is no way a threat to the secular and democratic character of the polity. It become undemocratic only when a minority imposes its chosen rules of behaviour on a majority, and it becomes unsecular only when a religious authority rather than the will of a majority lays down the rules. Now, what is the fuss about this majoritarianism effectively about? What possible policies would constitute this threatening phenomenon of majoritarianism, it cannot be the issue of cow slaughter, or the re-adoption of Vande Mataram as the anthem, much less the abolition of the discrimination against Hindus in education or temple-management. Mr. Abraham gives exactly one example, and I don't think he has another :"When the `majority'... wants to build a temple on a site which the `majority'... believes is the birthplace of Ram, then the proper course of action for the state is to assist, and certainly not to hinder that project. If it so happens that a mosque stands on the site, then not to allow the temple to be built for that reason is to be guilty of `minorityism'."this argument deserves some scrutiny. First of all, the word majority as the term for Hindu society is a creation of the secularists. If Mr. Abraham distances himself from it here, through the quote marks, it is because he is using the term here in another sense, in fact its proper, democratic sense :a majority of opinion on the specific issue under consideration. By distancing himself from the term in this meaning, he wants to sow doubts that it is really a majority of the Indian people that want the Mandir to be Built. Well, that can be ascertained by a referendum, as the BJP has demanded. Secondly, democratic states the world over do have the right to expropriate people or communities when they consider it necessary for the common good- a category to which a concrete meaning is given by the perception of a majority. Not only are roads built on land expropriated from unwilling landed farmers :sometimes as a matter of social reform policy, poor landless peasants are given lands expropriated from unwilling landed farmers. The majority of poor people can impose harsh measures on the rich minority. Stealing from the rich to give to the poor, you may consider it just or unjust, but it is one of the options in a democracy. And it is

sometimes done, and then mostly justified as a corrective measure for past injustices (a case in point : positive discrimination policies like job reservation). So, if a majority decides to take something from a minority, it is not yet fascism, in fact it is more probably socialism. Nevertheless, the point which Mr. Abraham makes, is that in a majoritarian (i. e. democratic) system, no minority is safe from the possible extortions by the majority. For instance, in Bangla Desh the property of the Hindus has been threatened by the Enemy Property Act (the democratic caliber of Bangla Desh is poor, but it is quite certain that even otherwise, no majority would have come forward to prevent the enactment of this law). In fact, in most countries, democratic or not, minorities are at the mercy of the majority. What protects the minorities is not so much the democratic character of the state, but the effective rule of law and/or the kindness and tolerance of the majority. Let us narrow the discussion down to the example under consideration : taking over a place of worship. On what ground was it reprehensible that the Soviet government, claiming to be a people's government, claiming to be a people's government (a claim which we will concede here for the sake of the argument), expropriated the places of worship in order to transform them into temples of modernity and socialism (like factories and bureaucratic offices)? The majority of dialectical-materialist peasants and workers took from the minority of feudal and petty-bourgeois obscurantists their places of worship. This was reprehensible because (granting all other claims) it interfered with the exercise of these people's religious freedom. Taking a single, or let's say three, mosques from the Muslim minority, is less than a denial of their religious freedom. But it is a small factual encroachment on the material exercise of their religious rights. As such, it can be justified as a, merely symbolic, righting of an old wrong. In a juridical sense, the communities that own and use the mosques, or their Waqf boards, can certainly be considered the successors to the rulers that built these mosques and initiated the worship that is continuing there. So, demanding from them these few places as a delayed and merely symbolic compensation for the wrongs inflicted by the erstwhile mosque-builders, while leaving them all the freedom and maybe even financially assisting them to set up alternative mosques nearby, is not at all misplaced, nor unjustifiable, nor in violation of internationally accepted limitations to a government's rights of expropriation. However, the point about majoritarianism is not so much whether the expropriation of three contentious mosques is justified. The point is that a majority has the power to enact such expropriation regardless of its being justified or not. Conversely, a minority does not have the power to enact a similar expropriation, even if justified. A case in point: the Hindus in Bangla Desh have no democratic power to reclaim some of their sacred places which the Muslims laid waste, not in Babar's or Aurangzeb's time, but the last few decades. This separation between justice and power is of course one of the most fundamental political problems that humanity faces. A minority cannot democratically enforce its claims, even if justified; while a majority can, even when its claims are unjustified. A majority can democratically enact blatantly unjust laws and constitutional provisions ( as it effectively does in Pakistan, Malaysia and other Muslim 279 countries). That possibility of the majority riding roughshod over the minorities is indeed present in the democratic system. Yet normally it doesn't happen. Most majoritarian democracies do not oppress their minority communities. The very fact of running a pluralistic democratic polity will condition people to be respectful towards all the different components of their society. The outright oppression of a minority by the majority almost exclusively happens where other ideological factors condition the majority community to disrespect towards the minorities. The most important such factor in the world today, you guessed it, is Islam. So, it is not he system of majoritarian democracy that will make minorities oppressed and reduce their members to second-class citizens. It is the contents that the majority gives to the polity, that

may have this effect. In Bangla Desh and Pakistan, Hindus have been oppressed by the Muslim majority in almost equal measure under dictators as under democratic governments. Not the political system, but the chauvinistic anti-Kafir attitude of the majority community brought this about. In Hinduism, such fostering of intolerance towards non- Hindu communities, let alone active oppression, is not sanctioned by Scriptures or other sources of doctrine. Even if the continuing Islamic aggression against Hindus, both in the Islamic republics and in India itself, provokes Hindus to an anti-Muslim polarization, this will remain a peripheral and occasional tendency. There is simply no danger at all that the normal majoritarian form of democracy will lead to any oppression of the religious minorities in India. By contrast, it is already a fact that minorityism, the policies with a bias towards the religious minorities, has effectively led ( even within a formal structure of majoritarian democracy ) to a number of discriminations against the Hindus on the basis of religion. In most majoritarian democracies in the world ( all except the few Islamic republics that know democracy ), there are no legal or political discriminations against the minorities ( first of all because minorities are only recognized as a relevant category in some very few contexts, otherwise there are merely individuals). But then, in most majoritarian democracies in the world, there is no minorityism either. The recent claim of some secularists thatminorityism is essential to democracy. That Hindus suffer from discrimination favouring the minorities, is not an effect inherent in the prevalent political system. It is a policy followed by Hindu politicians of their own free will. And it can stop the moment these Hindu politicians come to their senses, and stop enacting or maintaining discriminating laws against their own people. This minorityism is not a legislative or constitutional problem ( except secondarily ), it is primarily a problem of mentality. And it is not so much a problem created by the aggressive minorities, it is at least partly created by the morbid willingness in Hindu politicians to appease minority arrogance. So, solving the problem of minorityism requires chiefly a change of mentality in Hindu society. It should free itself from the wholly mistaken notion that it owes the minorities anything. It has not done them any injustice ( which is more than what at least the Muslim minority can say ) even in centuries past, and fully discharges its human and democratic duty by giving members of minority communities full citizen's rights and equality before the law, as well as full religious freedom. Hindus should realize that there is no reason at all for them to co-operate in policies that impose on them an inferior status in matters like education, settling in Kashmir, temple management, or marriage rights. Hindus should shake off the mental chains ( nowadays called secularism )that make them tolerate these political and constitutional injustices.

14.7 Targeting a minority "Majority communalism is far worse than minority communalism, for minority communalism can only lead to secessionism, while majority communalism leads to fascism", so some secularists say, citing Nehru as their guide in this vision of things. It is what the white minority in South Africa has been saying for some time : if we oppress them, it is only oppression, but if they get a chance to oppress us, we will be exterminated. No Indian secularist is known to have come out in support of this reasoning. The comparison with South Africa is fair to this extent that, generally, the problem posed is the same : in how far does democracy (in South Africa called majority rule) have to modified in order to give safety and autonomy to non-territorial sub-units of a nation ? India need not be apologetic about having this problem in common with South Africa: it is one of the main political problems of today's world.

It is a fact that majorities can do a lot more harm to minorities, once they really want to, than the reverse. The Germans never could have taken on the Jews the way they did, if the Jews had formed the majority. Then again, it is not the number of heads that counts, but the effective power. When as army invades a country, it is mostly outnumbered by the populations it is out to subdue. The Conquistadores who committed the final solution on the native American population of the Caribbean and much of the South American continent, were vastly outnumbered by the population they exterminated. It is not just numbers and military might that count, but also the unscrupled will to go to such an extreme. Moreover, what is a majority ? In Western Armenia in 1915, the Christian Armenians outnumbered the Muslim Turks. But the Turks on Armenia were not left to themselves, they had a support base in Turkey proper. And they exterminated the Armenians in that area. The same thing, minus the genocide, we have seen in Cyprus: the Turkish minority, claiming oppression by the Greek majority, called in big brother Turkey, and imposed its will (Partition) on the helpless majority. So, calling the Hindus a majority, is a statement that must be qualified in different respects. They are fragmented. They are outnumbered by the Muslims worldwide. In the Subcontinent, the Muslims already number one third of the population (in 1981 it was 28% and increasing fast). Most of all, the Hindus don't have the ruthless determination to impose their will, of which the Muslims gave proof when they forced Partition on the country. But going by secularist parlance, and calling the Hindus themajority community, there is still no reason to postulate an imminent re-enactment of the German vs. Jewish story of 1933-45, with the Hindus exterminating the Muslims. First of all, the relations between the communities concerned are very different in two cases. The Jews had not forced a Partition on Germany. They had no history of Persecuting and massacring the Germans. They were not sending infiltrators from a neighbouring Jewish Republic (they were actually preparing to set up a Jewish state in far-away Palestine). They were not forcibly occupying a piece of German territory. They were not starting riots. The Jews were blamed for all Germany's problems. The economic crisis was because of : "Jewish capitalists". So was the German defeat in World War I (in which many Jews even outside Germany had in fact supported the German war effort). Decadence was attributed to Jews like Sigmund Freud. The Communist threat was attributed to the Jew Karl Marx (who merely had a Jewish-born, but converted, father). This does not apply to the Muslims in Hindu perception. Poverty, the defeat against China, the non-victory against the Tamil Tigers, corruption, unemployment, India's poor showing in the Olympics, all these are not blamed on the Muslims. The Muslims are blamed for creating riots (which is at least partly correct), for oppressing and hounding out the Hindus of Bangla Desh, Pakistan and Kashmir, for having inflicted Partition on India (all correct, except that it is done by some rather than by the Muslims, but it is certainly done under the banner of Islam). Then there are some allegations of things that in the short term are not actual problems for the Hindus, such as refusing family planning and a common civil code. But it is absolutely not true that Hindus attribute all their problems to the Muslim hand, the way the Germans (and generally also the Poles and the Russians) used to do with the Jews. According to M.J. Akbar, : "just as Hitler had given a frustrated Germany a target and that target was the Jew, so through the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, a frustrated country was given a 280 target and that target was the Muslim".

Before we analyze this comparison, I would like to point out that Mr. Akbar is in absolutely no position to blame anyone for making people into a target the way Hitler did with the Jews. Mr. 281 Akbar is a Muslim, a congressman , and a Nehru worshipper. Now, the Muslims are still doing what Hitler did : blaming the Jews for all the problems. So many Muslim or Arad resolutions on any topic include condemnations of the Zionist entity. When someone falls out of favour with a Muslim dictator, he tends to get caught spying for Israel, and hanged. When Khomeini counterattacked Iraq, he declared his real goal was Israel. When Muslims made a slander film about Rushdie, he was portrayed as a Zionist playboy. Stereotypes about the influence of the Jewish282 controlled press and the Jewish capitalists, which in Europe count as unpermissible expressions of anti-Semitism, are current in Arab and pro-Arab comments on the Arab-Israeli problem. And don't try to be clever by making a distinction between Jews and Zionists. In Europe quite a few bomb attacks are committed by anti-Zionist Muslims against Jews, including doctors, schoolchildren and citizens who have no plans of settling in Zion. The Islamic terrorists are not making that distinction, and neither are the Islamic governments who plan to destroy the state of Israel. If Israel will be destroyed, it will be with a chemical or nuclear holocaust killing millions of Jews. And then the Congressmen who have continued Nehru's policy of total support for the anti283 Israeli cause, will say :Wir haben das nicht gewusst. In fact. Nehru himself fluently went from anti-Zionist to anti-Jewish. This is what he wrote: "In practice the Hindu is certainly not tolerant and is more narrow-minded than almost any person in 284 any other country except the Jew". (in practice, Nehru was certainly not tolerant and he was more narrow-minded than almost any other person in any other country except Hitler) So, before Mr. Akbar starts to elaborate comparisons with Hitler's propaganda of blaming everything on the Jews, he should first of all belongs, are reiterating Hitler's propaganda till today. Now, in M.J. Akbar's comparison, Jews were made a target for Germans by the Nazis, and Muslims are made a target for Hindus by the Hindutva organization. At one point, which M. J. Akbar does not mention, the comparison is correct: in both cases, the hatred aroused was nothing new, but a centuries-old animosity with stable historical roots. While Islamic anti-Judaism (or "anti-Semitism") had three causes : 1. The belief that the Jews killed Christ (who was himself a Jew, cfr. blaming Hindus for killing Gandhi), which was a lesser factor in the secular Nazi movement, but which till today is a reason for the Russian Orthodox Church to foster anti-Jewish attitudes. 2. The association of Jews with Muslims During the Middle Ages, when many Christian lands had been overrun and forcibly converted to Islam, while in the Mediterranean many Christians were made slaves by the Muslims. By these experiences, Christians decided on a forward strategy known as the Crusades, they started by attacking the nonChristians in their midst: the Jews. 3. The fact that the Jews, or at least a conspicuous section among them, were rich an powerful. This was a modern phenomenon due to the 18th century Jewish Enlightenment(or Haskala), when the Jews came out of the ghetto and involved themselves in society at large, and yet retained a separate identity. This kind of hatred against successful minorities occurs in many countries, such as against the Chinese in Malaysia and Indonesia, or against Indians in some African countries. In Europe, it got blown up into a suspicion of a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world. Let us compare this with the Hindu attitude towards the Muslims:

1. The traditional Sikh animus against the Muslims has a lot to do with the murder of the fifth and the ninth guru by the Muslim rulers. Unlike the allegation that the Jews killed Jesus (more probably the Romans did it, but the later Gospel-writers absolved the Romans and blamed the Jews for reasons of mission tactics: blaming the weak and wooing the strong), blaming Muslims for killing these gurus is historically correct. Thousands of sadhus were also killed, thousands of temples demolished, etc. But unlike the killing of God's only-born Son, this was just a huge crime committed by people, not a Godordained event with cosmic dimension. And unlike the killing of Christ, it was not distant history, but recent history continuing till today in the Muslim parts of the Subcontinent, and the actualization of a doctrine that could any moment give rise to new crimes of the same kind. Jewish Scripture does not say that Christ must be killed, but Islamic Scripture does ordain an all-out struggle against the unbelievers. So, while the Christian's allegation that the Jews murdered Christ is largely mythical, the Hindu resentment against the Muslims is firmly historical. 285 2. Hindus have not attacked others (including Jews to avenge the crimes of Islam. Neither have they attacked Muslims to avenge the crimes committed by others (the way the German flare-up against the Jews was partly a reaction against the unjust treaty of Versailles imposed by France and Britain). If they have a dislike for Muslims, it is not by association, it is not because of a general fear or hatred of Non-Hindus, it is a precisely directed reaction to a collective memory of Islamic atrocities heaped upon them as unbelievers. 3. If Hindus dislike Muslims, it is certainly not for their being rich and powerful. In fact, Hindus have not started hating any other minorities for acquiring a disproportionate share of the wealth and the power positions. On the other hand, most Muslims who remained in truncated India, are not at all rich, though as a collectivity they are rather powerful. The suspicion of an international conspiracy is in this case not without foundation. The Muslims do have international co- ordinating bodies like the Rabita (the World Islamic League), with huge sums at their disposal for furthering the cause of Islam in any area deemed strategic. Unlike the Jews, the Muslims do have a doctrine of world conquest. Unlike the Jews, they effectively oppress other religions, and they do convert secular countries into Islamic republics (e.g. Malaysia, Libya, Iran, Bangla Desh, Sudan): there is 286 no guarantee that they don't have similar plans for India. So, these are the suspicions Hindus have against Muslims. It is possible that inflammatory speeches occasionally manage to transform that suspicion into violence. But M.J.Akbar is trying to fool us if he says that it is the BJP/VHP campaign that has created this suspicion and made the Muslims into a targeted group. Firstly, the collective memory of the crimes of Islam is quite established among the Hindu populace, which doesn't need campaigns for knowing about these crimes. Secondly, if there has been a Hindu awaking in recent years, it is not thanks to any campaign, but thanks to reality. It is the stands taken by the Bukharis and Shahabuddins, the plight of the Hindus in Kashmir, Punjab, Bangla Desh, and the endless riots started by Muslim criminals, that has caused the Hindu masses to stop and think. The BJP/VHP have not created the Hindu wave, they are merely riding it. It is not entirely impossible that the Hindu-Muslim conflict will further escalate and turn India into a giant Lebanon. As Hindus are afflicted more seriously with more Muslim violence, they may start 287 reacting in kind. It is the secularists, like Tavleen Singh and Madhu Limaye, who are painting this picture of the near future. While I am 100% sure that Hindus will not start a conflict on that scale, they may join it unreservedly once a minority really gets it going. It is certainly not the Hindu communalists who will create such a situation: they wouldn't know what to do with it, they just don't have the martial character and equipment for it.

14.8 Authoritarianism It is alleged that the Hindu movement is against democracy:"For the VHP, Ayodhya is not an end but the means to an end. It has become both the justification and the rallying point for a coldly calculated bid to mobilize support under the banner of recalcitrant, vengeful Hinduism. What it is doing is not to defend Hinduism - the very idea that this is necessary in a country where 85% of the population is Hindu is ludicrous - but to hijack the symbols of Hinduism to serve the political 288 end of creating an authoritarian state". There are not too many facts known that could give rise to this allegation. And in fact, I am sure the allegation has not grown out of interpretation of given facts. It has grown out of the sloganfascist! When someone is called fascist, on the basis of whichever aspect of his behavior or thought that the may have in common with historical fascism, the (intended) effect is to associate him with all aspects of fascist thought and behaviour. So, if someone is a fascist because he "singles out a minority for attacks, like Hitler did to the Jews", he thereby also becomes an imperialist, anti- democrat, advocate of violence, genocide-planner, racist, etc. That us the most important reason for the sloganesque allegation of being anti-democratic, which has been levelled against the whole Hindutva movement. During the Janmabhoomi controversy, the BJP has demanded a referendum. Is this antidemocratic ? It is a shortcut to deciding on the will of the people, cutting through the corrupt horse-trading of the political parties, through the perverse arithmetic of the British constituencybased (first-past-the-post) election system, and through the secularist mental inhibitions of Hindu politicians. As demanded in South Africa, democracy will imply that the majority has the freedom to act as the majority. Another case of implied anti-democratic bias among the secularists,was all this nonsense of accusing politicians of building vote banks. Well, that is precisely what the democratic game is all about : pleasing the voter. If the secularists are against this (though they support politicians in building Muslim vote banks), then they should say clearly that they are against rule by the voters. They could take the aristocratic line, like Plato, who pointed out that democracy could only be the rule of the vulgar, the uninformed, the people with no vision, because they are the most numerous. They could say: we are elitist, we advocate the imposition of our own principles as a state policy, and we don't want voters to come in our way. Of course, it is a fact that far-sighted leaders are often unable to rally a majority, and have to give way to demagogues. That is one of the problems of democracy, and those who decry others as anti-democratic are themselves not sufficiently conscious of the inherent imperfections of democracy. They should admit that democracy as we know it is not the final word in government by the people. At any rate, the solution for this distance between principle and popular support has so far been, to consider this as a challenge to the politicians. They have to convince people of the correctness of certain views and policies. So, rather than imposing principled policies on the people, as aristocrats would do, they should endeavor to make the people a party to the principled policies they propose. So, far, the Hindutva politicians have not anywhere advocated the abolition of the democratic system (as opposed to the communists, who openly advocate the installment of the Dictatorship [of the Proletariat through its Vanguard Party). The BJP stresses that it wants a common law for all and equality for all regardless of religion, things that are considered evident in all democratic countries in the West. One thing that might be mentioned against the democratic credentials of the Hindutva movement, is that Bal Thackeray, the Shiv Sena leader, has made some naughty remarks about dictatorship. In some interview I read, he was asked what he thought of Subhash Chandra Bose's remark that India needed one year of dictatorship to get on the right track. And he replied with a grin that he

fully agreed. But so what? For such remarks, the secularists call Thackeray an unabashed advocate of dictatorship, but they don't do the same thing about Subhash Bose, just mentioned as saying the thing which Thackeray merely confirmed. They don't mention the numerous wellmeaning foreign commentators who have opined that India is too vast and complex and 289 backward for democracy to function and to preserve the country's unity. Anti-Hindu anti-fascists of Congress obedience, like M.J.Akbar and M.S.Aiyar also tend to gloss over Indira, who actually practiced dictatorship. They all forget to point out that Marxism-Leninism, a strong component of the secularist front, by definition aims at the establishment of dictatorship. And they all forget that the point is not what off-hand remarks Mr. Thackeray makes in casual conversation, but what his party offers as a programme. In the Shiv Sena programme, you do not find any demand for the establishment of dictatorship. There have been a few incidents of the Shiv Sena using muscle power against opponents. But this again does not prove authoritarian ambitions, unless you add that other parties, who use large-scale muscle and gun power especially at election time, have even stronger ambitions for dictatorship. But the parties I mean have succeeded each other in forming the government at the centre, so they have been in the best possible position to launch dictatorial rule, and yet they stepped down when they lost their majorities. So I don't think their authoritarian thrust is that strong, and the same thing counts for the Shiv Sena. About the RSS, it has been said that its organizational structure is authoritarian. In an interview, Subramaniam Swamy (an erstwhile Jan Sangh leader, presently Commerce Minister in Chandra Shekhar's cabinet) once said that the RSS could not be called fascist because it did not advocate or organize violence, but that its authoritarian structure as well as its anti-intellectural bias are elements which the RSS has in common with fascism. And the two are related: an anti-intellectual bias inculcated in the rank and file, implies that the leader is doing the thinking for them, and they just obey. The structure of the RSS is at least partly democratic. The general secretary, or Sarkaryavaha, is elected by the 450 district leaders, who meet twice a year (the Pratinidhi Sabha). The constitution of the central executive (Karyakarini Mandal), with about fifty members, is more intricate, with both elected and nominated members. The really controversial point is that the RSS top man, the Sarsanghchalak, is not elected at all, but appointed by his predecessor, like in a monastic parampara (teacher-pupil lineage.) I do not know of any statement by any RSS leader in which he advocates the RSS organizational structure as his chosen model for the organization of the state. So, a distinction must be made between the political programme (which the RSS as a self-described cultural organization does not have, but which may be surmised from the programme of the affiliated BJP) and the internal functioning. We may compare this with the Roman Catholic Church where the pure is elected by bishops who themselves have been hierarchically appointed, not elected. The idea is moreover that it is the Holy Spirit who arranges the election result by inspiring the bishops. So, the Church is not a democracy. Nor is the Jesuit order or any other Catholic order. Nevertheless, it does not follow that the Church, a nonpolitical organization, intends to reshape the secular polity after its own model. And it doesn't follow that Catholic politicians are anti- democratic and planning to impose the organizational model of the Church on the secular polity. It would only give proof of historical incompetence, if one starts using the typically modern category fascist for those pre-modern and pre-democratic types of organization. In the general polity, everybody s entitled to participation in the decision-making process. But in a private organization, the founders may reserve themselves the right to select candidates for leadership functions on the basis not of popularity but of loyalty to the project which the founders had in mind. They have the right to set up such anundemocratic structure, without being deemed an

enemy of the political democracy in society at large. In the Communist Party, they do not allow just anyone to become a member, take part in the decision-making, elect the leadership, and thus perhaps force policies on the party for which it was not created (in which case the party would be helpless against a hostile take-over by a large group who collectively join and claim a majority). There is nothing democratic about the Communist Party, yet it is the communists' democratic right to privately run an undemocratic organization. By being a member of society, you have the right to political participation; but that does not necessarily count for private organizations. So, an organization can follow a Parampara-system of appointment of the leader without being politically anti- democratic. Nevertheless, the leadership of the RSS is partly elected, though not by the mass of ordinary members, but by a group of people who have already climbed several steps on the RSS leader. In its actual functioning, it seems there is a stable consensus between the different components of the RSS leadership. A Sunday Mail report states that "the titular head, like the pope, remains infallible as far as far as orders go. Never has a single order of the Sarsanghchalak been questioned till date in the Sangh's history. This is not due to any totalitarian dictate, as the Left would believe, but because the Mandal and the Pratinidhi Sabha are like huge counter weights in 290 a balance checking the powers of both the Sarsanghchalak and the Sarkaryavaha." It is therefore not accurate or objective to describe the RSS structure simply as authoritarian, much less as fascist. Nonetheless, it is still quite possible that a certain follow the leaders spirit prevails in the RSS rank and file, and that independent thinking is not encouraged. I have been told that the late Guruji Golwalkar got angry when he saw people reading papers or books. He would ask : "Don't you have anything more useful to do for the Sangh?" And when you see the total intellectual output of the RSS people, it is not much. Subramaniam Swamy is probably right when he ascribes an anti-intellectual bias to the RSS. Now, if they would compensate for this near-absence on the intellectual front with great activity on the street violence and terrorist front, then they would be feared and dangerous, and their role would be comparable to the Nazi squads around 1930. But they are not active on the violent front, in the spite of all the propaganda put out by allegation journalists. Several times, dozens of their people got massacred by the Khalistanis: what violence has ensued? Compare with the massacre of Sikhs that Indira's followers committed after Indira's murder : who is a fascist then ? They do not even react in kind when they are violently provoked. It is therefore that they are not getting much respect. The secularists despise people who don't take to violence, like the 291 Tibetans, and they support people who take to terrorism, like the Palestinians. If they replaced thought with muscle, then others would be victims of their anti-intellectual bias. But now, it is they themselves who are paying dearly for their refusal to develop an intellectual dimension and to wage the struggle on the ideological front. There they leave the field entirely to the Leftists and secularists. One cannot even say they are on the defensive. Look at the humiliating consequences which their anti-intellectual bias has had on them. Whenever anything happens, they are accused and spit at, by those who are having the entire debating arena to themselves. In the forties, they opposed Partition, together with the Hindu Mahasabha. Everyone else ended up agreeing to it. Yet, in articles written then and today, you find that they are being accused, without any proof, of "provoking" Partition by "frightening" the Muslims into support for the Muslim 292 League. Unbelievable: the only innocent ones are being made the culprits by the united front of 293 culprits. This shows how weak they are: it is always the week who are being blamed

By contrast, the Communists, who betrayed their compatriots to the British, and who actively worked for Partition, were back on top within a few years, respected and imitated by many other politicians including Jawaharlal Nehru. Why ? Because they had a thought system which was widely broadcast and fashionable, and by which everyone was influenced, so that everyone owed them a certain ideological allegiance. But the Hindutva force were mute cows without an ideology, much less any intellectual or media impact on the general public. Even the millions of refugees from Pakistan, who should have become a reliable popular basis or vote bank, could not be attracted with a political analysis that could pinpoint the causes of their problem and indicate a solution: the Hindutva people had no analysis, merely some emotions and slogans. During the Emergency, many socialists were left untouched by Indira, while the RSS was made to bear the brunt of the repression. But when the Janata government was formed, the same socialists, who had come to power on the blood and sweat of the RSS workers, demanded that the RSS members of the government choose between their seat and their RSS membership. There was no come out in their defense, no front or committee of intellectuals of expose the utter dishonesty and absurdity of the whole dual membership issue. Everybody thinking was moulded by the Left, and had no affinity or sympathy with RSS thought. Everybody felt some allegiance to socialism and would not go against a socialist demand. And in shame the RSS people were sent into the wilderness. These events prove at least that the RSS is not at all a fascist movement. Hitler would not have been treated like that, and otherwise he would not have borne it without protest (in fact, having made it into the government, he would never have given it up). But more importantly, these events prove that the RSS is totally absent from the debating arena. Their anti-intellectual bias makes them into a passive object of abuse and ideological vilification. They don't have an intellectual apparatus with which they would be able to put their enemies in their proper places. They also don't have a propaganda apparatus to put forward their viewpoint (which would have been the first priority of any fascist, as of any communist party.) Therefore, they are at the mercy of their enemies. Fascism should be made of sterner stuff. Even when they got the largest mass movements in Indian history going, the Ram Janmabhoomi campaign, they were not capable of putting the secularist Babarwadis on the defensive. While in the historical Ayodhya debate the secularists had no case at all, still they could get away with depicting the solid Ram Mandir case asdistortion of history, myth etc. On the strength of the evidence, the Hindutva leaders should have been capable of instilling a massive confidence in all struggle of truth against falsehood. But no, they resorted to the weaker, anti-intellectual and somewhat dishonorable line that it is faith and not historical evidence that has to decide the issue. And even among their own followers, they did not wage a campaign to inform them about the hard facts of the matter and the larger issues at stake, assuming that the massiveHindus 294 sentiments were enough. Sentiments are enough to get a Ram Janmabhoomi movement going, they are perhaps enough to make that one-issue movement succeed, but they are utterly insufficient when it comes to building a long-term movement for the defense and development of Hindu society. A purely physical movement, of which the intellectual dimension is limited to rumours and slogans, cannot 295 realize (in fact, not even formulate) its goals. Any movement can only succeed if it has an ideological backbone. So, the point about this unwillingness to develop an intellectual thrust is not that it is fascist : it isn't. The point is that it is a sure formula for not achieving anything in the long run.

14.9. Fascism in India : where is it ? L.K. Advani is described by M.J.Akbar as having "an interesting blend of falsification of history 296 and his own cool and convincing personality". What is more: "He and Vajpayee are the careful camouflage of decency' over a nasty, vicious and blood-thirsty movement." Now, I wouldn't dare to say such crass things about a fellow human being, but since Mr. Akbar has said them himself, he will allow me to leave the sentences intact but with himself as the subject : Mr. Akbar has an interesting blend of a convincing personality (he has convinced many that he is an authority on communalism) and shameless falsification of history. Moreover, he is the careful camouflage of decency over a nasty, vicious and blood- thirsty movement. That M.J.Akbar is a falsifier of history, should be clear from his postulation, in the very same article, of a thousand years of brotherhood and amity between Hindus and Muslims, and "of shared culture, of a shared civilization, a shared vision". In reality, as can Islamic history, Islam in India was "a nasty, vicious and blood-thirsty movements". It is never preached or practicedbrotherhood and friendship with the Hindus. It has never sharedHindus society's culture and vision. That one occasion when emperor Akbar ceased persecuting the 297 Hindus, there was a Sirhindi to reprimand him. That one occasion when Dara Shikoh translated Hindus writings and considered them the mother of the Book, there was an Aurangzeb to kill him. Islam was out to exterminate the Hindus civilization, as it has exterminated the cultures of Arabia, West and Central Asia. To this vicious and blood-thirsty movement, M.J.Akbar is giving a camouflage of decency. If fascism is to erupt in India in the sense of organized attempts at extermination of selected minorities, it will be in the pockets where Hindus are the minority, and it will be Hindus who get singled out for massacre. So far, the massacres in Punjab and Kashmir have not been intended as steps towards extermination, merely as a tactic to scare the Hindus into fleeting, which has worked very well in Kashmir, and has not been entirely without results in Punjab. If this gets really out of hand, Hindus may retaliate with mass-slaughter wherever they can. While the minority separatists have the guns, the enraged Hindus will have the numbers. So, a mass killing of minority people is not excluded as a possibility. However, it will only take place if minority terrorists first go very far in their violence against Hindus. Unlike the entirely unprovoked Nazi terror against the peaceful Jewish minority, Hindus will attack the minority community only after being very heavily provoked. The entire history of jihad in India, of communal riots, and of the Partition story, corroborates it. When M.J.Akbar compares the riots of 1989-90 with those of 1947, he is mistaken as to the magnitude of the riots, but the may be right in the tacit analogy that in each case (1947, Bhagalpur, Aligarh, Hyderabad) the Hindu violence was merely a reaction to minority violence. A tendency of fascism taking shape in India exists among the self-proclaimed leaders of a different majority, or pretended majority. There are attempts to forge an anti- Hindu front including all the minorities, the Scheduled Castes and Tribes, and the Other Backward Castes, against the upper-caste Hindus. One of the embodiments of this drive is V.T.Rajshekar's writing, another is Kanshi Ram's Bahujan Samaj Party. These people claim that all the said groups are the big majority (Bahujan) of India, oppressed by the minority of Aryan invaders. They are finding that many of the groups they are claiming as belonging in their anti-Hindu front, are strongly attached to Hinduism. Nevertheless, their ideology claims that the majority is in fact not Hindu, and that this anti-Hindu majority should remove the upper castes from their positions and seize power. And they are quite unabashed about favouring ruthless methods to root out Brahmin rule. Kanshi Ram is on record as saying about the Khalistanis, that he personally doesn't care for Khalistan, but I 298 like their methods. V.T.Rajshekar announces: "As the 20 the century comes to an end, the Aryan imperialism must also come to end.... A bloody revolution is in the offing. Don't miss this 299 historic opportunity".

An earlier anti-Brahmin activist, Ramaswamy Naicker, had said that"we will do with the Brahmins what Hitler did with the Jews". Another slogan of his was: "If you see a snake and a Brahmin, kill the Brahmin first". While the comparison of the German anti-Jewish attitude with the Hindu antiMuslim attitude doesn't hold in most respects, the comparison with the Dalit (including missionary, Dravidian, Ambedkarite etc.) anti-Brahmin attitude is more exact. Just like the Jews, the Brahmins get depicted as: foreign (Aryan invaders), keeping themselves separate, observing maniacal purity rules, having a large inter-state network employing a common language (Yiddish/Sanskrit), very book-oriented, deceivers, always favouring their own kind, dressed 300 distinctively and ridiculously, cowardly but cunning, rich and keeping the others poor. Most of the things the Nazis said about the Jews, are being said by the anti-Brahmin movements about the Brahmins, including that they are a mere minority, and that they have to be shown their place by the majority, and be deprived of the undeserved power they wield. That may not yet add up to Nazism but when I see the potential for violence in this movement, as well as its increasing self-righteousness, I know where in India a kind of fascism may erupt. But in the near future I don't see this budding fascism catch on among the masses. For that, they are all still too Hindu, not inclined to self- righteous fanaticism.

14.10.Who reads Hitler anyway ? When you are accused of a crime, you are considered innocent until proven guilty. There is one exception :the meta-crime of making false allegations, or slander. When you utter an allegation, you are guilty of slander, while the other party remains innocent. This changes when you furnish proof for your allegation: then the other party is considered guilty and you cease to be a slanderer. By these standards, all the people who postulate an ideological lineage from Hitler to Advani, are guilty of slander. For, so far I have not seen this oft-repeated allegation substantiated by any evidence whatsoever. For instance, Madhu Kishwar. In an article with the promising title In defense of our dharma, she writes that the BJP, RSS and VHP "display much greater fascination with Hitler's ideas and campaigns than with the Ramayana 301 or other Hindu religious texts". That the ruling secularist dispensation has strongly discouraged the study of Hindu tradition, is a fact of which even the Hindutva movement shows the consequences, and the study of Hindu tradition in Indians schools and other media should be a top priority indeed. But that is not Madhu Kishwar's point. Apart from saying that the Hindutva campaigners are illiterates, she also says that they seek inspiration in Hitler's ideas and campaigns: "Their inspiration comes from Hitler, not from Ram". Now, this is a statement which can easily be checked. First of all, both the Hindu Mahasabha (1906) and the RSS (1925) came into being before anyone in India knew Hitler. Savarkar's Hindutva (1923) was published three years before Hitler's Mein Kampf. Clearly, the inspiration to organize and defend Hinduism at the political level, does not stem from Hitler, and it did not need any outside impulse. Secondly, the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha existed when Hitler came to power. Have they sided with Hitler ? Have they even called on its followers to follow Subhash Bose and join the Axis war effort against the British ? Subhash Bose's title Netaji was just the Hindi equivalent of the German Fuehrer, Hitler's title, and the Italian Duce, Mussolini's title, yet he is not, for that, accused of beingHitlerian. But of course, since the Hindutva people are at the receiving end of all the blame, their non-support to Hitler is being turned against them, as collaboration with the British in 1942 and supported them in 1944, and yet they are accused neither of effectively supporting the Axis nor of collaboration with colonialism. The Communists opposed the British in

1940 (under Stalin's pact with Hitler) and supported them after 1941, yet after independence they have not been branded as collaborators with either fascism or colonialism. They can get away with it, while the Hindu parties are covered with abuse regardless of the stand they take. The RSS has not glorified Hitler when he was successful in any larger measure than most Indians at that time (the facts of the extermination camps were not known until 1945, and for the rest most Indian were skeptical about the British propaganda). It would not even prove genuine fascist convictions, for many non-fascist leaders outside Europe were very impressed with the material success of Hitler's non-colonial empire, and with his formidable challenge to the colonial powers. Whatever the evil inherent in fascism, what outsiders got to see in the thirties, was that Hitler succeeded where democratic republics failed, and in the early forties, that he captured or threatened the centres of several colonial empires. So many leaders outside Europe, from Argentina's trade-unionist Juan Person to the Multi of Jerusalem, were enthusiastic about the Axis successes. And yet, where is the proof that took inspiration from Hitler, though at the time his name didn't carry the stigma it carries today ? Hitler applied some general principles in order to achieve success. He strengthened discipline in German society. Just like Indira Gandhi during the Emergency. Just like Mao Tse-tung in China : what little positive achievements are to his credit, follow from the fact that the he could actually enforce his laws whereas the previous regime was hampered by chaos. Hitler didn't invent discipline, it was always a formula for effectiveness, and if the RSS believes in cultivating discipline within its organization (and that merely as a matter of character building, not as a model for running society as a whole), then that is just an application of universal principle, not Hitlerian or fascist. Unless and until Madhu Kishwar comes up with proof that the RSS chose its ideology and methods in express imitation of Hitler (and explains why in spite of such borrowing the differences are so big), she is a slanderer. Hitler had made it perfectly clear where he stood and what he wanted, in his book Mein Kampf (My Struggle), written years before his take-over. His speeches are also available. So, please point out where Mr. Advani and other Hindu leaders have quoted Hitler. Failing that, apologize for the slander. 302

Another case of slander is Mani Shankar Aiyar's article The Saffron Swastika. Since I don't want to feel like a schoolteacher, I will not bother about the string of mistakes Mr. Aiyar makes about the pre-Nazi German politics and politicians. It is indeed very difficult to write about some distant country without making mistakes. But saying that Gustav Steersman, a true statesman who had nothing to do with majority-baiting or minority appeasement, was"remarkably like Nehru in his commitment to democracy and his opposition to majority communalism", is of course an unabashed declaration of his intention to distort the German situation any which way so as to make it comparable with the Indian situation. Before we listen to Mr.Aiyar=92s pontification about the Jews in Germany, we should make it clear that here is yet another Nehruvian with an anti-Israeli bias which sometimes comes close to anti-Jewish bias. I have been quoting him enough in this book, so let me rather quote with approval a reply to one of his tirades against Israel: "I was surprised to read in the article A catechism for communalists (July 29) the false information about Israel. Israel is a secular state, and Muslims, Christians and other minorities have the same rights of Jews. Mani Shankar Aiyar mentions the Muslims 'driven out or Israel but nowhere once does he mentions the thousands of Jews killed, massacred and driven out of curious. Arab, where Jews lived as third class citizens and in constant fear. In fact, the largest ethnic group in Israel today consists of 303 refugees from Arab and Muslim lands". Now, the comparison with Nazism. It is of course a plain lie, Mr. Aiyar, that Hitler ever campaigned on a platform Appeasement for none, justice for all. it was never the Nazi perception that the Jews were being appeased by the state. It was there perception that the Jews were

accumulating wealth and power through violentagitation etc. There was no appeasement issue miles around. When economic crisis struck, "Hitler blame it all on the Jews. The BJP...blames it all on...our largest minority." This again is simply not true . The economic non-success of India is first of all the handiwork of Soviet-infatuate sleepwalker Jawaharlal Nehru, and more recently things have been made worse by the socialist policies to which most Indian politicians still subscribe (not only V.P.Singh, under whose tenure things suddenly looked critical). But no one is blaming the Muslims for this. If the Jan Sangh/BJP had been a fascist party, it would have grabbed power long ago, and kept it. Since the fifties, it has had the percentage of votes Hitler had in 1928. The percentage of unemployed youth available for enlistment in Private militias has been continually higher in India than in Germany before Hitler's rise to power. The Jan Sangh formed part of the government in 1977-79: unlike the Nazi party, it did not take the occasion to liquidate democracy altogether. Mani quotes an apocryphal statement attributed to Hitler by Thomas Mann:"I am not an antiSemite. It is just very regrettable that the Jews have this unfortunate identification with Marxism". And then he equates this with an imaginary statement which he thinks sums up Advani's views:"I am not an anti-Muslim. It is just very regrettable that the Muslims have this unfortunate identification with Babar and Aurangzeb." Of course, one shouldn't really walk into the trap of replying to Mr. Aiyar's rhetoric. He is a proven liar, and there comparisons are not really meant to inform or to argue a point. They are meant to put Hindus on the defensive and make them waste time on coping with such Hitlerian allegations. Nonetheless, it may be instructive to show up the falsehood to which the secularists have to resort in order to be able to blacken the Hindus. Firstly, while Mr.Aiyar has yet to prove that Mr. Advani is an anti-Muslim, it is clear enough that Hitler lied when (if ever) he said that he was not an anti-Semite. This is not only clear when one has the benefit of hindsight, it is quite clear when one reads Hitler's own big statement Mein Kampf. Hitler did not cultivate a Jewish following, the way the BJP woos the Muslims and counts two Muslims in its leadership. Even without wooing the Muslims, without organizingminority cells in its party units, and without this rhetoric of Muslims being mohammedi Hindus, the BJP would not be anti- Muslim in any way comparable to Hitler's anti-Jewish stand. The most important ideological difference is that Hitler was against a group of people, the Jewish race, regardless of their behaviour (including their confabulated identification with Marxism); while the Hindutva people are against a particular doctrine and attitude, the anti-Hindu stand of some Muslim leaders, rooted in the anti-Kafir doctrine of Islam. Hitler wanted to exclude the largely wellintegrated Jews, while the BJP wants to "draw the minorities (who are kept in the ghetto by their bigoted leaders) into the national mainstream." Secondly, the Jews' "unfortunate identification with Marxism" is not only a fable, it is also based on the crank racist assumption that Marx remained a Jew even after his father had converted to Protestantism and he himself had become an atheist. By contrast, the Muslims' "unfortunate identification with Babar and Aurangzeb", while never postulated by Advani (except in Mani's slander story), does make sense in the case of a few vocal Muslim leaders, who insist on continuing Babar's and Aurangzeb's occupation of Hindu sacred places even while knowing fully well (in contrast to the common Muslim) that they had built their mosques in Mathura. Varanasi and Ayodhya for the sole reason of terrorizing and humiliating the Kafirs . In that sense, some Muslim leaders are indeed the ideological descendants of Babar and Aurangzeb. Thirdly, Marx did not invent his theories in the name of Judaism, while Babar and Aurangzeb did commit their crimes in the name of Islam. Marx had no identification with Judaism, while Babar and Aurangzeb had of course a strong identification with Islam. But I repeat that L.K.Advani has never attributed any identification with Babar and Aurangzeb to the Muslim community in India. It is significant that Mr. Aiyar has to make his case on the strength of imaginary statement.

To conclude this chapter about the allegation of Hindu fascism, it deserves mention that most original Western publications dealing with the Hindu Mahasabha, RSS, Jan Sangh or BJP, just 305 don't seem to be aware of the notion that these could be fascist movements , or they reject the 306 allegation explicitly after closer consideration. Objective outsiders are not struck by any traces of fascism in the Hindutva movements, let alone in the general thought current of anti-imperialist Hindu awakening. While one should always be vigilant for traces of totalitarianism in any ideology or movement, the obsession with fascism in the anti-Hindu rhetoric of the secularists is not the product of an analysis of the data, but of their own political compulsions.

15. The Hindu movement after Ayodhya 15.1 Symbolic issues The Ayodhya issue is a symbolic issue. Non-sympathetic people will say only a symbolic issue. But for people who are part of it, symbols do matter. The Indian Constitution specifically demands respect for the flag and the anthem, even though these are onlysymbols. So, all due respect for symbols. Nevertheless, a symbol is only a symbol of something. It is this something that makes the symbol into something that matters. And the care extended to the symbol, is only a symbol of the care extended to that something. Ram is the symbol of dharma. Ram Rajya represents Dharma Rajya, the Rule of Righteousness. The attention which in a symbolic moment like the present Janmabhoomi-building is given to the symbolizing entity, Ram, is itself a local-temporal representation of the general attention given to the symbolized entity, the Dharma. So, the Hindu activists should impress upon their minds that the struggle is not for a brick structure, though that is a legitimate symbolic part of it, but for Dharma. After centuries of Muslim oppression and Western indoctrination, even activist Hindus have become self- alienated and forgetful of the true values of their own civilization. Do they know what Dharma means? In all modesty, let us attempt to define the fundamental distinction between Hindu dharma and the monotheistic religions. The fundamental problem in Hinduism is avidya, lack of consciousness. The goal of life is peace or happiness, the place and means to achieve it is consciousness. Therefore, techniques of consciousness culture have been developed, and they are available for everyone to choose from, according to one's own character and level of development. In Islam, consciousness has no role at all. It suffices to be in the right club, the Muslim millat. Secondarily, it is expected that you conform to the common rules of Islamic law and morality, and that you serve the interests of Islam, if need be through armed struggle against the unbelievers. Consciousness is nowhere in the picture. In Christianity also, there is a strong stress or morality, though ultimately it is not your moral calibre but only Jesus who has the power to save you. At any rate, it is not consciousness. In Marxism, consciousness is even denied any independent status. Mao Tse-tung rejected all soulculture as bourgeois diversion from the class struggle. When some secularists have said that the Ram Janmabhoomi movement was not truly a Hindu movement, they were right in the sense that it was a consciousness movement. It involved a lot of physical locomotion, a lot of people giving their lives, and all that for a physical structure that would undo the physical harm which Islam has done to the physical temples of Hinduism. But then again, in the circumstances, such a physical movement was probably the best reminder and consciousness-raiser.

Hindu society may take up several more symbolic issues after this temple business is over. A very important one for most Hindus is cow protection. In fact, in calling it merely a symbolic issue, I may well betray a bias or lack of empathy resulting from my non-Hindu roots. I have never been taught to venerate the cow, but it a majority of the people in India think that what is sacred them, deserves protection, then they can enact a law enforcing cow protection in every nook and corner 307 of the country. It is in keeping with the injunction of the Constitution. Is it unsecular to ban cow slaughter? To answer that question, let us first make a comparison. The Catholic Church is very strongly opposed to abortion, and encourages Catholic politicians and votes to prevent its legalization. In Ireland, the people recently voted in a referendum to ban abortion not just by law, but in the Constitution. So now, the unborn children are the sacred cows of Ireland. Was this unsecular? No, it was perfectly secular, because the secular democratic procedures laid down by law were followed, the sovereign people and no one but the people made the decision, and the Church or any other religious authorities were nowhere in the picture. If some people had based their viewpoint an abortion on their commitment to the Catholic faith, then that was their own private affair, with which the secular state had no business. Conversely, in Belgium, a law allowing abortion was passed, in spite of the Catholic bishops' opposition to it, but in conformity with an appeal by the Humanist [i.e. atheist] League. The same thing happened in Italy. In these countries, the voters who were sufficiently committed to the Catholic faith to uphold its rejection of abortion, as well as the non-Catholic opponents of the abortion law, had dwindled and become a minority. So the secular procedure was to count the votes and legislate accordingly, without anyhow bothering about the religious or non-religious reason why people had voted the way they did. So, a secular democratic decision is not defined as that one which will make the bigots the most unhappy. It is simply the decision supported by the majority in the relevant round of voting. It is secular from the moment no religious Scripture or authority came between the voters' preference and the actual legislation. So, if cow-slaughter is banned because the Shankaracharya demands it, it is not secular. If it is banned because a majority in parliament decides so, it is secular. And it remains that, even if the politicians or their constituents have autonomously chosen to follow the Shankaracharya's advice. My impression is that a clear majority of the citizens of Bharat would favour a comprehensive legal ban on cow- slaughter. Given the right intellectual climate, talented politicians should be able to transform this majority opinion into a parliamentary majority, and finally into a law. If sacred places can be protected by law, so can sacred animals. Of course, if another community has another sacred animal, than can be protected as well as. A law protecting animals is in fact much more humane and progressive than a law conserving the status quo of places of worship. Another symbolic issue, in fact symbolic par excellence, is the question of restoring old names. Local Hindu groups have demanded and sometimes enacted the adoption of re-adoption of Hindu names for cities, replacing names like Aurangabad which only served to eternalize Muslim fanatics like Aurangzeb. One that would be a very resounding international statement, is the replacement of Delhi by Indraprastha. Some people who think a centuries-old name is more sacrosanct than a millennia-old name, predictably come out with their bored non-interest, asserting that there are better things to do. It is an old trick: when you oppose a change, you say there are so much more important things to do. Thus, when the Link Language problem became acute in 1965 (according to the Constitution, the change-over from English to Hindi had to be completed by then, but those in power had sabotaged the process completely), the English-speaking elite had no intention of giving up its language privileges, so it said that you cannot feed Hindi to the poor, and such hollow excuses more. A cartoon showed ship sinking into an ocean of problems (unemployment, poverty, etc., the realproblems), with the crew fighting each other over English and Hindi instead of saving the

ship. This disgusting trick of declaring other people's demands (even if they are for the implementation of the democratically accepted Constitution) to be beside the point, instead of addressing them, is always used by people who havearrived and settled into the comfort of power. There is no conflict between solving the realproblems, and taking decisions regarding symbolic issues. The two are not in each other's way. Other countries, far poorer than India, have changed names. Burma became Myanmar, Batavia become Jakarta, Leopoldville became Krishnasa, Lourenzo Marques became Maputo, Rhodesia became Zimbabwe, etc. These countries also took down most statues of the colonial heroes, unhindered by any Babri Masjid Committee. So it is entirely in the hands of the sovereign people whether they want to retain the imposed name or restore the indigenous name, and whether they want to create, abolish or change national symbols.

15.2 The need for a Hindu programme The Hindutva people should develop a clear programme of where they want to go with Hindu society. The slogan Hindu Rashtra has so far attracted a lot of bad press, with secularists misrepresenting it as a Hindu theocratic state, with Hindu Khomeinis and a Hindu inquisition. This nonsense can only be countered by an ideological offensive which articulates the values the Hindu movement wants to realize, which weeds out obscurantist or otherwise negative elements within the current Hindutva ideology, and which defines goals and indicates the means. But first of all the Hindus should be clear in their own minds about what contents they intend to give to 308 a Hindu polity. The last half-century or so, the only ones with an articulate ideology, were the communists and their softer variety, the socialists. Everybody was constantly imbibing and reproducing their thought categories. In Europe, that dominance was never that complete, and it was overthrown radically in the seventies, when ex- Marxists turned against the dogmas they had adored, and intellectuals took a new pride in developing freedom- oriented and reality-based social thought. In India, the Leftists are still the only ones with an ideology, and the rest is still mentally fettered by thought categories copied from the Left. The time is ripe for a change. What movement in history has ever succeeded, that was not based on a sustained intellectual effort to analyze the factors determining reality, to formulate the goals of the policy, and to outline strategies? If you want to achieve something, you have something, you have to know what you are doing. A movement merely based on emotion will get entangled in situations it cannot comprehend. It is bound to lose its momentum and peter out, or to discredit itself. The secularists have been very unfair in their writings on the Hindutva movement, when they ascribed to it a grand design of a theocratic Hindu state. In bracketing theocratic with Hindu, they displayed their contemptuous willful ignorance about Hinduism; but the more important point is that they were wrong in ascribing any grand design to the Hindutva movement. The fact is that this movement has not more than a vague intuition about where it is going. At the political level, there is a party that does the practical business of governing several states, like Madhya and Himachal Pradesh, and that has a few Hindutva- oriented programmed points, like the full integration of Kashmir into India, and the termination of appeasement policies for the minorities. But nowhere in its party documents, or even in the scarce ideological literature to which it may refer, do I find an outline of the grand political coal of the Hindutva movement.

At the popular level, there is an enthusiastic movement aroused by emotionally charged issues like the Ram Janmabhoomi. The common people involved are, however, little informed about any larger scheme in which this movement fits. When communists organize a strike, they make it an opportunity to educate the workers about their ideology and long-term goals, But what has the common Ram bhakta learned about Hindu Rashtra? The consciousness-raising for which such a mass movement would normally be an excellent occasion, has been limited to some flag-waving and some slogans. Slogans are alright when they are the summary of a considered political 309 programme. but by themselves they are nothing. At the academic level, there is just nothing at all. Communists have produced a vast literature. Not just party literature, not just pamphlets. Thousands upon thousands of academic studies, including graduate dissertations, consists of little more than the application of Marxist concepts to a given issue. On almost anything, you will find a number of books that give the Marxist View. On a slightly lesser scale, there is a large body of Islamic literature. Not just historical studies of what the medieval doctrine of Islam about such and such a topic was, but also studies on Islamic economics and banking, on Islamic social policies, on the Islamic answers to problems of development, of justice, of emancipation. There is no such Hindu literature. Except for disinterested and esoterical studies of the past, there is no academic articulation of the Hindu approach to any relevant issue. There are professors who privately express their sympathy with Hindu viewpoints, but they are too timid to come out openly with a rebuttal of the arrogant secularist statements. And even if they are bold enough to do that, that still does not amount to building a Hindu ideology that can stand up to the modern world. The vocal Hindutva advocates of this century have produced little more than a Bunch of Thoughts, as Guru Golwalkar's work was aptly called. A very large percentage of the pages of all the books together which you may find in RSS-affiliated bookshops, is devoted to the trauma of Partition. Another large percentage is devoted to comment on other misfortunes that have befallen Hindu society, or to the glorification of Hindu leaders. This may be useful to strengthen the enthusiasm and devotion of Hindutva militants, as well as their anti-Pakistan pathos, but it is ideologically not going very far. It doesn't develop a wellfounded coherent vision on a range of topics which any social thinker and any political party will have to address one day. There are a few basic statements of the Hindu view, but they are at best sketchy, like Balraj 310 Madhok's Rationale of Hindu State , or Jay Dubashi's columns (in Organiser as well as in other papers). The best achievements of the best minds among the Hindutva people still do not exceed the length of a speech or an article, and seldom do they have more ambition than to comment on one past or present event. There is as yet very little original or comprehensive work being done. Moreover, they are all isolated: never is there any Hindutva ideologue who sits down to make a critique of the worm of one of his predecessors, or who takes up a line of research where an earlier writer had left it. So, there is no growth, no progress, no building on top of what has earlier been achieved, and no weeding out of what was wrong or poorly formulated. Short, there is no intellectual life in this Hindutva movement. To an extent, that is due to the general culture and intellectual situation in India. When you read the works of these Indian thinkers who are still being praised in yearly memorials by their sycophantic followers, it is all very disappointing. It is the same from Left to Right: M.N.Roy,Jawaharlal Nehru, Subhash Bose, Bhimrao Ambedkar, Ram Manohar Lohia, Jayprakash Narayan, Vinoba Bhave, V.D. Savarkar, Guru Golwalkar, Deendayal Upadhyaya, they are all pretty elementary and second- hand. Of course, they were involved in social and political work, they did the writing in between other things. But the fact remains that they were no comprehensive thinkers who independently applied their minds to the political and cultural problems of their time: they just borrowed some basic ideas, wrapped them in their own personal style of rhetoric, and that was it.

Yet, there are papers today who adorn every issue with a words-of-wisdom column devoted to some words of these thinkers: Thus Said Nehru, Thoughts Waves (mostly Golwalkar) and Thus Spake Ambedkar. If these quotes were taken as starting-points for critical comments, they could be useful; but they function merely as calligraphed verses from Scripture, to be repeated and repeated again. If not among social and political leaders, have there been among armchair thinkers some who really developed their thought, and made it available to those who wanted to serve Hindu society in the socio-political arena? After Sri Aurobindo, who produced some powerful thought both during his politically active life and after, I don't see too many of them. Mahatma Gandhi, of course, though a man of action, found time to produce insights that still make interesting reading for those who can read him with a learner's, not an admirer's mind. But these great men have attracted nothing but followers. No one is building on them, taking their line further from where they left it. Looking specifically at the Hindutva movement, I may give two example of how thought built on top of earlier thought could have made a difference. Secularists often quote Guru Golwalkar as saying that "Muslims can only live in this country as guests, claiming nothing, no privileges, not even citizen's rights". Since they always quote that line, I presume it is the worst and most fascist thing they could find in Golwalkar's work. Now, if there was an intellectual effort going on the Hindutva movement, this statement, which has been available for thirty years or so, would have been commented on, critically discussed, put in a certain context, and by now it would have been amended, rejected, or given a specific interpretation. When a secularist would quote it, the Hindutva think tank would reply that their though had much developed since, that they had outgrown this crud viewpoint. Or they could stick to this hard-line statement, and argue, and support with illustrative facts, that reciprocity with Pakistan (which doesn't give full citizen's rights to Hindus) is the only fair and fruitful policy. Or they could up with some refined reinterpretation, or with whatever product of thirty years of thought progress. But no, the statement is still there as it was, a line in the Canon of Guruji's words of wisdom. A second example is Deendayal Upadhyay's Internal Humanism. If I understand the historical context correctly, this doctrine was developed in reply to M.N.Roy's Radical Humanism, which after Marxist fashion reduced man to his economical dimension. Against that, Deendayal restored the four purusharthas (aims of human life: pleasure, wealth, duty, liberation) as the coindispensable components of a fully human life. I cannot find fault with that. It is very similar to the stand taken by the Christian-Democrats in Europe against the Socialists:Man liveth not by bread alone. Moreover, I think Hindu tradition is in this regard more sophisticated than the sources the Christian-Democrats have drawn. So, this Integral Humanism has potential. Nevertheless, it is extremely elementary. It is not a developed ideology with which you can analyze all the actual social and political problems. Or maybe you can, who knows, but at any rate it has not been done. There has been no follow-up on Deendayal's thought, neither to develop it nor to demolish it. It is now just another murti put up for paying respects to. So, I see little of a Hindu Rashtra ideology expressing itself through organizations like the RSS, parties like the BJP, or campaigns like the Ram Janmabhoomi Mukti campaign. The whole Hindutva movement is still now a body without much of a mind. It is looking for a mind. 311

This ideological work is in the first place a task for intellectuals, not for political parties. Today's thought determines tomorrow's politics. So, intellectuals have to create an intellectual climate in which the aspirations of Hindu society can be put forward as a realistic political as well as culture programme.

In the first place, they have to break the anti-Hindu bias that now dominates and positions the intellectual atmosphere. They have to put the secularist vipers on the defensive, by exposing their lies and distortions, and by exposing the abysmally black record of the ideologies and systems which they champion. This is not the most important and certainly not the most pleasant part of the work, but in the present situation which Hindus have allowed to develop, it is necessary to cut through this thick mud of slander and falsehood. The intellectual war is largely a matter of terminology. So far, the Left has been dictating the terminology and thus it has determined the values that everyone tries to live up to. Secularism, need I repeat, has been given a wholly distorted meaning, and it has been prescribed as the norm by which every non-Muslim has to be measured. The Hindutva people, who have no thought and no terminology of their own, have therefore been dancing to the Leftists' beat, and have tried their best to be recognized as secularists Instead of proudly saying :We are Hindus, they are saying :"We are the real secularists, they are pseudo-secularists", a new variation on: "We are positive secularists, they are negative secularists". This is a losing game. When country to live up to the hostile party's norms, you can at best give a good imitation, never the first-hand product. You had better put your own product in profile. Of course, the Hindutva people are right when they call the secularists pseudo-secularists (L.K. Advani has managed to drive this point home in the public arena, which may well prove a decisive reversal in the terminology battle). If secularism means what it really means, as in Europe, then the people who make common cause with Muslim fundamentalists and defend a separate status for a state with a Muslim majority, religion-based personal laws, and religionbased discrimination in education or in temple management, cannot count as secularists. They are pseudo-secularists, and their opponents are genuine secularists. But now in India the term secularism has become so contaminated through systematic distortion and misuse, that it cannot be saved anymore. In the short run, it cannot be restored to its rightful meaning. And it can never be restored to its proper meaning as long as it is in the political arena. Therefore, the word secularism has to be dropped. Why would the Hindutva people go on proclaiming that they aretrue secularists? Either the term means anti- religion, and then it doesn't apply, and it should not be held up as an ideal except by Stalinists; or it means a mutual non-interference of state and religion, and on that everyone agrees (except for some Muslim fundamentalists), so it should not be an issue. On the whole, the claim of being genuine secularists is justified, but it should no longer be shouted out loudly. Secularism is a matter of course for Hindu, and merely making it an issue is already to the Hindubaiters For instance, the amending of Article 30 of the Constitution so as to abolish the discrimination against Hindus in the matter of opening schools: should it be demanded in the name of secularism? Of course, in a really secularist country, the Constitution would not impose discrimination on the basis of religion. But the issue is far simpler, and can be formulated in terms of a less controversial and more fundamental principle than secularism: non-discrimination. The words religion and secularism need not even figure in the discussion. So, the term secularism should be de-emphasized and removed from the political debating scene. It should be dismissed once, and never mentioned again. By contrast, the term secular, which is not an ideological but a legal term, figures in the amended preamble of the Constitution, and it can continue to be used as a legal term in specific contexts. It should no longer be an issue in the political debate, except the day when Muslim fundamentalists want to abolish the secular character of the state.

Conversely, the frantic efforts to shake off the stigma ofcommunalism should also be given up. I could understand, if they call you fascist, you feel the need to disprove this allegation. Butcommunalism shouldn't put you on the defensive. First of all, growth-up English speaker outside India don't even know this term, and if asked what it means, they would probably attach a positive meaning to it. Perhaps "stress on community value", or "living in a commune", or "communal living, as in a joint family". In French and German, the term community means municipal. No one would think it means "We are not communalists, we are the real secularists. It is they who are the real communalists". Just change the rules of the game, ignore this terminological terror, and get down to the real issues. So, what value should the Hindu movement put towards as the real issue, instead of the failed god of socialism and the fake god of secularism? As I have said, there is not much of a tradition of modern Hindu political thought on which to build. But it is immature to insist on starting from zero, let us just proceed from where we are. The latest thing in Hindutva-politics, still unsurpassed, was Deendayal's Integral Humanism. Underdeveloped as it is, it will do for a little experiment. Let us confront integral humanism with the still-dominant ideology in India, socialism. But let us not do it the wrong way around, as the Hindutva people have been doing for too long. Let us not measure integral humanism by the standards of socialism, and demonstrate what a nice socialism this integral humanism really is. Let us, on the contrary, measure socialism with the yardstick of integral humanism. Socialism has reduced man to his socio-economical dimension. Actually, it is worse than that. It has denied some dimensions in human life, but even of those of dimensions which it did recognize, it had a very confused notion. The economical dimension is the dimension of gain (artha). But socialism denied the individual the right to pursue gain. It wanted to create the new man, who would only act out of a sense of duty (dharma) towards society, i.e. the state. But duty is narrowed down to a sense of serving, people who have the qualities for private undertaking are not allowed to take a role (dharma) convenient for their character (swabhava), they all have to conform to the one uniform role, servant of the state. Man would not seek excellence in order to gain from it, but merely to better serve the state. So, in the economical domain, man's natural striving for gain was outlawed, and replaced with a demand for a kind of servile devotion. The state itself took over the economical life. In chaturvarnya terms (but in Hindutva circles, few are as yet prepared to use these terms, for fear of being labeled a caste obscurantist), the Kshatriya sphere was usurping the Vaishya sphere. Moreover, to state decided to re-educate the people, so it also usurped the Brahmin sphere. Everybody was to become a Shudra, an employee of the omnipresent state. Since power corrupts, the inflated Kshatriya sphere generated a lot of corruption among its far too large army of people empowered to meddle in other people's lives (even while, in India, not discharging its proper function of protecting the people against gonads and terrorists, and the territory against hostile and greedy neighbours). Well, this is still not much, still very crude, but it already makes clear that the general social vision of integral humanism can show up, and avoid, the defects of socialism. So, integral humanism, which is nothing but a new name for traditional Hindu social philosophy, has potential. It should be developed into a modern ideology that can give practical guidance in real-life politics. This is not to say that there should be complete; break with all recent thought currents in social philosophy, has potential. It should be developed into a modern ideology that can give practical guidance in real-life politics. This is not to say that there should be a complete break with all recent thought currents in social and political philosophy. It is not that all foreign ideas have to be rejected. But they should be reevaluated in terms of this integral and humanist framework, and on that basis, some may have to be rejected, others accepted or adapted. Revolution and wholesale rejection of the present is not

a Hindu approach. The things that are here with us, do not have to be overthrown at once. They have to be accommodated and integrated, and that also counts for ideas, Bharatiya or foreign. So, even socialism should be allowed to run its course. This implies that now that it is waning, one should not artificially keep it alive. Meanwhile, one should positively come forward with an alternative. On a worldwide scale, the time is ripe for an alternative. This is one more of the tasks facing the Hindu intellectuals: to link up with the global evolutions in thought and culture. There is a worldwide ideological vacuum, and yet, it is not the end of history, there is still an urgent need for guiding ideas. After the horribly divisive ideologies that have tortured humanity during the twentieth century, there is just no alternative to ideologies that one way or another come down to integral humanism. So Hindu social philosophy has a lot to offer, provided it comes out of the dusty manuscripts and indological encyclopedias to get actualized and updated. For the relevance of the Hindu outlook to modern problems, let us, in tune with the very physical focus of the Hindutva movement at this time, take a very physical example: vegetarianism. Typically, Hindu social thought has always included an ecological dimension. Socialism and liberalism do not have this dimension, they can at best annex it. But it is an organic part of Hindu dharma. Ahimsa, non-violence, does not mean an unnatural and masochistic refusal to defend yourself, it is not a bizarre and repulsive item of moralism suppressing the self-defense instinct (as Gandhians have presented it). Traditionally, it means maintaining the harmony of the larger whole, caring not to disturb the ecosystem. The need to take this value seriously, has suddenly become very acute for all of humanity. Therefore, Hindu dharma has since a few millennia thought very highly of vegetarianism. Not that everyone practiced it, but it was universally respected and honoured as an expression of both asceticism and sensitivity for all life forms. Of course, the respect for all life forms could not be absolute, it was graded (like most things in Pagan culture). Thus, a cow would be more immune from killing than other large mammals, than birds and fish, and killing insects could not always be avoided. Life forms with less consciousness, like lower animals and plants, were less immune from killing than higher animals, deemed to be more conscious and thus more capable of suffering. So, this non-violence towards animals was not a stern and God-given rule, it was wellfounded in a natural and realistic sensitivity for the suffering of fellow creatures. Today, countries that do not have this traditional value of vegetarianism, are discovering it. Scientists have found that it is healthier. Spiritual seekers cultivate the sensitivity that brings fellow-feeling with the other life forms. But most acutely, ecologists are finding that the world ecosystem can no longer sustain carnivorism. For producing a given nutritional quantity of meat, you need seven times the cultivating space that you would need to produce the same nutritional value of that you would need to produce the same nutritional value of vegetable food. So, the deforestation problem and the world food problem can be solved quickly if meat consumption is cut down drastically. Otherwise, these problems will become disasters, as the number of human consumers keeps rising. So, the modernist elite in India is wholly mistaken in considering vegetarianism as something rustic, religious and horribly deshi. Environment minister Maneka Gandhi was a better spokeswoman of the new world-wide ecological awareness, when she declared in November 1990 that all Indians should take to vegetarianism if they want to stop deforesting and desertifying their country. So, the world is learning the hard way what Hindu philosophy has known all along. We need to respect not just our fellow human beings, but all fellow entities in this world. This goes to show how Hindu humanism is genuinely integral: not only does it take into account man's integral personality, but it also considers his integratedness in a larger social and ecological whole. This rather physical example of how the ancient Hindu value of vegetarianism is actually very modern, may help Hindus to get over their self-depreciation, and to go and discover how their

social philosophy too contains elements that are really very adequate for today's problems. The world today is looking for integral humanism.

15.3 Pride in Hinduism It may be remarked that the term integral humanism itself does not mention its Hindu roots. Perhaps that is good. The term Hinduis merely a geographical indication, while integral humanism briefly says what it stands for. And it does no injustice to the essence of Hindu social thought. After all manavadharma doesn't contain the word Hindu either. On the other hand, should we not suspect that the coining of this term shows the pressure on the Hindutva movement to portray itself as secular? After Nehru's crackdown on the RSS, following the murder of the Mahatma (in which the RSS was not implicated, according to both the court and the prosecutor), the RSS and its fronts, like the Bharatiya Jan Sangh, later Bharatiya Janata Party, and the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (All India Student Council), have avoided the conspicuous use of the term Hindu. They have complied with the taboo on everything Hindu. They were totally on the defensive, trying to placate the arrogant Leftists who dictated what was secular and what was not. Without suggesting that the term integral humanism should be amended or replaced, I do think it is time for Hindus to shake off their shyness about being Hindu. "Say it with pride : we are Hindus", is what Swami Vivekananda taught his fellow Hindus. Some anti-Hindu people insinuate that this slogan implies a doctrine that Hindus are superior. In that case,Black is beautiful would mean that white is not beautiful; it would therefore be a racist slogan and quite reprehensible. In fact, every colour is beautiful in its own way, and it is quite alright to express pride in the long-despised black colour. And everyone is entitled to have and to express pride in his identity. Expressing pride is not a matter of superiority, but being denied the right to express pride, is very certainly a proof of an imposed inferiority. Who is in a position to heap scorn on Hindus for being Hindus? What are these Babarwadis themselves, that they arrogate the right to look down on Hindus? What is the record of the parties, systems and ideologies to which they pledge allegiance? The record of the two main ideologies of the secularists, Marxism and Islam, is well-known. Whenever they heap scorn on Hinduism, they should be reminded of their own heritage. For instance, Inder Kumar Gujral declared in declared in parliament in late December 1990, that "a colour is being seen these days which was also seen at the time of the Mahatma's murder. I don't need to give the name of the colour." What about Gujral's own colour, red? It was very much in evidence when Stalin killed millions of farmers, when he killed political opponents, when he exterminated the elites of occupied Poland opponents, when he exterminated the elites of occupied Poland and the Baltic states, when Mao killed his millions, when Tibet was overrun, when Pol Pot cleared Cambodia to make away for the new communist humanity. Even when India was invaded in 1962, that colour was there. who is this Gujral to be so derogatory about saffron? In order to instill a proper and well-founded pride in Hindus, it is (once more) most important to restore the truth about Hindu history, especially about Hindu society's glorious achievements. In technology, it cannot match China, which was the world leader until a mere three, four centuries ago. But in abstract sciences like linguistics, logic ,mathematics, Hindu culture has been the chief pioneer. In psychology, it is still unsurpassed, though this is not yet fully recognized in the West, the part of the world that still arbitrates on what can count as rational and scientific.

Much of India's backwardness has been created by the foreign occupies. This is not just a convenient allegation: in other countries too, we see the destructive impact of foreign occupation on the flourishing of arts and sciences. Thus, in China mathematics was taken to new heights in the 11th-12th century. The works expounding these insights were preserved until after the Mongol occupation. But when we read comments from the post-Mongol period on these earlier works, we find that they had lost the correct understanding of these advanced theorems and algorithms. The flourishing of science needs a safe political as well as economical cradle. In India too, we see total stagnation in the sciences during the entire Muslim period, and a mere passive adoption of Western science under the British rule. Mani Shankar Aiyar, rejecting the proposition that India was a battleground between two civilizations since the advent of the Muslim hordes, states that Indian civilization has an unbroken civilizational history thanks to its"utterly 312 unique capacity to synthesize and move forward". But the striking fact about the Muslim period is that knowledge in India has not moved forward at all. The bhakti poets gave a new expression of old ideas, belonging to the spiritual domain which deals with the unchanging and eternal. They were part of Hinduism's answer to the challenge of this narrow-minded anti- universalist culture of the new rulers. But this Bhakti poetry is not proof of a really flourishing culture. As long as there are human subjects and things happening, there will be literature : that is not a sign of moving forward (in fact, times of disaster may be more fruitful in literature, than times of prosperity). But in astronomy, mathematics, logic, linguistics and philosophy, Hinds society hardly managed to save its old knowledge from oblivion (often just preserving it rather than keeping it alive). This stagnation and ossification of the sciences in India is yet another proof that the synthesis of Hinduism and Islam is a mere myth, for a synthesis would have been very fruitful and India would havemoved forward with enthusiasm. In reality, Muslim rule stifled Hindu creativity and disturbed its social and economical life, thus impoverishing it both culturally and materially. Of the British occupiers, it is known that they destroyed the existing system of education, that they dismantled industries and disturbed agriculture in order to integrate India into the colonial 313 trade system. They also obliterated quite a chunk of Ayurvedic medical knowledge, by discouraging and sometimes even forbidding its practice and teaching. Earlier, the Muslims had destroyed many universities, and if Hindu pandits are such an obscurantist lot, it is largely because the academic framework that gave life to their scholarship, has been destroyed. Hindusthan was always a proverbially rich country. Now, mother Theresa has made it something of a synonym with poverty. But this poverty cannot be blamed on Hindu culture. After the Muslims had blindly plundered large parts of the country and destroyed so much, the British made an even more systematic and profound attack on India's natural prosperity. They reorganized its economy to suit their own ends, integrating it in their colonial trade system, again to the country's detriment. When the British arrived, India was one of the most industrialized countries in the world, and one of its top exporters. The British economical policies, coupled with the world-wide impact of modern industry on the pre-modern economies, destroyed much of India's prosperity and economical; self-reliance. Finally, this process of impoverishment was completed when Jawaharlal Nehru imposed socialism on India. I am not an economist, but my experiences with state-run enterprises like the State Bank of India and Indian Airlines have made me quite aware of the damage done to this country by socialism. The so-calledHindu growth rate is in fact the Nehru growth rate. If you look at Hindus achievements abroad, it is quite clear that Hinduism instills enough of a work ethic for attaining professional and economical success. But this natural dynamism of Hindu culture, which in the past made the country fabulously rich, has been stifled by this misguided policy of a staterun economy.

Even that part of the English-educated elite which is no party to the detrimental Nehruvian policies, but has on the contrary actively contributed to the amount of prosperity that India still enjoys, has also added to the Hindu inferiority complex. Both those who bring Western modernity in business and technology and those who brought Soviet modernity in the from of the Nehruvian establishment, regardless of their merits and demerits, look down on the traditional culture of this country. The strongest expression of their superiority over the natives is of course the English language. Another very conspicuous example is dress. Both communists and liberals are extremely scornful about dhoti, kurta, pajama, pagari, and about rural patriarch Devi Lal who wears those things even in parliament (not to speak of Mahatma Gandhi). Colonial sahib Mani Shankar Aiyar calls 314 them ethnic fancy dress. A friend and compatriot of mine once traveled in a bus in Kerala, wearing a dhoti. Someone asked him: What are you wearing there? My friend replied: I think you know well enough that this is a dhoti.The man said: "But a dhoti is brahminical! This is the age of communism!" In fact, those people who think a three-piece suit is modern, while a dhoti etc. is rustic, are the really superstitious savages: they think they participate in modern culture, with its benefit of science, by imitating the dress of the people who brought this scientific culture to this backward land. This is a typically primitive and magical way of reasoning. In reality, all this ethnic dress is far more scientificand rational, in the sense of: adapted to reality. It is also far moremodern, in the sense of: liberating what is human from oppressive forms imposed by convention. Compared with dresses, trousers and suits, the native sari, dhoti and kurta-pajama are far more economical (need no tailoring), hygienical (especially in this hot climate) and comfortable, and generally also more elegant: all quite humanistic and rational values. This makes Devi Lal the herald of scientific modernity in this country. At present, the Hindu inferiority complex is still so serious. that all kind of funny attempts at compensation are in evidence. The best-known example is probably the contention that the Taj Mahal was a Hindu temple. Of course, architecturally it is not Hindu at all. But why claim the Taj Mahal in the first place? It is really very simple architecture, though that is made up for by the beautiful material used, which goes so well with the light of the full moon. At any rate, Hindus had better take pride in the temples which are really theirs (including the many thousands destroyed by the Muslim conquerors). Another pitiable example is the persistent claim that all the secrets of modern science are contained in the Vedas and other classics. This does injustice to the real contents of these scriptures. Unfortunately, the God in the new physics wave of the late seventies has confirmed some people in this pretense. In Frithjof Capra's masterpiece Tao of physics, the chief argument for the basic consonance between modern physics and Eastern mysticism, is the juxtaposition of a pageful of mathematical equations and a pageful of Sanskrit shlokas: both of them are abracadabra for those who know neither. A third example of crank theories compensating for the Hindu inferiority complex, is the belief that the whole world was colonized by the Hindus, lakhs of year ago. By contrast this other cherished belief of Hindu chauvinists, that the Aryans were not outsiders who overran the Indus civilisation, is on firmer ground. This is not the place to go into the details, but suffice it to say that the linguistic arguments for putting the home of the Aryans in Central Asia or Europe, have been found wanting, and that the construction of a Dravidian interpretation of the Indus script is not at all convincing. There is absolutely no archaeological proof for the Aryan invasions theory. All the argumentations that have been given for it are, on closer analysis, cases of petitio principii. And then there is the internal evidence of the Vedas, which seems to exclude a foreign homeland within human memory. Even the secularists and the other enemies of Hindu society, who have been having so much propagandistic fun with the Aryan invasions theory, will

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have to recognize its untenability soon. So, India can uninhibited pride itself on a civilizational continuity since about 5000 years, or more. Another thing in which the Hindus can take pride, is their much-maligned social system. When Iran was defeated by the Muslim armies and the state collapsed, the entire society collapsed. It had no inner resistance and got Islamized very quickly. By contrast, when in Hindusthan a state was destroyed by the Muslim conquerors, society did not collapse. With its weak state decentralized structure, Hindu society could live on in its non-state, organically co-ordinated way. This may sound too idyllic for modernist cynic, but the extra- ordinary historical fact of Hindu society's survival is undeniably there. If the misrepresentation of Hindu philosophy by illiterate and based intellectuals and schoolbookwriters is stopped, another completely misplaced source of inferiority feelings will disappear: the belief that Hindu philosophy leads to passivity. This is a belief spread systematically by the Christian missionaries. With it, they kind of pass on Marx' criticism that "religion is the opium of the people", which had been levelled in the first place against Christianity. Salvation not by effort but by the pseudo-historical event of Jesus' resurrection, is the hocus-pocus doctrine central to Christianity. By contrast, Hindu philosophy is a lot more methodical, realistic, and appealing to human effort and self-determination. Anyone who cares to study this, can find it out. Sir Edmund Hillary declared, after a journey along the Ganga and visiting many ashrams :"I became a Hindu. I was very close to the Hindu ethic. It was a great spiritual experience." This was unbearable to the Hindu- baiters present, so the press conference continued with a product of modern Indian education: "When it was pointed out to him that having faith in the Hindu ethic essentially involved a belief in destiny " (predetermination), Sir Edmund remarked :"No, not in that 316 sense. I believe a man can make his own destiny through his work and effort". No matter what faults you may be able to find with Hindu doctrine, belief in predetermination and impotence in the face of destiny (which is very much present in Islam) is not one of them. As Hillary correctly pointed out to these illiterate press people, a man makes his own destiny through his own effort. And that is not a modern novelty, it is precisely the meaning of the age-old karma doctrine: we make our destiny through our own actions. Unknown makes unloved. It is the complete ignorance concerning the vast river of Hindu Dharma, that makes many nominal Hindus indifferent or hostile to Hinduism. That is why Nehruvian education actively promotes this ignorance of and disdain for Hindu culture, and why Nehruvian secularists want to intensify this ignorance by banning religion classes from school and Hindu epics from TV. Microcomputer pioneer Adam Osborne thinks India has the potential to be the next Japan. Want he has in mind is technological achievement and a vibrant economy, nothing hazy and rapturous. But the clue to this very tangible kind of greatness is pride: "There is no doubt in my mind that India is one of the great financial success stories of the future. The curse of India is that Indians 317 lack pride in being Indian. The moment they have that pride, India will be the next Japan." Pride in being Indian means, for 99%, pride in Hinduism (unless you are a secularist distorter and consider the Islamic invaders' avowed objective of destroying Hindu culture also as culture and as Indian). So, this legitimate pride has to be nourished with broad and in-depth knowledge of Hindu culture. The two enemies of this effort are the secularist morbidity that glorifies the destroyers of Hindu culture, denies the unity and integrity of Hindu culture, and discourages its study altogether; and the mental laziness of some cranks who get exuberant over wholly 318 mistaken ideas about the Hindu past, without caring to critically and thoroughly study it. So, this historical reassessment of the Hindu achievements is important to give confidence and to re- establish the unity of Hindu civilization. But it is only one component of the central task before

the Hindu intellectuals, and not even the most important one. Any amount of negative self-image fostered by distorted history can be digested and forgotten when there are achievement in the present. The battle over the past, in which Hindus had until recently been pushed badly on the defensive, should of course be won. But it is only a supporting act for the intellectual battle over the present. Hindu intellectuals should address the modern world and show the world that there is nothing shameful in looking at world affairs from the Hindu angle. At the socio-political level they must show that the Hindu approach leads to a more humane and more satisfactory polity than the approach from the Islamic and the Marxist angles. A more advanced and more subtle task will be, to improve upon the reason-oriented and democratic Western approach: this has recently been the best we have, but it should not be taken as the ultimate in human civilization.

15.4 From Ayodhya to Indraprastha While thinkers create a new intellectual climate in post- Nehruvian India, the task of political parties like the BJP, is the listen. And then, it is their own business to frame policies that are realistically in tune with this new thinking. Politics is an autonomous sphere, and its personnel is free to take or not take its inspiration from a line of thought which intellectuals have developed. But in fact it has no choice but to be determined by the dominant ideological climate. Conversely, the thought that gives form to the aspirations of Hindu society, is not tied to any political party. Not so long ago, a BJP leader said :"We will not allow Congress to play the Hindu card". But from a Hindu viewpoint, it is just as well if Congress or any other party amends Article 30 or reintegrates Kashmir with India. Party workers may identify strongly with the success of their organization, but after all it is merely an instrument for realizing a programme beneficial to Hindu society. Once a convincing thought current has been created, all kinds of people and parties will tap into it, and that is precisely the sign of its success. Parties cannot keep ideas to themselves, but they may profit from being the most consistent in advocating and applying them. Till recently, most parties pledged their allegiance to some form of socialist ideology was visible from the very fact that different parties declared their intention of being instruments of socialism. Even the BJP in 1984 opted for some hazy thing called Gandhian socialism. This was yet another proof of how the Hindutva movement behaved like a mercenary looking for an employer, i.e. an ideology, because it was ignorant or ashamed of its own ideological roots. They had to borrow the socialists' platform and slogans. The decline and fall of socialism is a good occasion to drop all this second-hand nonsense and develop a modern Hindu programme In the short term, Hindu politicians would do well to concentrate on non-controversial issues like the abolition of the discrimination against the majority religion in state control over temples and, most of all, educational institutes (Article 30). This demand is perfectly unobjectionable. Anyone who objects to it, exposes himself as a supporter of religion-based discrimination in secular affairs, i.e. as a communalist. This issue, while of no concern to the minorities, is at the same time a top priority for Hindu society. By contrast, issue which affect the other communities but not Hindu society itself, should be relegated to second rank. This debate about the common Civil Code, or in effective terms, the abolition of the separate Muslim Personal Law, is not immediately important for Hindu tradition (which should however not be totally identified with its old forms) to leave these matters to the 319 community rather than to regulate it centrally and uniformly. Of course, it is not consistent with the generally Western-style Constitution which India has adopted in1950 (largely based on the colonial Government of India Act of 1935). But then, if even West-oriented secularists have not

cared to implement the Constitutional injunction to enact a common Civil Code, Hindus should not feel compelled to hurry when it is more expedient to settle other matters first. When Westerners hear about this political Hinduism, this Hindu Rashtra movement, they wonder what colourful ideas might be involved. But it is not all that exotic. A political party that champions Hindu Rashtra and comes to power, what is it going to do? Change the flag or the anthem? Rename India's capital Indraprastha or move it to Ujjain, the historical capital of Vikramaditya? Those are the kind of things which many anti-colonial movements have done upon coming to power, but they are merely symbolic. After that, the day-to-day business of government starts. A lot of the government decisions will be of the same kind as those taken by non-Hindu governments in similar circumstances. It will have to balance the budget, privatize inefficient state enterprises, encourage education, ensure social justice, fight crime and corruption both at the symptom and the root cause level, and all these other mundane things. The Hindu Rashtra will simply be a modern state, a democratic federal state, with political and religious pluralism, a free press, a free market economy with social security checks, all these common-sense things will be in common with most free countries. It may promote Sanskrit, yoga, traditional music and dancing, all these colourful things, but in politics it will not be all that exotic. But then, concentrating on these normal common-sense policies, after the first assertions of postcolonial restoration of the national Hindu culture are completed, already constitutes a substantial change of policy away from the Nehruvian pattern. In fact, in the short term its most valuable contribution to the Indian polity will not be the introduction of new concepts and policies, but the scrapping of the vast amounts of nonsense that the present Nehruvian dispensation continues to indulge in. Take this National Integration Council and this Minorities Commission. In all the growth-up countries of the world, subnational communities look after themselves without weighing on the polity. But in India, Hindus and their state are told that they should instill confidence in the minorities. And they should foster the emotional integration of the country by banning everything the might hurt the feelings of the minorities, including the historical truth. As if Hindus owe the minorities anything. They give them full religious freedom, which is what they would get in most democratic countries, and which is all they would get. For the rest, a secular state does not recognize anything like minority communities, but treats all citizens as equal individuals. Cutting out the Marxist and Minorityist nonsense will already be an invaluable service to India's integrity, progress and prosperity. In a recent article, Swapan Dasgupta has off-hand made the point that the BJP has the potential to play a leading role in Indian democratic politics, following the model of the Christian Democrats, who are centre-stage in the politics of stable European democracies like Italy, Germany, Holland and Belgium. Of course, that is a choice the party the party will have to make, as against perhaps more radical alternatives. But at least, finally commentators are dropping these hysterical outcries about Hindu fascism, and opening their eyes to the possibility that a Hindu party can stand for something else than Khomeini-type extremism. A party which champions traditional values embedded in a broad religious tradition, is not perforce a fundamentalist and theocraticparty. The Christian Democratic parties in Europe have played an important stabilizing role as centrist and integrationist forces. They have championed cultural and human values against the materialist accent in the socialist and liberal party programmes. And they have championed the harmony model against the class struggle model: a 320 similar stand is very much the need of the hour in Indian politics. Swapan Dasgupta comments on Murli Manohar Joshi's election as party president of the BJP: "It is one thing of offer, as mr. Advani has consistently done, a powerful critique of the

prevailing political culture. But the problem lies in designing an alternative... How, for example, does the concept of Hindu Rashtra...square with the notion of 'justice for all and appeasement of none? The campaign for the Ram Mandir, while important in symbolic terms, is unlikely to be a substitute for a comprehensive, alternative philosophy. Having tapped the reservoirs of anti-status quo, the BJP' is unlikely to progress if its critique stops at the secular-communal issue. Mr. Advani has struck a powerful blow at the shibboleths of Nehruvian consensus; his successor will be frittering away the advantages if a simultaneous assault is not launched on the other article of the reviled faith 321 socialism". It is correct that Hindu society faces more problems than just minorityism. In fact, the secularists are right in considering the minorityism problem a bit over-publicized and exaggerated: a few amendments to the Constitution and dropping as few bad habits in day-to-day politicking will do to end this minoritysm. Then, India will be just a secular democracy like any other. A few decisions on symbolic issues will do to make it a Hindu democracy (one shouldn't make the socialist mistake of over-estimating the importance of the state for the well-being of Hindu society). I agree that these things, few in number, are easier said than done. But in the whole volume of political issues, it is clear that a political party will have more on its mind than Hindu Rashtra. So, that is where the culture movement for real decolonization and real self-determination of Hindu society parts company with the political parties who champion Hindu causes and try to please the Hindu vote bank. Politics is an autonomous sphere in society, and it is but natural for advocates of Hindu culture to respect it as such. It is quite alright that politicians have other things to do apart from the explicitly Hindu issues. That is why I do not follow those purists of the Hindutva movement who protest that the BJP shouldn't waste time on such petty politicking as, for instance, this demand for statehood for Delhi. Of course, Hindu society couldn't care less whether Delhi is a Union Territory or a State, and whether the BJP can have a chief minister there (which is what this demand is all about). But then, that is politics, and those politicians have a right to work on what is purely a power issue. No one protests that the Birla family, the billionaires who go on building temples, also spends time making money instead of exclusively serving Hindu society by building temples. So, who cares if the BJP, or whatever Hindu party to emerge in future, practices power politics and electoral politics. It is but normal and healthy to have other things to do apart from affirming your identity. It was the Soviet Union that wasted tonnes of paper and deplorably long stretches of time in appending eulogies of Socialism to every book or speech on any and every topic. It is in the Islamic republics that this strains are put on the economy by fantastic demands for Islamic economic. For Hindu politicians, it is quite alright to go beyond identify and to get down to non-ideological business. It is only in its general spirit that economics and other mundane matters can have a Hinducharacter. Apart from that, things are just what they are. As for strictly political issues, I might mention two. There have been proposals to reform the Indian political system into a presidential system, as recently by L.K.Advani. This is a matter which in one sense or the other affects the efficiency of government, and since this is the only state Hindus have (apart from Nepal), the government of this state is a secular matter of importance for Hindu society. The same thing counts for proposals to reform the electoral 322 procedure. Such reforms do not make the state more Hindu, but they may be legitimate concerns of responsible politicians. If such strictly political work makes them neglect their duty to Hindu culture and society, then another party will criticize them for this neglect, and declare itself a better defender of Hindu values and interests - provided the Hindu consciousness pervades the though climate which all politicians imbibe, and which entices them to take up Hindu issues. It is this thought climate that

determines the programmes and behavior of the political class. That is why political parties championing Hindutva are really only a secondary phenomenon, a materialization of the prevalent thinking. In fact, it remains to be seen whether even the organizations being attacked as Hindu communalist, are such staunch champions of the Hindu cause in the first place. Some of their former prominents are not so sure. Balraj Madhok, president of the Jan Sangh during its apex in 1966-67, has criticized his former party (now reconstituted as the BJP) of opportunism, of having no ideological backbone. I cannot judge that, but I would hardly expect many politicians to be all that principled. And in fact, one should see the bright side of the fact that so many politicians are such opportunists. If the BJP could be very wavering in its Hindu convictions when the secularists were on the offensive, you can be sure that Congress will be very wavering in its secularist convictions once Hinduism (or Integral Humanism, or whichever name of the anti-and postcolonial upsurge of the native culture will be fashionable) becomes respected. It is quite a mistake to think that these mass movements and political parties are the leaders of the Hindu awakening. Their resolutions and programmes are but the visible shapes brought about by the lines of force of the prevalent thought configuration, like iron filings giving expression to the weightless and invisible magnetic field. The so-called leaders will easily fall in line and gladly make themselves instruments of a Hindu future, once their attachment to outdated doctrines is removed by the adhyatmik : AIR : akhand : akhara : AMU : archana : archanavatar : avarna : avatar : Babarwadi : Bajrang Dal : bandh : bhajan : bhakt : Bharat : Bharatiyatva : BHU : BJP : (AI)BMAC : BMMCC : bodhi : brahmin : BSP : burqa : chabootra: : communalism : secular interests Congress-I : CPI : CPI(M), CPM : crore : dacoit :

Glossary

spiritual All-India Radio unbroken, uninterrupted arena; martial monastery Aligarh Muslim University worship worship-incarnation, idol outside the varna system incarnation of a god follower of Babar; Indian secularist "Hanuman Team" closing, strike devotional song, psalm devotee India Indian-ness Banaras Hindu University Bharatiya Janata (Indian People's) Party (All-India) Babri Masjid Action Committee Babri Masjid Movement Co-ordination Committee awakening, enlightenment varna of keeping and transmitting knowledge Bahujan Samaj (Masses' Society) Party veil covering a Muslim woman's face platform ideology championing the political unity and of a religious community Indira Congress Communist Party of India Communist Party of India (Marxist) ten million armed robber, criminal

dalit : dharma : dharna : dhoti : DMK : doordarshan : ekatmata : ness fatwa : garbha-griha : ghat : gherao : goonda : Granth : granthi : guna : gurudwara : Hadis : harijan : HMS : imam : IPF : IUML : janmabhoomi : janmasthan : jati : JD : jihad : Kafir : kar seva : khatib : kirtan : kshatriya : kula : kulapati : kurta : lakh : Lok Sabha : directly elected) mahant : mandir : masjid : math : millat : MIM : Unity Council) MLA : muazzin : murti : mutwalli : naib : nambardar : nawab : nirguna : PAC : padyatra : pagari :

oppressed, downtrodden duty; world order; religion sit-down strike cloth covering hips and legs Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (Dravida Forward Group) television: India's TV network "belonging to a single self", integratedIslamic juridical opinion, verdict womb-house, sanctum sanctorum bathing-place lock-in strike street fighter, criminal Sikh Scripture reciter from the Granth quality, characteristic Sikh temple traditions of the Prophet "God's people", the untouchables Hindu Maha Sabha (Great-Assembly) prayer-leader in mosque Indian People's Front Indian Union Muslim League birthplace birthplace caste, endogamous group Janata Dal (People's Group) Islamic war against the Kafirs non-Muslim, Pagan manual service reader in mosque devotional chant varna entrusted with defending and ruling extended family "family-leader" ; vice-chancellor loose shirt one hundred thousand People's Assembly (lower house of Parliament, temple high-priest temple mosque monastery, abbey (the world Muslim) community Majlis-e Ittehad-ul Muslimeen (Muslims' Member of Legislative Assembly man who calls the Muslims to prayer idol mosque manager deputy village functionary honorific plural of naib; governor without characteristics, formless Provincial Armed Constabulary foot-march turban

pajama : loose trousers panth : school of thought, sect parampara : teacher-pupil chain, tradition pradesh : state of the Indian Union PUCL : People's Union for Civil Liberties puja : devotional ritual qaum : nation, community raj : rule, British rule Rajya Sabha : States' Assembly (upper house of Parliament, selected via the State Assemblies) Ramzan : month of fasting for Muslims RSS : Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Volunteer Corps) rath : chariot rathyatra : chariot-march, procession sadbhavana : goodwill samiti : committee sampradaya : sect sanatana : eternal Sanatana Dharma: philosophia perennis; Hinduism sanskriti : culture secularism : doctrine of separating state and religion shuddhi : purification, (re-)entry into the Hindu fold shudra : varna entrusted with serving SS : Shiv Sena (Shiva's or Shivajis' Army) suba : province swaraj : self-rule, independence tabligh : Islamic religious propaganda, especially to weed out non-Islamic practices among Muslims talaq : Muslim unilateral divorce thekedar : contractor tilak : mark on forehead tirth : ford; place of pilgrimage tirthankara : "ford-maker", Jain sage UP : Uttar Pradesh, formerly United Provinces (of Agra and Oudh) upajati : sub-caste vaishya : commoner, varna entrusted with trade varna : "colour", four function-wise groups in society vedi : altar Vidhan Sabha : Legislative Assembly of the states VHP : Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council) yajna (yagya) : sacrifical ritual zamindar : landlord zimmi : "protected one", non-Muslim tolerated in Muslim society thought currents of Sanatana Dharma.

Appendix 1. Girilal Jain on Hindu Rashtra

Girilal Jain is one of the India's leading journalists. He was editor of the Times of India until 1989. After that, he did not really retire, but continues to function as one of India's most respected columnists. In these, he has taken an increasingly bold and outspoken stand in favor of the recognition of India as a Hindu Rashtra, as the political embodiment of Hindu civilization. Unlike the many who don't go beyond a petty criticism of the injustices done to Hindus, Mr. Jain draws attention to the configuration of the large historical forces at work. I have included here two of his columns published in Sunday Mail (which have been honored with page full of reaction by Shankar Aiyar and P. Sainath), and an interview given to J. D. Singh and published in The Daily.

Limits of the Hindu Rashtra The Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri dispute has brought to the fore the critical issue of the nature of the Indian state as nothing else has since partition and independence in 1947. The secularist-versus-Hindu-Rashtra controversy is, of course, not new. In fact, it has been with us since the twenties when some of our forebears began to search for a definition of nationalism which could transcend at once the Hindu-Muslim divide and the aggregationist approach whereby India was regarded as a Hindu-Muslim-Sikh-Christian land. But it has acquired an intensity it has not had since partition. This intensity is the result of a variety of factors which have cumulatively provoked intense anxiety among million of Hindus regarding their future and simultaneously given a new sense of strength and confidence to the proponents of Hindu Rashtra. The first part of this story beings, in my view, with the mass conversion of Harijans to Islam in Meenakshipuram in Tamil Nadu in 1981. and travels via the rise of Pakistan-backed armed secessionist movements in Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir, and the second part with the spectacular success of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the last polls to the Lok Sabha and State Vidhan Sabha. These details, however, need not detain us in a discussion on basic issues. The basic issues, I need hardly add, are extremely complex; and judging by what has been written and spoken in recent months, they, I am afraid, are once again being simplified and sloganized. This is a pity in vies of the gravity of the situation we face and the nature of the stake we have in the outcome. I, therefore, wish to draw attention to what appear to me to be lacunae in the current and previous debates, and that too in a general fashion; for that alone is possible in this space. In much of what I have read and heart on the subject, an awareness of the civilizational aspect of the problem has either been absent or warped, though its very mention should suffice to convince us that this is a matter if the greatest importance. India, to put the matter brusquely, has been a battleground between two civilizations (Hindu and Islamic) for well over a thousand years, and three (Hindu, Muslim and Western) for over two hundred years. None of them has ever won a decisive enough and durable enough victory to oblige the other two to assimilate themselves fully into it. So to the battle continues. This stalemate lies at the root of the crisis of identity the intelligentsia is incidentally not a monolithic entity. Though its constituents are not too clearly differentiated, they should broadly be divided into at least two groups. The more resilient and upwardly mobile section of the intelligentsia must, by definition, seek to come to terms with the ruling power and its mores, and the less successful part of it to look for its roots and seek comfort in its culture past. This was so during the Muslim period; this was the case during the British Raj; and this rule has not ceased to operate since independence.

Thus in the medieval period of our history grew up a class of Hindus in and around centres of Muslim power who took to the Persian-Arabic culture and ways of the rules; similarly under the more securely founded and far better organized and managed Raj there arose a vast number of Hindus who took to the English language, Western ideas, ideals, dress and eating habits; many of these men came from the earlier Islamized groups, such as the Nehrus, for example; they, their progeny and other recruits to their class have continued to dominate independent India. They are the self-proclaimed secularists who have sought, and continue to seek, to remark India in the Western image. The image has, of course, been an eclectic one; if they have stuck to the institutional framework inherited from the British, they have been more than willing to take up not only the Soviet model of economic development, but also the Soviet theories on a variety of issues such as the nationalities problem and the nature of imperialism and neo-colonialism. Behind them has stood, and continues to stand, the awesome intellectual might of the West, which may or may not be anti- India, depending on the exigencies of its interest, but which has to be antipathetic to Hinduism in view of its non-Semitic character. Some secularists may be genuinely pro-Muslim, as was Nehru, because they find high Islamic culture and the ornate Urdu language attractive. But, by and large, that is not the motivating force in their lives. They are driven, above all, by the fear of what they call regression into their own past which have come and continue to come understandably from the Left, understandably because no other group of Indians can possibly be so alienated from the country's culture past as the followers of Lenin, Stalin and Mao who have spared little effort to turn their own countries into culture wastelands. As a group, the secularists, especially the Leftists, have not summoned the courage to insist that in order to ensure the survival of the secular India state, Muslims should accept one common civil code, and that Article 370 of the Constitution, which concedes special rights to Jammu and Kashmir mainly because it is a Muslim-majority state, should be scrapped. They have contented themselves with vague statements on the need for the majorities to join the mainstream, never drawing attention to the twin fact that, of necessity, Hindus constitute the mainstream and that this mainstream is capable of respecting the identities and rights of the minorities, precisely because it is inclined to take note of the international aspect of Indian Islam. Personally I have never been inclined to favour one common civil code. I regard such a demand as being Semitic in its inspection and spirit. A Hindu, in my view, can never wish to impose a code on a reluctant, in this case defiant, community. Even so I find it extraordinary that those who call themselves modernizers and secularists-the two terms are interchangeable-should shirk the logic of their philosophy of life. A number of Indians have tried to define secularism as sarva dharma samabhava (equal respect for all religions). I cannot say whether they have been naive or clever in doing so. But the fact remains that secularism cannot admit of such an interpretation. In fact, orthodox Muslims are quite justified in regarding it as irreligious. Moreover, dharma cannot be defined as religion which is a Semitic concept and applies only to Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Hinduism is not a religion in that sense; nor are Jainism and Buddhism, or for that matter, Taoism and Confucianism. The state in independent India, has, it is true, sought, broadly speaking, to be neutral in the matter of religion. But this is a surface view of the reality. The Indian state has been far from neutral inn civilizational terms. It has been an agency, and a powerful agency, for the spread of Western values and mores. It has willfully sought to replicate Western institutions, the Soviet Union too being essentially part of Western civilization. It could not be otherwise in view of the orientation and aspirations of the dominant elite of which Nehru remains the guiding spirit.

Muslim have found such a state acceptable principally on three counts. First, it has agreed to leave them alone in respect of their personal law (the Shariat) so much so that when the Supreme Court allowed a small alimony to a Muslim window on the ground that she was indigent and therefore viable to become a vagrant, parliament enacted a law to overrule such interventions in the future. Secondly, it has allowed them to expand their traditional Quran-Hadithbased educational system in madrasahs attached to mosques. Above all, it has helped them avoid the necessity to come to terms with Hindu civilization in a predominantly Hindu India. This last count is the crux of the matter. I do not believe for a moment that a genuine Hindu-Muslim synthesis took place in India during the Moghul period, or that the British policy of divide-and-rule was solely, or even mainly, responsible for the Hindu-Muslim conflict under the Raj. Two caveats, however, need to be entered on these observations. First, after the beginning of the collapse of the Moghal empire with Aurangzeb's death in 1707, new power Hindu-Muslim co- existence and co-operation on terms less onerous for Hindus. Second, the very consolidation of British rule on an all-India basis led to a search by both Hindus and Muslims for self- definitions on the same all-India basis. This search led to a sharpening of the conflict between which the British exploited to their advantage. Be that as it may, however, there is a basic point which has generally failed to attract the attention it deserves. Which is that a triangular contest is inherently not conducive to a stable alliance. So all equations (Hindu-Muslim, Hindu-British and Muslim-British) had to be unstable under the Raj; they were unstable. Each co-operated and clashed with the other two and each was also divided within itself. For example, just as Sir Sayyid Ahmed propagated the cause of co-operation with the British among fellow Muslims, the pan-Islamic sentiment began to spread among them on the Turkish question, inclining them finally to accept Gandhiji's leadership of the Khilafat movement in 1921. Gandhiji saw this triangular contest in civilizational terms. He juxtaposed all traditional civilizations against the modern scientific-technological civilization, which he called Satanic. Nehru saw the contest in economic terms. He juxtaposed the capitalist-imperialist and exploitative West against the exploited anti-imperialist East in which he included the Soviet Union. Gandhiji sought Hindu-Muslim amity on the platform of essential unity of the two religion and Nehru on that of a common fight against feudalism, exploitation and poverty. Both approaches failed to produce the desired result; they had to fail. The two leaders tried to wish away the unresolved and stalemated civilizational conflict and they could not possibly succeed. The nobility of their purpose, the intensity of their conviction and the Herculean nature of their effort could not prevail against the logic of history. The alternative to Partition would have been infinitely worse. For the first time in a thousand years, Hindus got in 1947 an opportunity to resolve the civilizational issue in the only manner such issues can be resolved. History clearly of one civilization alone produces the necessary condition for the assimilation of another. The predominant culture too changes, as any student of the Arab conquests of Christian Syria and Egypt in the seventh century. would know. But that is how civilizations grow. Hindus missed the opportunity, not so much because Nehru happened to be at the helm of affairs, as because they did not possess an elite capable of rising to the occasion. Indeed, Nehru himself was not an aberration. He was representative of the dominate elite which must not be equated with the Congress organizational leaders. The sweep and success of the campaign against Sardar Patel in 1947-48 should clinch the argument. Hindus were just not in a position to assert the primacy of their civilization and they are still in no position to do so. The case for Hindu Rashtra rests on the failure of the Nehru model and its pull on the rise of a vast unprivileged intelligentsia, mobilization of vast masses as part of the democratic process and the modernization programme.

While a proper discussion of this question must wait, I would wish to add in conclusion that V.P. Singh and Mulayam Singh have rendered a yeoman's service to the cause of Hindu Rashtra, the former by splitting the secularist forces in the political realm, and the latter by showing Hindus how contemptuous and brutal the Indian state can be in its treatment of them. [Sunday Mail, 2/12/1990]

The Harbinger of a New Order A spectre haunts dominant sections of Indian's political and intellectual elites-the spectre of a growing Hindu self-awareness and self-assertion. Till recently these elites had used the bogey of Hindu communalism and revivalism as a convenient device to keep themselves in power and to legitimize their slavish imitation of the West. Unfortunately for them, the ghost has now materialized. Million of Hindus have stood up. It will not be easy to trick them back into acquiescing in an order which has been characterized not much by its appeasement of Muslims as by its alienness, rootlessness and contempt for the land's unique culture past. Secularism, a euphemism for irreligion and repudiation of the Hindu ethos, and socialism, an euphemism for denigration and humiliation of the business community to the benefit of ever expanding rapacious bureaucracy and politocracy, have been major planks of this order. Both have lost much of their old glitter and, therefore, capacity to dazzle and mislead. By the same token, re-Hinduization of the country's political domain has begun. On a surface view, it may be a sheer accident that the battle between aroused Hindus and the imitation Indian state, neutral to the restoration of the country's ancient civilization on its own oft-repeated admission, has been joined on the question of the Ram Janam-bhoomi temple in Rama's city of Ayodhya. But the historic significance of thisaccident should be evident to anyone familiar with Rama's place in our historic consciousness. Rama has been exemplar par excellence for the Hindu public domain. There have been other incarnations of Vishnu in the Hindu view and the tenth (the Kalki avatar) is yet to arrive. But there has been no other similar exemplar for Hindu polity. In historic terms, therefore, the proposed temple can be the first step towards that goal. The proper English translation of Hindu Rashtra would be Hindu polity and not Hindu nation. The concept of nation itself is, in fact, alien to the Hindu temperament and genius. It is essentially Semitic in character, even if it arose in Western Europe in the eighteenth century when it had successfully shaken off the Church's stranglehold. For, like Christianity and Islam, it too emphasizes the exclusion of those who do not belong to the charmed circle (territorial, or linguistic, or ethnic) as much as it emphasizes the inclusion of those who fall within the circle. Indeed, the former, like the heretics and pagans in Christianity and Islam, are cast into outer darkness. Two other points may be made in this connection, though only parenthetically. First, the nation could become the new icon and wars between nations replace religious (sectarian) wars in Western Europe precisely because it was a secularized version of Christian and sectarian exclusivism. Second, the Western European imperialist expansion into pagan lands was not unrelated to the spirit of heresy hunting from the very beginning of the Christian enterprise. Spaniards and the Portuguese made no bones about it. They went about the task of destroying pagan temples and converting the peoples they conquered with a ruthlessness perhaps without a

parallel in human history. Latin America bears witness to the earnestness and thoroughness of the Spanish-Portuguese Christiansoul-rescue mission. The British and the French took a different route to the same goal of decimation of other cultures. They sought not so much blessed with the light, compassion and love of God's own son Christ, as to introduce these victims of primitive animism superstition, idolatory and female irrationalism to the world- ordering masculine rationality of the West. They too did as thorough a job of under-mining pagan civilization as their Spanish and Portuguese predecessors. The continued adherence to the concept of nationalism and secularism of our elites are evidence of the success of the British in our case. Obviously, I am calling into question the conceptual capital of the dominant elites. Equally obviously, I cannot deal with the issues I am raising even in the telegraphic language. But, fortunately, an American anthropologist, Ronal Inden, has written a book entitled Imagining India (Basil Blackwell) exposing the distortions our heritage has suffered in interpretations by Western orientalists, whether materialists (British and French) or idealists (Germans). He has not discussed how Western- education Indians have swallowed lock, stock and barrel these distorted interpretations of our past. But that should become obvious once we become aware of the misrepresentations. The book available in Delhi. To return to the issue under discussion, Hindus are not a community; they cannot become a community. This fact has less to do with the caste system even in this present degenerate from than with the essential spirit of Hinduism which is inclusivist and not exclusivist by definition. Such a spirit must seek to abolish and not build boundaries. Manava-dharma must come before swadharma in the hierarchy of our values. That is why I have said again and again that Hindus cannot sustain an anti-Muslim feeling except temporarily and that too under provocation. The provocation may not come directly from Muslims. But that is a different proposition not under discussion in this piece. Hindus have been compelled to recognize boundaries, as towards the end of tenth century when Eastern Afghanistan fell to Muslim Turks after a valiant struggle by shaivite princes lasting over three centuries and their access to Central Asia was effectively blocked as a prelude to the invasion of Bharat Varsha itself by Afghans converted to Islam (for details of the struggle see Andre Wink's Al Hind, Oxford University press). And they are obliged to recognize frontiers now even within the sub-continent which has been the heartland of their civilization. But that limitation cannot make them into a nation. Hindus are not a nation in being or becoming. They cannot be, not because of the illiterate view that they are divided on the basis of caste and language but of the deep and profound truth that they have been and are meant to be a civilization. A civilization must, by definition, seek to be universal. Of the great civilizations, China alone has been an exception to this rule. That has been so because Chinese civilization alone has been based on, and has derived sustenance from, the ethnic unity of its populace. It is this approach that I had in my mind when I wrote the article entitled "Rama and not temples is the issue" in his journal on November 4, though I took have been obliged since to speak ofHindu nation in order to bring out the absurdity of the Indian concept of secular nationalism which its proponents treat as being culturally neutral. As such I find it painful that even wellmeaning Hindus should make a distinction between Hindu culture-civilization and Hindu religion, little realizing that Hinduism is not a religion, and say that Rama was both a cultural hero and a religious figure as if he can be so split. No, he epitomizes our civilization in its totality. The construction of the proposed temples in the city of his birth, as we know it from Ramayana which, much more than the Maharashtra, has shaped the Hindu world view at least in this

millennium of deep trouble and continuous struggle against foreign inroads, cannot symbolize the return of Rama as such. But it can mark the beginning of the process which must in the nature of things be prolonged and painful. The Hindu fight is not at all with Muslim; the fight is between Hindus anxious to renew themselves in the spirit of their civilization, and the state, Indian in name and not in spirit and the political and intellectual class trapped in the debris the British managed to bury us under before they left. The proponents of the Western ideology are using Muslims as auxiliaries and it is a pity Muslim leaders are allowing themselves to be so used. Developments in this regard have, however, not been without a positive aspect since 1986 when the padlock on the gate to the structure known as the Babri mosque were opened and Rama Lala (child Rama) which was already installed at the site sanctified by tradition as the place of Rama's birth. On the contrary, it can argued that in the absence of opposition by the state and Muslim leaders the necessary task of mobilizing Hindus would have got neglected, with adverse consequences in the long term. Proponents of a Hindu order have reason to be particularly grateful to the U.P. chief Minister, Mulayam Singh, who on October 30 and November 2 gave Ram bhaktas an opportunity to prove that they could withstand a mass massacre. That is how instruments for fulfillment of historic destiny are forged. In the past up to the sixteenth century, great temples have been built in our country by rulers to mark the rise of a new dynasty and/or to mark a triumph which they have regarded as vindication of their claim to the Chakravarti status. In the present case, the proposal to build the Rama temple has also to help produce an army which can in the first instance achieve the victory the construction can proclaim. The raising of such as army in our democracy, however flawed, involves not a body of disciplined cadres, which is available in the shape of the RSS, a political organization, which too is available in the Bharatiya Janata Party, but also an aroused citizenry. That had so far been missing. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad and its allies have fulfilled this need in manner which is truly spectacular. So long as this task of mobilizing support continues, delay in the actual construction of the proposed temples need not be a cause for concern. That can well await the arrival of a Hindu government in New Delhi. Indeed, it would be in order to build the temple then. It can appropriately herald the dawn of a new order. I am in no position to say whether the mobilization programme has been flawed because the organizers have not taken adequate precautions to ensure that it is not allowed to acquire antiMuslim overtones, or whether that was unavoidable on account of V.P. Singh's duplicity and Mulayam Singh's desperate search foe power on the strength of the Muslim card. Indeed, I must confess that the top BJP leaders, especially L.K. Advani, could not have been more careful; they spelt it out day after day that they were not guided by anti-Muslim bias. Even so, no effort should be spared in future to avoid the risk of Hindu-Muslim clashes. The BJP-VHP-RSS leaders have rendered the country another greater service. They have brought Hindu interests, if not the Hindu ethos, into the public domain where they legitimately belong. But it would appear that they have not fully grasped the implications of their action. Their talk of pseudo-secularism gives me that feeling. The fight is not against what they call pseudosecularism; it is against secularism in its proper definition whereby man as animal usurps the place of man as spirit. The concept of man as an economic being is a complement to the secular man. In the existing West-dominated political-intellectual milieu, it is understandable that BJP leaders act defensively. But it is time they recognize that defensiveness can cripple them, as it did in the past when they sought respectability in claimed of adherence to Gandhian socialism, whatever it might mean, and this time in a context favourable to them. The Nehru order is as much in the throes of death as its progenitor, the Marxist-Leninist- stalinist order. A new order is waiting to be conceived and born. It needs a mother as well as a mid-wife.

[Sunday Mail, 9/12/1990]

This is Hindu India Giri, would you define the India of your dreams? First, let me tell you I am not a dreamer. I am not a utopian. I am an analyst. I analyze the correlation of forces and make certain assessments on that basis. You would never have seen a statement by me which is not backed by. analysis of forces in play. I do not have a vision of Hindu India. I certainly do not have a blueprint for Hind India. What I see is the disintegration of the existing order, then I try to analyze the reasons responsible for it and indicate a possible solution, or, to put it differently, an alternative model of development which may hopefully turn out to be more viable and healthier. What are these forces ? It is for instance, sheer escapism on our part to believe that the Hindu-Muslim problem is of a recent origin, or that it is solely the product of the British policy of divide and rule. This is a thousand-year-old civilizational problem which has not been resolved. In the seventh century Islam arose in Arabia and expanded rapidly in the West, reaching up to the Mediterranean and beyond within a hundred years and the north conquering Persia and then, Central Asia. It moved into India with far greater difficulty. The resistance was formidable and continuous. Most people who comment on these matters have no idea that Shaivite kings, backed by Buddhists, resisted the Islamic onslaught in eastern Afghanistan, which was then part of India for close to four hundred years, It was only in the last part of the tenth century that the Ghaznavid kingdom was established there. Similarly, most people have no idea of the resistance Muslims met on the Makran coast which was also an integral part of India. But this is all by way of information. The central point is that Muslim rule could never be fully consolidated in India. Muslim rulers remained for most part like military garrisons. I am not taking a moralistic position either on the fact of the Muslim attacks or on the fact of Hindu resistance. I am stating these facts as a student of history. Incidentally, while the Muslim occupation of Sind took place in the eighth century with Mohammed bin Qasim, up to the 11th century there was very little conversion in Sind. The resistance was very tough and Muslims had to come to terms with local centres. But all this is also incidental to my argument. Conversion, however, took place in India on a mass scale from the time of the Sultanate till the end of the 17th century under Aurangzeb ; the Muslim population multiplied for a variety of reasons. The people captured in war were, for example, given the option of being killed or converted. You will appreciate that most of them agreed to get converted. Similarly, like all invaders in that period, Muslims took women as prisoners and distributed them among soldiers. So they produced children who helped swell the Muslim population. But in spite of all that, the Muslim population did not exceed 25 per cent of the population on the subcontinent at any time. My difference with most contemporary writers on the subject arises from their perception that a Hindu-Muslim synthesis took place and a new civilization, or a new culture, which

could be called Into-Muslim, arose. In my opinion, nothing of that kind happened on a significant scale. To begin with, it needs to be emphasized that Muslims themselves were broadly divided into two categories - the foreigners and their descendants who constituted the ruling elite, and those who were converted or born of Indian parents. The social status of these people remained more or less what it was at the time of conversion. This is in spite of the fact Islam believes in equality? The Islamic claim to equality is not false. All Muslims pray together in a mosque. There is no gradation. But Islam could not possibly overcome social stratification and ethnic distinctions. Not only in India but also abroad? The Arabs, for example, continue to regard themselves as superior to Muslims elsewhere even today by virtue of being the people of Mohammed. To return to the issue of HinduMuslim synthesis, however, only a small group of Hindus took to Persian culture and language in and around the Muslim courts. Only this small crust at the top took to what we may, for the sake of brevity, call the Muslim way of life, though they also continued to practice the old rituals at home and avoid social contacts, like eating together with Muslims. The most prominent groups among them were the Kayasthas of UP and Bihar and the Kashmiri pandits who had migrated to north India. At the other end of the spectrum, ordinary converted Muslims remained close to the Hindus in their way of life. The best illustration of this fact is that even as late as the last part of the 19th century in Bengal, many Muslims kept Hindu names and at the time of the 1871 census no one knew, or suspected, that Muslims constituted a majority in Bengal. Every single Islamic concept in Bengal had to be explained to Muslims there in terms of Hindu concepts and practices, so much so, that the prophet himself was represented as an incarnation of Vishnu. There is substantial literature on the subject which shows that Muslims were indistinguishable from Hindus for all practical purposes. Finally, a kind of situation was reached where at the top you had Islamized groups among Hindus and just below that, you had more or less Hinduized groups among Muslims and you can say that a kind of coexistence prevailed. With the decline of the Mughal empire the country broke up into different kingdoms whose rulers were neither capable of, or interested in, imposing their way of life on people of the other faith. My other point of departure with most of my fellow commentators is that they assume unity of all religions as given. There is, of course, a transcendental unity of all faiths. But that transcendental unity is, for practical purposes, less significant than the differences in religious forms. The difference of form is extremely important. Along with it, comes the difference of culture. Now there is a world of difference between what Western scholars call natural religions, that is religions which have grown over hundreds of years in a natural way, and prophetic religions. There is a would of difference between the Semitic spirit and the Hindu-Buddhist-Jain spirit, that is the Indian spirit. The Semitic spirit is informed by an earnestness and a single- mindedness which are wholly absent in the Indian spirit. The Semitic spirit is intolerant and insistent on the pursuit of a particular course, whereas the Indian spirits is a broadminded and tolerant one. To say therefore that Ram and Rahim are the same is, in my opinion, a form of escapism or make-believe.

There is no concept, for example, in Hinduism of kafir. You cannot be a kafir in Hinduism. You do not cease to be a Hindu whatever you do, unless you choose to get converted to another religion. You can be a Buddhist and a Hindu at the same time, not only in a social sense but also in religious terms. I do not know what would have happened if the British had not come. Probably, adjustments at the local or regional level could have taken place and a new kind of reality might have emerged. You talk of adjustments, not assimilation ? Assimilation is possible only id one civilization prevails over the other. Assimilation is not neutral. For example, Syria was a major Christian centre before the rise of prophet Mohammed. When the Arabs conquered Syria, Christianity was, however, on the decline. As one writer has put it, there was a lot of cultural property lying around waiting for somebody to take it over and give it a new shape and life. Islam provided the form in which the old content t was absorbed and reshaped. That is assimilation. Assimilation in India is treated as if it is a neutral concept, which it is not. Assimilation is critically dependent on the predominance of the form over the other. As a result of assimilation, the dominant culture also changes its shape and its character. But broadly speaking, it retains more of its old form, content and spirit than the other which is absorbed. In India such a situation has not arisen. Can one speculate that if the British had not come the adjustment Would have been smoother ? Although Muslim power weakened and disintegrated after the death of Aurangzeb in 1707, nothing like a composite Hindu power emerged. The two dominant groups, Sikhs in the north and Marathas in the west, did not show the capacity to prevail on an all-India scale. The failure of the Marathas was more significant than that of the Sighs. Sikhs were a small community but Marathas possessed the necessary numbers. They ranged all over the country at one stage. But they could not establish a kind of predominance which could have held out promised of Hindu triumph. As the British power got consolidated, local adjustments also began to be subordinated to the urge for larger unity. Hindus began to define themselves in pan-Indian terms and Muslims in pan-Islamic terms. By this logic, I would regard partition not only inevitable but desirable. Many would share this view. In the wake of partition, the India that emerged could not, in a sense, but be Hindu India because, for all effective purpose, the Muslim component of state power moved to Pakistan. The army was partitioned along religious and communal lines. The police was partitioned along the same lines. The bureaucracy was partitioned and much of the top crust of the Muslim elite migrated to Pakistan from various parts of India. This reality however, we refused to recognize. What would this recognition have implied ? Recognition would have meant, first of all, an assurance to Hindus that they had at long last come into their own. The Indian elite has spent the last 43 years in trying to convince Hindus that they have not come into their own. That has not been the intention but that has been the result. This recognition should have been made like in the case of Arab nationalism. No Arab nationalist will, for instance, refuse to recognize the fact that this nationalism is underscored by its commitment to Islam. Even Christian Arabs recognize this to be the case. If we had owned the India that emerged as a result of partition as a Hindu India, then a new process of adjustment could have taken place which, in my opinion, would have been far healthier.

Was failure of leadership responsible for it in some measure? The dominant Hindu intelligentsia is the product of the Macaulay school of education. It has got alienated from its own roots. It has to an extent lost its sense of identity. It is anxious to join the Western world even if as a very junior partner. It thinks mainly in Western terms. Its conceptual equipment and intellectual baggage is wholly Western in its origin. Such an intelligentsia could not and cannot possibly recognize the reality. Was it not possible for the leadership to give a different kind of orientation ? If any Congress leader other than Nehru had been the first prime minister of India, a movement in that direction Might have taken place. If, for instance, Sardar Patel, Rajendra Prasad or C. Rajagopalachari were at the helm, the orientation would surely have been more sympathetic to the aspirations of ordinary Hindus. Nehru was quite alien to the world of Hinduism. In reality, he had a contempt for popular Hinduism'. His autobiography and his Discovery of India can leave no score for doubt on that score. But the very fact that Nehru was popular and he remained prime minister, even after the debacle in 1962 at the hands of china, would show there was widespread sentiment in favour of his policy. I would not be able to say whether it was more the result of his talk of socialism than of his talk of secularism. As far as I know, Nehru never defined secularism n its proper European and historical context. The Muslim community as a whole was very glad that India had not declared itself a Hindu republic and had set out to become a secular republic. This was possibly the result of two undercurrents of thought. First, judging by their own attitude to other religions, they could well have believed that a self- confessed Hindu India would be intolerant of their faith. Secondly, even those who remained here had good reasons to feel that as a result of this policy of secularism, combined with the pursuit of democracy, they would have a better chance of getting a share in power than they would have in Hindu India. Again a misconception. But while they welcomed the commitment of the state to secularism, they were not prepared to take to secularism themselves. For example, at no stage have Muslims shown the slightest inclination to accept one common civil code. There has also been a tremendous expansion in the traditional Quranbased education in madrasas attached to mosques, since independence. There commitment to the shariat has remained unshaken. I must emphasize at this point, that I do not criticize Muslims on these counts. I regard it as the right of Muslims to stick to the shariat. As such, I am not opposed to their opposition to one common civil code. I do not believe in imposing such a code. I do not believe in imposing such a code on a reluctant minority. Has uniformity no merit? Uniformity has no place in the Hindu view of life. Also, Hindus do not believe in abstract laws and abstract principles. Both these are the products of Europeans. Would not lack of it encourage separatism? By itself it would not encourage separatism. What encourages separatism is our refusal to recognise that Muslims are different. They have, of course, their rights as citizens which they exercise. They have every opportunity to raise in life. But that can be possible only when they conform to the general atmosphere and ethos. After all, you cannot become a professor in a university unless you acquire the same kind of knowledge as your Hindu counterparts. You cannot be a top bureaucrat, or a general, unless you grow up in the same discipline and speak the same language, at least in the public domain. The confusion has arisen because their distinctness is not recognized.

Again, in my view, nation-building is not a hopeless enterprise in India. May I point out in his connection that a vast majority of Muslims have for 200 years or more, refused to Shah Wali Ullah in the early part of the 18th century till today, that is for nearly 300 years, and especially since the rise of Al-Wahab in Saudi Arabia and the spread of his influence in India in the 19th century, there has been a persistent campaign to rid Indian Islam of saint worship and so-called Hindu accretions and influences. But, by and large, ordinary Muslims have stuck to saint worship as a visit to any important durgah would show. So there has been a potentiality for the rise of an Indian Islam, provided power equations were clearly understood. By Indian Islam do you mean a modified version of Islam? No. Most Hindus have not tried to understand what is Islam. As in Christianity for 600 years, there were major dissent movements in Islam for 300 years, particularly the powerful sufi movement, emanating from Iran with its Zoroastraian background, and Central Asia with its Shamanistic-Buddhist background. It is interesting that the powerful sufi movement arose not in the heartland of Islam but on the periphery of the world of Islam. When the juridical approach finally triumphed in the 10th century, something like a Muslim creed emerged. Islam was frozen in its present shape in the 11th-12th century. Let me make another point which is not too well remembered in this country. This is that all idolatrous practices against which Mohammed fought in the seventh century were prevalent at the time of rise of Al-Wahab in Saudi Arabia in the 19th century. The sayings and activities of the prophet; polytheism could not be eliminated even in Arabia, the birthplace of Islam. Such is the power of this phenomenon. To say that an Indian Islam would have differed from the pristine from is Islam will thus be only partially valid. There is just no pristine Islam, whatever Muslim might say and believe. However, an Islam broader in its vision and more tolerant in its spirit could have arisen if the power equations were made explicit. But this did not happen even in the Central Asian republics in the Soviet Union. The Central Asian republics example is not valid in our case because the Russians tried to exterminate Islam. Extermination never succeeds. Incidentally, it should be noted that the revival of Islam has taken place in Central Asia not through orthodox ulemas but through the Sufi brotherhoods. Thus, in a sense, the pre-Islamic tradition is asserting itself in Central Asia. Incidentally, the Shia search for spiritual life can also be traced back to Zoroastrianism. Two other developments tool place which worked against assimilation. I am not against Urdu. But Urdu makes a departure from what was called Hindvi with the imposition on that growing language of Persian and Arabia words and concepts. Urdu in its grammar and in respect of the roots of most of its vocabulary, is not different from Hindi. When the Persianization and Arabization of Hindi began, the Sanskritization of Hindi also began. At the time of partition or soon after partition, Nehru divided the problem of Muslims in two parts: one of containing Pakistan and the other of accommodating Muslims and restoring their confidence in the economic-political set-up of India. The containment of Pakistan required that on the world stage we aligned ourselves with the more powerful of the two blocs, the Western bloc. In the very act very act of not doing so, he made sure that Pakistan would not be effectively contained. The Kashmir crisis is thus primarily his gift to the country. He also failed to understand that we could not allow continued proselytization and conversion except at the grave risk of hurting the Hindus psyche. The result is there for anyone to see. I for one regard Meenakshipuram as a very critical and dangerous development. After the mass conversion of Harijans to Islam came the trouble in Punjab.

It was followed by the rise of revivalism and fundamentalism in Kashmir, though it fully exploded in our face only in 1989-90. All in all, the impression began to grow among Hindu that they were besieged in their own country. Is the Ram temple issue a reaction to it? The VHP is closely linked with the RSS. It would be dishonest to deny that link. But the popular appeal it has made has very much to do with the prevalence of the siege psychology among Hindus. The idea that the Allahabad High Court can settle the issue I regard as irresponsible. Courts cannot settle such questions. There are historians who raise such absurd question as whether Ram was ever born, whether he was a historical figure, whether Ayodhya was his city. All this is irrelevant and worse. Two facts are important in this regard. First, for several centuries there has been a struggle over that site. Hindus have been one in regarding that site as holy. The chabootra adjoining the mosque where prayers and worship have been going on ever since, was allowed to be constructed by Akbar. From the 16the century this has been a live issue. Those who raise the question of whether a temple existed on not, are not aware of the dangerous implications of what they are saying. For there is no dearth of mosques in India which stand at temple sites. Second, Muslims believe in fighting idolatry. It has been an article of faith for them to destroy idols. They have lived according to their perception of the faith . By modern criteria, it may have been wrong, but by the criteria of the day, it was not wrong. Nor can all these wrongs be set right. They are important symbols which cannot be disregarded. Ram is by far the most important symbol of Hindu identity. For anyone to raise this kind of issue in respect of what millions of Hindus regard as Janmabhoomi of Ram is to ask for trouble. The issue would have been settled long ago if politicians had not intervened in the manner they have. It is extraordinary that a man like Mulayam Singh who otherwise has shown scant respect for court judgments should swear by the court in this case. It is also extraordinary that V.P.Singh should speak one language in private and another in public. I have the same feeling about Rajiv Gandhi. These people have played politics of a dangerous variety. What solution have you to offer? The least Hindus need is a symbolic victory. The Babri mosque does not exist. A structure exists which is called a mosque. Equally important, it can never be a mosque again. Muslim shall not pray there ever again. So it is defunct. The issue is not whether the mosque should stay or not. The issue is whether Hindus are allowed to build the temple. But I do not really believe that Muslim activists are going to compromise on this question. So I think this conflict will continue. How do you see the communal issue in its larger perspective? I don't take such a pessimistic view of this problem as many others do. I do not believe that we are in anything like the 1946-47 situation. Communal riots have taken place and more riots may take place. But I see the situation differently. I see it in terms of a redefinition of Indian politics of which this controversy has become a major instrument. My assessment falls into two parts. First, the existing order is in a pretty bad shape. It is not only that one-tenth of members of Parliament have formed the government. It is not only that horse trading has taken place, in new Delhi, Ahmedabad, Patna and Lucknow. There has been a general decline in the quality of our democracy. Indeed, our slogans no longer keep pace with reality. For the past 20 years, money earned through smuggling, bootlegging and muscle power have been significant factors

influencing the course of elections. And yet all the time we have talked of the nexus between politics and big business. I am not suggesting that big business does not have any influence on politics in a subterranean manner. I am suggesting a new element has entered the situation, which is called criminalization of politics. In U.P. and Bihar a large number of MLAs have criminal records. The crimes include charges of murder. Mafia dons have become extremely influential. I for one, am not surprised at this development. But that is another story. As of the other pillars of our system - secularism and socialism - the communal situation is precarious and nothing more need be said about it. And socialism, as is well known, has produced a parallel black money economy of unprecedented proportions. I do not see any signs of improvement in that situation. One reason for all these developments is the denigration by the power elites of traditional mores. Everyone knows that religion has been the most important restraining influence on our appetites. Our appetites have now been unleashed, and we have set for ourselves the American model where consumerism is the ideology. In view of the decay of the present political order, the struggle for the rise of a new order is unavoidable. In my opinion, the BJP represents the wave of the future precisely because it emphasizes the link between religion and politics. That is why I attach a great deal of importance to the activities of the BJP. Whatever else the RSS may have done, nobody can suggest that its members have ever engaged in anti-social activities. Nobody can deny that they are a very disciplined group. If the BJP gains access to power it would have to defer in a big way to the RSS cadres who are highly motivated, patriotic and disciplined. So we can get a new kind of policy. But the BJP stands isolated today and is confined to the Hindi heartland. No, the BJP is no longer confined to the Hindi belt. The RSS has a presence throughout the country. In western India, the BJP itself is quite strong. There is widespread speculation that if an election is held tomorrow, the BJP would sweep in Gujarat and do reasonably well in Maharashtra. The main check on the BJP in Maharashtra is the personality of Sharad Pawar. In Tamil Nadu. Hindu organizations are beginning to do well. In Karnataka, the BJP is gaining in influence. In north India, its presence is quite strong. The next place where it will consolidate itself will be U.P., epicenter of the MandirMasjid storm. That the BJP is isolated among the established political organizations and the Westernized intellectual elite is not only logical in view of what I have said but also desirable. It is logical because all other parties, including the Congress, represent the status quo; the BJP alone stands for a new order which is rooted in the country's cultural past. And it is a desirable one, that it helps avoid an erosion, as in the past, of the BJP's identity, commitment and programme. [The Daily, 23/12/1990, with J.D.Singh]

Appendix 2. Ram Swarup on Indian secularism

I gladly leave the last world to Ram Swarup. By way of introduction, let me quote the first part of Arun Shourie's article Fomenting reaction, concerning the ban on the Hindi translation of Ram Swarup's book understanding Islam through Hadis: Ram Swarup, now in his seventies, is a scholar of the first rank. In the 1950's when our intellectuals were singing paeans to Marxism and to Mao in particular, he wrote critiques of communism and of the actual-that is, dismal - performance of communist governments. He showed that the sacrifices which the people were being compelled to make, had nothing to do with building a new society in which at some future date they would be the heirs of milk and honey. On the contrary, the sacrifices were nothing but the results of terrorism, pure and simpleof state terrorism, to use the expression our progressive use for all governments save the governments which have used it most brutally and most extensively. And that this terror was being deployed for one reason alone: to ensure total dominance, and that in perpetuity, for the narrowest of oligarchies. He showed that the claims to efficiency and productivity, to equitable distribution and to high morale which were being made by these governments, and even more so by their apologists and propagandists in countries such as India, were wholly unsustainable, that in fact they were fabrications. Today, anyone reading those critiques would characterize them as prophetic. But thirty years ago so noxious was the intellectual climate in India that all he got was abuse, and ostracism. "His work of Hinduism and on Islam and Christianity has been equally scholarly. And what is more pertinent to the point I want to urge, it has been equally prophetic. No one has ever refuted him on facts, but many have sought to smear him and his writing. They have thereby transmuted his work from mere scholarship into warning".

Seeing through Indian secularism The country's political atmosphere is rent with anti communal slogans. There are deafening warnings against the threat to India'ssecularism. Everywhere there is a gushing love for the minorities and a hearty condemnation of the forces of communalism as incarnated in the VHP, the RSS and the BJP. The parties and personalities who not long ago opposed India's struggle for freedom and unity are fully in the campaign. The Left intellectuals who dominate the media lead the Chorus; Muslim fundamentalism provides the political sinews and the street strength; that section of the press which had British connections (like the Statesman and the Times of India) is still carrying on the old tradition either out of habit or old loyalty or for sheer consistency. The warnings against communalism are not new. They have a familiar feature of the postindependence period. They have been sounded partly to keep the warners in form, and partly because they have been the stock-in-trade of slick intellectuals in search of a progressive image and of skillful politicians in search of easy votes. But this time one also notices a new urgency and shrillness in the alarm bells. It seems it is no longer a put-up affair and the warners feel really endangered. It also appears that this time the danger is not felt to be against the Muslims- their adopted ward- but against themselves. For what has begun to be attacked is not Muslim fundamentalism but pseudo-secularism itself. A great threat indeed to those secularistcommunists in India whose model show-piece in Europe is in ruins and whose ideology and the very way of thinking are under great questioning. Though borrowed from the West, secularism in India served a different end. In the West, it was directed against the clergy, tyrannical rulers, and had therefore a liberating role; in India, it was designed and actually used by Macaulayites to keep down the Hindus, the victims of two successive imperialisms expending over a thousand years. In the West, it opposed the Church which claimed to be the sole custodian of truth, which took upon itself the responsibility of dictating science and ordering thought, which decided when the world was created, whether the

earth is flat or round, whether the sun or the earth moves round the other, which gave definitive conclusions on all matters and punished and dissent. But in India, secularism was directed against Hinduism which made no such claims, which laid down no dogmas and punished no dissent, which fully accepted the role of reason and unhampered inquiry in all matters, spiritual and secular; which encouraged viewing things from multiple angles - Syadvada (for which there is 323 no true English word) was only a part of this larger speculative and venturesome approach. There is yet another difference. In the West, the struggle for secularism called for sacrifice and suffering-remember the imprisonments, the stakes, the Index; remember the condemnation of Galileo; remember how Bruno, Lucilio Vanini, Francis Kett, Bartholomew Legate, Wightman and others were burnt at the stake. But in India secularism has been a part of the Establishment, first of the British and then of our own self-alienated rulers. It has been used against Hinduism which 323 has nourished a great spirit and culture of tolerance, free inquiry and intellectual . Syadvada literally means perhaps-ism. Approximate translations could be cognitive [as opposed to moral] relativism,viewpointly pluralism. The dictionary translations and spiritual integrity. Such a culture deserves to be honoured and owned and cherished by its inheritors, but unfortunately under a great misconception it is held in odium and it is being denied and disowned by a self-forgetful nation. Secularism has become a name for showing one's distance from this great religion and culture. Macaulayites and Marxists also use it for Hindubaiting. Now turning away from this larger aspect and looking at it in its present context, we find that secularism is quite a profitable business. Even more than patriotism, it has become a refuge of many shady characters of various descriptions Ambitious politicians resort to it for vote-catching; intellectuals, many of them not too intellectual, use it for self-aggrandizement . But the slogan has been so often used that it has become hackneyed; and considering the contexts in which it is used, it also sounds hypocritical; by a too reckless use, it has even lost its abusive power. Religious harmony is a desirable thing. But it takes two to play the game. Unfortunately such a sentiment holds a low position in Islamic theology. The situation is made more complicated by certain historical factors into which we need not go here. The immediately preceding British period added its own difficulty. More than the policy of divide and rule, the British followed another favourite policy, the policy of creating privileged enclaves and ruling the masses with the help of those policies were embraced in their fullness by our new rulers-the rules of the game did not change simple because the British left. They have a vested interest in consolidated minorities and minorityism. Consolidated minorities can be used against a notional majority which can be further fragmented and rendered powerless a la Mandalisation and other such devices. In his book My Eleven Years With Fakhruddin Ahmad, Mr. Fazle Ahmed Rehmany quotes an incident which throws interesting light on the psychology of secularism and its need to keep Muslims in isolation and in a sort of protective custody. During the Emergency period, some followers of the jama'at-e-Islami found themselves in the same jail as the members of RSS; here they began to discover that the latter were no monsters as described by the nationalistand secularist propaganda. Therefore they began to think better of the Hindus. This alarmed the secularists and the interested Maulvis. Some Maulvis belonging to the Jama'at-ul-Ulema-i-Hind met President Fakhruddin Ahmad, and reported to him about the growing rapport between the members of the two communities. This stunned the President and he said that this boded an ominous future for Congress Muslim leaders, and he promised that "he would speak to Indiraji about this dangerous development and ensure that Muslims remain Muslims." Different political parties have a vested interest in Muslims retaining their Hindu phobia. This phobia is a treasure trove of votes for them-or, at least, this is what they believe. It is unfortunate that the Muslims have not thrown up leaders who stop playing the anti-Hindu game of some Hindus. It can bring no religious amity. What Islam needs is an introspective leadership, a leadership which is prepared to have a fresh look at its traditional doctrines and approaches. It must give up its religious

arrogance and its fundamentalism, its basic categories of believers and infidels, its imperialist theories of Zimmis and Jizya, its belief that it has appeared with a divine mission to replace all other religions and modes or worship. [Published with some editing in Indian Express, 2/1/1991]

Notes: 1. Published by Voice of India, Delhi 1990. So far the only book by a non-Indian on the Ayodhya controversy. 2. See the authoritative articles by B.B. Lal (Manthan, 10/1990) and S.P. Gupta (Indian Express, 2/12/1990), and annexure 28 to the VHP document Evidence for the Ram Janmabhoomi Mandir. 3. The Political Abuse of History : Babri Masjid / Rama Janmabhoomi Dispute, published by the Centre for Historical Studies of Jawaharlal Nehru University, and in Times of India, 6/11/89. 4. Ram Janmabhoomi : Muslim Testimony, published in the Lucknow edition of The Pioneer, 5/2/90, and slightly modified in Indian Express, 26/02/90. 5. Indian Express, 27/3/90. After that, more evidence has come to light including a text by Aurangzeb's granddaughter from the early 18th century, and one by a local Qazi from 1735 (see the VHP document Evidence for the Ram Janmabhoomi Mandir, ch.3). But at least the testimony presented by A.K. Chatterjee and by Harsh Narain was known to the pro-Babri polemists since spring 1990. 6. see Harsh Narain : op.cit., and Arun Shourie : Hideaway Communalism, published as ch.13 of his Religion in Politics (Roli Books, Delhi 1989); both included in Hindu Temples : What Happened to Them (Voice of India, Delhi 1990). 7. In her book : The Secular Emperor Babar, Lokgeet Prakashan, Sirhind 1977 ; dealt with in ch.1.7. of my Ram Janmabhoomi vs. Babri Masjid. 8. The Ayodhya Controversy : Where Lies the Truth?, published as ch.3 of A.A. Engineer (ed.); Babri Masjid Ram Janmabhoomi Controversy (Delhi 1990). Worked out more fully in Sushil Srivastava : The Disputed Mosque. Vistaar Publ., Delhi 1991. A long excerpt was published in Sunday, 6/1/1991. 9. This refusal to face both the relevant archaeological and documentary evidence to date certainly counts for the JNU historians, R.S. Sharma, Gyanendra Pandey, and most secularist journalists. Syed Shahabuddin has made a few unconvincing attempts to discredit a small part of the documentary evidence. Gyanendra Pandey's book The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (Oxford University Press 1990), dealing with nearby Varanasi in just the period when the British are alleged to have launched the Ram Janmabhoomi rumour, doesn't give any indication that the British constructed such rumours (let alone communalism). A.A. Engineer makes a distinction, in the introduction to his op.cit., p.7., between the belief that Mohammed was born (history) and the belief that he was the Prophet (theology). But, taking Jesus as a better illustration, there is apart from the belief that he was born and the belief that he was the Saviour, also the popular belief that he was born in a stable in Bethlehem, which is till today a Christian place of pilgrimages, protected by the Israeli government : this belief is neither a matter of history nor of theology. 10. pioneer, 11/11/90. 11. The Jews have not only been persecuted by Hitler and by Mohammed (who chased out two and massacred one of the three Jewish clans in Medina) : Stalin's last persecution campaign, mercifully aborted by his death, was directed against the Jews. Until glasnost, merely teaching Hebrew was punished with years of forced labour. The anti- Jewish

12. 13.

14. 15.

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combine of Islam and Stalinism is reflected in India : those Muslims and Leftists who are Hindu-baiters on the home front, turn out to be Jew-baiters on the international front. as it was called by Lance Gay in an article in Sunday Mail, 4/11/90, titled Now a Jewish 'Ayodhya' in Israel. Gul-Fraaz M. Ezekiel sums up what let to the shooting ;"According to the report, the riot broke out after a Muslim official sounded a false alarm by megaphone that members of the Temple Mount Faithful were entering the area to Jay their cornerstone. The Palestinians responded by attacking the 44 members of the Border police stationed there with stones, bottles and metal bars, shouting 'Slaughter the Jews'. The police responded with teargas but were forced to retreat. Stones were then thrown at the Western Wall worshippers for about fifteen minutes and the gates locked with the police outside." (Pioneer, 20/11/90). As in his article For a Positive Hinduism, in Indian Express, 27/11/1990. This implies in practice that even a law that fixes the status-quo of places of worship as on 15/8/1947 or on 26/1/1950, cannot impede this gesture. For, even such a law cannot prevent people from voluntarily handing over (or keeping, but changing the religious status of) a mosque. The whole story is told by Dipak K. Barua : Buddha Gaya Temple and its History, published by the temple management committee in 1981, and in my Ram Janmabhoomi vs. Babri Masjid, pp. 102-105. But in Judaism, the division between the time before the genesis of the religion and the time after that, is not so sharp. In a sense, the biblical God already makes a Covenant with Adam and with Noah, and the generations who lived before Abraham and Moses are not doomed to hell-fire, as in Islam the generations before the Prophet. The Hebrew God takes his time to reveal himself, and does not punish the people who happened to live too early to hear about the One God. The Bible books Exodus, Deuteronomy, Leviticus and Joshua give some strong stories of how ruthless Moses and Joshua were with anyone who stood in the way of the Hebrew conquest of Palestine. Statesman, 30/10/90 6/2/86, published in A.A.Engineer, op.cit., ch.30. Published in id., ch.35. The numeration in the references to the appended documents is confused, and the document is said to be published in July 1989 while commenting on a document from October 1989. Some printing errors seem to have crept in. The VHP evidence in question should not be confused with the historical evidence presented on 23/12/1990, it refers to evidence pertaining to the judicial dispute. published as a booklet by the Ram Janmabhoomi Mukti Yajna Samiti, Lucknow 1990 ; no dateline given, but apparently written at the end of January 1990. My main source for this judicial chronicle is Deoki Nandan's Sri Rama Janmabhumi, a Historical and Legal Perspective. This is a publication of the Sri Ram Janma Bhumi Mukti Yajna Samiti (Lucknow 1990), which is very much a party to the debate, but justice Nandan's treatment of the developments is factual and precise. I cannot help it that the opposite side has been carefully avoiding the detailed facts of the matter and hiding in a cloud of slogans. Muslim Testimony, published in the Lucknow edition of the Pioneer, 5/2/90, slightly modified in Indian Express, 26/2/90, and in the book Hindu Temples : What Happened to Them Ram Janmabhoomi : More Evidence, by A.K. Chatterjee, in Indian Express, 26/3/90. Sunday Observer, 9/12/90. This crucial element in the judicial history of the disputed site is systematically concealed by the secularists and omitted from their over-views of this history, e.g. in Countdown to the Shilanyas (India Today, 15/12/1989), and in A legal history of temple-mosque dispute (Times of India, 8/12/1990). For the Hindu assessment of all these elements, see justice Nandan's op.cit., and the article The Hindu View, by a group of VHP-affiliated jurists, in Indian Express, 30/7/1990. For the Muslim view, see Syed Shahabuddin's very informative monthly Muslim India.

29. e.g. Gyanendra Pandey, India Magazine, 2/90. 30. Reported in Sunday Mail, 27/1/1991. 31. The Muslim Personal Law Board declared :"The Shariat does not allow the shifting or demolition of the Babri Masjid as it has not been built on a temple or on illegal land." (Times of India, 9/12/1990) This justification rests on the assumption that the Masjid was not built on a Mandir, which has meanwhile been thoroughly disproven. But of course, foreseeing that they might lose the historical debate, they also played a different tune :"The law protects it even if built on a temple" (Syed Shahabuddin, Indian Express, 13/12), or Once a mosque, always a mosque. The Babri part in the historical debate has been non-serious and purely tactical. 32. More examples in Rape of the Constitution, article by K.B. Jindal in the Pioneer, 25/11/1990. I may add that the declaration of Hindi as the link language (regardless of whether this was a wise move), and the termination of English as an official language, which had to come into force in 1965, have remained a pious constitutional intention, actively sabotaged by the English-speaking elite. 33. More examples in Court Verdicts and their Fate, article by dr. S.N. Bhatnagar in the Pioneer, 18/11/1990. 34. Reported in Indian Express, 14/12/1990; conspicuously absent in some other papers. 35. The Hindu, 19/12/1990. 36. In Islam also, a mosque is Allah's property, and the Waqf Board or the mutwalli are only caretakers, not owners. But in Islam, this principle is extended to secular matters also, like the state. The Caliph, who according to Maulana Mohammed Ali was an Emperor and Pope in one was merely theviceregent of the Dar-ul- Islam, with Allah as the lawful ruler. 37. Organiser, 26/11/1989 ; also included in Hindu Temples : What Happened to Them. 38. "Arey bhai, Masjid hai hi Kahaan ?" meant for publication in Indian Express, but just then Shourie was sacked as its editor. The reason was not so much the article, but, apparently, his entire policy of including columns by Hindu communalists like Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel, and his own articles that debunked some of the prevalent secularism, such as Hideaway Communalism. 39. Published in Sunday Observer, 30/12/1990. 40. For a real proof of the change in the atmosphere, this is what Chandra Shekhar said in Parliament, two weeks after the Ayodhya slaughter :"I am a Hindu... I am proud of being a Hindu... and because of tolerance to all other religions, I consider Hinduism superior." (mentioned in a interview with him in Hindustan Times, 19/11/1990). The CPI has protested against this statement, because it implies that religions are not tolerant. Well, exactly. 41. Patriot, 11/1/1991. 42. Interview on 17/11/1990. 43. Pioneer, 10/11/1990. 44. Reported in Sunday, 11/11/1990. We also get the view of the Bangla Jammati Islami leader Maulana Abbas Ali Khan: "There is no scope for communal harmony." 45. Northern India Patrika, 15/11/1990. Ershad was also held up for praise by Blitz columnist P. Sainath. 46. Pioneer, 23/11/1990. 47. Column in Sunday Observer, 25/11/1990. 48. Hindustan Times, 19/11/1990. 49. Northern India Patrika, 15/11/1990. 50. Sunday Observer, 25/11/1990. 51. Times of India, 2/11/1990. 52. Sunday Observer, 25/11/1990. 53. Quoted in Indian Express, 21/9/1990. And afterwards often quoted by Hindus, perhaps too often for his credibility among communally mobilized Muslims. 54. Hindustan Times, 31/10/1990. 55. Letter to the Pioneer, 28/11/1990. 56. Letter to the Pioneer, 28/11/1990.

57. Sunday Observer, 4/11/1990 ; emphasis mine. 58. Letter to Indian Express, 23/11/1990. Since this is much to many Hindus' liking, some in the anti-Hindu camp might suspect that this letter was not written by a real Muslim : as if the phenomenon of pro-Babri Hindus cannot have its Muslim counterpart. Nonetheless, about a letter of similar content by one R. Naqvi (IE 29/11) Syed Shahabuddin wrote back that he had contacted the address mentioned but saw his letter undelivered, and concluded that it must have been a psuedo-Naqvi. Maybe that similarly those anti-Hindu Hindus are really pseudonmous Shahabuddins ? 59. Letter to Indian Express, 9/11/1990. 60. Letter to the Statesman, 12/11/1990, and to Indian Express, 13/11/1990. 61. Letter to the Hindustan Times, 6/11/90. 62. Letter by K.N. Seth, who quotes him, in Hindustan Times, 26/11/1990. 63. Communalism and Communal Violence in India (Ajanta Publ., Delhi 1989), p.320. 64. This was at a function in Himachal Bhavan, presided over by Girilal Jain, where two books were presented to the public and the press : Hindu Temples : What Happened to Them, by Arun Shourie and others; and the present writer's book Ram Janmabhoomi vs. babri Masjid, a Case Study in Hindu-Muslim Conflict. 65. His two speeches, in Hindi, have been published as a booklet: Sri Rama Janma Mandir ke Navanirman ka Prashna, by the Bharatiya Jan Sangh. 66. The point that politicians should not marginalize the moderates within their own community by treating the hardliners as its true representative, is made compellingly by Arun Shourie in his Religion in Politics, Roli Books, Delhi 1989 (1987). 67. Especially Sita Ram Goel : Perversion of India's Political Parlance, Voice of India, Delhi 1983. 68. Indian Express, 13/12/1990. Emphasis added. 69. Sunday Observer, 4/11/1990, carried an article Diary of a 'Kar sevak' : Journey to nowhere. But it is fake, it is written by a reporter who at best put on the apparel of a Kar Sevak, but made absolutely no effort to understand the mind of the people he had spied on. 70. In its 10/12/1990 issue, even the American weekly Newsweek took note of the unpalatably streamlined news mores on Doordarshan, and explained why Indian viewers increasingly watch News videos made by private studios. 71. Times of India, 14/11/1990. 72. To mr. Sardesai's collaboration with falsehood, I prefer this commentary by Amit Agarwal, in Times India, 4/11/1990:"Governments, when they suppress information in this manner, always say they do so in the national interest, that they soften things so that riots don't break out. Well, Doordarshan news itself is a riot." 73. Sunday, 2/12/1990. 74. Times of India, 23/12/1989. 75. But they have been learning. The text Evidence for the Ram Janmabhoomi Mandir, presented to the government on December 23, was sent to all the press people and many others besides. 76. For another example: the story that Indians understand nothing about sex, because,as a Dutch correspondent wrote,"there is not even a Hindi word for orgasm" (as in most languages before the sexologists took over). Moreover, women don't enjoy it, for they call love-making kaam karnaa, i.e.do work(as if this terminology is specific to woman; and here kaam comes not from karma, work, but from kama , erotic enjoyment, as in Kama Sutra). 77. In the name of`History',published in Indian Express,25/2/90. 78. Indian Express, 1/4/90. 79. Ayodhya Dispute: Tool for Political Mobilization, in The Hindu, 1/11/90. 80. op. cit., p.4. 81. Indian Express, 25/2/1990. 82. Yet, on the flap of the book, it is said : "It is not only violence which must be condemned but also distortion of history and intellectual dishonesty." What makes A.A. Engineer's

own distorted selection more objectionable, is that he realizes that"coming generations will have the right to know what the controversy was about". 83. Partha S. Ghosh ; Ram Temple Controversy : Time for dispassionate Introspection, in the 17/11/90 issue. 84. Communalism and the Writing of Indian History (People's Publishing House, Delhi 1987 (1967), p.15. 85. From Glimpses of World History, quoted in the words- of-wisdom section Thus said Nehru, in National Herald, 9/11/90. 86. Incidentally, Hsuen Tsang's statement that his patron, king Harsha, worshipped both Buddha and the Hindu goods, is always carefully kept out of secularists' invocations of Hsuen Tsang's authority, as it is one more blow to the myth of Hindu-Buddhist struggle. 87. In A.A. Engineer : op. cit., p.37-38. 88. Indian Express, 5/12/90, by prof. Romila Thapar, prof. S. Gopal and prof. K. N. Panikkar. 89. Indian Express, 2/12/90. 90. Reported in Indian Express, 6/12/90. 91. Prof. Lal has re-summarized his findings in an article in Manthan, 10/90. The JNU historians's reply statement in Indian Express, 5/12/90 also takes on prof. Lal's statement. 92. Reported in Indian Express, 5/12/90, which also mentions that mr. K.V. Soundarajan of the ASI confirms that the temple existed. 93. Letter to Indian Express, 15/12/1990. The same issue contains the letters by JNU historians Romila Thapar and K.N. Panikkar, and by a JNU sociologist, R. Champakalakshmi, who go on hammering on the non- mentioning of the pillar-bases in the first report. Well, thanks to Muhammed K.K.'s testimony, their insinuation that these pillar-bases are a recent concoction, falls flat on its face. 94. Indian Express, 18/12/1990. 95. For some more high-handed overruling of evidence, and medieval reasoning using sheer arguments of authority, see the interview with prof. Romila Thapar in Times of India, 9/12/90. The line cited by her from the first archaeological report, that the entire late period was devoid of any interest, in fact implies that the report about that period would not be too detailed, leaving ample room for so far unpublished newrevelations like that of the pillar-bases. 96. Times of India, 6/12/90. 97. On 7/12/90 also, Times of India gave to an article, in which it was cursorily though only implicitly admitted that there must have been a pre-Babri building on the site, the entirely misleading title No pillar-bases at Ayodhya ASI reports. As dr. Gupta had already explained, the detailed report had not been published yet. The article amply quotes B.B. Lal but takes care not to mention his most recent statement on the issue. The same undeontological invoking of prof. B.B. Lal's authority for a theory just recently repudiated by himself occurs in the Romila Thapar interview of 9/12/90. 98. Prof. Gupta wrote, in a letter published in Times of India on 13/12/1990 : "In a conversation with me, he has completely dissociated himself from this." 99. Emphasis mine ; date not given but quoted with strong approval in Sunday, 11/11/90. The same thing is said by S. Mulgaonkar, in India Express, 22/12/1990, and by others. 100. Blitz, 11/8/90. On 25/9/1990, she filed a writ petition in Lucknow High Court claiming the Buddhist origin of the Babri Masjid. 101. Ambedkar's contemporary, M.N. Roy, was perhaps the first to link the myth of Buddhist social revolution with the myth of Islam as a liberation movement welcomed by the Indian masses, in his 1939 book Role of Islam in History. 102. Her claim has been conclusively laid to rest in a reply by S.D. Thirumala Rao, in Blitz, 17/11/90. That she nonetheless continues to take it very seriously, is shown in her interview with Times of India, 11/12/1990. 103. Mainstream, 17/11/90. To the same effect, one can quote Harbans Mukhia in Communalism and the Writing of Indian History. 104. A ruler who has been more reliably accused of the killing of 500 Buddhist monks by his army (which, he pleaded, acted autonomously), was Ashok, the secularists'

darling. The affair is reported in the Vinaya Pitaka, in the chronicle of the Buddhist Council, where the event was discussed. These monks refused to accompany the soldiers to Ashok's court, where the king wanted to pronounce judgment on a dispute within the monk community. The monks contended that a king should mind his secular business, and were killed for it by the soldiers of that one outstanding communalist in preMuslim India, Ashok. 105. In fact, there is no real evidence of fully Buddhist rulers in Indian history except for Ashok. Incidentally, mr. Ghosh forgets to ask why there are absolutely no Hindu temples of that period left in all of North India. 106. Title in Sunday Observer, 4/3/90. 107. Indian Express, 25/2/90 and 1/4/90. 108. To my knowledge, in other papers than Indian Express, the debate has been mentioned once, vaguely. Harsh Sethi writes in Sunday Observer, 18/11/90 : "The wellknown exchange between the JNU historians and prof. A.R. Khan of Himachal Pradesh University, Shimla, reported in Indian Express earlier this year, gives a flavour of how the best of our historians play with evidence." 109. Indian Express, 1/4/90. 110. The Week, 3/2/1991. 111. Communalism and the Writing of Indian History, p.15-16. 112. Communalism and the Writing of Indian history, p.34. 113. Communalism and the Writing of Indian History, p.30. 114. Marrying a widow (or more often, taking her as concubine), in the war against the Infidels, often meant effectively "killing the men and abducting the women". 115. This Belgian king was righfully criticized for his harsh colonial policies. The example always given by his critics was that plantation workers who couldn't deliver the quota, had a hand chopped off. Recent research has shown that the largely autonomous officials who meted out this punishment, were Muslim Zanzibaris : they considered nondelivery of the quota as theft, and applied the Islamic punishment for theft, hand amputation. 116. Muslim apologists here often say that slavery just happened to be around in Pagan Arabia. But as Maxime Rodinson, the French Leftist historian sympathetic to Mohammed's historic mission has pointed out, the tribal society knew slavery only to a limited degree, if only because it was hard to guard slaves for small communities living in tents. Only when Mohammed formed a real state, slavery could become a big institution. 117. According to the experts for the VHP side in the evidence debate, on 24-25 January 1991, it was prof. Sharma who demanded six extra weeks to study the evidence presented by the VHP, thus making a mockery of this debate. From someone who had just completed a book on the matter and made several public statements, one would have expected a fresh familiarity with the evidence. Conversely, if he was so ignorant about the matter as to need six more weeks, his statements should be weighed accordingly. 118. Al-Hind : The Making of the Indo-Islamic World (Oxford University Press 1990), p.219-223. 119. Indian Express, 18/9, 5/10 and 17/10/1990. 120. Not that an isolated occasion of saying the truth automatically leads to the disappearance of falsehood. Dharampal's famous book The Beautiful Tree completely demolished the myth that the Brahmins kept all the education for their own caste, and that Shudras were kept in darkness and illiteracy. Yet, the myth is still repeated, and the book has only reinforced the Leftist rhetoric that the British (who destroyed this indigenous education system) are to blame for everything. It is not enough to unearth the truth, it also has to be broadcast, and nobody should get away with pretending it isn't there. 121. If Buddha had wanted to reform society, he would have remained a prince in his palace, because the seat of power is the best place from which to organize reform. The seat of power is the first target of people who want to re-create society, such as the Communists, and it was the first thing which Buddha renounced.

122. Indian Express, 9/12/90. 123. A week after issuing their new rules for journalists, they effectively killed the Panjab AIR director, R.K. Talib, apparently for hosting a talk about the terrorist ultimatum. Five of the separatist groups issued a joint statement claiming responsibility for the murder. They opened up new horizons in cynicism by declaring that they had nothing against the man personally, and that "the murder was only symbolical". Subsequently, their demand for more Panjabi and less Hindi on the radio was obediently complied with. 124. Rajendra Singh Nirala : Ham Hindu Hain, Bharat- Bharati, Delhi 1989 ; Ham Hindu Kyon, id. 1990. 125. In his History of the Sikhs (1963), he has argued for a Sikh state within India, in which the use of Gurumukhi and the learning of the Sikh Scriptures would be obligatory in the schools, and in which the state would actively protect and promote Sikh culture. If that is secularism, let him explain what communalism is. He rejected the concept of a Panjabi Suba as a dishonest cover for what was really intended as a Sikh Suba. Later he opposed the separatist militants, but has defended his Sikh Suba as protector of Sikh identity in some more articles. 126. K.P. Agrawal took the trouble of counting how may hundreds of times Hindu names and concepts, like Parambrahma, Omkara, Veda, Hari, appear in the Guru Granth. "Ram"figures about 2400 times. See his Adi Sri Guru Granth Sahib ki Mahima (Bharat-Bharati, Delhi 1985), p.2. 127. The following excerpt from a Times of India editorial (14/12/1990) is basically about Tavleen Singh's stand : "As long as determined killers are charitably viewed as misguided and alienated individuals who can be reformed by showering generous doses of love and affection, the Panthic Committee will continue to have a free run." 128. In the mid-19th century this was already a matter of debate between George Jacob Holyoake (Reason, 1851), apparently the first to use the word secularism as a political term in English, and Charles Bradlaugh : the latter considered atheism essential to seculrism, while the former held that secularism just means that state and religion are mutually exclusive, not hostile. In fact, that is what, to Holyoake, justified a separate term secularism, distinct from atheism. 129. One might extrapolate the dichotomy secular/non- secular to the non-religious domain. The monks' practice of pure religion corresponds to the research scientist's practice of fundamental science, and the parish priest's practice ofapplied religion corresponds to the engineer's practice of applied science. The engineer's work is secular in the sense that it is world-oriented, intended for intervention in the temporal flow of events ; while the researcher's work is non-secular, in the sense that it is truthoriented, intended towards vision of the eternal laws of nature. 130. As the antonym of secularism, the term communalism is simply unknown in the West. The antonym is clericalism. The term rightly applies both to clerics' intervention in state affairs, and to governmental intervention in strictly religious affairs (as with the 18th century Austrian emperor Joseph II). The Hindi term Sampradayikta would translate as "sectarianism". 131. During the build-up to the Kar Seva on 30/10/1990, the Vishva Hindu Parishad published ads in some papers, with the caption : Hindu India, Secular India. 132. India Today, 15/12/1990. 133. In China and Tibet, it is at the time of writing not a memory yet. 134. The term which the Chinese philosopher Chuang-tse used for meditation, is tsuowang, "sit and forget". But this is not a flight from outer reality, which is indeed to be forgotten during meditation, but a venture into the inner reality, which is most of the time forgotten due to immersion in outer reality. 135. One of the most striking examples of how naturally Pagan practices come to us, quite regardless of any dogma, is the fact that the French revolution symbolically enthroned "the goddess Reason". This personification of Reason as a goddess had of course existed millennia before, e.g. the Greek goddess Pallas Athena. Reason was an integral part of the Pagan religion.

136. While today in China, Taoism is ritualism in effect, the great theoretician of ritual was Confucius. He made it his business to register and codify all existing rituals, and eulogized the value of ritual in building a harmonious society. It is in this search for authentic information on ritual that he met archive- keeper Lao Tan, also called Lao Tse, later considered as the founder of Taoism. The postulated opposition between the mystical andprofound Lao-tse and Confucius "who propagated superficial ritualism", is to an extent misconceived. 137. The conferral of a hereditary character on social functions finds its parallel among the Germanic (as well as many other) peoples, when upon the advent of Christianity, kingship ceased to be based on merit and became a hereditary title. The one jati division in European society, which somehow most researchers on caste have overlooked, is the feudal institution of nobility. The French Revolution deprived it of its social relevance, but it has remained a largely endogamous group well into the 20the century. 138. The Buddha never said : "Down with the Brahmins ! Break Brahmin tyranny !" On the contrary, he taught about how to be a true Brahmin, as against having the outer attributes but not the inner qualities of the Brahmin. Many of his disciples were Brahmins. The myth of Buddhist social revolution against Brahmin tyranny can be disproven on many counts with the Buddha's own words. 139. For a balanced description and a largely positive evaluation of the varna doctrine by a Westerner, see Alain Danielou : Les Quatre Sens de la Vie, Paris 1976. 140. Shudra Raj as description of communism, in my opinion, wrongly narrows down the Shudra varna to the proletariat. This varna in fact also comprised the artists, a class particularly disliked by all communist regimes because of their free lifestyle. This relative freedom from rules and moral duties is actually inherent in the Shudra status : the higher the varna, the more rules one has to observe. 141. Some will not even grant him the essential Brahmin attribute: thought. All his writings are full of borrowed thought. 142. A retired Indian Army commander has explained to me how an intervention force well within India's capacity, could have stopped the Chinese in Eastern Tibet. It would have been a war, but it would have been a genuine war of independence, and the number of casualties would have been far less than the lakhs of Tibetans that have by now been killed by the Chinese occupation force. Short, for such a noble cause, a prime minister with a kshatriya spirit would have gone in. And failing that, he could have opened a diplomatic offensive. But he chose to totally betray Tibet. 143. It is of course possible that Nehru's statement was not a matter of personal inclination or conviction, but a smoke-screen for his heartfelt approval of a Communist take-over. 144. An example of a human, culturally determined belief in Mahavira's teachings, is the belief in generatio spontanea, the belief that if you have the right environment for a certain species to live in, then automatically that species will come into being there. it is not central to his teachings at all, it is mentioned somewhere for the sake of comparison, and being a culturally determined misconception, it may just as well be discarded without anyhow affecting the Jain path to Liberation. But if it had been construed as God- given, there would be a theological problem. 145. Sunday, 4/11/1990. 146. When Mahatma Gandhi said :"I am a Hindu, I am a Muslim, I am a Christian, I am a Sikh", one of the Muslim leaders aptly commented : "Well, that is a typically Hindu thing to say." And we may add that it is an absolutely un-Islamic thing to say. 147. The recent reproach by Christians that other societies have not cared for social work, can be answered by Chuang-tse's parable: when the pond has dried up, the fish spew water on eachother, trying to stay wet ; but when they are swimming they forget about eachother. Traditional societies had better social security than what the missionaries, whose arrival together with colonialism marked the break-up of traditional culture, can make up for with all their charity.

148. For those who believe in etymology, some trace the Latin word religio to religare, "re-bind", "re- integrate"; others link it with re-legere, "re-collect" or "re-read"; which itself is related to lex, "law". 149. The Independent, 7/11/1990. 150. The Hindu, 8/12/1990. 151. That it was very certainly Muslims who started the Hyderabad violence can indirectly be derived from the fact that even M.J. Akbar blames "minority extremists" along with the "majority extremists" including the BJP. Both as an investigative journalist and as a Congress spokesman M.J. Akbar has always seen the BJP/RSS-hand behind practically every riot (see his Riot after Riot, Penguin 1988). That standard allegation means nothing. But when even he cannot avoid mentioning minority extremists, you can be sure they were there. 152. The Statesman, 11/12/1990. Emphasis added. 153. A Muslim lawyer declared :"Actually the educated Muslims have not been too happy about the tenor of Mulayam Singh' speeches at his anti-communalism rallies. Such intemperate language can only annoy the Hindus and deepen the Hindu-Muslim divide. We also realize that he is after the Muslim vote. his motives are very suspect." (cited in The Week, 28/10/1990. 154. Times of India, 7/10/1990. Emphasis added by Muslim India, which reproduces the article in its 12/1990 issue. 155. Times of India, 7/10/1990, included in the 12/1990 issue of Muslim India. 156. Muslim India, 12/1990, p.555. 157. Samachar Post 3/11/1990. Remark the belief in mantra magic: a slogan is uttered, and hocus pocus, a bomb explodes. 158. Indian Express, 30/10/1990. Emphasis added. 159. Indian Express, 30/10/1990. 160. The name is mentioned in the Patriot, 12/12/1990. 161. On 11/12/1990, the Censor Board banned the inclusion of a news story on the illegal arms manufacturing in U.P., in the Observer News Channel video magazine. The same day, a team of another video news company, Kalachakra was barred from entering riot-hit Aligarh. 162. India Today, 15/1/1990. 163. Reported in Times of India,17/12/1990. 164. Organiser,6/1/1990.It is unclear whether these are literal quotes. 165. Times of India, 12/12/1990. 166. The Hindu,9/12/1990. 167. Times of India, 14/12/1990. 168. Policemen also complain that families of riot victims get Rs. one lakh compensation (at least those of autumn 1990 in U.P.), while their own families would get only Rs 20,000. 169. Reported in Times of India, 12/12/1990. 170. Times of India, 16/12/1990. 171. Patriot, 21/12/1990. 172. Indian Express, 13/12/1990. 173. According to Frontline, 22/12/1990, the Hyderabad violence of 1978 was triggered by the rape of a Muslim woman and the killing of her husband in a police station. That may of course not be the entire story, but I am willing to believe that those things which in history have been done on a massive scale by self- righteous conquerors, and that are being done frequently by policemen and soldiers in Pakistan and Bangladesh (like extortion, rape and murder of members of a minority community), sometimes even happen in India. 174. Indian Express, 9/12/1990. 175. During Friday noon prayers on 14/12/1990 in the Delhi Jama Masjid. Reported in Times of India, 15/12/1990. 176. Times of India, 23/12/1990. 177. Sunday Observer, 23/12/1990.

178. In a rabidly communalist article in the secularist paper Mainstream (5/1/1991), N.A. Ansari demands :"The Muslims must be provided at least 30% jobs in government, semi-government sectors including the military, the police, the administration and the judiciary." 179. Indian Express, 2-3/1/1991. 180. The Hindu, 9/12/1990. 181. Times of India, 23/12/1990. 182. Frontline, 22/12/1990. 183. As Frontline puts it in its 27/10/1990 editorial :"The minorities feel threatened and insecure, as is evident from the reaction of Muslims to the rath yatra and the Ram jyoti processions."This reaction was absent in the case of the rathyatra, perhaps due to large safety measures and the intimidatingly vast numbers of Hindus assembled. But what Frontline so prudishly calls the reaction of Muslims to the Ram jyoti processions, was in many cases bomb attacks. 184. This scenario is confirmed by M.J. Akbar in The Hitler Nerve, in Illustrated Weekly of India, 22/12/1990. He tries to portray it as the model for the 1990 BJP behaviour ; but drawing a parallel with the Khalistani tactics and with riot-fomenting by Muslim extremists fits the facts better. 185. The Hindu, 19/12/1990. 186. There is an exception : in Pakistan, the census figures register an unexplained decline of 0.09% between 1971 and 1981. But anyway, in East Pakistan/Bangla Desh, the Muslim population has risen 10% from 1951 to 1981, at a constant tempo. In the Subcontinent, there has been an increase of about 1.5% per 10 years, with the rate of increase itself gradually increasing. Between 1971 and 1981, the Muslim community was the only one to gain in percentage, at the expense of all others, mostly of the Hindus. 187. In his article "Why the riots always start with attack on Hindus"(Organiser, 13/1/1991), P.S. Yog builds a strong case for the assumption made in the title. He also quotes F.K. Khan Durrani (Meaning of Pakistan) saying : "The creation of Pakistan was necessary as a base for conquering the rest of India", and Jayaprakash Narayan remarking that the aim of communal riots seemed to be to secure a second partition of the country. 188. Riot reporting is unreliable because it is largely monopolized by investigative journalists who know before they leave for the riot-hit area, systematically and often unjustly blamed, it is because Hindu society somehow does not breed any capable journalists and fact- finders who combine a basic commitment to Hindu culture with a disciplined professionalism and objectivity. 189. See their pamphlet on the Jamshedpur riots report, or their list of favourable Court verdicts, What High Courts Say on RSS. 190. K.R. Malkani gives, in his The RSS Story, p.144, in a long list of good deeds or cases of non-involvement in evil deeds, just two examples of the RSS doing everything in its power to control riots and restore order, and in one of the two they had been dragged in by members of the Shia community asking for help. This leaves one case of active intervention. 191. Taking Khushwant Singh's lead, I will grant that the RSS and BJP workers have played a decisive role in limiting the damage and saving many lives in the anti- Sikh riots of 1984, allegedly started by the Congress youth organization out to revenge Indira's murder. 192. Hinduism should stop seeing itself through the eyes of other religions. Thus, in a Hindu catechism book Daddy, am I a Hindu ? (by V. Edakkandiyal, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan 1988) there is constant reference to Christianity. Many a great man of Hindu history is described as a Christ-like figure. It is not other religions that measure the value of Hinduism, but its use for human happiness. The current hostile fixation on Islam is but a negative of this alienated self-image. The self-rediscovery of Hindu society will push this hostile preoccupation with Islam, like the servile preoccupation with Christ, to the background.

193. In the case Varsha Publications vs. State of Maharashtra, in 1983, the state government had given in when Bombay Muslim sought a ban on an article exploring the theory that the Kaaba had been a Shaiva temple (ancient Hindu merchants in Arabia saw a Shivalingam in the black stone worshipped in Mecca). But in a landmark decision, the Court ruled that history cannot be kept under cold storage just because somebody's feelings are hurt, and struck down the ban on and seizure of the publication. 194. The first Latin translation of the Quran was titled : Alcoranus sive Lex Islamica Mohammedis Pseudoprophetae. Later Christian writings on Mohammed carried titles like Mohammed the Impostor. 195. However, sometimes Khushwant Singh bravely refuses to join Muslim demands for book-banning : notably when the Muslims felt offended by his own pornographic novel Delhi. 196. According to Indian Express, 13/11/1990, the Press Council held the publication from The Satanic Verses to be an aberration from the path of ethical rectitude. 197. e.g. Pranav Khullar in Patriot, as late as 12/12/1990, writes that the washerman, the vegetable vendor etc. whom he had asked, had no intention of reading Rushdie: "Nobody cared a hoot for Rushdie. In a free country people have the right not to read him." But the whole article is written to put to unfunny ridicule the real issue: in a free country, people also have the right to read him. 198. Sunday, 11/11/1990. The book he refers to, is apparently Shourie's Religion in Politics, a very sane and sober look at several Scriptures in the light of reason. 199. On 31/10/1990, Pakistan's highest Islamic court has ruled that defining the name of Prophet Mohammed is an offence punishable only by death. Life imprisonment for this offence, so far prescribed under Pakistan's penal code, is not in conformity with Islamic and Quranic teachings, the five judges ruled. Broadmindedly, the court also ruled that the death penalty would equally be invoked for contempt of any other prophet. 200. Times of India, 27/12/1990. 201. Indian Express, 30/12/1990. 202. Times of India, 30/12/90. 203. When in the seventies a Danish film director intended to make a full-blooded erotic film on Jesus, the pope publicly asked him to refrain from doing so. The pope is granted his right of expression of his opinion ; the point is that he did not ask for a ban. 204. The Calcutta Quran Petition by Chandmal Chopra, Voice of India, Delhi 1986. 205. After this, Mohammed got a revelation which allowed him to marry her, after her divorce, in spite of a taboo on the marriage of a man with his adopted son's ex-wife. In Christian polemics against Islam, this story of Mohammed and Zaynab is a classical argument that the revelations were Mohammed's own mental fabrications, always at his service to arrange for the fulfilment of his desires. Even his favourite wife Aisha is said to have mocked this all too convenient revelation. 206. In an article, Fomenting reaction, written for the Economic Times in December 1990 but not published there ; however, translations have been published in Hindi papers. 207. The reason why Nehru gave in to this demand so easily, is perhaps that he wanted to hit K.M. Munshi, the Kulapati of the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, who had earned Nehru's enmity for his taking pride in Hinduism. Munshi, then U.P. governor, apologized publicly for the publication, and even declared that every year he celebrated the Prophet's birthday. 208. Shortly after the ban on Ram Swarup's book, the Kerala High Court has upheld an earlier verdict banning the rock-opera Jesus Christ Superstar for being blasphemous. Of course, in Europe it has been performed in theatres, shown in cinemas and broadcast on most TV stations. 209. Some people fear that it will be hard to sustain this secularist policy, given the mounting presence of Islamic fundamentalism in some European countries. However, they cannot make much more upheaval than they did against The Satanic Verses. In that agitation, a few bookstores were burnt down, without any human casualties. No government has even considered banning the book. So, I am confident that even the

present wave of immigrant Islamic fundamentalism will not rise high enough to threaten our secular polity. 210. The Mahabharat producer B.R. Chopra said (or, according to Sunday, 23/12/1990, he ) that "the two serials made millions proud of their culture and religion". 211. From his Communalism in Modern India, Delhi 1984 ; quoted by Amir Hasan in Secularism versus State Communalism in India, on p.117 of Bidyut Chakrabarty, ed.: Secularism and Indian Polity, Segment Books, Delhi 1990. 212. Not that Hindus have anyone to blame but themselves. You can call it overgenerous, or self- forgetful to an almost criminal extent, but at any rate, a Hindu majority voted this Article of the Constitution. 213. Times of India, 12/12/1990. Remark that nation should have been state. 214. It may be repeated that secular is a polar opposite ofreligious (broadly), and that it does not mean anti-religiousany more than that female means antimale. Secularismmerely upholds the autonomy of the secular sphere, without even denying (let alone crusading against) the religious sphere. 215. This includes groups of people who believe in certain pedagogical approaches, like Rudolf Steiner's system of education, rooted in a doctrine called Anthroposophy. 216. See articles by Ram Swarup in Indian Express, 19- 20/9/1990, Ram Narayan's rejoinder on 15/11/1990, and Ram Swarup's final rejoinder on 16/11/1990, as also prof. N. Krishnaswamy's rejoinder on 21/12/1990. 217. Reported in Indian Express 19/12/1990. Not so long ago, the paper of the Belgian Marxist-Leninist party published an article by a historian who set out to debunk the myth that the communists had started this war. Fortunately we now have the Pravda to tell us the truth. 218. Reported in Time, 14/1/1991. Meanwhile in Latin America, some people floated the idea of celebrating 1992 as the 500th anniversary of a meeting of cultures (cfr. the cultural synthesis for which Hindus should be grateful to the Muslim invaders). The idea was rejected in disgust by both Native Americans and European- descended intellectuals. 219. The Gypsies are always forgotten when people mention the Nazi camps. They speak an Aryan language, in fact a Panjabi-Hindi dialect (efforts by Gypsy linguists are on to standardize their language using Devanagari script), so their massacre raises questions about Hitler's Aryan scheme. They had been deported in the early part of Muslim rule in India. In Europe they have been living as nomads, and they are known for certain crafts, for fortune-telling and for their music. But people mistrusted them as thieves, and that hostility was taken to an extreme by Hitler. 220. Similarly, both Israel and Korea had earlier refused to receive German and Japanese visitors unless they offered an apology for their countries' war crimes. If Hindus today demand a similar act of recognition of past crimes, this is notoverbearing or coercive, it is quite a normal thing to do. 221. With glasnost in Poland, the official death toll of Auschwitz has been brought down from four million to over one million. Jewish sources had estimated it at about two million. It is therefore being suggested that the total number of Jews killed by the Nazis is only between five and six million. 222. About the use of Hindu troops in Muslim armies, see K.S. Lal : Indian Muslims, Who Are They (Voice of India, Delhi 1990), p.106-108.. 223. Bat Ye'or : The Dhimmi. Jews and Christians under Islam, Fairleigh Dickinson 1985, translated from French, Le Dhimmi, Paris 1980. The French paper Le Figaro put it briefly : "The dhimmis were undoubtedly the colonized natives." (review on 26/7/1980) 224. Speech reported in Times of India, 1/12/1990. 225. Speech by the Math head of the Kabirpanthis in Allahabad, available on cassette ; and personal talk with the Math head of the Kabirpanthis in Varanasi. The fable that Kabir brought a synthesis between Islam and Hinduism, does not survive a comparison between his works and the Quran. That Kabir was a simple weaver who produced lofty poetry just like that, is another fable for children of socialists : Kabir was well-read and

knew his classics. There are hardly any Muslims in the Kabirpanth, and it is only the Hindus who venerate him. 226. A spiritually-minded friend of mine had read Rumi and other Sufis. He felt attracted to Islam, the religion that he thought must have inspired these Sufis. So he read the Quran. Well, that was the end of his love affair. But he continued his search. The real sources of Sufism, the pre-Islamic religions of Iran, were either directly related to the Vedic religion (Zoroastrianism), or influenced by Buddhism and other later Hindu sects. So logically, he ended up in India, and is now a genuine traditional Swami. 227. Praising V.P. Singh for his caste-based reservations policy, Bihar chief minister Laloo Prasad Yadav has said : "V.P. Singh is the first person after Lord Buddha and Mahavira to do something for the poor and downtrodden." This assumes a mistaken view of Buddha's and Mahavira's work : they considered all worldly endeavours futile, including social reform, and they saw suffering as the core experience (and their Arya Dharma as the solution) in the life of all sentient beings, not just of the downtrodden. Such misconceptions may be forgiven to a politician who extols backwardness, but not to the intellectuals who fed him this myth in the first place. 228. When Ambedkar led several lakhs of followers into mass conversion to Buddhism, he extracted from them 22 promises, essentially to break with all Hindu practices. This is totally un-Buddhist, as was pointed out at the time by experienced Buddhists from Myanmar and Sri Lanka. Ambedkar's mental fixation on hatred for the Brahmins was not visibly mitigated by the Compassion which Buddhism teaches. It was a political conversion, just like the mass conversions his grandson has been leading in late 1990. 229. The key work to understanding polytheism is Ram Swarup: The Word as Revelation : Names of Gods, published by Impex India, New Delhi, 1980. 230. Mainstream,, 5/1/1991, and Times of India, 5/1/1991. 231. Hindustan Times, 6/1/1991, with reference to Abd al-Aziz Sayed al-Ahl:Khalifa alZahid Umar bin al-Aziz, Cairo. 232. e.g. A.A. Engineer has devoted a chapter to Islamic tolerance in his book Communalism and Communal Violence in India, Ajanta Publ., Delhi 1989. In it, he parades the classics oftolerance in the Quran and early Islamic history. 233. In Arabia, in the century preceding Islam, they had persecuted the Christians, in a joint revenge action together with other religious communities that were persecuted in the Christian Byzantine empire, including the Nestorian Christian heretics. 234. A few years ago, the Israeli representative in Bombay (there was no ambassador, because no full diplomatic relations) declared, no doubt correctly, that it was only the Indian government that sided with the Arabs, while the Indian people sympathized with Israel. He was thrown out of the country. 235. e.g. M.J.Akbar (in his India:The Siege Within), Rafiq Zakaria,A.A. Engineer. To M.J.Akbar I would give the benefit of the doubt:he seems not so steeped in Islamic theology, and he is in the anti-Hindu-front as a secularist rather than as a pan-Islamic schemer. But for each of these moderated, one should compare what they say in English with what they say in Urdu:doing the moderate thing before a modern and non-Muslim audience doesn't prove much. 236. The Times of India, never a staunch defender of Rushdie, in its editorial of 12/1/1991, has asked Indian Muslims to "responds to mr. Rushdie's appeal". 237. Dr. H. Somers :Jezus de Messias. Was het Christendom een vergissing? ("Jesus the Messiah. Was Christianity a Mistake?") EPO Publ., Antwerp 1986. 238. Ambedkar was a nationalist, and he saw through the anti-national, colonial inspiration of the Aryan Invasions theory (which the British called the furniture of Empire). It is because of his nationalism that he refused offers to convert to the predatory religions that continued their invasion of India. He also declared that the choice of Buddhism for mass conversion was the one least harmful to the country. 239. One should, however, take into account that the word racewas ambiguous in its meaning, and could mean a people, without any biological dimension attached to it. As

late as 1947, some British officials spoke of Hindus and Muslims asthe two races of India, without intending any racial definition of these religious communities. 240. "The Brahmin of Panjab is racially of the same stock as the Chamar of Punjab", etc. "Caste system does not demarcate racial division. Caste system is a social division of people of the same race", Ambedkar said in Annihilation of Caste. See p.49 of his Writings and Speeches, vol.1, Education Dpt., Government of Maharashtra 1979. 241. It is well-known that most Indians prefer a lighter to a darker skin colour. This may be due to the fact that the lighter-skinned Turkish and British rulers have enjoyed superiority over the Aryan brown (the term is Kipling's), more than to any Nordic homeland of invading Aryans. The supposedly pre-Aryan god Shiva is white, while the incarnations of Vishnu are dark. Muslims like Amir Khusrau spoke scornfully of the Hindus as crow- faced, i.e. black. 242. such as K.R. Malkani : The RSS Story. 243. Sunday Mail, 23/12/1990. 244. Sunday Observer, 23/12/1990. 245. For a thorough debunking of the fables about the relation between Islam and the Backward Castes, see K.S. lal : Legacy of Muslim Rule in India, Aditya prakashan, 1991. 246. Samachar Post, 3/11/1990. 247. Times of India, 1/2/1991. 248. Concerning the caste system as checking the islamization of India, see K.S. Lal : Indian Muslims, Who Are They? (Voice of India, 1990), p.114-122. 249. It is also used in a subtler form, as in Mani Shankar Aiyar's article The Saffron Swastika, in Sunday, 2/12/1990. 250. In Greek, the etymologically related words are aristos, the best (wherefrom aristocracy), and arete, virtue. 251. While the term Arya is used only a few times in the Vedas, it was used a lot by the Buddhists and Jains. Today, everybody uses it all the time, though perhaps unknowingly : the honorific - ji, as in Gandhiji, is an evolved form, through Pali aya or aja and Apabhramsa aje, from Sanskrit arya. 252. Prem Shankar Jha writes :The Nazis created myths about Germany's Aryan heritage and resurrected legends by symbols such as the Nordic sagas and the Swastika to mobilize mass support. Mainstream, 1/12/1990. That this had anything to do with Hitler's mass support, is nonsense ; the common people were in no way familiar with these myths and symbols. 253. Illustrated Weekly of India, 22/12/1990. 254. This polemic has been fully covered in Sita Ram Goel : History of Hindu-Christian Encounters (Voice of India, 1989). 255. Maulana Azad and the Communists accused Home Minister Sardar Patel of somehow having condoned the murder, as part of their campaign against Hinduism, of which Patel was a great benefactor. 256. The details are given in the introduction, by Nathuram's brother Gopal Godse, to Nathuram's speech in court : May it Please Your Honour, Surya Prakashan, Delhi. 257. Illustrated Weekly of India, 22/12/1990. 258. V.D. Savarkar : Hindutva (published in 1923, sixth edition published by Bharatiya Sahitya Sadan, Delhi 1989.) 259. This scenario of wiping out Paganism and dividing the spoils between Islam and Christianity, before the final showdown, is not that far-fetched : it is being enacted in Africa. In 1900, some 50% of the total African population was Pagan, today the figure is down to around 10%. 260. Illustrated Weekly of India, 22/12/1990. 261. Mani Shankar Aiyar in Illustrated Weekly of India, 29/7/1990. 262. Actually, that was just what that Shiv Sena demanded twenty years ago, when it was purely a sons-of- the-soil party. Then, M.S. Aiyar's Congress Party made alliances with the SS, but now that the SS has become a Hindu party and repudiated this divisive regionalism, it is untouchable. 263. Reported in Indian Express, 21/12/1990.

264. The same is the case in Thailand, where 1990 saw some violent demonstrations and murders by Muslim fundamentalists. There too, Leftist "political analysts.... opine that fundamentalism nay be only a cover to give vent to the major social and economical ills which the Muslims are facing", such as under- representation in government jobs. But : "Officials in Bangkok blame Muslims for their inability to get into civil service. Since most Muslims attend religious schools, they end up being very proficient in Arabic and Persian, but not in Thai... Consequently, they are unable to complete..."Reported in Pioneer, 12/11/1990. 265. Indian Express, 12/12/1990. 266. Times of India, 6/1/1991. 267. Title in India Today,31/3/1990. Emphasis added. 268. Times of India, 23/12/1990. 269. Hindustan Times, 19/11/1990. 270. Hindustan Times, 26/11/1990. 271. Mentioned in V.K.Malhotra's speech in the Lok Sabha, reported in Organizer,6/1/1991. 272. Sunday, 11/11/1990. 273. Sunday, 23/12/1990. Emphasis added. 274. Mohajir means refugee. But while the Hindu migrant are refused that accurate description by the secularists, here the term refugee is self-applied to the Muslims from Bihar and U.P. who had terrorized the Hindus into conceding Partition and then went to the Promised Land of their own creation. The term illustrates how Islam nowadays plays the wretched martyr and refugee to claim undeserved pity. 275. The Week, 11/11/1990. 276. Sunday, 23/12/1990. 277. Times of India, 10/12/1990. 278. I am well aware that Marxists decry this formal democracy as a bourgeois concept. For them, it is the contents of a decision that make it democratic, regardless of authoritarian procedures. 279. A recent illustration of communal inequality in Muslim states, was the Saudi Arabian court ruling, that a company should pay substantially less compensation to the family of a labour accident victim, it the latter is a non-Muslim ( with the difference between the Muslim amount and the non-Muslim amount going to the state ). This court ruling has nothing to do with the undemocratic state structure of Saudi Arabia. 280. Illustrated Weekly of India,22/12/1990. 281. See his biography of Nehru, Penguin 1989. 282. This is how G.H. Jansen gives the American Jews the blame for Iraq's invasion in Kuwait on 2/8/1990 :For the Iraqis the war began sometimes in March or even earlier when the West, under the impulsion of Israeli-Zionist controlled media, especially in the US, began to portray Iraq... as the future regional power that could be hostile to Western interests... (Times of India, 17/1/1991. Emphasis added) What he conceals, is that the Western press merely commented on Saddam's own boast that he would burn down half of Israel with chemical weapons (i.e. continue Hitler's work). 283. This sentence means : We didn't know this, and it was said in horror by the Germans who had faithfully supported Hitler without knowing what was going on in the extermination camps, when after the war the truth came out. 284. Quoted by Shachindra in Pioneer, 18/11/1990, from Nehru's letter to dr. Kailash Nath Katju in 1953. 285. The only countries where Jews were safe from persecution, were China and Hindusthan. These countries' reputation was well-known in West Asia among Christian heretic sects and other persecuted communities. When the Muslims took over, the remaining Manichaeans fled to China, the Zoroastrians to India. 286. Muslim leaders like the Shahi Imam regularly threaten that the Muslim countries will come to their help, or will punish India by cutting oil supplies. In the twenties they said the Emir of Afghanistan would come and conquer India from the British. But these threats are usually dismissed as a bit puerile. The only help they are getting is vast amounts of

money, so that the mosques of this poor wretched community are far better equipped than most temples. 287. In his article At what cost Hindu vote bank ? in The Hindu, 20/12/1990, he calls on Hindu activists to "ponder over the consequences of their action. Do they want to turn the entire Islamic world into India's active enemies ?...If the country plunges into a civil war...will anything worthwhile survive the holocaust?" 288. Prem Shankar Jha in Mainstream, 1/12/1990. 289. M.J.Akbar has aptly criticized this patronizing attitude and this lack of confidence in democracy, in his India: the Siege Within. Pakistan has mostly been ruled autocratically, and it is a sick state that has already undergone one will-deserved partition. India, by contrast, has kept together, not in spite of but with the help of its strong democratic tradition. The comparison should be deepened into an inquiry on why most Muslim countries are not functioning democracies, while Hindu society has been rather successful at establishing and preserving democracy. 290. Sunday Mail 23/12/1990. 291. An illustration of the contempt of the secularists for the oppressed Tibetans, is that they mispresent the Dalai Lama's views. Time and again, they have written that the Lama nowprefers limited autonomy to full independence. He has never said that. But he is prepared to accept limited autonomy for now, because his concern is the very survival of his people (something about which the flourishing and pampered Palestinians don't have to worry), in which light full independence becomes secondary. The secularists black out the continuing Tibetan demand for freedom, because they don't want to be reminded of Nehru's treacherousness and of Communist oppression. 292. e.g. Madhu Kishwar : "The chauvinist nationalism of the RSS and Hindu Mahasabha, which found support among large sections of the Congress as well, was a key reason for the success of Jinnah." (Telegraph, 25/12/1990). 293. An example of the law that the weak get the blame, is the way the Khalistanis are blaming the Hindus for all the real and imaginary problems of the Sikhs. All through their history, it was the Muslims who fought and persecuted the Sikhs. The Hindus did nothing to them except honour them. But because they are weak, they get the blame. 294. This changed when the Chandra Shekhar government asked both parties for historical evidence. The VHP invited some scholars to collect evidence and to formulate an argumentation integrating all the pieces of evidence. The result made a very good impression on the government and on outside observers, so perhaps the Ram Janmabhoomi affair will be a turning-point in the RSS-VHP valuation of scholarship and work at the level of thought. 295. Hindus should study the failure of the Rajputs to push back the Islamic conquerors. They didn't study the ideological backbone or the strategy of these persistent aggressors, they didn't update their art of warfare, all they did was being heroic and die. This comparison has been made when hundreds of kar Sevaks were shot. 296. Illustrated Weekly of India, 22/12/1990. 297. According to Maulana Azad, Akbar would have finished Islam in India, but for Sirhindi. Akbar the board-minded ruler is a Muslim hero for Hindu consumption, Muslims themselves prefer Sirhindi. 298. About the very violent posture of the BSP-criminal nexus in Bihar, see Times of India, 14/1/1991 : Harijan militancy up in Bihar. The BSP purposely seeks to separate the communities, it does not allow upper caste people into the party membership nor into its meetings. Its nexus with criminal gangs is explained by some as just a form of social action and upliftment through whatever venues are available. 299. Aggression on Indian Culture, p.20 (Dalit Sahitya Akademy, Bangalore 1987). 300. Of course, it is only in the crassest propaganda literature that the Brahmins are dominant and therefore rich. According to a survey in Karnataka in the late seventies, Brahmins were the poorest community there. In a district in Andhra, 55% of the Brahmins lived below the poverty line, substantially more than the local as well as the national average. 301. Telegraph, 25/12/1990.

302. Sunday 2/12/1990. His earlier Sunday article Chaaranna Sarkar (March 1990) develops' the same theme, and in the months after Kar Seva, M.S. Aiyar has made his Sunday column into a continuing story of comparisons between the BJP and the rise of the National-Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP). Apart from factual mistakes about German politics and untruths about the programmes of both parties, every episode contains a few truly stunning comparisons, like the equation of Advani's by-passing his liberal colleague Vajpayee, with Hitler's liquidating his friend Rehem, leader of the Nazi Party's storm troopers. 303. Letter by Israeli reader Yigal Samuel, published in Illustrated Weekly, 21/10/1990. 304. e.g. Mulayam Singh Yadav warned for the security of Hindus in Bangla Desh and in the Gulf countries, as reported in Sunday Observer, 4/11/1990. The warning is realistic, yet, conceding the building to the Muslims on this ground is definitely a case of appeasement, of buying peace. 305. Examples are the well-researched book by Bruce Graham : Hindu Nationalism and Indian Politics (Cambridge University Press 1990), and Craig Baxter : Jana Sangh (Oxford University Press 1969). They don't notice any fascist connection in the Hindutva ideology nor in its organizational structures. 306. Walter K Andersen and Shridhar D. Damle : The Brotherhood in Saffron, Vistaar Publ., Delhi 1987, p.82- 83. 307. For a school model of dishonesty and twisted reasoning & see the 1955 speech by Nehru against a proposal to ban cow-slaughter (republished in Muslim India, 11/1990). He brings in economics and agriculture, declares that allowing cow-slaughter is the way to preserve India's cattle wealth, and expresses his contempt for legislation :By merely passing this bill, you are not going to protect the cattle in this country. In fact, protecting cows is worse than killing them:"You may actually face a situation where the cattle is worse off than before." All this inventive reasoning merely to embellish his hatred of Hindu culture. 308. There is truth in Girilal Jain's proposal that Hindu policy is the most adequate translation of Hindu Rashtra. See his article Harbinger of a new order, included in appendix to this book. 309. One may complain about the poor intellectual thrust of the Hindutva movement. But one can also see it the other way round: in spite of the lack of an articulate ideology, this movement has brought to the surface an unprecedented mass support fir the Ram Janmabhoomi cause. This indicates that its implied ideology is really the answer for India, though it is as yet only in seed form and needs development. 310. Published by Indian Book Gallery, Delhi 1982. See also his published lecture Case for Hindu State (Hindu World Publ., Delhi 1990). Madhok's speeches in parliament, of which collections have been published, were also quite valuable as ad hoc formulations of the I Hindu viewpoint or interest vis-a-vis specific issue. He also wrote much of the Jan Sangh's manifestos, before he fell out with it. 311. It is remarkable that all the writers who have published contributions to Hindu thought in the Voice of India series, are not members of any RSS front. The same thing counts for the scholars (except two) who have compiled the VHP evidence for the Ram Janmabhoomi Mandir. Thought develops independently. But social and political movements may, or may not, provide intellectuals with a platform and a network to broadcast their ideas. 312. Sunday, 6/1/1991. 313. The Gandhian anti-modern bias with the spinning- wheel, is very un-Hindu. Hindusthan had been in the forefront of science and industry for millennia, and there is no contradiction between Hindu spirituality and progress. Gandhi's retro tendencies were borrowed from Western writers like Tolstoy. 314. Sunday, 18/11/1990. 315. It is telling that the pioneering work on this topic by K.D.Sethna has been thoroughly ignored by India's politically motivated historians. See his The Problem of

Aryan Origins (s&s Publ.Calcutta), Karpasa in Prehistoric India (Biblia Impex, New Delhi 1981), and Ancient India in a New Light (Aditya Prakashan, New Delhi, 1990). 316. Pioneer, 9/11/1990 317. Times of India, 7/12/1990. 318. An example of mistaken glorification of the Hindu past, without being crank, concerns Kautilya and his Arthashastra. His doctrine that an enemy of your neighbour is your ally, has substantially contributed to the absence of solidarity among Hindu rajas against the Islamic onslaught. Sri Aurobindo, who was a really conscious and proud Hindu (rather than an ignorant and exalted one) took the unsycophantic freedom to criticize him sharply. 319. Among all those Hindu men who complain about the discrimination regarding polygamy, there should be at least one prosperous and virile enough to get two women to marry him. When the state refuses him his bigamous marriage, he can go to Court to demand the right to marry both of them, invoking the Constitutional guarantees against legal discrimination. Instead of complaining. Hindus should go out and create some fresh debate. It might even be fun. 320. By waging a casteist struggle, the Janata Dal and the Bahujan Samaj Party are not going to create a casteless society anymore than the class struggle has ever created a classless society. 321. Times of India, 14/1/1991. 322. The British (first-past-the-post) system dates back to the time when an MP individually represented his town,while now he is first of all a Party representative; it is only suited for stable one or two-party configurations; and it is grossly unfair, giving disproportionate representation to regionally concentrated parties (in 1984, the Telugu Desam Party got a dozen times as many seats as the BJP,with a smaller percentage of votes). Proportional representation on the basis national (or at least state-wise) partylists, as an the Netherlands and Israel, would be fairer. The German formula is a good compromise.

AYODHYA The Case Against the Temple Koenraad Elst Voice of India, New Delhi

Contents

Foreword 1. The Ayodhya debate: focus on the �no temple� evidence

2. Ashoka and Pushyamitra, iconoclasts? 3. The Bodh Gaya temple controversy 4. Harsha of Kashmir, a Hindu iconoclast? 5. Vandalism sanctified by scripture 6. The details about �Hindu iconoclasm� 7. Why did Aurangzeb demolish the Kashi Vishvanath temple? 8. From Ayodhya to Nazareth 9. Ayodhya and the Supreme Court 10. Mohammed Habib�s history-rewriting 11. The Ayodhya evidence debate 12. About the Hindu critique of monotheism 13. Postscript: a lasting solution Bibliography

Foreword The present book is my last contribution to the literature on what is known in India as �communalism�, meaning the conflict between the different religions, principally Hinduism and Islam. Some of the authors whose works were published by Voice of India, notably Prof. Harsh Narain and Sri Suhas Majumdar, had only started speaking out on the communal question in the very last years of their lives. We must be grateful to them that they were willing to sacrifice their years of well-earned rest to a diagnosis of this unpleasant problem. I am very fortunate in having discovered the problem at an earlier stage of life and being offered a forum where I could contribute to the research into and reflection on its causes. In terms of my own potential, I feel I have exhausted the topic and I now intend to move on (or return) to more fundamental subjects of philosophy and religion. My first book in this sphere of interest was Ram Janmabhoomi vs. Babri Masjid: A Case Study in HinduMuslim Conflict (1990). I now find it a somewhat clumsy attempt to understand the Ayodhya controversy, but at the time it served a good purpose, viz. to break the false impression that the world of scholarship including Western Indologists was united in certifying that the Hindu claim to the disputed site in Ayodhya was historically unfounded. in the subsequent years, evidence has been piling up in favour of the Hindu claim. Coming full circle, I have included in this book a compilation of papers on various aspects of the Ayodhya debate written by me between 1995 and 2002. Its main focus is the argumentation and view of Hindu-Muslim history offered by the anti-temple party. My thanks are due to Yamini Liu, Gopi Maliwal, Krishan Bhatnagar and friends, Satinder Trehan, Tushar Ravuri and Vishal Agarwal, and to the Voice of India publishers.

Antwerp, 25 January 2002

KE

1. The Ayodhya debate: focus on the �no temple� evidence In May 1998, the World Archaeological Congress held a conference on the island of Brac, Croatia, where a session was devoted to the Ayodhya dispute. I had registered to read a paper, and though I couldn�t make it to the conference due to unforeseen family matters, I had prepared the following text. 1.1.Two sides to the story In references to the question whether there really was a Hindu temple at the Ayodhya site later covered by the Babri Masjid, the focus is invariably on the case made by the Hindu side, viz. that there was a temple, and that different types of evidence confirm this. The standard question is: is this evidence for the temple demolition scenario valid? Have they succeeded in proving the existence of the temple? By contrast, the opponents of the temple hypothesis are but very rarely asked to put their evidence on the table. Let us now look at the anti-temple argumentation (with due attention to the several non1 archaeological types of evidence) and in particular to its offer of positive evidence that the allegedly demolished Hindu temple never existed. Of course, some might argue that it is impossible to prove the non-existence of something, and that it is therefore unreasonable to 2 demand such proof. But this argument is not valid: if there was no temple and no temple destruction, then there must have been something else at the site, some other history preceding the building of the mosque, which is exactly as capable of leaving some written or archaeological testimony as a demolished temple would. There is no need to prove the temple�s nonexistence; it will do to prove the existence of something else at the site. The disputed site is an elevated site near the centre of a city, quite well-known to a whole city population, so it is perfectly reasonable to expect the existence of testimonies of any alternative history of the site. Thus, the site may have been covered with a forest and the city records mention its felling to make way for a mosque; or the owner of some secular building standing at the site sold his real estate to the builder of the projected mosque at a fair price, vide the written sales contract. As much as the temple party is expected to provide evidence for the temple, the non-temple party must provide evidence for the alternative to the temple. Now, a close scrutiny of the argumentation by the nontemple party, whether by the Babri Masjid Action Committee, by the scholars representing it during the Government sponsored scholars� 3 debate of December-January 1990-91 (at least its last two meetings) , or by independent 4 scholars such as those of Jawaharlal Nehru University shows that none of them even formulates an alternative hypothesis. Not one of the numerous scholars who took up arms against the temple party has thought it necessary to explicitate even in the vaguest terms what exactly happened before a mosque was built at the site. Much less does any of them provide any kind of evidence for such an alternative scenario, even though positive proof for a non-temple scenario would be the best possible refutation of the temple scenario.

1.2. Vanquishing a straw man The non-temple argumentation is confined to two types of evidence: arguments from silence, and attempts to find fault with pieces of evidence offered by the temple party. Criticism of the pro-temple argument is usually directed against a straw man, not against the actual argumentation as presented by pro-temple scholars. A number of much acclaimed antitemple publications bravely announce in the introduction or on the cover that they will demolish every argument given (or �concocted� and �maliciously propagated�) by the temple party, but then fail to address or even mention the main statements of the pro-temple party. Thus, Asghar Ali Engineer has published two anthologies of articles on this controversy, but carefully leaves out the official as well as the competent non-official formulations of the protemple position; 5 instead he includes only a few clumsy ones to create a semblance of even-handedness. The most powerful non-official books by pro-temple scholars are simply never mentioned, let 6 alone discussed. Even the official argumentation offered by the scholars mandated by the Vishva Hindu Parishad during the Government-sponsored debate is generally 7 ignored. Gyanendra Pandey manages to leave all this argumentation by professional historians totally unmentioned in three successive publications purporting to deal with the Hindu way of doing history during the Ayodhya controversy, focusing instead on some Hindi pamphlets by local 8 religious personnel totally unacquainted with scholarly historiography. The same ignoring of the very argumentation which is purportedly refuted is found in the successive editions of S. Gopal�s Anatomy of a Confrontation, for most foreign scholars the only accessible source on the Ayodhya conflict. Even the fact that a Govemment-sponsored debate between historians mandated by both sides took place is obscured in most publications, and when it is at all mentioned, it is mostly to denounce the fact that the Government had �collaborated with the communal forces� by giving them a hearing at all. 1.3. Case study of a straw man The single, most important book in the whole Ayodhya controversy is Sita Ram Goel�s twovolume bookHindu Temples, What Happened to Them. Its first volume contains a number of presentations of specific cases of temple demolitions, a brief presentation of the Islamic theology of iconoclasm, and most of all a list of nearly 2,000 mosques standing on sites of temples 9 demolished by Islamic iconoclasm. Everybody whispered that within the Ayodhya movement, a list of �3,000� demolished temples was circulating. The normal thing to do for serious historians would have been, to analyze this list inside out, and to try to refute it. After all, far from basing itself on �myth�, Goel�s argument consists of two thousand precise and falsifiable claims, as a scientific theory should. It turns out that none of the anti-temple historians has taken up the challenge of refuting even one of those claims, viz. by proving objectively that one of the mosques in the list had definitely not been built in forcible replacement of a temple. The list has 10 never been discussed and the book figures in practically no bibliography. Even more important is the second volume, The Islamic Evidence. It is the key to the whole Ayodhya controversy, no less. Its main parts are a 174-page compilation (emphatically not claiming completeness, merely the discovery of a �tip of the iceberg�) of Muslim literary and epigraphic evidence for the demolition of Hindu temples, and a 138-page presentation of the Islamic theology of iconoclasm. Goel�s comment on the compilation opens thus: �Starting with Al-Biladhuri who wrote in Arabic in the second half of the ninth century, and coming down to

Bashiruddin Ahmad who wrote in Urdu in the second decade of the twentieth, we have cited from seventy histories spanning a period of more than a thousand years. Our citations mention fifty kings, six military commanders and three sufis who destroyed Hindu temples in one hundred and 11 seven localities�� The importance of the book is that it provides the historical and ideological context of the temple demolitions: it demonstrates that the Ayodhya dispute is not a freak case but on the contrary an entirely representative case of a widespread and centuries-long phenomenon, viz. Islamic iconoclasm. It shows that the iconoclastic demolition of Hindu temples was practised in practically all Indian regions which were under Muslim rule at one time. Historians, particularly modern historians with their emphasis on �context�, ought to welcome it and study it closely. Instead, it has been completely obscured and kept out of the picture in the whole controversy. It may have achieved mention in a footnote here or there. The longest discussion of it which I am aware of, is by political scientist Chetan Bhatt (who does not try to hide his ignorance about medieval history), who devotes fifteen lines to it: two separate lines in his text, and a 13-line footnote. He accuses Goel of �a highly selective obsession with archaeology and to some extent anthropology� , of marshalling �the most selective archaeological and historical 12

facts� , and of this: �Goel�s text uses Islamic sources to �prove� that Mughals were only interested in religious domination of Hindus and nothing more. The historical method used is 14 based almost entirely on highly selective non-contextual quotations from these sources.� 13

It is of course very convenient to allege that embarrassing quotations are �selective� and �pulled out of context�, especially when you don�t say what that context is, nor how it changes the meaning of the quotation. But here we are dealing with hundreds of quotations, requiring no less than an equal number of contexts to redeem them, to turn a testimony of fanatical vandalism into a testimony of tolerance. Moreover, it is normal for quotations to be selective (those in Bhatt�s own book, culled from writings by Hindu nationalist ideologues to put them in a bad light, certainly are); at any rate, quoting from primary sources is a decent form of scholarship. Incidentally, that the �Mughals� (meaning the Islamic invaders in general) were �only� interested in religious domination is a caricature misrepresenting Mr. Goel�s stated views; his point merely is that the religious motive provides an exhaustive and well-attested explanation for the observed fact of Islamic temple-demolishing campaigns. Bhatt also claims that Goel �provides �evidence� that the Black Stone in the Kaaba at Mecca 15

(the most sacred site for Muslims) was originally a shrine to the Hindu God Shiva�. In reality, Goel explicitly denies just that claim. He discusses a long-standing Hindu tradition to this effect, as well as testimonies of the mutual visits to each other�s temples by Pagan-Arab and Hindu traders and of the (well-founded) Muslim belief in a connection between Arab and Hindu polytheism, to the extent that the first Muslim invaders took great risks to reach and demolish the Somnath temple (Gujarat), in which they believed the Arab Goddesses had taken refuge after the islamization of Arabia. At any rate, the presiding deity of the Kaaba, Hubal, was a male moongod just like Shiva, and polytheists have always identified their own Gods with roughly corresponding deities in other pantheons. Goel explains how he always �dismissed� this belief as an invention of crank historians, until he ran into some new evidence, and even then he 16

reserves his judgment: �But in the course of the present study this author has run into some

facts which force him to revise his judgment. He is not prepared to say that the Ka�ba was a Shiva temple. He, however, cannot resist the conclusion that it was a hallowed place of Hindu 17

pilgrimage.�

Bhatt describes Goel�s book as �a fairly typical RSS-Hindunationalist text�. I challenge him to produce a similar text by a declared RSS man. Anyone familiar with the Hindu nationalist movement knows that (and knows why) the RSS scrupulously avoids this type of critical study of Islam as a doctrine. Since at least the Emergency (1975-77), when RSS activists were jailed and developed friendly relations with jailed activists of the jamaat-i-Islami, the RSS is wooing the Muslim community; its political ally, the BJP, is courting the Muslim voters and showing off its fast-increasing number of Muslim election candidates. Even when criticizing specified Muslim politicians or Islamic militants, the RSS and its allies firmly refuse to turn this into a criticism of 18

Islam as such; rather, they will denounce their Muslim target as �straying from the true message of Islam, which is a religion of peace and tolerance�. In the very book which Bhatt claims to be criticizing, Goel has taken the RSS-BJP leaders to task for precisely this proIslamic attitude: �Hindu leaders have endorsed the Muslim propagandists in proclaiming that Islam does not permit the construction of mosques at sites occupied earlier by other people�s places of worship. One wonders whether this kowtowing to Islam is prompted by ignorance, or cowardice, or calculation, or a combination of them all. The Islam of which Hindu 19

leaders are talking exists neither in the Quran nor in the Sunnah of the prophet.� On other occasions as well, Goel has sternly criticized the RSS and BJP for their policy of eschewing all 20 serious discussion of Islamic doctrine. His book Time for Stock-Taking is the single most incisive critique of the RSS available; unlike the stereotyped and sloganeering tirades by Marxists like Chetan Bhatt, it is based on first-hand knowledge, including the testimonies by a number of disappointed RSS volunteers. In spite of this, political �scientists� like Bhatt can disregard all the evidence and label Goel as an RSS man. �Disregarding the evidence� is indeed the name of the game. Critics of the Hindu historians� case on Ayodhya have so far never looked their opponents in the eye, smugly settling for a labelling number, excelling in demonizing terminology ad bominem rather than in a factual analysis ad rem. It is historiographical nonsense to discuss the phenomenon of Islamic iconoclasm, in Ayodhya or elsewhere, without addressing the question of its motivation - always an important aspect in any history of human behaviour. Yet, that is precisely what a whole establishment of Indian historians have done in suppressing the very mention (or in the case of Bhatt, at least the true contents) of Sita Ram Goel�s book. 1.4. The BMAC historians The only (partial) exception to the solid front of scholarly disregard for the pro-temple argument is the official statement by the scholars mandated by the Babri Masjid Action Committee half-way 21

through the Government-sponsored scholars� debate. The story behind this is that the BMAC officials, no historians themselves, had shown up at the first meeting in December 1990, at which bundles of evidence would be exchanged, with nothing but a pile of photocopies of newspaper articles and book excerpts stating opinionson the Ayodhya dispute, but no historical evidence. The only solid material included pertained to the fairly uncontroversial judicial history of the site since 1857. My reading is that they had been misled into an unwarranted self-confidence by the assurance propagated by certain media-savvy academics that the pro-temple case was completely baseless and fraudulent. To their surprise, they were confronted with a genuine

presentation of evidence by the pro-temple party, represented by Prof. Harsh Narain, Prof. B.P. Sinha, Dr. S.P. Gupta, Dr. B.R. Grover, and Mr. A.K. Chatteji (none of them formally associated with the Vishva Hindu Parishad except for Gupta). In desperation, the BMAC representatives approached Prof. Irfan Habib of the Indian Council of Historical Research asking him to save them. Habib collected a team of genuine historians for them, led by Prof. R.S. Sharma. We will refer to these employees of the BMAC as �the BMAC team�, for it is in that capacity that they have participated in the debate, notwithstanding their initial attempt to be recognized as �independent historians� (as the BMAC negotiators have continued to call their own employees). Now that in spite of minimum coverage in the Englishlanguage Indian press, the impression was out that the VHP-mandated team of historians was winning the debate, the BMAC team had little choice but to address the pro-temple argumentation. On 24 January 1991, when they were expected to present their case, Sharma and his team failed to show up and unilaterally broke off the talks. One could see the unilateral walk-out from the negotiations by the BMAC team as an admission of defeat. But the day before, the four BMAC historians, in their first meeting (chaired by a government representative) with the VHP team, had said that they needed six weeks to study the evidence, - a remarkable position for people who had led 40 colleagues into signing a public statement on the absolute non-existence of any evidence, just a few days before. However, it must be admitted that they did make their homework as promised. A few months later they presented an argumentation under the title Historians� Report to the Nation, which remained their central argument when the talks briefly resumed in October 1992. Then too, they broke off the talks, viz. in (arguably justified) protest against the VHP�s announcement that, disregarding the ongoing negotiations, it would stage a demonstration in Ayodhya on December 6, the occasion when the Babri Masjid was demolished. In the BMAC team�s Report, the salient point is that the BMAC scholars exclusively attempted to refute (a part of) the pro-temple argumentation but made no attempt whatsoever to present any original evidence of their own. They had literally �studied the evidence�, meaning the evidence given by their opponents. In effect, they pretended to sit in judgment on evidence presented to them by supplicants, when in reality they themselves were one of the contending parties in the arena, expected to present their own evidence. Unfortunately, to keep both parties to the rules of a debate and to evaluate the evidence objectively, a genuinely neutral judge would have been needed, and of course, it seemed that there was no neutral judge available in India. 1.5. Arguments from silence The central line of argument in the BMAC team�s Report is that until the late 18th century, no literary source mentions a temple or a temple demolition at the site. Arguments from silence are always the weakest type of argument. The absence of testimony in a particular source may simply mean that the author was unaware of an event eventhough the event did take place; or it can mean that the author had no intention of providing the kind of information which we are looking for, either deliberately or simply because he had a different project in mind when writing that particular text. Thus, poet Tulsidas, author of the main devotional work on Rama in Hindi, the Ramacharitmânas, is often cited as remaining silent regarding the alleged temple demolition. But this proves little,

when you keep in mind that in his day (ca.1600 A.D.) the construction of the Babri Masjid at the site (1528 A.D. according to the inscription on the mosque itself) was a long-accomplished fact, and that the same Tulsidas doesn�t mention any of the numerous temple demolitions even in his own Varanasi. As a rewriter of ancient traditions, Tulsidas was just not a reporter on recent events at all; he does not even mention his own most famous contemporary, the more enlightened Emperor Akbar. But in this case, there is an even more decisive argument against reliance on arguments from silence: each argument from silence against the temple is equally valid as an argument from silence against every possible alternative scenario, for none of the texts cited mentions any nontemple entity at the site. Every cited text which fails to mention a temple also fails to mention a forest or a secular building or any alternative at the site. One frequently mentioned argument from silence is simply disingenuous: the absence of any reference to Ayodhya in Babar�s memoirs. As Babar himself relates, the pages for the period when he may have stayed in Ayodhya were blown away during a storm. If those missing pages listed Babar�s activities day by day and failed to mention his stay in Ayodhya, then that would constitute a serious argument from silence; but since those pages are missing, there is not even an argument from silence in Babar�s memoirs. 1.6. A British concoction ? But if there had never been a temple demolition, why did a tradition come into being asserting just that? Usually, this anomaly is explained by means of an ad hoc hypothesis, viz. that the temple demolition scenario was invented by the British rulers as part of their policy of �divide and rule�. Even pro-temple authors like K.R. Malkani, editor-in-chief of the party paper BJP Today, have conceded an important role to this British �divide and rule� policy, which in my view is a figment of the imagination. Admittedly, at the institutional level the British did follow a policy of �divide and rule�: communal recruitment quota and separate electorates for Muslims were obviously meant to isolate the Muslims from the national movement. In their conquest of India, the British had also used one community against another, e.g. they took help from the Sikhs, hereditary enemies of the Moghul Empire, to suppress the so-called Mutiny of 1857, which was a predominantly Muslim revolt aimed at restoring the Moghul Empire. However, in this process, they used existing antagonisms between communities and had no need of inventing new ones. Moreover, it is simply not true at all that the British encouraged inter-religious rioting, nor that they exploited (let alone created) the kind of emotive issues (such as temple demolitions) which led to street fighting rather than to purely political disunity. Once the British-Indian Empire was securely established, the British rulers sought to establish communal peace, and did so with remarkable success. The period between 1858 and 1920, at the height of British power, saw the lowest incidence of Hindu-Muslim violence since the Ghorid invasion of 1192. When Hindu-Muslim riots started on a large scale in 1922, it was due to the failure of the illconceived Khilafat agitation started by the (Muslim and Congress Hindu) Indians themselves. At any rate, not one of the proponents of the British concoction scenario has discovered even the faintest evidence for it in the copious colonial records. Remark, moreover, that this scenario implies a number of highly unlikely presuppositions. Thus, it imputes a great deal of stupidity to the wily Britons: it has them concoct a temple demolition scenario when so many factual, well-

attested temple demolitions had marked India�s landscape, often in the form of temple remains being visibly incorporated in mosques built over them. In Ayodhya itself, several Rama temples were destroyed by Aurangzeb (Treta-ka-Thakur and Swargdwar), a fact which even the official polemicists against the Rama-Janmabhoomi have not dared to deny. If the British had wanted to poke up anti-Muslim feelings among the Hindus of Ayodhya by means of temple demolition narratives, they had no need at all to go through the trouble of concocting one. Further, this scenario credits the guardians of Hindu tradition with an uncharacteristic openmindedness. All through the past centuries, Hindu Pandits have refused to listen to European scholars who claimed that the Sanskrit language had been brought from South Russia during the so-called Aryan Invasion, eventhough this Aryan Invasion Theory is taught in every schoolbook o history in India. These Pandits have consistently turned a deaf ear to European theories about Indian chronology, Sanskrit etymology or Aryan-Dravidian relations. They won�t even allow non-Hindus into Hindu temples. Yet, we are asked to believe that a few British agents could infiltrate the local traditions and make these same Pandits swallow and then propagate a newly invented story about the birthplace of one of their greatest gods. The British concoction hypothesis is conclusively refuted by several pre-British testimonies of (at least the belief in) the temple demolition scenario. The best-known and clearest testimony is certainly the one by the Austrian Jesuit Tieffenthaler, who wrote in 1768: �Emperor Aurangzeb got demolished the fortress called Ramcot, and erected on the same place a Mahometan temple 22

with three cupolas. Others believe that it was constructed by Babor.� One could speculate, along with R.S. Sharma and his BMAC team of historians, that the tradition which Tieffenthaler recorded, was a concoction from the early 18th century (still �in its initial phase of creation�) , but it cannot, at any rate, have been a British concoction. 23

To their credit, R.S. Sharma and his team are the only ones in the no-temple camp to have abandoned the British concoction hypothesis, at least implicitly. But they fail to give the elements which could lend substance to a pre-British concoction hypothesis: no who, no how, no why. And no evidence whatsoever. 1.7. A closer look at the arguments from silence While Sharma c.s. leave undiscussed several pre-British testimonies which the VHP-mandated team had brought as evidence, they do mention a few other sources of this type nonetheless. In each case, they claim it as an argument from silence: the source fails to mention the preexistence or the demolition of a temple at the site. But each of these Ayodhya related passages cited is very brief and fails to mention other buildings in Ayodhya, and none of the texts cited purports to be a history of temple demolitions, so that the non-mention of a birthplace temple is quite in keeping with the project of the texts concerned, and not a telling omission. Thus, Abul Fazl�s Ain-i-Akbari, completed in A.D. 1598. Sharma c.s. note that it includes Ayodhya among the foremost places of pilgrimage, calling it �one of the holiest places of antiquity� and �the residence of Ramchander�, and mentioning the celebration of Ram Nomi (Rama�s birth festival) there. The BMAC historians comment: �Clearly, the tradition till then did not confine Rama�s place of birth to the existing town of Ayodhya, let alone the site 24

occupied by the Baburi Masjid.�

But this is hardly incompatible with a tradition concerning a specific birthplace. Till today, people can say: �I�m from Scotland�, or: �I was born in Edinburgh�, rather than to tell you in exactly which house or maternity ward they were born. When filling out forms, people still write the name of the town behind the entry �place of birth�, and not the full address of the building; yet in doing so, they are not denying that they were born in that specific building. You really have to be a university professor to come up with the brilliant idea that people who mention a town as their place of birth are implying that they have no notion of having been born in one specific house. Anyone familiar with the lore of Hindu devotional tradition would find it strange that Hindus would come on pilgrimage to Ayodhya as Rama�s city and not let that Rama association come alive in an enactment of Rama�s career with the designation of specific sites as the theatres of specific scenes in Rama�s life. That, for example, is why another temple in Ayodhya was associated with Rama�s death: the Swargadwar, �gate to heaven�. Even if Rama were a purely fictional character, the religious imagination would have created that kind of landscape, and in the Bhakti period, i.e. from well before the start of the second Christian millennium, it was the done thing to adorn such religiously meaningful sites with temples. Sharma c.s. assume that the identification of the demolished building as a �fortress� (Ramkot, �Rama�s fortress�) refutes the assumption that it was a temple; but Hindu �idolworshippers� consider a temple as the house of the deity, in the case of a warrior-deity as his fortress. The whole idea of idol-worship is to make a deity come alive, realistically: the idol is washed and clothed and fed, and of course it lives in a house appropriate to the god�s character and epic career. 1.8. On balance So, in spite of sometimes painstaking attempts to neutralize the evidence presented by the temple party, the proponents of the non-temple hypothesis have only come up with some highly contrived readings of some of the VHP-mandated scholars� items of evidence, not with a convincing refutation. Moreover, they have completely failed to produce any positive evidence for a non-temple scenario. This observation raises a few questions. First of all: why is there an Ayodhya debate in the first place? Normally, scholars only take time from their busy schedules to reopen a settled affair when fresh evidence has surfaced which throws a new light on the matter. In this case, no such new evidence has ever been presented. It is most conspicuous by its absence in the opening shot of the debate, the JNU historians� pamphlet The Political Abuse of History (Delhi 1989). Had there not been the purely political motives which drove some to declare the Ayodhya debate opened, we would still have been with the consensus of 1989 as laid down in the Encyclopaedia Brittannica (1989 edition, entry Ayodhya): �Rama�s birthplace is marked by a mosque erected by the Moghul emperor Babur in 1528 on the site of an earlier temple.� Secondly: what is the score if each one of the attempted refutations of the items of pro-temple evidence proves correct, and if the non-answered items of evidence were likewise to be refuted? In that case, the pro-temple evidence is reduced to zero, but that would still make it exactly as voluminous as the evidence for every possible non-temple scenario, which to date is non-

existent. Even if all the trouble taken by the pro-temple scholars had been in vain, their evidence would still be equal in magnitude to the evidence offered by their opponents, whose endeavour has been purely negative. Anyone weighing the actual evidence presented by both sides would have to infer that the balance of evidence, while not yet definitive, is strongly on the pro-temple side. 1.9. Tampering with the evidence Before concluding, we want to register a remark on a minor but quite significant chapter in the exchange of evidence: the VHP-mandated scholars have, in their argumentation, pointed out no less than four attempts where scholars belonging to the anti-temple party have tried to conceal or destroy documentary evidence. Those are of course cases where the attempt failed because it was noticed in time, but the question must be asked how many similar attempts have succeeded. At any rate, there has not been any attempt from the anti-temple side to counter or even deny these four specific allegations. They have also not been able to point out any similar attempt by the pro-temple party to tamper with the record. With one possible exception: immediately after the announcement of the discovery, in the postdemolition debris on 6-7 December 1992, of Hindu sculptures and an inscription explicitly supporting the temple thesis, seventy academics issued a statement alleging that this evidence had been stolen from museums and planted there. Since then, the allegation has resurfaced every time the archaeological evidence was mentioned. It has also been stealthily expanded to include the dozens of temple-sculpture pieces found during public works at around the Babri Masjid in June 1992. Well, who knows. if proof is offered, we will have to consider it. So far, however, this attack against the professional integrity of the scholars who presented these findings (grouped in the Historians� Forum chaired by Prof. K.S. Lal) remains unsubstantiated. Unless proven, the allegation is a case of defamation. In the six years since then, this archaeological material has been in the custody of politicians openly hostile to the Hindu Revivalist movement, who would gladly have made the material available for inspection by scholars capable of proving the allegation (especially Human Resources Minister Arjun Singh, 1991-96). If the anti-temple academics really believed their own allegations, they could not have dreamed of a better occasion to expose the mendacity of their opponents, than to invite an international panel of experts to investigate the archaeological pieces and prove their fraudulent origins. Instead, they continued their bluffing and shouting and kept the public�s attention as far away from the evidence as possible. 1.10. The politics behind the debate The political equation behind all this intrigue is rarely understood by non-Indians. Thus, it requires quite a historical excursus to explain why declared Marxists like Irfan Habib, R.S. Sharma and Romila Thapar are making common cause with Islamic fundamentalism in its 25 struggle against Hindu pluralism. Leaving aside the larger framework of the alliances and power equations in India�s political arena, we may for now draw attention to a significant asymmetry in the political backgrounds of the pro- and anti-temple parties. Reducing the �belief� in the preexistence of a Hindu temple at the site to a political agenda is, apart from being a case of the �genetic fallacy�, also counterfactual. Among those who uphold the temple thesis, you find scholars who did not support the movement for replacing the mosque structure with temple architecture, and who explicitly distanced themselves from the Vishva Hindu Parishad�s campaign, e.g. Prof. A.R. Khan and archaeologist Dr. R. Nath. By contrast, I am not

aware of anyone in the anti-temple party who supported the right of Hindus to build a temple at the site: every one of them explicitly subscribes to the position that Hindu attempts to reclaim this Hindu sacred site should be thwarted. Of course, the opponents of the replacement of the Babari Masjid (already back in use as a Hindu temple since 1949) with new temple architecture could have taken that political stand without dragging in the historical question, e.g.: �The fact that a Hindu temple stood at the site still does not give Hindus the right to claim it back.� Some of them have indeed fallen back on that position when they saw they were losing the debate on the historical evidence. But in 1989-91, the field seemed ripe for the more aggressive position, which was to deny the Hindu history of the site altogether; nobody had expected that the VHP would be capable (and in effect, it was not capable, but it found some independent scholars who were capable) of collecting and presenting the available as well as some newly-found evidence for the temple. The VHP-mandated scholars, for their part, have not been aggressive enough to take the struggle into the enemy half of the field by focusing public attention on the quality of the evidence presented by the BMAC-mandated scholars and their allies in academe and the media. That is why the latter have gotten away with creating the false impression, at least among those unacquainted with the actual contents of the debate, that the pro-temple case is weak and fraudulent while, purely by implication, their own case must be unassailable. 1.1 1. The role of foreign scholars It is not reassuring to watch the ease with which foreign scholars have absorbed or adopted the non-temple thesis from their Indian colleagues (whom they assume to be neutral observers) even without being shown any positive evidence. In academic circles in the West, my own restating the status quaestionis in terms of actual evidence has only earned me hateful labels and laughter, and this from big professors at big universities whose prestige is based on the widespread belief that scholarship goes by hard evidence, not politically fashionable opinions. Never has any of them offered hard evidence for the newly dominant view, or even just shown a little familiarity with the contents of the debate. Until 1989, there was a consensus about the existence of a medieval Hindu temple and its destruction by Islamic iconoclasm. Western scholars who did primary research, notably the Dutch scholars Hans Bakker and Peter van der Veer, found nothing which gave reason to question that consensus. Had they cared to follow the debate in India, they would have looked in vain for the presentation by the no-temple party of any historical or archaeological fact which is radically incompatible with (and thereby constitutes a refutation of) that consensus view. A painful example of a scholar intimidated into conformity by the demonization of the temple thesis can be witnessed in this climbdown by Peter van der Veer, who had at first accepted the preexistence of the Ayodhya temple on the basis of the local tradition: �While Bakker and I could 26

naively accept local tradition, this cannot be done any longer.� In fact, the local oral history was confirmed by other types of evidence as presented by B.B. Lal, S.P. Gupta, Harsh Narain et al., but none of these are known to Van der Veer (as per his own text and bibliography) because his only source turns out to be S. Gopal�sAnatomy of a Confrontation, which conceals the protemple evidence. More importantly, because of their implicit support to the old consensus view of the temple demolition, Van der Veer and Bakker have been attacked nomination in S. Gopal�s 27 book, which falsely associates them with the Hindu fundamentalist bad guys all while diverting

attention from the historical evidence, which it spurns as �pointless�.

28

Being associated with

�Hindu fundamentalism� is about the worst defamation one can inflict on an Indologist, and this is most likely the sole reason for Van der Veer�s change of heart. At any rate, he offers no historical evidence at all which could justify his retreat from the well-established consensus. 1.12. Conclusion Future historians will include the no-temple argument of the 1990s as a remarkable case study in their surveys of academic fraud and politicized scholarship. With academic, institutional and media power, a new academic-journalistic consensus has been manufactured denying the wellestablished history of temple demolition by Islamic iconoclasm to the Babri Masjid-Ram Janmabhoomi site; at least among people with prestige and influence but no firsthand knowledge of the issue. But the facts will remain the facts, and their ongoing suppression is bound to give way as new generations of scholars take a fresh look at the data.

1

Footnotes: On the archaeological aspect, seeAyodhya Archaeology after Demolition by Prof. D. Mandal, Delhi 1993, and Archaeology of Babri Masjid, Genuine Publ., Delhi 1994, by Mrs. Surinder Kaur and Mr. Sher Singh, amateurs with whom other anti-temple authors like Sushil Srivastava have refused to be associated; and on the pro-temple side, the Babari Masjid of Ayodhya by R. Nath, Jaipur 1991. 2

E.g. S. Guhan in Jitendra Bajaj, ed.: Ayodhya and the Future India, Madras 1993, p.89.

R.S. Sharma et al.: Historians� Report to the Nation, People�s Publ., Delhi 1991. To my knowledge, the argumentation offered by the BMAC office bearers themselves during the first round of the talks, in December 1990, was never published. 3

4

S. Gopal, Romila Thapar, K.N. Panikkar, Bipan Chandra et al.: The Political Abuse of History, JNU 1989; and S. Gopal, ed.: Anatomy of a Confrontation, 2nd ed., Penguin 1992. 5

A.A. Engineer: Babri Masjid Ramjanmabhoomi Controveiy, Ajanta, Delhi 1990, and Politics of Confrontation, idem 1992. 6

E.g. Harsh Narain: The Ayodhya Temple-Mosque Dispute, Perunan, Delhi 1993, and S.R. Goel: Hindu Temples, What Happened to Them, vol.2, The Islamic Etddence, Voice of India, Delhi 1991. 7

Available in two editions: The Great Ramjanmabhoomi Emence, VHP, Delhi 1991, and History vs. Casuistry, Voice of India, Delhi 1991. Gyanendra Pandey: Hindus and Others, Viking/Penguin 1993, p.9-10; �New Hindu History of

8

Ayodhya�, Economic and Political Weekly, 18-6-1994; �The New Hindu History�, in J. McGuire, P. Reeves & H. Brasted: Politics of Violence, Sage Publ., Thousands Oaks, Colorado 1996, p. 143-158. 9

This first volume includes articles by Harsh Narain, Ram Swarup, Jai Dubashi and Arun Shourie, apart from the main body by Goel himself. In appendix, it also reproduces a list of Hindu temples demolished in Bangladesh in autumn 1989, prepared by the Hindu-Buddhist-Christian Unity Council of Bangladesh, as if to prove that Islamic iconoclasm is not ancient history.

10

In a review in the Calcutta Telegraph (ca. 30-1-1991), Manini Chatterjee of the Communist Party (Marxist) calls Hindu Temples, vol. 1, (along with my own book Ramjanmabhoomi vs. Babri Masjid) a �very bad book�, but fails to even attempt a refutation. 11

S.R. Goel: Hindu Temples, vol.2, p.266-267 of the first edition, the one which Chetan Bhatt (cfr. infra) uses; there is a much-expanded second edition (1994) citing 10 more histories, and mentioning quite a few more kings, military commanders, sufis and localities. 12

C. Bhatt: Liberation and Purity. Race, New Religious Movements and the Ethics of Post modernity, UCL Press, London 1997, p. 169. 13

C. Bhatt: Liberation and Purity, p. 175.

14

C. Bhatt: Liberation and Purity, p.278.

15

C. Bhatt: Liberation and Purity, p. 278.

16

E.g. in his De Bello Gallico, Julius Caesar identified the Celtic gods with the Roman gods

familiar to his readers. Likewise, a Muslim commentator of the Quran (Md. Faruq Khan: Qur�ân Masjîd in Hindi, Rampur 1976, p.242, quoted by Goel: Hindu Temples, vol. 2, p.364) identifies the Arab Goddesses Al-Lât, Al-Manât and Al-Uzza typologically with Hindu Goddesses like Saraswati and Lakshmi. 17

S.R. Goel: Hindu Temples, vol.2 (1st ed.), p.429.

18

C. Bhatt: Liberation and Puritty, p.278.

19

S.R. Goel: Hindu Temples, vol.2 (Ist ed.), p.ii.

20

See S.R. Goel, ed.: Time for Stocktaking: wheither sangh parivar? Voice of India, Delhi 1997.

21

R.S. Sharma et al.: Historians Report to the Nation, cf. supra, largely copied in Pradeep Nayak: The Politics of the Ayodhya Dispute, Commonwealth, Delhi 1993. Quoted by R.S. Sharma et al.: Historians Report, p.19, italicizing the words �the fortress�.

22

23

R.S. Sharma et al.: Historians Report, p.20. R.S. Sharma et al.: Historians� Report, p.16.

24

25

Thapar and Sharma are quoted as representatives of Indian Marxism in Tom

Bottomore�s History of Marxist Thought, Oxford 1988, entry �Hinduism�; Habib has subtitled his recent book Essays in Indian History(Tulika, Delhi 1995) as Towards a Marxist Perception. 26

P. van der Veer: Religious Nationalism, p. 161. Reference is to his book Gods on Earth, London 1988, and to Hans Bakker�s book Ayodhya, Groningen 1986. 27

S. Gopal: Anatomy of a Confrontation, p.30.

28

S. Gopal, ed.: Anatomy of a Confrontation, p.20.

2. Ashoka and Pushyamitra, iconoclasts? One of the diversionary tactics employed by the �eminent historians� in order to shield Islamic iconoclasm from the public eye is to allege that Hinduism itself is the guilty religion, viz. of persecuting minority religions such as Buddhism. So much is this accusation now taken for granted, that any attempt to stick to the historical record fills the secularists with exasperation at such Hindu fanatical blindness. Thus, Tavleen Singh challenges us: �Try, for instance, to get a BJP leader to admit that Hindus did to Buddhist shrines pretty much what Muslims were later to 1 do with Hindu temples and you will find that it is nearly impossible.� Sadly, some Buddhists have taken the bait and interiorized this line of anti-Hindu polemic, which also ties in neatly with the pro-Buddhist bias in Nehruvian and Western Indology. How painfully ungrateful. While Hinduism has received from Islam nothing but murder and destruction, Buddhism owes a lot to Hinduism. Apart from its very existence, it has received from Hinduism toleration, alms by Hindu laymen, sons and daughters of Hindus to fill its monasteries and nunneries, land grants and funding by Hindu rulers, protection by Hindu rulers against lawlessness and against the Islamic invaders between the mid-7th and the late 12th century. In many cases, Buddhist temples formed part of large pluralist temple-complexes, and Hindu codes of art and architecture dealt with Buddha on a par with Shiva and other objects of depiction and 2 worship. Whatever the facts, we are now faced with a massive propaganda alleging Hindu persecution of Buddhism. Let us study one example: the story of alleged Hindu persecution of Buddhism by Pushyamitra, a general in the service of the declining Maurya dynasty, who founded the Sunga dynasty after a coup d�état. This story provides the standard secularist �refutation� of the �myth� that Hinduism has always been tolerant. Thus, the Marxist historian Gargi Chakravartty writes: �Another myth has been meticulously promoted with regard to the tolerance of the Hindu rulers. Let us go back to the end of second century B.C. Divyavadana, in a text of about the second-third century A.D., depicts Pushyamitra Shunga as a great persecutor of Buddhists. In a crusading march with a huge army he destroyed stupas, burnt monasteries and killed monks. This stretched up to Shakala, i.e. modern Sialkot, where he announced a reward of 100 gold coins to the person who would bring the head of a Buddhist monk. Even if this is an exaggeration, the acute hostility and tensions between 3 Pushyamitra and the monks cannot be denied.� We need not comment on Chakravartty�s misreading ofDivyâvadâna as a person�s name rather than a book title. Remark the bias in the assumption that the supposedly �undeniable� conflict between the king and the monks proves the king�s intolerance; for what had been their own contribution to the conflict? When Shivaji had a conflict with the Brahmins (a well-known episode) , all secularists and most Hindus blame the �wily, greedy� Brahmins; there is no good reason why the Buddhist monks should, by contrast, be assumed to be blameless when they came in conflict with a king. 4

The story is in fact given in two near contemporaneous (2nd century A.D.) Buddhist histories, the Asokâvadâna and the Divyâvadâna; the two narratives are almost verbatim the same and

5

very obviously have a common origin. This non-contemporary story (which surfaces more than three centuries after the alleged facts) about Pushyamitra�s offering money for the heads of Buddhist monks is rendered improbable by external evidence: the well-attested historical fact that he allowed and patronized the construction of monasteries and Buddhist universities in his 6

domains, as well as the still-extant stupa of Sanchi. After Ashoka�s lavish sponsorship of Buddhism, it is perfectly possible that Buddhist institutions fell on slightly harder times under the Sungas, but persecution is quite another matter. The famous historian of Buddhism Etienne Lamotte has observed: �To judge from the documents, Pushyamitra must be acquitted through 7

lack of proof.�

In consulting the source texts I noticed a significant literary fact which I have not seen mentioned in the scholarly literature (e.g. Lamotte, just quoted), and which I want to put on record. First of all, a look at the critical edition of the Asokâvadâna (�Illustrious Acts of Ashoka�) tells a story of its own concerning the idealization of Buddhism in modern India. This is how Sujitkumar Mukhopadhyaya, the editor of the Asokâvadâna, relates this work�s testimony about Ashoka doing to a rival sect that very thing of which Pushyamitra is accused later on: �At that time, an incident occurred which greatly enraged the king. A follower of the Nirgrantha (Mahâvîra) painted a picture, showing Buddha prostrating himself at the feet of the Nirgrantha. Ashoka ordered all the Ajivikas of Pundravardhana (North Bengal) to be killed. In one day, eighteen thousand Ajivikas lost their lives. A similar kind of incident took place in the town of Pataliputra. A man who painted such a picture was burnt alive with his family. It was announced that whoever would bring to the king the head of a Nirgrantha would be rewarded with a dînâra (a 8

gold coin). As a result of this, thousands of Nirgranthas lost their lives.� Only when Vitashoka, Ashoka�s favourite Arhat (an enlightened monk, a Theravada-Buddhist saint), was mistaken for a Nirgrantha and killed by a man desirous of the reward, did Ashoka revoke the order. Typically, Mukhopadhyaya refuses to believe his eyes at this demythologization of the �secular� emperor Ashoka: �This is one of the best chapters of the text. The subject, the style, the composition, everything here is remarkable. In every shloka there is a poetic touch.( ... ) But the great defect is also to be noticed. Here too Ashoka is described as dreadfully cruel. If the central figure of this story were not a historic personage as great and well-known as Ashoka, we would have nothing to say. To say that Ashoka, whose devotion to all religious sects is unique in the history of humanity (as is well-known through his edicts) persecuted the Jains or the Ajivikas is simply absurd. And why speak of Ashoka alone? There was no Buddhist king 9 anywhere in India who persecuted the Jains or the Ajivikas or any other sect.� Contrary to Mukhopadhyaya�s confident assertion, there are a few attested cases of BuddhistJain conflict. The Mahâvamsa says that the Buddhist king Vattagamini (2917 B. C.) in Sri Lanka destroyed a Jain vihara. In the Shravana-Belgola epitaph of Mallishena, the Jain teacher Akalanka says that after a successful debate with Buddhists, he broke a Buddha statue with his 10 own foot. The same (rare, but not non-existent) phenomenon of Buddhist fanaticism can be found outside India: the introduction of Buddhism in Tibet and Mongolia is associated with a �forceful suppression� of the native Shamanism. In recent decades in Sri Lanka, Buddhist monks have been instrumental in desecrating and demolishing Hindu temples. None of this proves that Buddhist doctrine incites its followers to persecution of non-Buddhists, but neither should anything human be considered alien to Buddhist human beings. 11

Mukhopadhyaya�s refusal to face facts about Ashoka�s misconduct just goes to show how far the idealization of Buddhism and Ashoka has gotten out of hand in Nehruvian India. When the modern myth of Ashoka as the great secular Buddhist ruler is contradicted by an ancient source, even one outspokenly favourable to Buddhism and Ashoka, which shows him persecuting rival schools of thought, the modem scholar (a Hindu Brahmin by birth) still insists on upholding the myth, and dismisses the actual information in the ancient source as a �great defect�. It is at the end of the Asokâvadâna that we find the oft-quoted story that Pushyamitra offered one dînâra for every sramanasirah, �head of a Buddhist monk�. Not that he got many monks 12

killed, for, according to the account given, one powerful Arhat created monks� heads by magic and gave these to the people to bring to Pushyamitra�s court, so that they could collect the award without cutting off any real monk�s head. So, even according to the only story cited as source for Pushyamitra�s persecution, the Hindu villain is a ridiculous failure at killing Buddhists. At any rate, the striking fact, so far not mentioned in the Pushyamitra controversy, is that the main line of the narrative making the allegation against Pushyamitra is a carbon copy of the just-quoted account of Ashoka�s own offer to pay for every head of a monk from a rivalling sect. Hagiographies are notorious for competitive copying (e.g. appropriating the miracle of another saint, multiplied by two or more, for one�s own hero); in this case, it may have taken the form of attributing a negative feat of the hero onto his enemy. But there are two differences. Firstly, in the account concerning Pushyamitra, a miracle episode forms a crucial element, and this does not add to the credibility of the whole. And secondly, Ashoka belongs to the writer�s own Buddhist camp, whereas Pushyamitra is described as an enemy of Buddhism. When something negative is said about an enemy (i.c. Pushyamitra), it is wise to reserve one�s acceptance of the allegation until independent confirmation is forthcoming; by contrast, when a writer alleges that his own hero has committed a crime, there is much more reason to expect the allegation to be correct. In the absence of external evidence, the best thing we can do for now is to draw the logical conclusion from the internal evidence: the allegation against Pushyamitra is much less credible than the allegation against Ashoka. Mukhopadhyaya can only save Ashoka�s secular reputation by accusing the Asokâvadâna author of a lie, viz. of the false allegation that Ashoka had persecuted Nirgranthas. Unfortunately, a lie would not enhance the author�s credibility as a witness against Pushyamitra, nor as a witness for the laudable acts of Ashoka which make up a large part of the text. So, Mukhopadhyaya tries to present this lie (which only he himself alleges) as a hagiographically acceptable type of lie: �in order to show the greatness of Buddhism, the orthodox author degraded it by painting the greatest Buddhist of the world as a dreadful religious 13 fanatic.� However, contrary to Mukhopadhyaya�s explanation, there is no hint in the text that the author meant to �show the greatness of Buddhism� by �painting the greatest Buddhist as a religious fanatic�. By this explanation, Mukhopadhyaya means that the writer first made Ashoka commit a great crime (the persecution of the Nirgranthas) to illustrate the greatness of Buddhism by sheer contrast, viz. as the factor which made Ashoka give up this crime. There is an famous

analogy for this: the cruelty of Ashoka�s conquest of Kalinga was exaggerated by scribes in order to highlight the violence-renouncing effect of Ashoka�s subsequent conversion to Buddhism. But in this passage, Buddhism plays no role in Ashoka�s change of heart: it is only the sight of his own friend, killed by mistake, which makes him revoke the order. And it is his commitment to Buddhism which prompts Ashoka to persecute the irreverent Nirgranthas in the first place. Buddhism does not gain from this account, and if a Buddhist propagandist related it nonetheless, it may well be that it was a historical fact too well-known at the time to be omitted. By contrast, until proof of the contrary, the carbon-copy allegation against Pushyamitra may very reasonably be dismissed as sectarian propaganda. But a 20th-century Hindu scholar will twist and turn the literary data in order to uphold a sectarian and miracle-based calumny against the Hindu ruler Pushyamitra, and to explain away a sobering testimony about the fanaticism of Ashoka, that great secularist patron of Buddhism. Such is the quality of the �scholarship� deployed to undermine the solid consensus that among the world religions, Hinduism has always been the most tolerant by far.

Footnotes: Tavleen Singh: �Running out of control�, Indian Express, 25-7-1993.

1

2

E.g. Varahamihira: Brihatsamhitâ, ch.57, 59. Gargi Chakravartty �BJP-RSS and Distortion of History�, in Pratul Lahiri, ed.: Selected

3

Writings on Communalism, People�s Publishing House, Delhi 1994, p. 166-167. 4

J. Sarkar: Shivaji and his Times, Orient Longman, Delhi 1992 (1919), p.161, 165-167. Avadâna, �narrative�, is the Buddhist equivalent ofPurâna. Divyâvâdana = �divine

5

narrative�. 6

The same argument exists in the reverse direction concerning the Kushana king Kanishka (lst2nd century A.D.). This patron of Mahayana Buddhism is sometimes accused of persecuting Brahmins, but the sparse physical testimony argues against this: on his coins, he honoured Greek, Zoroastrian and Brahmanic deities along with the Buddha. 7

E. Lamotte: History of Indian Buddhism, Institut Orientaliste, Louvain-la-Neuve 1988 (1958), p. 109. 8

S. Mukhopadhyaya: The Ashokavadana, Sahitya Akademi, Delhi 1963, p.xxxvii. In footnote,

Mukhopadhyaya correctly notes that the author �seems to have confused the Nirgranthas (Jains) with the Ajivikas�, a similar ascetic sect. Nirgrantha = �freed from fetters�, a Jaina. 9

S. Mukhopadhyaya: The Ashokavadana, p.xxxviii. In fact, the non-persecution of other religions, claimed here for Ashoka against the very evidence under discussion, was not unique at all: it was the rule among Hindu kings throughout history, and the Buddha himself had been one of its beneficiaries.

10

Both instances cited by S.R. Goel: Hindu Temples, vol.2 (2nd ed.), p.413, with reference to Epigraphica Indica, vol.3, p.192 and p.201. 11

Piers Vitebsky: De sjamaan, Kosmos, Utrecht 1996 (1995), p. 135.

12

S. Mukhopadhyaya: The Ashokavadana, p.134.

13

S. Mukhopadhyaya: The Ashokavadana, p.xxxviii.

3. The Bodh Gaya temple controversy When anti-Hindu lobbies unite, they often manage to get the contemporary form of Indian Buddhism on their side, viz. Ambedkarite neo-Buddhism. Because of its political background, the conversion of Scheduled Caste leader Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and many of his Mahar castemen to Buddhism (1956), in effect contributed to the genesis of what one might call 1 Buddhist communalism. The anti-Hindu bias of Ambedkarite Buddhism was strengthened by the parallel Buddhist animus against Tamil Hindus in Sri Lanka and Burma/Myanmar, as well as by the tendency among Nehruvian intellectuals to construe Buddhism historically as an anti-Hindu revolt. As a materialization of this anti-Hindu animus, the neo-Buddhist movement has tried to create controversies over certain temples in imitation of the Ayodhya temple/mosque controversy. In particular, the Ambedkarite neo-Buddhists have started a movement for the �liberation of the Mahabodhi shrine� in Bodh Gaya. Its aim is to remove the statutory four Hindu members of the eight-member temple management committee, and to prohibit worship of a sivalingam in the temple. Quite in contrast with the secularist calls for �composite culture� and for multi-religious worship at the Rama-Janmabhoomi site, this is a demand to free the Mahabodhi site from multireligious worship and particularly from the �taint� of Hinduism. The agitation has been marked by petty vandalism, as when the neo-Buddhists desecrated their own holiest site, or at least the sivalingam standing there, in October 1992. One of the strange things about this agitation is that it revives a conflict which had been solved several decades earlier. Since 1590, Shaiva monks had taken care of the temple, which had been abandoned by Buddhists after the massacre of the Buddhist monks by Muslim invaders in ca. A.D. 1192. In 1874, they agreed to the Burmese king�s proposal to re-establish the building as a Buddhist place of worship. But the Anglo-Burmese War and several foreign interventions spoiled the project. In 1890-92, Edwin Arnold, author of the Buddha romance The Light of Asia, appealed to the British-Indian Government to hand over the temple to the Buddhists, and even went to Japan to plead for diplomatic support to this demand. A court case ensued which the Buddhists ultimately lost. Negotiations dragged on, involving Swami Vivekananda (1901) and Hindu Mahasabha leader Bhai Parmanand (1935), among others. A compromise proposal by Rajendra Prasad (1924), later on President of India, was thwarted several times but finally became law in 1949: the Bodh Gaya Temple Act, which gives both Hindus and Buddhists the right to worship and an equal 2 representation in the management committee. So, the goal of the Bodh Gaya temple movement is not to get the Buddhists in (they are in since 1949), only to get the Hindus out. Given the existing compromise and the Hindu record in tending the building after the Buddhists had abandoned it, Hindus consider this Buddhist campaign graceless and ungrateful.

The movement for the �liberation� of the Mahabodhi temple was formally launched by a Japanese monk, Bhadant Arya Nagarjuna Surai Sasai. His involvement provides a typical example of how people spoiling for a fight tend to attack meek rather than dangerous adversaries. Buddhism has been eclipsed by Christianity in South Korea and among the 3 Indonesian Chinese. In Bangladesh, the Buddhist Chakmas of the Chittagong Hill Tracts have been driven out by the Muslim settlers and the Government of Bangladesh. Buddhism is oppressed by Communism in China, North Korea, Tibet and Vietnam. If Sasai had started a similar agitation in those countries, it would not have lasted a single day, and he would have been lucky to get expelled rather than locked up or killed. By contrast, Buddhism is not oppressed or endangered in India. It is not obstructed in worshipping at its traditional sacred sites, including the Mahabodhi temple, which Hindus have made available for Buddha worship. India provides shelter to the Dalai Lama, and has sanctioned the creation of a network of Buddhist monasteries and institutes, including a TibetanBuddhist university (in Sarnath) and the nerve centres of several international Buddhist organizations. It welcomes Buddhist associations from Japan, Taiwan and other countries and allows them to build pilgrim hostels and research institutes in Sarnath, Bodh Gaya and other Buddha-related sites. It is, moreover, one of the few countries where even most non-Buddhists have a sincere respect for the Buddha and his Dharma. And yet, of all places, India is the one where Arya Sasai has to �liberate� Buddhism from Hindu �oppression�. Arya Sasai reported thus on the high point of his campaign: �On October 14 [1992], a big rally was held at the Boat Club, New Delhi, and over 3 lakh Buddhists of India and foreign countries 4

attended it.� In the next few years, however, nothing much happened, because Bihar Chief Minister Laloo Prasad Yadav and his wifely successor Rabri Devi went back on an earlier promise of support to the Buddhist agitation. Another agitation, with �indefinite hunger-strike�, 5 took place in November 1995, but with no results. The RSS claims credit for mobilizing the Hindu opposition, but the main point is probably that the Backward Castes inside Laloo Prasad Yadav�s own party (Janata Dal, now Rashtriya Janata Dal) are not as insensitive to Hindu concerns as some political scientists always assume in their fevered dreams of a big antiBrahmin alliance. The equation of Ayodhya with Bodh Gaya, commonly made in the press, is not tenable at all. Hindus never destroyed the Mahabodhi temple, they never took it from the Buddhists, they have handed it over for Buddhist worship in a settlement piloted by the Hindu Mahasabha, and they are not interfering nor claiming a right to interfere with Buddhist practices there. More than that, a Buddhist member of the Bodh Gaya temple management committee has admitted that �the laudable work of the construction of the Mahabodhi temple� was �undertaken by a Brahmana minister of Shaivite persuasion�.

6

The local RSS leader explains: �The earliest and most authentic record is of course by Hiuen Tsang [= Xuan Zang] who visited Bodh Gaya in A.D. 637. He says that two Brahmin brothers prayed to Lord Maheshwara in the Himalayas to grant their wishes, upon which Maheshwara instructed them to carry out the meritorious task of erecting a large temple and excavate a large tank and devote all kinds of religious offerings near the most sanctified Bodhi tree for attaining �the fruit of a Buddha�. The elder Brahmin devotee accordingly built a large temple�, 7 etc. Not only did Hindus refrain from demolishing the temple, but they actually built it. Now find us a Hindu temple built by Babar.

Studying the backgrounds of this quarrel throws a new light on the now-common allegation that Buddhism was persecuted by the Brahminical reaction under the imperial Gupta dynasty. In Bodh Gaya, the Chinese pilgrim Xuan Zang stayed in the Mahabodhi Sangharama, a �splendid monastery� with �1000 monks�, which had been built, at the Sri Lankan king 8

Meghavarmana�s request, under the auspices of Samudragupta, the Gupta Emperor. Bodh Gaya has a large number of dated sculptures from the Gupta period, which was in fact one of the 9 most fruitful periods in Buddhist art. It is therefore no surprise that Hindus have traditionally worshipped at Bodh Gaya, even during the heyday of Buddhism. Prof. Benimadhab Barua reports that �concerning the right of the Hindus to worship the Buddha-image Dharmeshwara, [the Bodhi tree] in the Bodh-Gaya temple and its sacred area, we have noticed that as far back as the Kushana age it is enjoined in the Epic version of the earlier Eulogium that every pious Hindu visiting Gaya should make it a point to go also to Dharmaprastha or Bodh-Gaya and have a sacred touch of the Buddha image of the place. The later Eulogium in the Puranas enjoins in the same manner that every Hindu pilgrim to the Gaya region desiring to release the departed spirits of his ancestors must visit also Bodh Gaya to pay his respectful homage to the Buddha image Dharmeshvara as well as the [Bodhi 10 treel�. Even while arguing against the Shaiva Mahant of the Mahabodhi temple, who in the 1930s and 1940s, in league with the British (who feared Japanese interference), obstructed the implementation of a Hindu-Buddhist settlement, Prof. Benimadhab Barua admits: �So far as our information goes, the Buddhists have never and nowhere prevented the Hindus from either visiting or conducting worship at their shrines. As a matter of fact, they have no case against the Hindu devotees coming to a Buddhist shrine for worship. Their shrines remain open to all for worship, without any distinction of caste and creed. The inscription of Keshava, engraved during the reign of Dharmapala, clearly proves that the Buddhists were liberal and tolerant enough even to allow a Hindu to instal a figure of his deities, Shiva and Brahma, in their temple at Bodh-Gaya 11 for the benefit of the resident Shaivite Brahmins.� It may therefore be noted that the Buddhist membership of the Bodh Gaya temple management board does not altogether share the anti-Hindu animus of the neo-Buddhists and their secularist manipulators. Thus, the 5th European Hindu Conference in Frankfurt featured a speech by Bhikkhu Jnana Jagat, member of the Bodh Gaya temple management committee and of the VHP. He presented the standard VHP viewpoint on Buddhism, viz. that �from time immemorial the �Vedic culture� and �Shramana (ascetic) culture� have been growing and flourishing simultaneously in this land. Both being the integral part of the same Aryan culture or way of life 12 have been enriching and sustaining each other through centuries.� Whether the Brahmin control of the Mahabodhi area since the 16th century upto 1949 was similar in nature to the Muslim control of the Rama-Janmabhoomi site during the same period, can perhaps best be decided after considering this statement by a Muslim scholar, Dr. Abdul Qudoos Ansari: �The iconoclastic fury of Islam must have [had] a terrible effect on the shrines of the Gaya region, and particularly on Buddhism, with the result that a time came when, there being no Buddhists to look after their own shrines and worship at Bodh Gaya, the Brahmins had to do 13 their work even by going [outside] their jurisdiction.� Though he gratuitously accuses the Brahmin management of �the sin of greed�, he does not accuse them of any destruction or

forcible take-over, and this constitutes a radical difference with the Rama-Janmabhoomi/Babri Masjid scenario. Dr. Ansari�s testimony against Islam rather than against Brahmanism as being the destroyer of Buddhism in India is doubly strong because otherwise he is a subscriber to the now-popular theory of an intense Buddhist-Brahminical antagonism. Thus, he interprets a depiction of the Vishnu Dashavatar series in which Vishnu�s ninth incarnation as the Buddha is missing as proof of this antagonism, along with a more explicit statement for hostility on the Buddhist side, viz. �the images of some of their gods shown as humiliating the Hindu deities�. He has no information on temple destructions, idol-breaking, massacres etc., only an artistic act of disrespect. And that only on the Buddhist side: no Hindu art is mentioned as depicting Hindu gods humiliating the Buddha. Showing disagreement or disrespect in words or images is no proof of effective fanaticism, meaning suppression of a cult or destruction of its symbols or institutions. On this type of evidence, Sita Ram Goel comments: �It is nobody�s case that Hindu sects (in which I include Buddhists and Jains) did not use strong language vis-à-vis each other. Every Brahmanical sect has used strong language about other Brahmanical sects. So have the Buddhists and the Jains, not only vis-à-vis Brahmanical sects but also vis-à-vis each other. The situation gets much worse when it comes to the sub-sects [in their polemic against one another], whether Buddhist or Brahmanical or Jain. But strong language alone, whether in words or portrayals, is no evidence 14 in the present context, unless it is followed by overt acts of destruction or usurpation.� The context which Dr. Ansari relates gives the impression that a more serious and less artistic fanaticism was troubling the Buddhists of Bodh Gaya, but not from the Brahminical establishment: the then king Buddhasena (the last but one independent ruler in the area) had �fled into the forest on the outskirts of Gaya on the approach of the Turkish raiders but returned soon after withdrawal�. The famous Tibetan monk Dharmaswami (1234-36 in that area) �had to flee away for seventeen days, owing to the [apprehension of] the attack of the Turks�, and king Buddhasena, �not able to provide protection�, also �escaped into the forest for fear of the 15

Turks�.

It was the temple�s good fortune that the living Buddhist presence there had practically disappeared by the time the area passed into Muslim hands. Already in Dharmaswami�s time, decades before the actual Muslim take-over of that very area, all students and pilgrims and lay Buddhists had stopped coming to the area: �According to Dharmaswami, the Bodh Gaya establishment had been deserted by all except for [some] monks, on account of the repeated 16

Turkish conquests.� The popular support base and the training grounds for Buddhist monks were being destroyed in all of North India, and Bodh Gaya was dying as a Buddhist centre along with all those other establishments that were being physically eliminated by the Turks. Not Hinduism but Islam destroyed Buddhism in India.

Footnotes: 1

About Dr. Ambedkar, vide K. Elst: Dr. Ambedkar, a True Aryan, Voice of India. Delhi 1993.

2

More details in K. Elst: Ram Janmabhoomi vs. Babri Masjid, Voice of India, Delhi 1990, p.102104. 3

The Christian-dominated Korean leadership has even been accused by neutral observers of

�military persecution of Buddhism�, esp. the crackdown in October 1980, seeEncyclopedia Brittannica, Book of the Year 1988, entry �Buddhism�. 4

Letter to Dalit Voice, published on 1-2-1993. We need not fuss over inflated attendance figures. �Monks launch fresh stir at Bodh Gaya�, Indian Express, 2-11-1995.

5

6

Dipak K. Barua: Buddha Gaya, Bodh Gaya 1981, p.41, with reference to Xuan Zang, who saw the temple in 637 A.D., shortly after it was built, and who explicitly gave the credit to a Brahmin worshipper of Shiva Maheshwara. �Bodh Gaya: Facts and Fiction�, Daya Prakash speaking to Organiser, 16-7-1995.

7

8

Surendranath Sen: India through Chinese Eyes, Bagchi & Co., Calcutta 1979 (1956), p. 166.

9

Reported in Abdul Quddoos Ansari: Archaeological Remains of Bodhgaya, Ramanand Vidya Bhavan, Delhi 1990, p.15. B. Barua: �Bodh-Gaya from Buddhist Point of View and Bodh-Gaya from Hindu Point of

10

view�, app.2 in D.K. Barua:Buddha Gaya, p.267. The article is a reprint of an older publication, of which no date is given, but which seems to be related to his book Gaya and Buddha-Gaya, 1934. Bodhi = �awakening�; the Bodhi tree is the one under which Siddhartha Gautama achieved Bodhi and became theBuddha, �the Awakened One�. 11

B. Barua in D.K. Barua: Buddha Gaya, p. 268-269. Mahant= managing temple priest.

Bhikkhu Jnana Jagat: �Contribution of Buddhism to Indian Culture�, 5th European Hindu Conference (conference souvenir volume), p. 57. 12

13

A.Q. Ansari: Archaeological Remains, p.119.

14

S.R. Goel: Hindu Temples, vol.2 (2nd edition), p.413.

15

A.Q. Ansari: Archaeological Remains, p.26.

16

A.Q. Ansari: Archaeological Remains, p.26.

4. Harsha of Kashmir, a Hindu iconoclast? 4.1. Claims of Hindu iconoclasm Whenever the history of the many thousands of temple destructions by Muslims is discussed, the secularists invariably come up with the claim that Hindus have done much the same thing to

Buddhists, Jains and Animists. In particular, the disappearance of Buddhism from India is frequently explained as the result of �Brahminical onslaught�. Though extremely widespread by now, this allegation is entirely untrue. As for tribal �animists�, numerous tribes have been gradually �sanskritized�, acculturated into the Hindu mainstream, and this never required any break with their worship of local Goddesses or sacred trees. The latter have easily found a place in Hinduism, if need be in what Indologists call the �little traditions� flourishing in the penumbra of the �great tradition�. The only break sometimes required was in actual customs, most notably the abjuring of cowslaughter; but on the whole, there is an unmistakable continuity between Hinduism and the various �animisms� of India�s tribes. Hinduism itself is, after all, �animism transformed by metaphysics�, as aptly written in the 1901 census report�s introduction discussing the infeasibility of separating Hinduism from �animism�. As for conflict with the Jain and Buddhist sects, even what little evidence is cited turns out to prove a rather different phenomenon on closer inspection. The very few conflicts attested were generally started by the sectarian Buddhists or Jains. This way, a few possible cases of Shaiva (esp. Virashaiva) intolerance against Jains in South India turn out to be cases of retaliation for Jain acts of intolerance, if the event was at all historical to begin with. if there was a brief episode of mutual Shaiva-Jaina persecution, it was at any rate not based on the religious injunctions of either system, and therefore remained an ephemeral and atypical event. The oft-repeated allegation that Pushyamitra Sunga offered a reward for the heads of Buddhist monks is a miraculous fable related exclusively in a hostile source and contradicted by the finding of art historians that Pushyamitra was a generous patron of Buddhist institutions. Of the Buddhist emperor Ashoka, by contrast, it is known from Buddhist sources that he ordered the killing of Jain monks. Moreover, the Vinaya Pitaka relates another incident in which he ordered the killing of five hundred Buddhist monks. He was angry because they rejected his interference in an internal dispute in the Buddhist order. This event incidentally illustrates how even the actual killing of Buddhists need not be motivated by an anti-Buddhist animus. However, even Ashoka�s acts of intolerance remained exceptional events because they lacked scriptural justification. Likewise, the alleged oppression of Brahmins by the Buddhist Kushanas can never have been more than exceptional because it had no solid scriptural basis; unlike Islamic iconoclasm and religious persecution, which is firmly rooted in the normative example of Prophet Mohammed. Judging from the evidence shown so far, I maintain that Hindu persecutions of Buddhists have been approximately non-existent. Buddhism was alive and flourishing in dozens of institutions including international universities like Nalanda when Mohammed Ghori and his lieutenants appeared on the scene to destroy them all in the last decade of the 12th century. To sum up: �1) Buddhism was flourishing all over the country when the Islamic invaders arrived on the scene; 2) both Buddhism and Jainism were being patronised by kings whom the Marxists label as Hindus; 3) Buddhist monks fled to Nepal and Tibet only after thousands of them were massacred and their monasteries destroyed by the Islamic marauders; 4) Buddhism continued to flourish all over Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Karnataka till attacked by the armies of Islam in the fourteenth century; 5) Buddhism did not survive the Islamic assault because, unlike 1 Brahmanism and Jainism, it was centred round monasteries and monks.�

4.2. An �eminent historian� on the warpath The matter should have been put to rest there, but some Marxist polemicists just cannot let go of what they had hoped would be a trump card in their struggle to death against Hinduism. Next to the Pushyamitra fable, the most popular �evidence� for Hindu persecutions of Buddhism is a passage in Kalhana�s history of Kashmir where king Harsha is accused of looting and 2 desecrating temples. This example is given by JNU emeritus professor of ancient history, Romila Thapar, in a book and again in a letter written in reply to a query on Arun Shourie�s revelations on the financial malversations and scholarly manipulations by a group of secularist historians 3 including herself. The letter found its way to internet discussion forums, and I reproduce the relevant part here: �As regards the distortions of history, Shourie does not have the faintest idea about the technical side of history-writing. His comments on [D.D.] Kosambi, [D.N.] Jha and others are laughable - as indeed Indian historians are treating him as a joke. Perhaps you should read the articles by H. Mukhia in the Indian Express and S. Subramaniam in India Today. Much of what Shourie writes can only be called garbage since he is quite unaware that history is now a professional discipline and an untrained person like himself, or like the others he quotes, such as S.R. Goel, do not .understand how to use historical sources. He writes that I have no evidence to say that Buddhists were persecuted by the Hindus. Shourie of course does not know Sanskrit nor presumably does S.R. Goel, otherwise they would look up my footnotes and see that I am quoting from the texts of Banabhatta�s Harshacharita of the seventh century A.D. and 4

Kalhana�s Rajatarangini of the twelfth century A.D. Both texts refer to such persecutions.�

Hopefully she is aware that the Harsha of her first source (Harsha of Kanauj) is not the same person as the one of her second source, the villain Harsha of Kashmir. Let us at any rate take a closer look at this paragraph by the �eminent historian�. Most space of her para and indeed her whole letter is devoted to attacks ad hominem, much of it against Mr. Sita Ram Goel. In his book Hindu Temples, What Happened to Them, vol.1 (Voice of India, Delhi 1990), Goel has listed nearly two thousand mosques standing on the debris of demolished Hindu temples. That is to say, nearly two thousand specific assertions which satisfy Karl Popper�s criterion of scientific theories, viz. that they should be falsifiable: it must be clear which test, if not met, would decide on the wrongness of the assertion. In practice, every secularist historian can go and unearth the story of each or any of the mosques enumerated and prove that it was unrelated to any temple demolition. But until today, not one member of the wellfunded brigade of secularist historians has taken the scholarly approach and investigated any of Goel�s documented assertions. The general policy is to deny his existence by keeping him unmentioned; most publications on the Ayodhya affair have not even included his book in their bibliographies eventhough it holds the key to the whole controversy. But sometimes, the secularists cannot control their anger at Goel for having exposed and refuted their propaganda, and then they do some shouting at him, as done in this case by Romila Thapar. It is not true that Sita Ram Goel is an �untrained person�, as she alleges. He has an MA in History from Delhi University (1944). And he has actually practised history, writing both original and secondary studies on Communism, Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. Goel also happens to be fluent in Sanskrit, quite unlike Romila Thapar, whose knowledge of Sanskrit has subtly been tested by questioners during lectures and found wanting. Having gone

through Urdu-medium schooling and having lived in Calcutta for many years, Mr. Goel is fluent in Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, English and Sanskrit, and also reads Persian (a course of Persian being a traditional part of Urdu-medium education). This is the perfect linguistic equipment for a student of Indian history, and in that respect at least, Goel can argue circles around the ill-equipped Professor. In Hindu Temples, vol. 2, a book of which Goel sent Prof. Thapar a copy, he has discussed the very testimonies she is invoking as proof (along with her similarly haughty and 5 status-oriented reply and his own comment on it) , - yet here she maintains that he has not bothered to check her sources. Note, at any rate, Romila Thapar�s total reliance on arguments of authority and status. No less than seven times does she denounce Shourie�s alleged incompetence: Shourie has �not the faintest idea�, is �unaware�, �untrained�, and �does not know�, and what he does is �laughable�, �a joke�, �garbage�. But what exactly is wrong in his writing, we are not allowed to know. If history is now a professional discipline, one couldn�t deduce it from this Prof. Thapar�s letter, for its line of argument is part snobbery and part medieval invocation of formal authority, and either way quite bereft of the scientific approach. Reliance on authority and especially on academic titles is quite common in academic circles, yet it is hardly proof of a scholarly mentality. Commoners often attach great importance to titles (e.g., before I obtained my doctorate, I was often embarrassed by lecture organizers introducing me as �Dr.� or even �Prof.� Elst, because they could not imagine that someone could be competent without such a title). But scholars actively involved in research ought to, know from experience that many publications by title-carrying people are useless, while conversely, a good deal of important research is the fruit of the labour of so-called amateurs, or of established scholars accredited only in a different field of expertise. Incidentally, Prof. Thapar�s pronouncements on medieval history are also examples of such transgression of specialism boundaries, as her field really is ancient rather than medieval history. At any rate, knowledge of Sanskrit is not the issue, for theRâjatarangini is available in English translation, as Romila Thapar certainly knows: Rajatarangini. The Saga of the Kings of Kashmir, translated from Sanskrit by Ranjit Sitaram Pandit, with a foreword by Jawaharlal Nehru, 1935. With my limited knowledge of Sanskrit, I have laboriously checked the crucial sentences 6 against the Sanskrit text. I could not find fault with the translation, and even if there were imperfections in terms of grammar, style or vocabulary, we can be sure that there are no distortions meant to please the Hindu nationalists, for the translator was an outspoken Nehruvian. If I am not mistaken, he was the husband of Nehru�s sister, Vijayalakshmi Pandit, whose defects did not include a weakness for Hindutva. 4.3. An eminent brawl Let us now check Prof. Thapar�s references, starting with the review article on Shourie�s book by S. Subramaniam: �History sheeter. Bullheaded Shourie makes the left-right debate a brawl�. This article itself is quite a brawl: �Shourie has nothing to say beyond repeating the Islamophobic tirade of his henchman, the monomaniacal Sita Ram Goel who is referred to repeatedly in the text as �indefatigable� and even �intrepid�. Goel�s stock in trade has been to reproduce ad nauseam the same extracts from those colonial pillars Elliott and Dowson 7 and that happy neo-colonialist Sir Jadunath Sarkar.�

It is, of course, quite untrue that Shourie�s book is but a rehashing of earlier work by Goel. As can be verified in the index of Shourie�s book, Goel�s findings are discussed in it on p.99-100, p. 107-108, and p.253-254; that leaves well over two hundred pages where Shourie does have something to say �beyond repeating the tirade of his henchman�. Goel may be many things, but certainly not �monomaniacal�. He has written a handful of novels plus essays and studies on Communism, Greek philosophy, several aspects of Christian doctrine and history, Secularism, Islam, and of course Hinduism. Goel�s writings on Islam are much richer than a mere catalogue of atrocities, and even the catalogue of atrocities is drawn from many more sources than just Elliott and Dowson. The latter�s alleged colonialist motives do not nullify the accuracy of their translation of Muslim testimonies; it is not without reason that their 8-volume study was called History of India as Told by Its Own Historians. I am also not aware that Goel has repeated certain quotations ad nauseam; to my knowledge, most Elliott & Dowson and Jadunath Sarkar quotations appear only once in his collected works. Finally, Goel�s position is not more �Islamophobic� than the average book on World War 2 is �Naziphobic�; if certain details about the doctrines studied are repulsive, that may be due to the facts more than to the prejudice of the writer. So, practically every word in Subramaniam�s evaluation is malicious and untrue. No wonder, then, that he concludes his evaluation of Shourie�s latest book as follows: �But serious thought of any variety has been replaced by spleen, hysteria and abuse.� That, of course, is rather the case with Shourie�s critics, including Subramaniam himself who keeps the readers in the dark about Shourie�s arguments and withholds from us his own rebuttals. If Romila Thapar refers to his review, it can only be for its �treating Shourie like a joke�, but by no means for its demonstrating how history has now become a scientific discipline. All it demonstrates is the bullying rhetoric so common in the debate between the scientific and the secularist schools of Indian history. As a reader commented in the next issue: �The review of Arun Shourie�s Eminent Historiansironically hardly mentioned what the book was about. It read more 8

like a biographical sketch of the author with a string of abuses thrown in.�

As for NU professor Harbans Mukhia, in a guest column in Indian Express, he surveys the influence of Marxism in Indian historiography, highlighting the pioneering work of D.D. Kosambi, 9 R.S. Sharma and Irfan Habib in the 1950s and 60s. He argues that this Marxist wave began without state patronage; this in an apparent attempt to refute Shourie�s account of the role of state patronage and of the resulting corruption in the power position Marxist historians have come to enjoy. This is of course a straw man: Shourie never denied that Kosambi meant what he wrote rather than being an opportunist eager to please Marxist patrons. The dominance of Marxist scholarship started with independent and sincere (though by no means impeccable) scholars like Kosambi. In a second phase, the swelling ranks of committed Marxist academics got a hold on the academic and cultural power positions. In the next phase, being a Marxist was so profitable that many opportunists whose commitment was much shallower also joined the ranks, hastening the inevitable process of corruption. I may add that in the present phase, Marxists are furiously defending their power position while their history-rewriting is being exposed and demolished; and in the final phase, they will lose their grip and disappear.

Anyway, the only real argument which Mukhia develops, is this: �To be fair, such few professionals as the BJP has in its camp have seldom levelled these charges at least in public. They leave this task to the likes of Sita Ram Goel who, one learns, does full time business for profit and part time history for pleasure, and Arun Shourie who, too, one learns, does journalism for a living, specializing in the investigation of non-BJP persons� scandals.� It is not clear where Mukhia has done his �learning�, but his information on Goel is incorrect. Goel was a brilliant student of History at Delhi University where he earned his MA. in some parts of the period 1949-63 he was indeed a �part-time historian�, working for a living as well as doing nonprofit research on the contemporary history of Communism. He did full-time business for profit between 1963, when he lost his job after publishing a book critical of Jawaharlal Nehru, and 1982, when he handed his business over to younger relatives. Ever since, he has been a full-time historian, and some of his publications are simply the best in their field, standing unchallenged by the historians of Mukhia�s school, who have never gotten farther than the kind of invective ad hominem which we find in the abovementioned texts by Romila Thapar, S. Subramaniam and Mukhia himself. As for Shourie, Mukhia is hardly revealing a secret with his information that Shourie �does journalism for a living�. The greatest investigative journalist in India by far, he has indeed unearthed some dirty secrets of Congressite, casteist and Communist politicians. His revelations about the corrupt financial dealings between the Marxist historians and the governmentsponsored academic institutions are in that same category: fearless and factual investigative journalism. Shourie has a Ph.D. degree in Economics from Syracuse University in U.S.A., which should attest to a capacity for scholarship, even if not strictly in the historical field. When he criticizes the gross distortions of history by Mukhia�s school, one could say formally that he transgresses the boundaries of his specialism, but such formalistic exclusives only hide the absence of a substantive refutation. After all, it is only the contents of an author�s writings on history which must stamp him as a real c.q. a would-be historian. For instance, Shourie�s historical research on Dr. Ambedkar has 10 suddenly brought back to earth the deified Ambedkar of the early 1990s. None of the politicians or intellectuals who had extolled Ambedkar beyond all proportion till the day before have challenged the research findings presented by Shourie. Likewise, Shourie�s allegations of both financial malfeasance and scholarly manipulation (amounting to wilful distortion of Indian history) against Harbans Mukhia�s circle stand unshaken. 4.4. Kalhana�s first-hand testimony Now, let us look into the historical references cited by Romila Thapar. To check Banabhatta�s Harshacharita, concerning Harsha of Kanauj (r.606-647), no knowledge of 11 Sanskrit is needed, for the book has long been extant in English and Hindi translations. I have not found the allegations cited by Romila Thapar, nor any other description of a case of religious persecution (though Bana mentions in passing that the Buddhist monks did not love the Brahmins, a legitimate exercise of their freedom of opinion as guaranteed under all Hindu regimes). On the contrary, the text testifies to Hindu society�s achievement of an impressive communal harmony, as even the otherwise Hindu-baiting translator E.B.Cowell is forced to admit.

Of course, being myopic and easily distracted when reading difficult texts, I may have overlooked the tell-tale passage. Perhaps the eminent historian could provide the exact location and quotation herself? Meanwhile, I have been able to consult both the Sanskrit original and the English translation of Kalhana�s Râjataraniginî, and that source provides a clinching testimony. Harsha or Harshadeva of Kashmir (r. 1089-1111) has been called the �Nero of Kashmir�, and this �because of his cruelty�. He is described by Kalhana as having looted and desecrated most of the Hindu and Buddhist temples in Kashmir, partly through an office which he had created specially for this purpose. The general data on 11th-century Kashmir already militate against treating him as a typical Hindu king who did on purely Hindu grounds what Muslim kings also did, viz. to destroy the places of worship of rival religions. For, Kashmir had already been occupied by Masud Ghaznavi, son of Mahmud, in 1034, and Turkish troops were a permanent presence as mercenaries to the king. 12

Harsha was a fellow-traveller: not yet a full convert to Islam (he still ate pork), but quite adapted to the Islamic ways, for �he ever fostered with money the Turks, who were his 13

centurions�. There was nothing Hindu about his iconoclasm, which targeted Hindu temples, as if a Muslim king were to demolish mosques rather than temples. All temples in his kingdom 14 except four (two of them Buddhist) were damaged. This behaviour was so un-Hindu and so characteristically Islamic that Kalhana reports: �In the village, the town or in Srinagara there was 15

not one temple which was not despoiled by the Turk king Harsha.�

So there you have it: �the Turk king Harsha�. Far from representing Hindu tradition of iconoclasm which no one has ever known or discovered, Harsha of Kashmir was a somewhat peculiar (viz. fellow-traveller) representative of the Islamic tradition of iconoclasm. Like Mahmud Ghaznavi and Aurangzeb, he despoiled and looted Hindu shrines, not non-Hindu ones. Influenced by the Muslims in his employ, he behaved like a Muslim. Even Ranjit Sitaram Pandit is forced to admit the impact of Islam, though in veiled language: �The Turks referred to here, it is clear, are those who in accordance with the religious ideas of the Arabs had renounced 16

pork.�

All this is said explicitly in the text which Romila Thapar cites as proving the existence of Hindu iconoclasm. If she herself has read it at all, she must be knowing that it doesn�t support the claim she is making. Clearly she has been bluffing, making false claims about Kalhana�s testimony in the hope that her readers would be too inert to check the source. Worst of all, she has made these false claims about Kalhana�s testimony even while denouncing others for not having checked with Kalhana. 4.5. Romila Thapar on Mahmud Ghaznavi It is not the first and only time that Romila Thapar has somehow missed the decisive information given in primary sources. In her much-publicized paper on Somnath and Mahmud Ghaznavi, she questioned the veracity of Mahmud�s reputation as an idol-breaker, claiming that all the references to Mahmud�s destruction of the Somnath temple (1026) are non-contemporary as 17 well as distorted by ulterior motives.

That was the Ayodhya debate all over again: when evidence was offered of pre-British references to the destruction of a Rama temple on the Babri Masjid site, the pro-Babri Masjid Action Committee historians replied that the evidence was not contemporary enough, but without explaining why so many secondary sources come up with the temple demolition story. Likewise here: if there was so much myth-making around Ghaznavi�s Somnath campaign, even making him the norm of iconoclasm against which the Islamic zeal of every Delhi sultan was measured, what momentous event (other than that he really destroyed the Somnath temple) triggered all this myth-making? Anyway, in this case the claim that there is no contemporary evidence for Mahmud�s explicitly religious act of destroying the Somnath idol and temple, is simply false. Though Romila Thapar does mention Ghaznavi�s employee Alberuni, she conceals that Alberuni, who had widely travelled in India and was as contemporary to Ghaznavi as can be, has explicitly confirmed Ghaznavi�s general policy of Islamic iconoclasm and specifically his destruction of the Somnath temple. It is in fact Alberuni who gives the oft-quoted detail that the main idol was broken to pieces, with one piece being thrown into the hippodrome of a mosque in Ghazni and another being built into the steps at the entrance of the mosque, so that worshippers could wipe their feet 18

on it.� Mahmud�s effort to desecrate the idol by all means shows that his iconoclasm was not just a matter of stealing the temple gold, but was a studied act of religious desecration. He thereby smashed to pieces yet another pet theory of the Romila Thapar school, viz. that the Islamic iconoclasts� motive was economic rather than religious. I think it is demeaning to devout Muslim rulers when their religious zeal is explained away as a mere matter of greed. Also, in Islam there is no contradiction between greed and religious zeal, as the division of the spoils is a rightful conclusion to a jihad, sanctioned by Prophet Mohammed�s own example. At any rate, it is precisely the primary sources which leave no stone standing of the edifice of Nehruvian historyrewriting. It may be remarked here in passing that Prof. Thapar also demonstrates her very weak grip on religious issues with her little excursus on the occasional Muslim interpretation (rendered more plausible by the imprecision of the Arabic script in transcribing Indian words) of Somanâtha as �Somanât�, and hence of the temple as a place where the Arabian Goddess Manât was worshipped. In spite of her own position, she actually hits the nail on the head in her rendering of what she describes as Turco-Persian myth-making: �The link with Manat added to the acclaim for Mahmud. Not only was he the prize iconoclast in breaking Hindu idols, but in destroying Manat he had carried out what were said to be the very orders of the Prophet.� Well, exactly. Far from being some semi-literate�s private myth-making, this is a fanciful elaboration on what is otherwise a pure instance of Islamic theology, valid for all Muslims who take their religion seriously. Regardless of whether Manat was worshipped in the Somnath temple (or earlier in a Somnath-devoted open-air sacred space), the Islamic struggle against �polytheistic, idolatrous� Hinduism was but a continuation of Prophet Mohammed�s own struggle against and destruction of the native �polytheistic, idolatrous� religion of Arabia. The continuity between these two Pagan traditions had been acknowledged by their own votaries: pre-Islamic Arab traders in Gujarat paid their respects to Shiva Somnath, as Hindu traders in Bahrain or Yemen did to the Gods and Goddesses of Arabia in the Kaaba. In Islam, it was therefore a pious act to treat all instances of Hindu idolatry the way Prophet Mohammed had

treated the idols in the Kaaba upon conquering Mecca: destroy them. In spite of herself, Prof. Thapar has pointed out the purely Islamic basis for Mahmud�s behaviour. 4.6. A small apology It gives me no enjoyment to demolish the false credibility of a highly-placed historian like Prof. Romila Thapar. indeed, those who have read earlier works of mine, esp. Negationism in India (1992), will have noticed that my language even in polemic has softened and become more focused on viewpoints rather than groups of people such �the� Muslims or the Marxist historians. I truly regret it if the above chapter has hurt the feelings of the august professor, as I guess it must have. The only mitigating circumstances, which still cannot undo my sincere regret, are the following two. Firstly, it must have become quite apparent in passing that she herself has done her share of levelling accusations against people. I dare add that she has often made allegations very lightly, either without bothering to check the sources or deliberately not taking the sources� information into account. in my research on various topics, I have run into allegations by Prof. Thapar which flew in the face of both the documentation available to historians and the general knowledge available to the public. Thus, when writing on the Aryan invasion debate, I encountered a paper by her on the same topic in which she alleged that in the Arya Samaj, �the untouchables were excluded� Every Indian, 19

and a fortiori a historian originating in the Arya Samaj�s Panjabi heartland. must be aware that the Arya Samaj pioneered the struggle against untouchability, and that its office-bearers voluntarily risked exclusion from their own castes by inviting untouchables to participate in the Samaj�s activities on equal terms. It is hard to find a way of explaining the eminent historian�s slur on the Arya Samaj as a mere mistake. Secondly, in my criticism of other authors, I take their social position into account. I will avoid being harsh on a poor and marginal author who is made to suffer for his opinions by being thwarted in his career. On the other hand, people who enjoy fame, profitable appointments and royalties from prestigious publishers, should have a thicker skin. Prof. Thapar is the mostapplauded Nehruvian historian alive at the time of my writing, so my little bit of criticism is easily outweighed by all the more pleasant aspects of her position. In early 2001, she even received an honorary doctorate at the Sorbonne, France�s premier university. Most unusually, the awarding committee made it a point to lambast, in its official announcement, French journalist François Gautier for having exposed some of the scholarly frauds committed by the eminent historian. Rather than check Gautier�s allegations, which implied that rewarding Romila Thapar would taint the fair name of the Sorbonne, the French professors acted as her good political buddies and awarded her the honour anyway. Fair enough: at her age, she should not be denied some fine laurels to rest on.

Footnotes: 1

Hindu Temples, vol.2 (2nd ed.), p.421.

2

Rajatarangini, Taranga 7: 1089 ff.

3

Romila Thapar et al.: Communalism in the Waiting of Indian History, People�s Publishing House, Delhi 1987 (1969), p.15-16, and repeated in her letter to Mr. Manish Tayal (UK), 7-21999, concerning Arun Shourie: Eminent Historians, ASA, Delhi 1998. Manish Tayal: �Romila Thapar�s reply to �Eminent Historians��, [email protected], 16-2-1999. 4

5

Sita Ram Goel: Hindu Temples, What Happened to Them, vol. 2 (second edition), p.408-422.

M.A. Stein, ed.: Kalhana�s Rajatarangini or Chronicle of the Kings of Kashmir (1892), republished by Munshiram Manoharlal, Delhi 1960. 6

S. Subramaniam: �History sheeter. Bullheaded Shourie makes the left-right debate a

7

brawl�, India Today, 7-12-1998. 8

K.R. Panda, Delhi, in India Today, 21-12-1998.

Harbans Mukhia: �Historical wrongs. The rise of the part-time historian�, Indian Express, 2711-1998. 9

10

Arun Shourie: Worshipping False Gods. Ambedkar and the Facts which Have Been Erased, ASA, Delhi 1997. 11

E.B. Cowell and F.W. Thomas: Harsa Carita of Bana, Royal Asiatic Society Oriental Translation Fund, New Series no. VIII, London 1929 (1897); and Jagannatha Pathak:Harsha-Charita, Chaukhamba Vidyabhavan, Varanasi 1964. Also vide V.S. Agrawala: The Deeds of Harsha, Prithivi Prakashan, Varanasi 1969, and Bijnath Sharma: Harsha and His Times, Sushma Prakasha, Varanasi 1970. 12

S.B. Bhattacherje: Encyclopaedia of Indian Events and Dates, Sterling Publ., Delhi 1995, p.A20. 13

Rajatarangini 7:1149; translation by Ranjit Sitaram Pandit, Sahitya Akademi reprint, Delhi 1990, p.357; other relevant passages at p.352. 14

Enumerated in Rajatarangini 7:1096-1098; translation by R.S. Pandit.

15

Raiatarangini 7:1095; translation by R.S. Pandit, p.352.

16

Rajatarangini, p.357n.; translation by R.S. Pandit; emphasis added.

Romila Thapar: �Somanatha and Mahmud�, Frontline, 23-4-1999. The Communist fortnightly refused to publish a rebuttal by a historian of equal rank, Prof. K.S. Lal; it was published as �Somnath and Mahmud� in Organiser, 4-7-1999. 17

Edward Sechau, tra.: Alberuni�s India, London 1910, vol.2, p.103.

18

Romila Thapar: �The theory of the Aryan race and India: history and politics�, Social Scientist, Delhi, January-March 1996, p.8, discussed in K. Elst: Update on the Aryan Invasion Debate, Aditya Prakashan, Delhi 1999, p.5. 19

5. Vandalism sanctified by scripture (After Hindu activists demolished a mosque in a small town in Rajasthan, the on-line magazine

�OutlookIndia� published a comment with an entirely predictable message by the well-known secularist Yoginder Sikand. At the editor�s invitation, I wrote the following rebuttal, published on 31 August 2001.) In his article �Sanctified Vandalism As A Political Tool� (www.OutLooklndia.com, Aug. 23, 2001), Yoginder Sikand tries to explain away Muslim iconoclasm as marginal and uncharacteristic, all while accusing �the Hindus and others� of just such iconoclasm. In both endeavours, he predictably relies on Richard Eaton�s bookEssays on Islam and Indian History (OUP Delhi 2000). According to Sikand, �Eaton clearly shows that cases of destruction of places of worship were not restricted to Muslim rulers alone. He recounts numerous instances of Hindu kings having torn down Hindu temples, in addition to Jaina and Buddhist shrines. He says that these must be seen as, above all, powerful politically symbolic acts.� Follows a list of such allegations against historical Hindu kings. As it takes at least a page to evaluate or refute an allegation uttered in a single sentence, I cannot discuss those allegations here, so I will accept for the sake of argument that there have indeed been �instances of Hindu kings looting Hindu idols and destroying Hindu temples for political purposes�. However, it is obvious that these do not create Sikand�s desired impression of symmetry between Hindu and Muslim iconoclasm. Such symmetry would require that like Hindu kings, whose goal was political rather than religious, Muslim kings also destroyed places of worship of their own religion. Eaton and Sikand would succeed in blurring the contrast between Hindu and Muslim attitudes to places of worship if they could present a sizable list of mosques destroyed by Muslim conquerors. In a further attempt to blame even Islamic iconoclasm on the alleged Hindu example, Sikand quotes Eaton again: �It is clear that temples had been the natural sites for the contestation of kingly authority well before the coming of Muslim Turks to India. Not surprisingly, Turkish invaders, when attempting to plant their own rule in early medieval India, followed and continued established patterns.� How strange then that the Muslim records never invoke the Hindu example: invariably they cite Islamic scripture and precedent as justification for desecrating Pagan temples. As we shall see, the justification was provided outside of the Hindu sphere of influence in 7th-century Arabia. But at least Sikand admits the fact of Islamic iconoclasm: �It is true that, as the historical records show, some Muslim kings did indeed destroy Hindu temples. This even Muslims themselves would hardly dispute.� However, Sikand claims that unnamed �Hindutva sources� have grossly exaggerated the record of Islamic temple destruction: �Richard Eaton points out that of

the sixty thousand-odd cases of temple destruction by Muslim rulers cited by contemporary Hindutva sources one may identify only eighty instances �whose historicity appears to be reasonably certain�.� In his seminal book Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them, independent Hindu historian Sita Ram Goel has listed two thousand cases where a mosque was built in forcible replacement of a Hindu temple. Not one of these verifiable items has been proven false, not by Sikand nor by Eaton or other eminent historians. It is also instructive to see for oneself what Eaton�s purported �eighty� cases are, on pp. 128-132 of his book. These turn out not to concern individual places of worship, but campaigns of destruction affecting whole cities with numerous temples at once. Among the items on Eaton�s list, we find �Delhi� under Mohammed Ghori�s onslaught, 1193, or �Benares� under the Ghurid conquest, 1194, and again under Aurangzeb�s temple-destruction campaign, 1669. On each of these �three� occasions, literally hundreds of temples were sacked. In the case of Delhi, we all know how the single Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque replaced 27 temples, incorporating their rubble. At this rate, Eaton�s �eighty� instances easily match Goel�s two thousand, perhaps even the unnamed Hindutva author�s �sixty thousand�. Sikand continues with the oft-used argument: �Caution must be exercised in accepting the narratives provided by medieval writers about the exploits of kings, including their �feats� of temple destruction. Most historians were employees of the royal courts, and they tended to exaggerate the �exploits� of the kings in order to present them as great champions of Islam, an image that hardly fits the facts that we know about them.� So, as Sikand admits in so many words, the Muslim chroniclers were collectively convinced that they could enhance the standing of their patrons as �champions of Islam� by attributing to them �feats of temple destruction�. Perhaps some of them were liars, as Sikand alleges, and merely attributed these feats of temple destruction to kings who had no such merit. But fact is: all of them, liars as well as truth-tellers, acted on the collectively accepted premiss that a good Muslim ruler is one who extirpates idolatry including its material places and objects of worship. They all believed that Islam justifies and requires the destruction of idol temples. And rest assured that, like the Taliban, they had received a far more thorough training in Islamic theology than Eaton or Sikand. In a further attempt to minimize Muslim iconoclasm, Sikand claims: �As in the case of Hindu rulers� attacks on temples, Eaton says that almost all instances of Muslim rulers destroying Hindu shrines were recorded in the wake of their capture of enemy territory. Once these territories were fully integrated into their dominions, few temples were targetted. This itself clearly shows that these acts were motivated, above all, by political concerns and not by a religious impulse to extirpate idolatry.� In fact, there were plenty of cases of temple destruction unrelated to conquest, the best-known being Aurangzeb�s razing of thousands of temples which his predecessors had allowed to come up. But I concede that stable Muslim kingdoms often allowed less prominent temples to function, most openly the Moghul empire from Akbar to Shah Jahan. This was precisely because they could only achieve stability by making a compromise with the majority population.

Islamic clerics could preach all they wanted about Islamic purity and the extirpation of idolatry, but rulers had to face battlefield realities (apart from being constrained by the never-ending faction fights within the Muslim elite) and were forced to understand that they could not afford to provoke Hindus too far. Akbar�s genius consisted in enlisting enough Hindu support or acquiescence to maintain a stable Muslim empire. After Aurangzeb broke Akbar�s compromise, the Moghul empire started falling apart under the pressure of the Maratha, Jat, Rajput and Sikh rebellions, thus proving the need for compromise a contrario. In order to justify this compromise theologically, the zimma system originally designed for Christians and Jews (but excluding polytheists, a category comprising Hindus) was adapted to Indian conditions. Thiszimma or �charter of toleration� implied the imposition of a number of humiliating constraints on the non-Muslim subjects or zimmi-s, such as the toleration tax or jizya, but at least it allowed them to continue practising their religion in a discreet manner. The longterm design was to make the non-Islamic religions die out gradually by imposing permanent incentives for conversion to Islam, as witnessed by the slow plummeting of Christian demography in Egypt or Syria, from over 90% in the 7th century via some 50% in the 12th century to about 10% today. The system had the same impact in South Asia, yielding Muslim majorities in the areas longest or most intensely under Muslim control. To varying extents, the zimma system could include permission to rebuild destroyed churches or temples. But even then, non-Muslim places of worship, though tolerated in principle, were not safe from Muslim destruction or expropriation. The Ummayad mosque in Damascus was once a cathedral, as was the Aya Sophia in Istambul; the Mezquita of Cordova was built in replacement of a demolished church. Eaton and Sikand can propose their rosy scenario of Islamic iconoclasts emulating an imaginary Hindu iconoclasm only by keeping the non-Indian part of Muslim history out of view. It is entirely clear from the Muslim records that these temple-destroyers consciously repeated in India what earlier Muslim rulers had done in West Asia. The first of these rulers was the Prophet Mohammed himself. And this brings us to the crux of Sikand�s argument. When the Taliban ordered the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, a secularist choir assured us that this had nothing to do with �genuine Islam�. To me it seems rather pretentious for secularists with their studied ignorance of religions to claim better knowledge of Islam than the Taliban, the �students (of Islam)�, whose mental horizon consists of nothing but the detailed knowledge of Islamic theology and jurisprudence. Nonetheless, Sikand repeats the exercise: �Most importantly, a distinction must be made between Islamic commandments, on the one hand, and the acts of individual Muslims on the other. The Quran in no way sanctions the destruction of the places of worship of people of other faiths.� In deciding what is genuinely Islamic and what is not, it must be borne in mind that Islamic law is very largely based on the precedents set by the Prophet. Thus, it is lawful to kill Rushdie because the Prophet himself had had his critics executed or murdered. Likewise, the Taliban could justify their destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas with reference to Prophet�s own exemplary iconoclasm. The primary Islamic sources on the Prophet�s career (the Hadis and Sira) teach us that during his conquest of Arabia, he did destroy all functioning temples of the Arab Pagans, as well as a Christian church. When he was clearly winning the war, many tribes chose to avoid humiliation and martyrdom by crossing over to his side, but he would only allow them to join him on condition that they first destroy their idols. The truly crucial event

was Prophet�s entry into the Kaaba, the central shrine of Arabia�s native religion, where he and his nephew Ali smashed the 360 idols with their own hands. When prophet Mohammed appeared on the scene, Arabia was a multicultural country endowed with Pagan shrines, churches, synagogues and Zoroastrian fire-temples. When he died, all the non-Muslims had been converted, expelled or killed, and their places of worship laid waste or turned into mosques. As he had ordered before his death, only one religion remained in Arabia. If we were to believe Yoginder Sikand, Mohammed�s iconoclasm was non-Islamic. In reality, Mohammed�s conduct is the definitional standard of what it is to be a good Muslim. It is true that the Quran has little to say on temple destruction, though it is very eloquent on Mohammed�s programme of replacing all other religions with his own (which obviously implies replacing temples with mosques). Yet, the Quran too provides justification for the smashing of the objects of non-Islamic worship. It claims that Abraham was the ancestor of the Arabs through Ismail, that his father had been an idol-maker, that he himself ordered the idols of his tribe destroyed (Q.37:93), and that he built the Kaaba as the first mosque, free of idols. It further describes how Abraham was rewarded for these virtuous acts. Obviously it cannot be un-Islamic to emulate a man described by the Quran as the first Muslim and favoured by Allah. If Abraham existed at all, the only source about him is the Bible, which carries none of this �information�. It tells us that Ismail was the son of Abraham�s Egyptian concubine Hagar, and that she took her son back to Egypt; Arabia is not in the picture at all. Nor do pre-Islamic Arab inscriptions mention Abraham, or Ismail or their purported aniconic worship in the Kaaba. The Quranic story about them is pure myth. Considering the secularist record on lambasting �myths�, I wonder why Sikand has not bothered to pour scorn on this Quranic myth yet. All the same, Islamic apologists regularly. justify the desecration of the Kaaba by Prophet Mohammed as a mere restoration of Abraham�s monotheistic mosque which had been usurped by the polytheists. This happens to be exactly the justification given by Hindus for the demolition of the Babri Masjid, with this difference that the preexistence of a Hindu temple at the Babri Masjid site is a historical fact, while the preexistence of monotheistic and aniconic worship established by Abraham at the Kaaba is pure myth. At any rate, the Islamic account itself establishes that the model man Prophet Mohammed desecrated the Kaaba and forcibly turned it into a mosque, setting an example, particularly, for Mahmud Ghaznavi, Aurangzeb and the Taliban to emulate. Let us conclude with a comment on Sikand�s conclusion: �Hindus and Muslims alike, then, have been equally guilty of destroying places of worship, and, in this regard, as in any other, neither has a monopoly of virtue or vice. The destruction of the mosque in Rajasthan and building a temple in its place, like the tearing down of the Babri Masjid by Hindutva zealots or the vandalism of the Bamiyan Buddhas by the Taliban, shows how sanctified vandalism and medieval notions of the politics of revenge are still alive and thriving in our part of the world.� Look how claims are smuggled into this conclusion which have not been established in Sikand�s argumentation. Even by Sikand�s own figures, Hindus and Muslims were far from �equally� guilty, as a handful of alleged cases of temple destruction by Hindus do not equal the �eighty� well-attested Islamic cases. Also, the notion of revenge, attributed here to Hindus and Muslims alike, does not apply to both. The Hindu kar sevakh in Ayodhya were arguably taking revenge for

the destruction of the preexisting Rama Mandir, but the Islamic destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas was not a case of revenge on anyone. The Taliban or Afghan Islam in general had not been hurt or threatened by Buddhists or by any other religion. Their iconoclasm was not a case of vengeance, but of unilateral and unprovoked aggression. Nobody in this forum, or so I hope, claims a �monopoly of virtue� for the members of one religion, nor that of vice for those of another. The problem with religions is that they can make virtuous people commit vicious acts out of innocent piety, viz. by ordaining vicious behaviour as divinely sanctioned. In spite of Sikand�s attempt to whitewash Aurangzeb, evidence remains plentiful that this Moghul emperor committed acts of persecution and iconoclasm which would generally be considered vicious (they certainly would if committed by Hindutva activists, witness the torrent of abuse after the demolition of the Babri Masjid). Yet, by all accounts, Aurangzeb was a virtuous man, not given to self-indulgence, eager to fulfil his duties. Likewise, the Kashmiri �militants� who massacre Hindus are not people of evil character. They have left fairly cosy jobs or schools behind to put their lives on the line for their ideal, viz. bringing Kashmir under Islamic rule. It is the contents of their religion which makes them cross the line between their own goodness and the evil of their terrorist acts. The problem is not Muslims, the problem is Islam. The founding texts as well as the history of Islam testify to the profound link between iconoclasm and the basic injunction of the Prophet, viz. that �until ye believe in Allah alone, enmity and hate shall reign between us� (Q.60:4), i.e. between Muslims and non-Muslims. I can understand that a peace-loving Muslim who is comfortable with religious pluralism would have problems with this quotation, and generally with the unpleasant record of the founder and role model of his religion. Having wrestled with the Catholic faith in which I grew up, I know from experience that outgrowing one�s religion can be a long and painful process. Regarding a Muslim�s reluctance to face these facts, I would therefore counsel compassion and patience. But Yoginder Sikand doesn�t have this excuse. For him as a secularist, facing and affirming the defects of religions should come naturally. One of the best-documented defects of any religion is the role of Islamic doctrine in the destruction of other people�s cultural treasures, rivalled only by Christianity in some of its phases, and surpassed only in the 20th century by Communism. A secularist should subject the record of Islam to criticism, not to a whitewash.

6. The details about �Hindu iconoclasm� A remarkable aspect of the Ayodhya debate is the complete lack of active involvement by Western scholars. Their role has been limited to that of loudspeakers for the secularist-cumIslamist party-line denying that any temple demolition had preceded the construction of the Babri Masjid. Even those who (like Hans Bakker and Peter Van der Veer) had earlier given their innocent support to the historical account, putting the Ayodhya case in the context of systematic Islamic iconoclasm, hurried to fall in line once the secularist campaign of history-rewriting started. Given the widely acknowledged importance of the Ayodhya conflict, one would have expected at least some of the well-funded Western academics to embark on their own investigation of the issue rather than parroting the slogans emanating from Delhi�s Jama Masjid and JNU. Their behaviour in the Ayodhya debate provides an interesting case study in the tendency of establishment institutions and settled academics to genuflect before ideological authorities overruling proper scholarly procedure in favour of the political fashion of the day. This is, I fear,

equally true of the one Western academic who has substantively contributed to the debate, and whose contribution we will presently discuss. 6.1. Massive evidence of temple destruction One Western author who has become very popular among India�s history-rewriters is the American scholar Prof. Richard M. Eaton. Unlike his colleagues, he has done some original research pertinent to the issue of Islamic iconoclasm, though not of the Ayodhya case specifically. A selective reading of his work. focusing on his explanations but keeping most of his facts out of view, is made to serve the negationist position regarding temple destruction in the name of Islam. Yet, the numerically most important body of data presented by him concurs neatly with the classic (now dubbed �Hindutva�) account. In his oft-quoted paper �Temple desecration and IndoMuslim states�, he gives a list of �eighty� cases of Islamic temple destruction. �Only eighty�, is how the secularist history-rewriters render it, but Eaton makes no claim that his list is exhaustive. Moreover, eighty isn�t always eighty. Thus, in his list, we find mentioned as one instance: �1994: Benares, Ghurid army�. Did the Ghurid army work one instance of temple destruction? Eaton provides his source, and there we 1

read that in Benares, the Ghurid royal army �destroyed nearly one thousandtemples, and raised 2

mosques on their foundations�. This way, practically every one of the instances cited by Eaton must be read as actually ten, or a hundred, or as in this case even a thousand temples destroyed. Even Eaton�s non-exhaustive list, presented as part of �the kind of responsible and 3

constructive discussion that this controversial topic so badly needs� , yields the same thousands of temple destructions ascribed to the Islamic rulers in most relevant pre-1989 histories of Islam and in pro-Hindu publications. That part is of course not highlighted in secularist papers exploiting Eaton�s work. Far more popular, however, is the spin which Eaton puts on his data: Islam cannot be blamed for the acts of Muslim idol-breakers, the blame lies elsewhere... Apparently in good faith, but nonetheless in exactly the same manner as the worst Indian history falsifiers, Eaton discusses the record of Islam in India while keeping the entire history of Islam outside of India out of view. This history would show unambiguously that what happened in India was merely a continuation of Prophet Mohammed�s own conduct in Arabia and his successors� conduct during the conquest of West and Central Asia. That the Arabian precedent is ignored is all the more remarkable when you consider that the stated immediate reason for Eaton�s paper was Sita Ram Goel�s endeavour to �document a 4

pattern of wholesale temple destruction by Muslims in the pre-British] period� Goel�s elaborately argued thesis, tellingly left unmentioned here by Eaton, is precisely that Islamic iconoclasm in India follows a pattern set in the preceding centuries in West Asia and accepted as normative in Islamic doctrine. Eaton�s glaring omission of this all-important precedent makes his alternative explanation of Islamic iconoclasm in India suspect beforehand.

6.2. Hindu iconoclasm? Instead of seeking the motives of the Islamic idol-breakers in Islam, Eaton seeks it elsewhere: in Hinduism. He admits that during the Hindu reconquest of Muslim-occupied territories: �Examples of mosque desecrations are strikingly few in number.� Yet, in his opinion, Hindus had been practising their own very specific form of iconoclasm in earlier centuries. Though they 5

themselves seem to have lost the habit by Shivaji�s time, it was this Hindu tradition which the Muslim invaders copied: �The form of desecration that showed the greatest continuity with preTurkish practice was the seizure of the image of a defeated king�s state-deity and its abduction to the victor�s capital as a trophy of war.�

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One of the examples cited is this: �When Firuz Tughluq invaded Orissa in 1359 and learned that the region�s most important temple was that of Jagannath located inside the raja�s fortress in Puri, he carried off the stone image of the god and installed it in Delhi �in an ignominious 7

position�.� And likewise, there are numerous instances of idols built into footpaths, lavatories and other profane positions. This is not disputed, but can any Hindu precedent be cited for it? The work for which Indian secularists are most grateful to Eaton, is his digging up of a few cases of what superficially seems to be Hindu iconoclasm: �For, while it is true that contemporary Persian sources routinely condemn idolatry (but-parastî) on religious grounds, it is also true that attacks on images patronized by enemy kings had been, from about the sixth century A.D. on, 8 thoroughly integrated into Indian political behavior.� Because a state deity�s idol was deemed to resonate with the state�s fortunes (so that its accidental breaking apart was deemed an evil omen for the state itself), the generalization of idol worship in temples in the first millennium A.D. oddly implied that �early medieval history abounds in instances of temple desecration that 9

occurred amidst inter-dynastic conflicts�.

If the �eighty� (meaning thousands of) cases of Islamic iconoclasm are only a trifle, the �abounding� instances of Hindu iconoclasm, �thoroughly integrated� in Hindu political culture, can reasonably be expected to number tens of thousands. Yet, Eaton�s list, given without reference to primary sources, contains, even in a maximalist reading (i.e. counting �two� when one king takes away two idols from one enemy�s royal temple), only 18 individual cases. This even includes the case of �probably Buddhist� idols installed in a Shiva temple by Govinda III, the Rashtrakuta conqueror of Kanchipuram, not after seizing them but after accepting them as a pre-emptive tribute offered by the fearful king of Sri Lanka. 10

In this list, cases of actual destruction amount to exactly two: �Bengali troops sought revenge on king Lalitaditya by destroying what they thought was the image of Vishnu Vaikuntha, the state deity of Lalitaditya�s kingdom in Kashmir� , and: �In the early tenth century, the Rashtrakuta monarch Indra III not only destroyed the temple of Kalapriya (at Kalpa near the Jamuna river), 11

patronized by the Rashtrakutas� deadly enemies the Pratiharas, but they took special delight in 12

recording the fact.�

The latter is the only instance of temple destruction in the list, eventhough rhetorical sleight-ofhand introduces it as representative of a larger phenomenon: �While the dominant pattern here was one of looting royal temples and carrying off images of state deities, we also hear of Hindu 13 kings engaging in the destruction of royal temples of their adversaries.� So, what is the �dominant pattern� in the sixteen remaining cases? As we saw in the case of the Lankan idols in Kanchipuram, the looted (or otherwise acquired) idols were respectfully installed in a temple in the conqueror�s seat of power, e.g. a solid gold image of Vishnu Vaikuntha, seized earlier by the Pratihara king Herambapala, �was seized from the Pratiharas 14

by the Candella king Yasovarman and installed in the Lakshmana temple of Khajuraho.� So, the worship of the image continued, albeit in a new location; and the worship in the old location was equally allowed to continue, albeit with a new idol as the old and prestigious one had been taken away. In both places, the existing system of worship was left intact. This is in radical contrast with Islamic iconoclasm, which was meant to disrupt Hindu worship and symbolize or announce its definitive and complete annihilation. There is no case of an Islamic conqueror seizing a Hindu idol and taking it to his capital for purposes of continuing its worship there. Hindu conquerors did not want to destroy or even humiliate or disrupt the religion of the defeated state. On the contrary, in most cases, the winning and the defeated party shared the same religion and were in no mood to dishonour it in any way. The situation with Islamic conquerors is quite the opposite. That is why Eaton fails to come up with the key evidence for his thesis of a native Hindu origin of Muslim iconoclasm. He can show us not a single document testifying that a Muslim conqueror committed acts of iconoclasm in imitation of an existing local Hindu tradition. On the contrary, when Islamic iconoclasts cared to justify their acts in writing, it was invariably with reference to the Islamic doctrine and the Prophet�s precedents of idol-breaking and of the war of extermination against idolatry. No advanced education and specialistic knowledge is required to see the radical difference between the handful of cases of alleged Hindu iconoclasm and the thousands of certified Islamic cases of proudly self-described iconoclasm. It is like the difference between an avid reader stealing a book from the library and a barbarian burning the library down. In one case, an idol is taken away from a temple, with respectful greetings to the officiating priest, in order to re-install it in another temple and restart its worship. in the other case, an idol is taken away from the ruins of a temple, with a final kick against the priest�s severed head, in order to install it in a lavatory for continuous profanation and mockery. Of the last two sentences, a secularist only retains the part that �an idol is taken away from a temple�, and decides that it�s all the same. For Prof. Eaton�s information, it may be recalled that an extreme and willful superficiality regarding all matters religious is a key premise of Nehruvian secularism. While such an antischolarly attitude may be understandable in the case of political activists parachuted into academic positions in Delhi, there is no decent reason why an American scholar working in the relative quiet of Tucson, Arizona, should play their game. 6.3. Temples and mosques as political centres Prof. Eaton develops at some length the secularist theory that temple destruction came about, not as the result of an �essentialized �theology of iconoclasm� felt to be intrinsic to the Islamic

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religion� , but as an added symbolic dimension of the suppression of rebellions. In some cases this has an initial semblance of credibility, e.g.: �Before marching to confront Shivaji himself, however, the Bijapur general [Afzal Khan] first proceeded to Tuljapur and desecrated a temple dedicated to the goddess Bhavani, to which Shivaji and his family had been personally 16 devoted.� Yet, the theory breaks down when the fate of mosques associated with rebellion are considered. Eaton himself mentions cases which ought to have alerted him to the undeniably religious discrimination in the decision of which places of worship to desecrate, e.g. Aurangzeb destroyed �temples in jodhpur patronized by a former supporter of Dara Shikoh, the emperor�s brother 17

and arch-rival�. But Dara Shikoh surely also had Muslim supporters who did their devotions and perhaps even their intrigue-plotting in mosques? Indeed, as a votary of Hindu-Muslim syncretism, he certainly also frequented mosques himself. So why did Aurangzeb not bother to demolish those mosques, if his motive was merely to punish rebels? Eaton describes how a Sufi dissident, Shaikh Muhammadi, was persecuted by Aurangzeb for teaching deviant religious doctrines, and sought refuge in a mosque. Aurangzeb managed to arrest him, but did not demolish the mosque. This incident plainly contradicts the secularist claim that if any temple destructions took place at all, the reason was nonreligious, viz. the suppression of rebellion located in the temples affected. As per Eaton�s own data, we find that intrigues and rebellions involving mosques never led to the destruction of the mosque. He even admits in so many words: �No evidence, however, suggests that ruling authorities attacked public monuments like mosques or Sufi shrines that had been patronized by disloyal or rebellious officers. Nor were such monuments desecrated when one Indo-Muslim kingdom 18 conquered another and annexed its territories.� Eaton tries to get around this as follows: �This incident suggests that mosques in Mughal India, though religiously potent, were considered detached from both sovereign terrain and dynastic authority, and hence politically inactive. As such, their desecration could have had no relevance 19 to the business of disestablishing a regime that had patronized them.� One wonders on what planet Eaton has been living lately. In the present age, we frequently hear of mosques as centres of Islamic political activism, not just in Delhi or Lahore or Cairo but even in New York. Sectarian warfare, as between Shias and Sunnis, always emanated from mosques almost by definition, and inter-Muslim clan or dynastic rivalries likewise crystallized around centres of preaching. The Friday prayers always include a prayer for the Islamic ruler, and Islamic doctrine never separates political from religious concerns. If Muslim rulers chose to respect the mosques, it was definitely not because these were unconnected to politics. Eaton continues: �Not surprisingly, then, when Hindu rulers established their authority over territories of defeated Muslim rulers, they did not as a rule desecrate mosques or shrines, as, for example, when Shivaji established a Maratha kingdom on the ashes of Bijapur�s former dominions in Maharashtra, or when Vijayanagara annexed the former territories of the Bahmanis 20 or their successors.�

Once people have interiorized a certain framework of interpretation, they become capable of disregarding obvious facts which don�t fit their schemes. In this case, when explaining Hindu non-iconoclasm, Eaton insists on the contrived and demonstrably false theory of the political irrelevance of mosques, even though a far simpler and well documented explanation is staring him in the face: unlike Muslims, Hindus disapproved of iconoclasm and preferred a universal respect for people�s religious sensibilities. 6.4. Raja Bhoja�s temple Contrary to the impression created in the secularist media, Prof. Eaton has not even begun to refute Sita Ram Goel�s thesis. He manages to leave all the arguments for Goel�s main thesis of an Islamic theology of iconoclasm undiscussed. Of Goel�s basic data in the fabled list of mosques standing on the ruins of temples, only a single one is mentioned: �an inscription dated 1455, found over the doorway of a tomb-shrine in Dhar, Madhya Pradesh� which mentions �the destruction of a Hindu temple by one Abdullah Shah Changal during the reign of Raja Bhoja, a 21 renowned Paramara king who had ruled over the region from 1010 to 1053�. In the main text, Eaton seems to be saying that Goel is an uncritical amateur who �accepts the inscription�s reference to temple destruction more or less at face value, as though it were a contemporary newspaper account reporting an objective fact�. But in footnote, he has to admit that Goel is entirely aware of the chronological problems surrounding old inscriptions: �Goel does, however, consider it more likely that the event took place during the reign of Raja Bhoja II 22 in the late thirteenth century rather than during that of Raja Bhoja I in the eleventh century.� Either way, the inscription is considerably younger than the events recorded in it. In history, it is of course very common that strictly contemporary records of an event are missing, yet the event is known through secondary younger records. These have to be treated with caution (just like the strictly contemporary sources, written from a more lively knowledge of the event, but also often in a more distortive partisan involvement in it), yet they cannot be ignored. Eaton makes the most of this time distance, arguing that the inscription is �hardly contemporary� and �presents a richly textured legend elaborated over many generations of oral transmission until 1455�. Therefore, �we cannot know with certainty� whether the described temple destruction 23 ever took place. So, at the time of my writing it has been twelve years since Goel published his list, and exactly one scholar has come forward to challenge exactly one item in the list; who, instead of proving it wrong, settles for the ever-safe suggestion that it could do with some extra research. Given the eagerness of a large and well-funded crowd of academics and intellectuals to prove Goel wrong, I would say that that meagre result amounts to a mighty vindication. And the fact remains that the one inscription that we do have on the early history of the Islamic shrine under discussion, does posit a temple destruction. So far, the balance of evidence is on the side of the temple destruction scenario, and if the evidence for it is merely non-contemporary, the evidence for the nondemolition scenario is simply non-existent. For argument�s sake, we may imagine that Eaton is right, and that the inscription merely invented the temple destruction. That would only mean Eaton is right on this point of detail, but

also that the very same inscription proves his main thesis wrong. For, suppose no temple was destroyed, yet the Islamic inscription claims the opposite. In Eaton�s own words: �Central to the story are themes of conversion, martyrdom, redemption, and the patronage of sacred sites by 24

indo-Muslim royalty, as well as, of course, the destruction of a temple.� Temple destruction is thus deemed central to Indo-Muslim identity, even to the point where local histories free of real temple destruction would be supplied with imaginary temple destructions, - so as to fit the pattern deemed genuinely Islamic. This would illustrate how the Muslims themselves believed in (and were consequently susceptible to further motivation by) �an essentialized �theology of iconoclasm� felt to be intrinsic to the Islamic religion� - what Eaton dismisses elsewhere as a �wrong� explanations.

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For the rest, all that Eaton has to show against Goel�s thesis is that it is based on �selective translations of premodem Persian chronicles, together with a selective use of epigraphic 26

data� However, the larger a body of evidence, the harder it becomes to credibly dismiss it as �selective�. Goel�s hundreds of convergent testimonies cannot be expelled from the discussion so lightly. But improvement is always possible, and we are ready to learn from scholars with higher standards, drawing their conclusions from a wider and less �selective� body of evidence. Unfortunately, Prof.Eaton has failed to cite us any paper or book on IndoMuslim iconoclasm which is less �selective�. His own studied silence on each one of the testimonies cited by Goel amounts to a selective favouritism towards the data seemingly supporting the secularist theory. It is of course true that there are cases (and Eaton delights the secularists by citing some new ones) where Muslim rulers allowed Hindu temples to function, to be repaired, even to be built anew. This was never disputed by Goel, for these cases of tolerance firstly do not nullify the cases of iconoclasm, and secondly they do not nullify the link between iconoclasm and Islamic theology. Muslim rulers were human beings, and all manner of circumstances determined to what extent they implemented Islamic injunctions. Many were rulers first and Muslims second. Often they had to find a modus vivendi with the Hindu majority in order to keep fellow Muslim sectarian or dynastic rivals off their own backs, and in order to avoid Hindu rebellion. But that is no merit of Islam itself, merely a testimony to the strength which Hindu society retained even at its lowest ebb. To the extent that Muslim rulers took their Islam seriously, a world free of Paganism and idol-temples remained their stated Quranic ideal, but political and military power equations often kept them from actively pursuing it. Richard Eaton�s paper is the best attempt by far to defend the secularist alternative to the properly historical explanation of Islamic iconoclasm as being based on Islamic doctrine. Yet he fails to offer any data which are incompatible with the latter explanation. There is no reason to doubt his good faith, but like many people with strong convictions, he somehow slips into a selective use of data, contrived interpretations and special pleading, all converging on a single aim: exculpating Islam itself from its own record of iconoclasm. According to the cover text on his book, Eaton is professor of History at the University of Arizona and �a leading historian of Islam�. Had he defended the thesis that iconoclasm is rooted in Islam itself, he would have done justice to the evidence from Islamic sources, yet he would have found it very hard to get published by Oxford University Press or reach the status of leading Islam scholar that he now enjoys. One can easily become an acclaimed scholar of Hinduism by lambasting and vilifying that religion, but Islam is somehow more demanding of respect.

Footnotes: Richard Eaton: �Temple desecration and Indo-Muslim states�, Essays on Islam and Indian History, OUP, Delhi 2000, p. 128. 1

Hasan Nizami: Taju�l Maasir, in H.M. Elliott and J. Dowson: The History of India as Told by Its Own Historians, vol.2, p.223; emphasis added. Note that unlike Sita Ram Goel, Richard Eaton is 2

not chided by the likes of Sanjay Subramaniam for using Elliott and Dowson�s �colonialist� translation. Richard Eaton: �Temple desecration and Indo-Muslim states�, Essays on Islam and Indian History, p.128. 3

Richard Eaton: �Temple desecration and Indo-Muslim states�, Essays on Islam and Indian

4

History, p.94. This misrepresents the thrust of Goel�s book as being merely a morbid piling up of gruesome Muslim crimes rather than an insightful tracing of this behaviour pattern to its ideological roots. Goel�s long and unchallenged list of temple destruction data is explicitly offered as �a preliminary survey� in the smaller first volume before developing the book�s main thesis in the bigger second volume, viz. the explicit justification of iconoclasm by Islamic theology and the normative precedent set Prophet Mohammed. Richard Eaton: �Temple desecration and Indo-Muslim states�, Essays on Islam and Indian History, p. 123 n. 5

Richard Eaton: �Temple desecration and Indo-Muslim states�, Essays on Islam and Indian History, p. 112. 6

Richard Eaton: �Temple desecration and Indo-Muslim states�, Essays on Islam and Indian History, p. 113. 7

Richard Eaton: �Temple desecration and Indo-Muslim states�. Essays on Islam and Indian History, p. 105. 8

Richard Eaton: �Temple desecration and Indo-Muslim states�, Essays on Islam and Indian History, p. 106. 9

Richard Eaton: �Temple desecration and Indo-Muslim states�, Essays on Islam and Indian History, p. 106-107. Most cases are cited from Richard H. Davis: Lives of Indian Images, Princeton University Press, 1997. 10

Richard Eaton: �Temple desecration and Indo-Muslim states�, Essays on Islam and Indian History, p. 106. 11

Sic, Richard Eaton: �Temple desecration and Indo-Muslim states�, Essays on Islam and Indian History, p. 107. 12

Richard Eaton: �Temple desecration and Indo-Muslim states�, Essays on Islam and Indian History, p. 107. 13

Richard Eaton: �Temple desecration and Indo-Muslim states�, Essays on Islam and Indian History, p. 106. 14

Richard Eaton: �Temple desecration and Indo-Muslim stares�, Essays on Islam and Indian History, p. 105. 15

Richard Eaton: �Temple desecration and Indo-Muslim states�, Essays on Islam and Indian History, p. 1 18. 16

Richard Eaton: �Temple desecration and Indo-Muslim states�, Essays on Islam and Indian History, p.120. 17

Richard Eaton: �Temple desecration and Indo-Muslim states�, Essays on Islam and Indian History, p. 122. 18

Richard Eaton: �Temple desecration and Indo-Muslim states�, Essays on Islam and Indian History, p. 123. 19

Richard Eaton: �Temple desecration and indo-Muslim states�, Essays on Islam and Indian

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History, p.123. He adds that the Vijayanagara kings built mosques themselves, �evidently to accommodate the sizable number of Muslims employed in their armed forces�, - a reliance on Muslim mercenaries which would become Vijayanagara�s undoing, as they proved disloyal during the crucial battle of Talikota in 1565. Richard Eaton: �Temple desecration and Indo-Muslim states�, Essays on Islam and Indian History, p.96. 21

Richard Eaton: �Temple desecration and indo-Muslim states�, Essays on Islam and Indian History, p.96. 22

Richard Eaton: �Temple desecration and Indo-Muslim states�, Essays on Islam and Indian History, p.97-98. 23

Richard Eaton: �Temple desecration and Indo-Muslim states�, Essays on Islam and Indian History, p.98. 24

Richard Eaton: �Temple desecration and Indo-Muslim states�, Essays on Islam and Indian History, p.105. 25

Richard Eaton: �Temple desecration and Indo-Muslim states�, Essays on Islam and Indian History, p.96. 26

7. Why did Aurangzeb demolish the Kashi Vishvanath temple? Moghul emperor Aurangzeb Alamgir (r.1658-1707) is an icon of Islamic iconoclasm in India. His name counts as synonymous with destruction of Hindu temples, though he also levelled many Hindu human beings. Yet, the dominant school of historians would like to salvage Aurangzeb�s reputation. Percival Spear, co-author (with Romila Thapar) of the prestigiousPenguin History of India, writes: �Aurangzeb�s supposed intolerance is little more than a hostile legend based on isolated acts 1

such as the erection of a mosque on a temple site in Benares.� This claim, warhorse of the �secularist� school of history-rewriting, provides us with an excellent case study in the ongoing historians� conflict in India. What are the facts? The official court chronicle, Maasir-i-Alamgiri, fills many pages with items like this �His majesty proceeded to Chitor on the 1st of Safar. Temples to the number of sixty-three were here demolished. Abu Tarab, who had been commissioned to effect the destruction of the idol temples in Amber, reported in person on the 24th Rajab, that threescore and six of these 2 edifices had been levelled with the ground.� It says in so many words that Aurangzeb �ordered all provincial governors to destroy all schools and temples of the Pagans and to make a complete end to all Pagan teachings and practices�. Moreover, it records: �Hasan Ali Khan came and said that 172 temples in the area had been destroyed�, etc. Aurangzeb�s supposed intolerance can be deduced from his actual policies, known to us through his own chronicles as well as other sources. And, to close a loophole favoured by evasive secular apologists when their whitewash fails, his policies were not a deviation from �true, tolerant� Islam by an idiosyncratic fanatic, but were seen by his contemporaries as pure Islam in full swing. Aurangzeb was a pious man full of selfdiscipline and eager to be a just and truly Islamic ruler. One of his officers wrote a collection of anecdotes, the Abkam-i-Alamgiry, showing the humane and incorruptible character of Aurangzeb. It carries anecdote titles like: �Aurangzeb preaches humility to an officer�, �ability the only qualification for office�, or (about a case where a governor had ordered an execution of a man without the required proof of his guilt) �trials to be held strictly according to Quranic 3

law�. Aurangzeb was a good man and a good Muslim, and his oppression of Hindus was not due to an evil personal trait but to his commitment to Islam. About Benares/Varanasi, we learn from the Maasir-i-Alamgiri: �News came to court that in accordance with the Emperor�s command his officers had demolished the temple of Vishvanath at Banaras�. Aurangzeb did not just build an �isolated� mosque on �a� destroyed temple. He ordered all temples destroyed, among them the Kashi Vishvanath, one of the most sacred places of Hinduism, and had mosques built on a number of cleared temple sites. Till today, the old Kashi Vishvanath temple wall is visible as a part of the walls of the Gyanvapi mosque which 4

Aurangzeb had built at the site. All other Hindu sacred places within his reach equally suffered destruction, with mosques built on them; among them, Krishna�s birth temple in Mathura and the rebuilt Somnath temple on the coast of Gujarat. The number of temples destroyed by Aurangzeb is counted in 4, if not in 5 figures. This is how Indian secularists deal with this episode: �Did Muslim rulers destroy temples? Some of them certainly did. Following the molestation of a local princess by some priests in a temple at Benaras, Aurangzeb ordered the total destruction of the temple and rebuilt it at a nearby site. 5

And this is the only temple he is believed to have destroyed.� This story is now repeated ad nauseam, not only in the extremist Muslim press (Syed Shahabuddin�s Muslim India, the Jamaati-Islami�s Radiance) and in the secularist press (e.g.Sunday, as quoted) but also in academic platforms by �eminent historians�.

6

JNU historian Prof. K.N. Panikkar offers a more political variation on the theme that the Kashi Vishyanath temple was destroyed to punish the temple priests for breaking purely secular laws: �the destruction of the temple at Banaras also had political motives. It appears that a nexus between the sufi rebels and the pandits of the temple existed and it was primarily to smash this 7

nexus that Aurangzeb ordered action against the temple.� The eminent historian quotes no source for this strange allegation. In those days, Pandits avoided to even talk with Mlecchas, let 8 alone to concoct intrigues with them. The fountainhead of all these rumors about Aurangzeb�s honorable and non-religious motives in destroying the Kashi Vishvanath temple is revealed by Marxist historian Gargi Chakravartty who quotes Gandhian politician B.N. Pande, introducing the quotation as follows: �Much has been said about Aurangzeb�s demolition order of Vishwanath temple at Banaras. But documentary 9

evidence gives a new dimension to the whole episode:�

What follows is the story launched by the late B.N. Pande, working chairman of the Gandhi Darshan Samiti and former Governor of Orissa: �The story regarding demolition of Vishvanath temple is that while Aurangzeb was passing near Varanasi on his way to Bengal, the Hindu Rajas in his retinue requested that if the halt was made for a day, their Ranis may go to Varanasi, have a dip in the Ganges and pay their homage to Lord Vishwanath. Aurangzeb readily agreed. Army pickets were posted on the five mile route to Varanasi. The Ranis made a journey on the Palkis. They took their dip in the Ganges and went to the Vishwanath temple to pay their homage. After offering Puja all the Ranis returned except one, the Maharani of Kutch. A thorough search was made of the temple precincts but the Rani was to be found nowhere. When Aurangzeb came to know of it, he was very much enraged. He sent his senior officers to search for the Rani. Ultimately, they found that the statue of Ganesh which was fixed in the wall was a moveable one. When the statue was moved, they saw a flight of stairs that led to the basement. To their horror, they found the missing Rani dishonored and crying, deprived of all her ornaments. The basement was just beneath Lord Vishwanath�s seat. The Rajas expressed their vociferous protests. As the crime was heinous, the Rajas demanded exemplary action. Aurangzeb ordered that as the sacred precincts have been despoiled, Lord Vishvanath may be moved to some other place, the 10 temple be razed to the ground and the Mahant be arrested and punished.� The story is very bizarre, to say the least. First of all, it has Aurangzeb go to Bengal. Yet, in all the extant histories of his life and works, no such journey to Bengal, or even any journey as far

east as Varanasi, is recorded. Some of his generals were sent on expeditions to Bengal, but not Aurangzeb himself. There are fairly complete chronicles of his doings, day by day; could B.N. Pande or any of his quoters give the date or even the year of this remarkable episode? Neither was Aurangzeb known to surround himself with Hindu courtiers. And did these Rajas take their wives along on military expeditions? Or was it some holiday picnic? How could the Mahant kidnap a Rani who was there in the company of other Ranis, as well as the appropriate courtiers and bodyguards? Why did he take such risk? Why did the �Rajas� wait for Aurangzeb to take �exemplary action�: did they fear his anger if they destroyed the temple themselves? And since when is demolition the approved method of purifying a defiled temple, an eventuality for which the Shastras have laid down due ritual procedures? One question which we can readily answer is, where did B.N. Pande get this story from? He himself writes: �Dr. Pattabhi Sitaramayya, in his famous book The Feathers and the Stones, has 11

narrated this fact based on documentary evidence.�

So, let us turn to this book, now hard to

find, to see what the �documentary evidence� is on which this whole wave of pro-Aurangzeb 12 rumours is based, but which no one has cared to reproduce or even just specify. Gandhian Congress leader Pattabhi Sitaramayya wrote in his prison diary: �There is a popular belief that Aurangazeb was a bigot in religion. This, however, is combated by a certain school. His bigotry is illustrated by one or two instances. The building of a mosque over the site of the original Kasi Visveswara Temple is one such. A like mosque in Mathura is another. The revival of jazia is a third but of a different order. A story is told in extenuation of the first event. In the height of his glory, Aurangazeb like any foreign king in a country, had in his entourage a number of Hindu nobles. They all set out one day to see the sacred temple of Benares. Amongst them was a Ranee of Cutch. When the party returned after visiting the Temple, the Ranee of Cutch was missing. They searched for her in and out, East, North, West and South but no trace of her was noticeable. At last, a more diligent search revealed a Tah Khana or an underground story of the temple which to all appearances had only two storys. When the passage to it was found barred, they broke open the doors and found inside the pale shadow of the Ranee bereft of her jewellery. It turned out that the Mahants were in the habit of picking out wealthy and be-jewelled pilgrims and in guiding them to see the temple, decoying them to the underground cellar and robbing them of their jewellery. What exactly would have happened to their life one did not know. Anyhow in this case, there was no time for mischief as the search was diligent and prompt. On discovering the wickedness of the priests, Aurangazeb declared that such a scene of robbery could not be the House of God and ordered it to be forthwith demolished. And the ruins were left there. But the Ranee who was thus saved insisted on a Musjid being built on the ruin and to please her, one was subsequently built. That is how a Musjid has come to exist by the side of the Kasi Visweswar temple which is no temple in the real sense of the term but a humble cottage in which the marble Siva Linga is housed. Nothing is known about the Mathura Temple. This story of the Benares Masjid was given in a rare manuscript in Lucknow which was in the possession of a respected Mulla who had read it in the Ms. and who though he promised to look it up and give the Ms. to a friend, to whom he had narrated the story, died without fulfilling his promise. The story is little known and the prejudice, we are told, against Aurangazeb 13 persists.� So, this is where the story comes from: an unnamed friend of an unnamed acquaintance of Sitaramayya knew of a manuscript, but he took the details of it with him in his grave. This hearsay in the third degree is the �document� on which secularist journalists and historians base their �evidence� of Aurangzeb�s fair and secularist disposition. This is how they go about �exploding the myth� of Islamic iconoclasm. Their �debunking� of genuine history as

preserved and presented by Hindu historians stands exposed as sheer bluff.

Footnotes: 1

P. Spear: History of India, p-56.

Muhammad Saki Musta�id Khan: Ma�âsir Alamgîrî, in H.M. Elliot and John Dowson: The History of India as Told by Its Own Historians (Low Price reprint, Delhi 1990, originally 1867-77), vol.7, p. 188. 2

3

Translated by Jadunath Sarkar: Anecdotes of Aurangzeb, Orient Longman, Delhi 1988 (1912).

Also discussed by A. Shourie: �Take over from the Experts�, app.1 in VHP: History vs. Casuistry (first edition, Voice of India, Delhi 199 1), p.81. 4

Namita Bhandare, Louise Fernandes and Minu Jain: �A Pampered Minority?�, Sunday, 7-21993. The Kashi Vishvanath temple was indeed rebuilt at a nearby site, but of course not by Aurangzeb, who had a mosque built at the original site instead. 5

The expression �eminent historians� gained some notoriety (and became a laughing-stock in Hindu Revivalist circles) during the Ayodhya debate, when it was the standard media description of a group of Marxist historians from JNU, including Prof. K.N. Panikkar, who circulated a booklet The Political Abuse of History (INU 1989) denying the evidence that the Babri Masjid had forcibly replaced a Rama temple. 6

K.N. Panikkar: �What is Communalism Today?�, in Pratul Lahiri, ed.: Selected Writings on

7

Communalism, People�s Publishing House, Delhi 1994, p.73. 8

The unwillingness to come close to those who do not follow the Brahminical purity rules is still alive. When I interviewed the Puri Shankaracharya in 1993, he did not want to accept a book I offered him, and was reluctant to speak directly with me, but preferred to address my companion, the late Jeevan Kulkani, a historian with Hindu Mahasabha links and a thoroughbred Brahmin. G. Chakravartty: �BJP/RSS and Distortion of History", in P. Lahiri: Selected Wiltings on Communalism, p. 168. 9

10

B.N. Pande: Islam and Indian Culture, Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Public Library, Patna 1987, p.4445. B.N. Pande: Islam and Indian Culture, p.45. He adds: �Dr. P.L. Gupta, former curator of Patna

11

Museum, has also corroborated this incident.� But if this P.L. Gupta had anything to add in his capacity of historian, B.N. Pande would not have failed to reproduce it. Instead, the more likely explanation is that Gupta simply had read the same book (quite popular in Gandhian circles after its publication in 1946) which Pande quoted as his source. 12

I thank Prof. Gopal Krishna and his wife Elizabeth for helping me find my way in the New Bodleian Library (oxford), where a rare copy of Feathers and Stones was available.

13

Pattabhi Sitaramayya: Feathers and Stones, Bombay 1946, p. 177-178.

8. From Ayodhya to Nazareth Indian Cbilstians and their allies in the international media have mostly taken the Muslim side in the Ayodhya dispute. This was the reason for the following open letter to the Church dignitaries, written in the last days of the year 1999, the occasion being the emergence of a vaguely similar problem in Nazareth. Muslims bad illegally started building a mosque next to a church, and the Israeli authorities bad not dared to interfere. It may be added now (February 2002) that in the context of the �second intifada� and the ongoing Israeli crackdown on Islamic terrorism, Israeli Minister and former Soviet dissident Nathan Sharansky bas ordered the construction work to be stopped. 8.1. A mosque casts its shadow on a church In Nazareth, a church (Basilica) marks the place where the angel announced to Mary that she was about to be impregnated with Jesus, God�s only-begotten son, the long awaited messiah. This church of Annunciation is one of the foci of Christian life in Palestine. However, the Christian community in Palestine and the whole Middle East is dwindling, in percentage if not in absolute figures, due to their observing more modern birth rates than their Muslim countrymen, and due to the emigration of numerous young Christians who see no future for themselves in a Muslim dominated part of the world. Even in Nazareth the Muslims are now in a majority, and with a Muslim-dominated �Palestinian Authority� now in power, the local Muslim community feels confident enough for a showdown. So, on 22 November 1999, the foundation stone for a mighty and magnificent mosque was laid in a square adjoining the Church. The Christian community had planned the construction of a Venice-type plaza there, to accommodate the numerous Christian and other visitors from all over the world. After all, the sacred sites of Christianity are not all that numerous, and those which exist deserve appropriate care. If the Muslims really needed an extra mosque, they could have built it anywhere. A diplomatic Saudi prince had even offered to finance the mosque if it were built elsewhere, but his offer was spurned. By contrast, the place of the Annunciation is not moveable, so Christians could not make any concessions short of allowing the humiliation of their sacred site as but a stand-in-the-way of the mosque. The Muslims would not see reason and went ahead with their confrontational plan. Most Palestinian Christians find this development gruesome. According to local Franciscan nun Sister Renee, �the Muslims want to trample and humiliate the Christians. The minaret of the 1

mosque will tower over the basilica .� The Pope came out in support of the Christians of Nazareth, and ordered all Catholic churches in the Holy Land closed for two days in protest. Yasser Arafat�s Palestinian Authority (PA) formally distanced itself from the Islamic ceremony (in order to curry favour with the Christian world so as to strengthen its own diplomatic position vis-A-vis.Israel), but did nothing to prevent it. The presiding Muslim leader, Ahmad Abu Nawaf, was not troubled for taking a defiant and confrontational stand, openly exulting in this Islamic �victory�. The incident must have reminded the Pope of the Muslim plans for building a mosque in Rome dwarfing the Pope�s own Saint Peter�s Basilica. The Italian authorities disallowed this symbolic show of strength but the mosque which came up close to the Vatican is still impressive

enough, and contrasts mightily with the absence of any Christian place of worships for hundreds of miles around Mecca. Because Saudi Arabia has declared the whole of its territory to be a mosque, no expressions of non-Islamic devotion are allowed there in any form whatsoever. In the circumstances, I cannot omit a vote of sympathy for the Palestinian Christians who find themselves besieged by an arrogant Islamic movement. However, I also want to propose to the Christian leadership, including the Pope and Indian Church leaders like Bishop Alan de Lastic, a few points to ponder. 8.2. Christians apologizing to Muslims First of all, Your Eminences, the last couple of years, the Catholic Church and many Protestant Churches and Christian laymen�s groups have been bending over backwards to convince Muslims and others about their own heartfelt repentance over the crimes committed by Christian states and institutions in the past centuries. But it seems this has not moved the heart of the Muslim world. The Pope himself has said sorry for the Crusades, even though these were but a Christian counter-offensive in a long-drawn-out war which Islam had unilaterally inflicted on Christianity ever since Prophet Mohammed�s failed invasion of the East-Roman Empire, not long before his death in A.D. 632. Hardly four years later, after suppressing the Arab national revolt against Islam (the Ridda, �return� to the ancestral religion), Islamic armies invaded and occupied the Levantine part of the Byzantine empire, and reduced Christians to third-class citizens without political rights. During and after this blitz offensive by Caliph Omar in A.D. 636, many churches were turned into mosques, Christians were sometimes forced to convert, but more often put under structural pressure by the imposition of a toleration tax plus a number of humiliating restraints on their rights. Next came the conquest of Christian North Africa, effectively destroying Christianity in Tunisia, Saint Augustine�s homeland, and in the Maghreb. Then followed the conquest of Christian Spain, the invasion of Christian France in A.D. 731 (mercifully defeated by Charles Martel in Poitiers), the occupation of Christian Sicily, and many other unilateral Islamic acts of aggression, including the capture and sale of millions of Christians as slaves. The invasion of Byzantine Anatolia by Muslim Seljuqs in Manzikert 1071 was one of the direct causes of the Crusades. In spite of regrettable Christian excesses during the reconquest of Jerusalem in 1099 (easily matched by Sultan Baybars� atrocities during the Muslim reconquest of the Crusader states), the Crusades were a legitimate attempt of the Christians to liberate their Holy Land forcibly occupied by the Muslims. Somewhat like the Hindus trying to liberate Ayodhya from Islamic occupation. Strategically speaking, the Crusades were a forward strike in a war in which Christianity had so far been on the defensive. After the defeat of the Crusaders, the Islamic world resumed the attacks, especially in the Balkans where one Christian nation after another came under the Turkish yoke, and as late as A.D. 1689, the Turks laid siege to Vienna. There is no doubt that Christian soldiers have misbehaved during the conquest of Jerusalem and on other occasions, but so have Muslim armies on numerous occasions, starting with Prophet Mohammed�s own caravan raids, murders of skeptics and massacres of recalcitrant tribes. For every Muslim gentleman conqueror (e.g. the Kurdish general Saladin who chased the Crusaders from Jerusalem), there was a Muslim mass murderer (e.g. the Mamluk sultan Baybars who finished off the last Crusader strongholds).

All the same, an ecumenical Christian group has even conducted a pilgrimage along the Crusader route, a Walk for Reconciliation, everywhere offering apologies for what Christians in the distant past had done to the Muslims. This proved to be an exercise in self-ridicule. Thus, these self-flagellating Christian peninents went to offer their apologies to the mayor of istambul for the sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade, forgetting that the city sacked by the Crusaders was a Greek Orthodox city where a Muslim Turk like the present mayor would be the number one enemy. Constantinople was far more definitively sacked by the Turks in 1453, and the Turkish mayor represented the Turkish occupation force which has, unlike the Crusaders, destroyed the Greek character of the city and nearly annihilated the millennia-old Greek presence in Constantinople and nearby lonia. Addressing an apology for the temporary inconvenience which the Crusaders had inflicted on the, Greeks to a mayor representing a conquering nation which definitively destroyed the Greeks of Asia Minor: only Liberation theologians could get that silly. So, if apologies have to be tendered, let Muslim dignitaries start the exchange. Let the mayor of Istambul apologize to his Christian visitors for representing a religion which killed and enslaved millions of Christians. Let the Turks apologize to the Greeks for sacking and occupying their capital, Constantinople. Better still, let them restore Constantinople to the Greek Orthodox Christians. But for now, the position is that the Muslims world is not even willing to refrain from the provocation in Nazareth. 8.3. Christian understanding of the Hindu position Secondly, Your Eminences, you might reconsider your haughty condemnation of the Hindu position regarding disputed sacred sites. In Ayodhya, a mosque had been imposed right on the site of a destroyed Hindu temple, but you joined the Muslim-Marxist choir in denouncing these �petty-minded and fanatical Hindus� reclaiming their sacred site. �Why the fuss about a temple when God is everywhere?�, you pontificated. Now you are being put to a similar test. In Nazareth, your Basilica was not even touched. The Muslims have a place for �the prophet Jesus� in their system, not for the idolatrous demon Rama, so they showed more tolerance in Nazareth than in Ayodhya. And yet, look what a fuss you are making over a mosque neatly juxtaposed to a church, perfectly respecting its existence though not perhaps its breathing space. To be sure, I understand that for Christians, sacred sites are a touchy issue. In Islamic and Communist countries, numerous churches have been destroyed or put to no Christian uses; but on the other hand, so many of those churches had been built in forcible replacement of Pagan places of worship. Thus, the Mezquita, the cathedral of Cordoba, used to be a mosque, which in turn had been built in forcible replacement of a church, but that ancient church had in its turn been built in forcible replacement of a Roman temple. Just recently, the Greco-Scything city of Chersoness on the Crimea Peninsula has witnessed a controversy between the Greek Orthodox Church, which is reclaiming an abbey stolen and abused by the Communists, and the archaeologists, who first want to find out what exactly is lying underneath the premises, known to have been a Pagan cultic site. The Churches cannot rock the boat of sacred sites controversy too badly, for there are too many skeletons in their own cupboards. 8.4. Muslims challenging Christianity in Europe Thirdly, Your Eminences, recent developments in Nazareth and many other places ought to make you more receptive to the general Hindu distrust of Islam. In the week before Christmas, some

fifty people were killed in Muslim Christian riots in Indonesia, adding their numbers to the many hundreds killed during the past year in that country alone, not to speak of thousands of Christians killed in East Timor, nor of the handfuls of Christians killed now and then by Islamic guerrilleros in the Philippines. Let us not make the picture more complicated by mentioning the hundreds if not thousands of Hindus killed in India�s Northeast by Christian separatists, let�s only consider killings of Christians. We then see a strange pattern emerge. Compared with the fuss you made over the deaths of just two priests, a Keralite Catholic and an Australian Protestant, plus the two sons of the latter, killings for which you prematurely blamed the Hindus, your outcry over Islamic atrocities is remarkably subdued. In the case of Nazareth, Church dignitaries have indeed spoken out. But look, a similarly strange moderation in your anti-Islamic protest strikes the eye of the beholder. The sharpest allegation is addressed not to the Muslims who are encroaching on what you consider to be Christian territory, but to the Israeli authorities. �Israel is trying to drive a wedge between Palestinian Christians and Muslims�, you say. But pray, if Israel meant you any harm, why has it left the Annunciation Basilica in peace for decades? You might reasonably accuse Israel of giving in to the party from which it fears the most serious trouble, viz. Muslims rather than Christians. But Israel is not doing more than that: giving in to pressure exerted by another party, viz. the Muslims. If it wasn�t for the Muslims claiming the site, Israel couldn�t have ruled in their favour. So, what keeps you from laying blame at the door where it belongs? The answer is obvious: fear. If even combative Israel feels it has to throw some crumbs to the Islamic fanatics, such as space for a mosque in Nazareth, what else can we expect of the Church? The fact is that the fear of Islam is increasingly gripping our aged Church Fathers by the throat. Ancient strongholds of European resistance to Islam are now home to imposing five-star mosques: Madrid, capital of Reconquista Spain; Paris, whence the Frankish Crusaders once left to liberate the Holy Land; even Rome itself. At the recent Bishops� Synod in Rome (October 1999), several Bishops expressed their worries about Islam�s encroachment on the Christian world. Consider the warnings by Mgr. Bemardini, Bishop of the Ionian city of Smyma, now better known as Izmir after the Turks killed and expelled the Greeks from there in 1922. To the analysis given by other Bishops, he added some recent anecdotes from real life, e.g.: �During an official Christian Muslim meeting, an important Muslim delegate said calmly and self-assuredly: �Thanks to your democratic laws we will conquer you. Thanks to out religious laws, we will 2

dominate you.��

And this one: �A Catholic monastery in Jerusalem had an Arab servant, naturally a Muslim. He was a very courteous, friendly and honest man, greatly valued by the monks. But the converse turned out not to apply. One day he told them with sadness: �Our leaders have convened and have decided that all infidels must be killed. But you need not fear: though I too will be ordered to kill you, I will do it without making you suffer.� We know that a distinction must be made between the fanatics and the more peaceful majority. But even the latter will rise against us as one man when Allah so commands.� In his concluding remarks, Mgr.Bernardini returned to an issue of disputed places of worship, specifically referring to the practice of selling the empty churches of European cities to Muslims for use as mosques: �To conclude, and speaking from my experience, I would at any rate advise

that no Catholic church should ever be handed over to the Muslims for their worship. To them 3 this is merely the most convincing proof of our apostasy.� Exactly, Your Eminences, places of worship are a serious business. Apart from their symbolic meaning, they also have a tangible political dimension. Like Mgr. Bernardini, and like the Christians of Nazareth, Hindus in Ayodhya don�t want to abandon their temples to eager Muslims. And rest assured that unlike churches in Europe, Hindu temples are not standing empty for lack of devotees.

Footnotes: 1

Quoted by Salomon Bouman, De Standard, 24-11-1999.

2

Reproduced in the Catholic monthly Nucleus, Bruges, November 1999.

3

Nucleus, November 1999.

9. Ayodhya and the Supreme Court What follows is a reworked version of my paper �The Ayodhya demolition: an evaluation�, contributed to the collective volume: The Ayodhya Reference. Supreme -Court Judgment and Commentaries(Voice of India, Delhi 1995), which also included papers by Swapan Dasgupta, M. Rama Jois, Arun Jaitley and S.P. Gupta. The book was occasioned by the Supreme Court�s decision not to help Narasimha Rao�s Government out of the Ayodhya dilemma by offering an opinion on the historical evidence. 9.1. The one-point reference The North-Indian town of Ayodhya became world famous in 1989-92 when Hindus and Muslims clashed over a mosque structure used by the Hindus as a temple but claimed by the Muslims as the Babri Masjid. It made headlines worldwide on at least three occasions. The first one was when Hindus laid the foundation stone of the prospective temple on 9 November 1989, incidentally the same day when the Berlin Wall was brought down. The second time was when the Hindu activists outwitted the troops deployed by Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav and entered Ayodhya in large numbers, only to be shot down (with several dozen being killed) within sight of the Babri Masjid. The third and most sensational occasion was when vanguard irregulars of Hindu society destroyed the controversial structure on 6 December 1992 and replaced it with a small makeshift temple in expectation of a proper (scripturally designed) temple building. Hindus believe that the site of the building is Rama�s birthplace, and maintain that a Hindu temple adorned the site until, in 1528 at the latest, Muslims forcibly replaced it with a mosque. Muslim leaders have recently taken to denying this, though their fellow Muslims of earlier generations had proudly confirmed it. Contrary to what the international press has written, the dispute over the RamaJanmabhoomi/Babri Masjid site in Ayodhya is not a hopeless tangle of contending fanaticisms in which the historical truth is forever unknowable. A lot of scholarly research has been done, and the Government of India has provided the contending parties with an official forum in which

experts could go through the evidence produced for both sides. This scholarly debate took place around the turn of 1991, and once more in autumn 1992. Though both rounds of debate were unilaterally broken off by one of the parties, viz. the anti-temple party, it brought to light enough evidence to support an unambiguous verdict. Apart from this semi-official debate, there was a longdrawn-out polemic in the general publishing market, in a dozen books and hundreds of newspaper articles and columns. The polemic started in earnest in 1989 and has effectively ended with the October 1994 decision of the Supreme Court to reject the Government�s �one-point reference�, viz. the request for a judicial verdict on the single historical question whether a temple had existed at the site until it was replaced with a mosque. Narasimha Rao�s government had made this request on the tacit understanding that a positive verdict would justify an acceptance of the Hindu claim on the disputed site, while a negative verdict would justify a �solution� in accordance with the Muslims� wishes. The one-point reference was supported by those who wanted the dispute to end, whatever the details of the eventual solution. Otherwise, it was widely objected to. Observers of India�s ramshackle institutions feared that the judiciary might not be immune to political manipulation. Some historians argued that judges are not competent on hi story and archaeology. Modernist supporters of the Babri Masjid cause objected that medieval state of affairs, no matter how wellproven, should not be allowed to determine today�s policies. Its Islamist supporters asserted that any and every mosque deserves protection, regardless of whether it had a history of forcibly replacing a temple. Supporters of the Rama-Janmabhoomi cause objected to the idea that a firm Hindu tradition would be made the object of a,contingent judgment by fallible human judges appointed by a hostile state. So, there was a sigh of relief in many quarters when in October 1994, after more than a year of deliberations, the Supreme Court formally rejected this one-point reference regarding the history of Ayodhya�s disputed site. With that, the historical question, which would have come into full focus if the Supreme Court had accepted to consider it, seemingly lost its political relevance and disappeared from public debate. For at least three reasons, this was a correct decision. In fact, it was correct for more and better reasons than the judges themselves realised. The formal reason is the matter of competence: historical questions should be decided by impartial scholars, not by judges. In practice, judges often have to base their verdicts at least partly on opinions about matters beyond their strict competence, after calling certified �expert witnesses� to the court. But in this case, such an opinion would not merely be an ancillary consideration in a properly judicial verdict based on the judges� expertise in legal matters; it would be the whole of the verdict. Though they could legally have chosen to offer the opinion, they were equally within their rights when they opted to refuse. This point is quite straightforward, has been argued sufficiently and needs no further elaboration. The other two reasons, by contrast, have hardly been mentioned, let alone elaborated: the historical question is in its pertinent aspects sufficiently clear; and history is not the cause of the dispute anyway. We will look into them in the next sections, before attempting a more general evaluation of the Ayodhya debate. 9.2. Why an Ayodhya debate at all?

The material reason why the judges were right not to entertain the historical question regarding Ayodhya, is that in this question, apart from details, there was nothing left to decide anyway. Until 1989, there was a complete consensus in all sources (Hindu, Muslim and European) which spoke out on the matter, viz. that the Babri Masjid had been built in forcible replacement of a Hindu temple. The 1989 edition of the Encyclopedia Brittannica (entry Ayodhya) puts it squarely: �There are few surviving monuments of any antiquity. Rama�s birthplace is marked by a mosque, erected by the Moghul emperor Babur in 1528 on the site of an earlier temple.� Apart from local tradition, architectural indications, supporting documents and archaeological evidence, this consensus had logic on its side: thousands of mosques inside and outside India do stand on demolished non-Muslim places of worship, while in every area of North India where Muslim power has reached during the Sultanate and Moghul periods, every prominent temple has been demolished. Therefore, all that the consensus claimed, was that the general rule, verified in thousands of places in India and thousands more in other countries, applied in this particular case (the central hill of the temple town of Ayodhya) as well. To affirm that the general rule also applies in a given particular case, is the most modest claim one can possibly make. He who makes the opposite claim, viz. that the given particular case forms an exception to the rule, must logically accept the burden of proof. In normal scholarly practice, the debate on the object of such a consensus is only reopened when new evidence surfaces. Scholars have more promising questions to figure out, so they don�t waste time on settled affairs. The �eminent historians� from Jawaharlal Nehru University JNU), Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) et al., who insisted on revising the consensus have not shown such evidence, no new fact nor credible new interpretation of known facts. Instead, they have constructed purely speculative hypotheses (like the British conspiracy to float demolition stories in order to �divide and rule�) which are in conflict with all available knowledge and remain in need of supporting evidence themselves. In the entire corpus of Ayodhya arguments, including the minutes of the Govemment-sponsored debates of DecemberJanuary 1990-1991 and October-November 1992 between scholars mandated by the Babri Masjid Action Committee (BMAC) and the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), I have not come across any piece of evidence which would warrant the reopening of the question in any normal scholarly context. On the contrary, what new evidence has surfaced, has only confirmed the old consensus: new documentary and esp. archaeological evidence confirms that a Hindu temple stood at the Babri Masjid site. The Supreme Court judges could not have added anything to this unambiguous status quaestionis. Of course, some as yet undecided historical details may remain of interest to scholars. Thus, it is unlikely that the demolition which was followed by the construction of the Babri mosque, was the first temple demolition on the Rama Janmabhoomi site. The temple from which historians claim to have recovered an inscription in the Babri debris on 6 December 1992 was built around 1100 A.D., i.e. well after Mahmud Ghaznavi�s raids. It is most likely that during the Ghorid and Sultanate periods (1192-1526), the RamaJanmabhoomi site suffered a fate similar to the Somnath site in Prabhas Patan, Gujarat: temple demolition followed by reconstruction followed by yet another demolition, mosque built by Muslim invaders but reclaimed by the Hindus and temporarily used as a makeshift temple, etc. The RamaJanmabhoomi site had probably been desecrated a number of times before Babar and A& Baqi set foot in Ayodhya. In various intemet discussion lists and other forums, this observation of mine has been quoted by anti-temple polemicists to counter the unreflected claim of some Hindutva publications that the original ancient temple itself is the one which Babar�s men destroyed. It is true that unlike the

hardliners in both contending parties, who are so terribly sure of their theories, I readily admit that in the said period, much remains obscure about the exact chain of events between the original Hindu temple and the Babri mosque. Thus, architectural indications have been pointed out for a preMoghul construction of the mosque, implying that it was not built by Babar but more likely by 1 the Sharqi sultans of jaunpur in the early 15th century. The �entirely disproportionate� size of the domes in relation to the walls and the �patchwork� nature of the building indicates an eventful history, probably including partial demolition, re-employment for different purposes and reconstruction. This scenario has plenty of room for periods of Hindu use of the site, either thanks to temporary unilateral acquisition of the site, or by consent of the Muslim authorities when they needed Hindu support against Muslim rivals. This was the case in the final years of the Sultanate, and - more definitely attested - in the post-Aurangzeb period of the Moghul empire, when the Muslims acquiesced in a Hindu presence 3 at the site, materialized in the Ram chahootra (platform) just metres outside the Babri mosque. 2

I therefore concur with archaeologist R. Nath�s observation: the Hindu temple at the contentious site �was devastated either by the armies of Mahmud of Ghaznin or the Delhi Sultans who captured the place and established here their provincial seat. It is quite probable, and possible too, that a mosque was first raised during the Sultanate period (1001-1030; 1192-1526) on the site of the most important temple associated with the life of Rama, and Mir Baqi just restoredthat mosque during his occupation of Ayodhya.� Sushil Srivastava likewise opines: �Mir Baqi might 4

5

have had the mosque renovated and then re-dedicated it to Babur.�

But interesting as these vicissitudes of Islamic iconoclasm in Ayodhya may be, they are immaterial to the fundamental issue: the very fact of Islamic iconoclasm as the cause of the destruction of a Hindu temple on one of the foremost sacred sites of India�s native religion. In a Hindu city, a mosque could not have appeared where a Hindu temple stood without the forcible replacement of that temple, no matter what the exact year was in which the replacement happened. The basic and pertinent fact of history is that first there was a Hindu temple at the site (at least until the Ghorid invasion of 1192) and later a mosque was built in forcible replacement of the temple (at least from 1528 onwards). The outline of the relevant historical events is quite wellknown, but then the controversy is not about history. This is not merely the now dominant position among India�s secularists who, knowing fully well that they can�t win the debate on history, try to shift their ground towards redefining the conflict as a strictly judicial property dispute. It is also the view of the Muslim and Hindu claimants. According to anti-temple author Sushil Srivastava, the local Muslims �believe that Emperor Babur came to Ayodhya in 1528 and destroyed the famous Ram Janmabhoomi temple, to 6

propitiate Pir Fazal Abbas Musa Aashikan�, an allegedly fanatical Muslim saint. Muslim claimants have only started challenging the established consensus about the iconoclastic origin of the Babri Masjid when secularist intellectuals taught them the tactical usefulness of that negationist position. Originally they accepted the true history, but differed with other people only in their theologico-juridical conclusions. To them, a mosque is not less legitimate because it was built in forcible replacement of an idol temple, rather the contrary. They claimed the Babri Masjid because at one point it was a mosque, and regardless of that mosque�s prehistory, they insist on the principle: �once a mosque, always a mosque�.

The Hindus who refuse to cede the Rama-Janmabhoomi site to the Muslim and secularist claimants, do so because this is a Hindu sacred site, - not because it was one in Valmiki�s, Vikramaditya�s or Babar�s day, but simply because it is one right now. And the problem, the cause of the post-1949 episode of the Ayodhya conflict, is not the fact that some mujahid denied them the right to their own sacred site sometime in the Middle Ages, but that Muslim and secularist politicians are denying them that right today. That Muslims have destroyed thousands of temples would not be an issue today if the Muslims had taken the same conciliatory attitude which the Pope takes vis-A-vis the Native Americans (during his 1992 visit to the site where Columbus landed in 1492, the Pope expressed his heartfelt regrets for the suffering which Christendom inflicted on them), which the Japanese now take vis-A-vis the Koreans, the Germans vis-A-vis the Jews, etc. Or they may dispense with the fashionable breast-beating and televised apologies, as long as they don�t repeat their medieval behaviour in our own time. The problem is not what Muslims did in the past, but what they do today: Hindus are trying to exercise a right which religious communities everywhere obviously have, viz. to worship at their own sacred site; and Muslims are trying to deny them this selfevident right - not in the middle Ages, but today. 9.3. The role of foreign scholars There never was a Rama-Janmabhoomi problem, only a Babri Masjid problem. That Hindus want to build a temple at their own sacred site is the most normal and natural thing in the world. By contrast, it is a most astonishing circumstance that some Muslims lay claim to this Hindu sacred site and try to occupy it. But this arrogant and self-righteous Muslim behaviour is only the effect of indoctrination in Islamic theology. The most abnormal and unnatural thing is the complete support which this Islamic communal aggression has received from world opinion. Foreign scholars might have played the role which the Supreme Court judges rejected: that of independent arbitrators. But as it turned out, the established Western academics, to the extent that they cared to look into the Ayodhya debate at all, have only looked through the glasses which the India�s Marxist-Muslim combine has put on their noses. Writing on the Ayodhya controversy, the American India watcher Susan Bayly describes how Hindu activists �claim that the �scientifically� verifiable facts of history justify their cause�. Against this tendency, she sees �a pressing need for more academics to join those in 7

India who have been brave enough to contest these views�. The claims made here explicitly or implicitly are the following five: 1) Hindu activists claim that facts of history justify their cause, viz. the official recognition of the Hindu status (effective since December 22, 1949) of the disputed RamaJanmabhoomi Babri Masjid site at Ayodhya, and its materialization in a scripturally appropriate Rama temple at the site. 2) These facts of history are scientifically verifiable, at least according to the said Hindu activists, though Bayly�s quote marks insinuate that the Hindus use the term �scientific� improperly. 3) Some Indians, academics and others, are contesting these views, viz. the view that the Hindu claim is justified by history, and the view that this reference to history is scientifically verifiable. 4) For these Indians, it requires bravery to contest the Hindu activist claims.

5) Western academics should urgently join these �brave� Indians in their rejection of the Hindu activist position. The first claim is incorrect, for the Hindu claim to the disputed site in Ayodhya was not originally based on history, but on the actual present-day status of the site as a Hindu sacred site. The need for historical justification only arose in 1989, four decades after Hindus had staked their claim, when the opponents of the temple started challenging the existing consensus regarding the history of the site, viz. that a medieval Hindu temple had been razed by Muslims to make way for a mosque. The second claim is obviously uncontroversial: once the pro-temple party accepted the challenge of collecting historical evidence, they were confident that their corpus of evidence would stand up to scientific scrutiny. To an extent, this scrutiny has also taken place, and it has not shaken the temple party�s confidence. The third claim is only correct in the weaker sense, viz. that Indian academics are politically contesting (opposing, protesting against) the Hindu position; not in the stronger sense, viz. that they are scientifically contesting (confronting, attempting to refute) it. With the very partial exception of the foursome of historians who represented the Babari Masjid Action Committee during the Government-sponsored scholars� debate, Indian academics have most definitely not confronted the case made by the pro-temple scholars. On the contrary, they have fully used their power in the media, academic and publishing sectors to muzzle the protemple voices and keep the pro-temple evidence out of public view, rather than face it and possibly refute it. When confronted with inconvenient new evidence dug up by their opponents, the knee-jerk reaction of the secularist scholars and media was to allege �concoctions�, �fabrications� and �Goebbelsian lies� at the top of their voices, and foreign scholars have sheepishly followed their lead. The fourth claim is simply untrue: it did not require bravery to oppose the pro-temple party from academic platforms, certainly much less than to defend the pro-temple position. There is no 8 physical risk involved in publishing a paper denouncing the Hindu claims on Ayodhya. To be sure, every now and then a secularist scholar claims to have received death threats from people venting their impotent anger, and the newspapers devote plenty of attention to these non-events 9 all while downplaying the real killing of Hindus in Kashmir or the Northeast. But being no stranger to hate mail and death threats myself, I know that someone who cares to send you advance warning is not very serious about murdering you. So, at the time of writing, Romila Thapar, R.S. Sharma, S. Gopal and all those other would-be martyrs for free speech are alive and well (like myself, thank you). The physical danger in writing against the temple is imaginary; by contrast, it is dangerous to uphold rather than oppose Hindu activist positions. It is a fact that throughout the 1990s, many office-bearers of the RSS, the BJP and their Tamil affiliate Hindu Munnani have been murdered; but that was more because of the demolition and other political matters than because of any statements on the historical background of the Hindu claims on Ayodhya. At one point, the publishinghouse Voice of India, which has published the Vishva Hindu Parishad�s statement and several other writings on the Ayodhya evidence, has had to seek police protection for a few days, but the threats had to do with �insults to the Prophet� and not with the Ayodhya evidence. The riotous and triggerhappy types are not the ones who attach great importance to feats of scholarship.

In terms of status and career, a non-conformistic stance in favour of the temple cannot be maintained without sacrifice. By contrast, joining the anti-temple party has always been a smart career move. Far from requiring bravery, posturing as a �committed secularist� up in arms against �obscurantist and communalist history manipulation� will only earn you praise (as Dr. Bayly�s own appreciation of this �bravery� illustrates). India�s secularist academics and journalists form a society of mutual praise, and the cheapest way of getting applause in elite India is to attack the Hindu movement. Dr. Bayly�s fifth claim, about the urgent need for Western support, is equally untenable. There is no need at all for Western scholars tocome out in support of their Indian colleagues who oppose the pro-temple position. The reason is that they are already in the same camp: not a single Western academic has come out in support of the Hindu (i.e. the pre-1989 consensus) position. Foreign academicians in overwhelming majority borrow the views of the secularist establishment in the Indian universities, so there is no need for them to �join� their Indian colleagues. Now, which is bravest: to take the position promulgated by the government, the parliamentary majority, the media and the capitalist media barons, most political parties, the academic establishment and the international Indological and India-watching community; or to stand alone 10 against this power bloc? In the footsteps of the Indian academics, their Western colleagues writing on Ayodhya pretend to discuss a conflict but do not care to find out the position of one of the parties. Somehow they manage to collect a lot of data and write lengthy papers without noticing that one half of the controversy�s contents is missing, and that they are merely rewording the position of one of the two warring parties; though I am sure that they would never accept a student�s thesis on any given controversy which reported only one side�s version. Future books on the affair will include a chapter on �the Ayodhya scandal�: the unscrupled use of academic and media power positions by India�s secularists to suppress relevant evidence, and the gullibility of foreign scholars relying on hearsay from Indian colleagues whose bonafides is open to question. Many outsiders still believe that the VHP case is based on �myth� and �concoction�, as the 11 BMAC and its Marxist supporters have kept on alleging. At the very best, many people, including sincere but uninformed scholars, assume a priory that �the truth must lie somewhere in between�, and that both sides are just equally unreliable hot-heads. Foreign press correspondents have simply parroted the views of the Marxist historians of JNU and AMU in support of the Babri Masjid cause, as well as their silence about the scholars� debate. Thus, in his review of the eminent historians� book Anatomy of a Confrontation, former Time correspondent Edward Desmond adopts the Marxist historians� contentions lock, 12 stock and barrel. As a writer of lengthy pieces on Kashmir in which the 1990 ethnic cleansing of the Hindus goes unmentioned, Desmond does not surprise us by concealing the government sponsored debate with its embarrassing outcome nor by deliberately denying the existence of evidence put at his disposal by Voice of India: in his lengthy article on the affair, he curtly dismisses all the protemple evidence as �bogus� without presenting any part of it, a position he would never be

able to defend in a public debate. His strength is, of course, that he does not have to fear any public debate: the other side simply cannot get its message across through the media, so the public assumes that this is a subject on which the debate is closed. Even the French sociologist G6rard Heuzie, who has written some fresh and independent observations on the Hindutva movement, has not been able to get around the secularist monopoly on the information flow on Ayodhya. He has analysed the anti-democratic musings which were audible in the discourse of secularism �when several thousands of karsevaks brutally demolished the Babri Masjid, refusing to listen to RSS cadres, who were acting as the last ramparts of the paternalist perspectives. Numerous comments showed clearly that for the academic and establishment commentators, the most insupportable thing was that uneducated youngsters, without any letters of introduction or written authorisations, had intervened to change the course of things.� Heuzé points out that �the way in which the RSS was overwhelmed by a thousand determined youngsters on 6 December 1992 is telling. The sect is worthless in street 14 combat... its manifestations remind us more of the boy scouts than of mass politics.� 13

And yet, watch how even a lucid man like Heuze gets trapped. For all his independence, even he proves to be the prisoner of the secularists� control of the information flow. Mentioning the historical claims regarding Ayodhya, he declares that Hindus believe only �since the 19th century� in the forcible replacement of a Rama temple by the Babri Masjid, that �there seems never to have been a temple underneath the mosque�, and that the Hindu pillars used in the mosque �were clearly brought from elsewhere�. These claims are not true, and have not emerged from the debate as even plausible. 15

There is no firm information about the pillars� provenance, though the rule is that a mosque systematically incorporated rubble from the very temple which it was replacing. There is ample archaeological evidence that the whole Ramkot hill was covered with a temple complex, as is only to be expected at the geographical place of honour in a temple city. Apart from older but vaguer indications, there are three firm pieces of evidence from the 18th century, apart from the unnamed pre-19th century sources cited as such by the local 19th-century Muslim 16 authors. Moreover, he should have been able to draw the right conclusions from the general context of Islamic iconoclasm, from the fact that the VHP scholars had discovered no less than four attempts by BMAC people to tamper with the evidence, and from the mediacentred and swearword-oriented performance of the proBabri academics as opposed to the evidence-centred performance of their rather fewer academic opponents. The point is that, judging from his text and bibliography, Heuze does not know the official VHP argumentation presented during the Government-sponsored debate, nor has he heard of the independent studies supporting the temple thesis. The same ignorance about the solid Hindu argumentation is in evidence in the publications on India�s religious conflict by Susan Bayly 17 (US), Peter van der Veer (Holland), Christophe Jaffrelot (France) and others. They have relied on India�s secularist accounts of the status quaestionis of Ayodhya research, and these have quite purposely kept the more serious and convincing formulations of the Hindu position out of the reader�s view. Thus, Ali Asghar Engineer writes on the cover of his Babri Masjid Ram Janmabhoomi Controversy. �Future generations will have a right to know what the controversy was 18

about� , but then takes care to include only a few token statements for the Hindu side which are

either on peripheral aspects of the debate or belong to the clumsier variety of Hindutva polemic; 19 he repeats the same exercise in his sequel Politics of Confrontation. To comment on such manipulation, I need only repeat Engineer�s own words on the same cover: �It is not- only violence which has to be condemned but also distortion of history and intellectual dishonesty.� The Dutch Indologist Peter Van der Veer profusely quotes from the contributors to S. Gopal�s and A.A. Engineer�s books. Even the bibliography (of a book published in 1994) does not mention a single book presenting any aspect of the protemple argument (all of which were available before 1993). However, in his own earlier research on the traditions concerning Ayodhya, he had endorsed the old consensus view. This earned him a lot of criticism, e.g.: 20 �Disconcertingly, Van der Veer does not query Babur�s destruction of the temple.� Even in his book Religious Nationalism, Van der Veer does not follow the secularists all the way. He actually quotes pro-temple archaeologist Dr. S.P. Gupta, albeit only in a footnote; and not some clumsy statement but an actual piece of refutation of Babri historian Prof. R.S. Sharma�s claims: �Mr. Sharma has not given a single piece of archaeological or historical evidence in support of what he says. The archaeological and other evidence from art history indicate that there was a Brahminical temple at the place where the mosque stands today. The iconographical 21

features like vanamala and karandmukut show that it was probably a Vaishnava temple.� Prof. A.R. Khan, who opposed the VHP plans for Ayodhya yet upheld true history by confirming the preexistence of a temple at the site, is also mentioned in footnote by Van der Veer but his 22 arguments are not given. However, it is clear that after being taken to task for providing ammunition to the pro-temple argumentation, the Dutch scholar developed cold feet, hence his climb down: �In research carried out in the 1970s both Bakker and I relied heavily on the local tradition that Babar�s general had destroyed a temple built on Rama�s birthplace. This tradition is supposedly corroborated by the fact that in the mosque are pillars of a temple (which Bakker ascribes to the eleventh century). The same kind of pillars are also used in the grave of a Muslim pir who is in the local tradition considered to have been instrumental in the demolition of the temple.( ... ) While Bakker and I could naively accept local tradition, this cannot be done any longer. For example, one could argue that the fact that there are temple pillars in the mosque does not tell you much. They could have been taken from anywhere and not from a demolished Rama 23 temple.� So this is the evidence given, the whole reason for abandoning a well-researched view of history: �One could argue...� It is in the nature of historical evidence (as opposed to evidence in physics) that it can always be �argued�, that is, explained away if inconvenient. Fossiles disprove the Biblical Creation Theory? No, for one could argue (and some Evangelical fundamentalists do argue) that God created the world with fossiles and all, if only to put the faith of palaeontologists to the test- Of even the hardest evidence one could argue that it may have been planted, doctored, misplaced, and that it should therefore be rejected by historians. Fact is that Bakker and Van der Veer, during their original and extensive research, have not come across any fact which casts doubt on the temple demolition scenario. Fact is also that Van der Veer (and likewise Bakker) can still not cite a single finding which casts such doubt now. All he has to show as justification for his climb down is that �one could argue� that the probable

things did not happen, and that, though there is no evidence for it, something improbablemight have happened. His critic Antony Copley goes all the way in parroting his Indian contact persons: �Myth rather than history has fuelled Hindu fundamentalist protest over Ayodhya.( ... ) Archaeologists question there being any urban site at Ayodhya at the alleged date of Rama�s birth, and find no evidence 24

of any temple on the site of the Babri Masjid mosque.� One wonders to what archaeological finding he may be referring, for the two latest diggings, by B. B. Lal in the late 1970s and by Y.D. Sharma in 1992, have yielded remains of a temple. To zoom in on a telling detail, Copley makes two claims which are readily refuted by Father Tieffenthaler�s 1767 evidence, which had figured prominently during the Ayodhya debate, but which has not come to Copley�s notice because the Indian historians on whom he relies have done their utmost to keep this evidence out of view. He claims that in the last decades of Nawabi rule (in Oudh), Muslims claimed that Hanuman Garhi was built on a mosque, and "to appease Muslim feeling [the Nawahl gave permission for a new mosque to be built near the Hanuman temple. This inspired the Hindu counter-claim that the Babri Masjid mosque was built on the site of a former temple, the Ram Janmabhoomi.� Further, Copley alleges that the chabootrahad been �illegally constructed near the mosque in 1857�. Both claims are explicitly refuted by 25

Tieffenthaler�s testimony: he saw thechabootra in 1767, and he reports the Hindu claim that the Masjid had forcibly replaced a Rama temple. Of course, Copley supports the secularist thesis that it was all a British concoction: �But the British, convinced that the Muslims lay behind the rebellion of 1857, (... ) saw fit to feed this mythology. Much is made by secular-minded historians of both this official literature and Miss Beveridge�s introduction to her translation of Babar�s memoirs, where she accused Babar of just this act of vandalism. That there was a temple to mark Rama�s birthplace and that the entire Ayodhya complex could be seen as commemorative of his birth suggests the irrationality of 26 this claim.� But there is plenty of pre-British testimony, which is why even after his climbdown, Peter van der Veer maintains: �The suggestion that the local tradition is entirely invented by the British thus 27

seems disingenuous.� The facile claim of a British concoction also flies in the face of the known fact that the British, while fostering disunity among the Indians at the political level, made great efforts to prevent communal clashes in the streets. Further, if the British had wanted to use temple demolition stories for fomenting communal friction, they could have pointed to numerous indubitable instances rather than having to invent one. A scrutiny of the available historical material clearly shows that the truth does not lie halfway between the recent politicized hypothesis and the centuries-old consensus, and that the former is not half right, nor the latter half wrong. By all standards of historical method, the case for the thesis that the Babri Masjid has replaced a pre-existent Hindu temple is strong, if not overwhelming. It should be accepted unless and until evidence to the contrary is produced - and that is precisely what the BMAC experts have failed to do when the Government of India provided them with an official forum for doing so.

That the international media without exception and even most academics have chosen the side of the Muslim aggressor and condemned the Hindus who were merely minding their own business at their own sacred site, is the eighth wonder of the world; but it becomes perfectly understandable when we realise that they merely act upon the �information� given them by India�s secularists. Like their source, they have blacked out the Hindu version on Ayodhya and completely identified with the Muslim version. Future scholars of political and communications science will study the reporting on the Ayodhya affair as an absolute classic of successful disinformation. 9.4. Misrepresenting the Ayodhya issue Neither the real probability that Rama was effectively born right there, nor the solid evidence that a temple was destroyed to make way for a mosque, are what should decide this controversy. After all, the call for historical proof was only launched by India�s secularists spoiling for a fight, as a dispersionary tactic. To be sure, I don�t want to follow the Babri Masjid Action Committee historians in replacing factual argument with rhetoric consisting of the attributing of ulterior motives to opponents. The weakness of their argumentative position has to be demonstrated in 28 its own right, as has already been done. They themselves have not contributed any evidence to the search for the historical true story, they were actually demanding from the Hindu side what they themselves never provided, - indeed, never intended to provide. In the process, their ulterior motives have come to light in sufficient measure to warrant some comment. The aim of the pro-Babri Masjid historians was never to settle any historical questions. If it had been, then they would not have opposed the VHP�s request to organize systematic excavations at the site; nor would they have concealed the pro-temple evidence in their publications. Their aim was merely to distract public attention from the obvious and extremely simple solution of this controversy. The fact that this solution would be in favour of the Hindu claims was apparently unbearable to them because of their seething hatred of their ancestral religion. The solution to the Ayodhya tangle lies in the universal ethical principle known as the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would be done to by them. Since Muslims would not like their own sacred sites to be occupied by members of another religion, they should not claim anyone else�s sacred site for themselves. This means in practice that they should give up every attempt to wrest the site from its rightful owner, Hindu society. This includes street agitation, political lobbying inside and outside Parliament, and also the judicial proceedings. The attempt to occupy another religion�s sacred site is morally wrong, and it is not made one per cent less wrong by circumstances which seem to bring the achievement of the reprehensible goal within reach. It is not made less reprehensible by political equations which have allowed Islamic activists to score some points (e.g. the Places of Worship Act which freezes the status of places of worship as on 15 August 1947). Nor by the media bias which confers guilt on the Hindus for the riots which Muslims have started in pursuance of their political goals (such as the Muslim attacks on Hindu lives and property all over India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Great Britain after 6 December 1992), and thereby gives Muslim rioters ample reward for their aggression. The incredibly arrogant Muslim attempt to take over a Hindu sacred site is not even justified by the legal sanction to the injustices of history which has been created by the British and Nehruvian juridical statusquo-ism regarding the accomplished facts of Islamic iconoclasm, and which may have given the Muslims a judicial leg to stand upon. Pressing the Islamic claim on a Hindu sacred site is morally outrageous, whether in the streets, in parliament or in court; whether using

Molotov cocktails, petrodollar bribes, or juridical residues of jihadic accomplished facts. The only just, honourable and workable solution is that Muslims simply withdraw their outrageous claim, preferably with apologies for the damage in lives and political stability which their Babri Masjid agitation has already caused. Some Muslims have understood the unreasonableness of the Islamic claim to RamaJanmabhoomi. When Chandra Shekhar was Prime Minister, in December 1990, even his friend Syed Shahabuddin wrote that for once, Muslims would be ready to �gift away� the Babri Masjid site: �The law protects the Babri Masjid even if it was constructed on the site of a temple after demolishing it, but in the interest of communal amity, as a one-time exception, the Muslim community is willing to make the offer, as a moral gesture, in accordance with the 29

Shariat.� The Dutch scholar Paul Teunissen, in a review of my own book Ram Janmabhoomi vs. Babri Masjid, takes me to task for putting Islamic fanatics and secularists in the same bag, and declares that Syed Shahabuddin cannot possibly be a fanatic, considering that �he has promised to demolish the Babri Masjid with his own hands if proof is furnished that it was built on 30 a temple�. After the demolition, several more Muslim leaders have come forward with proposals to abandon the claim to Ayodhya, notably Maulana Wahiduddin Khan and Asghar Ali Engineer. This raises the issue of a possible settlement with the Muslims, and the terms in which such a settlement should be formulated. But note that no secularist opinion leader in India nor any Western observer has highlighted these offers, let alone given them his explicit support. Their preference is with the most obscurantist and militant tendency in the Muslim community. The basis for a settlement must be a correct appreciation of the Ayodhya situation. The site belongs to the Hindus, and the fact of its historical Muslim occupation, now already a distant memory, has not altered that. The ancient Hindu status of the site, strengthened moreover by its restored Hindu status since 1949, implies that Muslims are in no position to �gift away� what isn�t theirs in the first place. Muslim postures of �generosity� and �sacrifice for the common good� still carry an implied claim that for now at least, the site is theirs; it isn�t. Similarly, the assertion that by exercising their right to their own sacred site, Hindus are �exacting revenge� or �demanding compensation� for Islamic misdeeds of the past, still implies that the site is now the Muslims� property, and that Hindus want to take it back or receive it back. �Revenge� would mean that Hindus kill as many Muslims as the number of Hindus killed by Muslims (in absolute figures, or perhaps in relative proportion, taking into account today�s higher population levels?), which would require a good number of Hiroshima-size nuclear bombs; also, thousands of functioning mosques, including those at the sacred sites of Islam in Central Asia, would have to be destroyed. It is no Hindu�s case that Muslims should be subjected to 31 this kind of treatment, and Ayodhya simply has nothing to do with it. �Restoration� is out of the question too: the contemporary Indian Muslims do not have the power to restore the millions of Hindu victims back to life, nor to bring back the millions deported as slaves, nor to resurrect the numerous treasures of civilisation which their ancestors destroyed. They may of course try to win back for Hinduism the lost territories now known as Afghanistan, the Maldives, Pakistan, Bangladesh and parts of Southeast Asia; and they are welcome to form a

special regiment and take Pak-Occupied Kashmir back into India, - that would be a very incomplete but nonetheless meritorious �restoration�. �Compensation� is what the Hindu upper castes are asked to do towards the Hindu lower castes, in the form of job reservations. In their supreme arrogance, some Muslim leaders are now demanding that Muslims be included in the category of �backwards� to whom the �forward� castes are expected to give favourable treatment in compensation of past injustices; at the same time, they angrily reject any suggestion that they (like upper-caste Hindus) could be held accountable for the �so-called misdeeds� of their ancestors. If compensation is needed in Hindu-Muslim relations, a start should be made with job reservations for the oppressed and dwindling Hindu minorities in Pakistan and Bangladesh: let the bullies make amends to their victims. In the case of the destroyed temples, compensation would mean that the estimated contemporary value of all the buildings and art treasures victimised by Islamic iconoclasm is paid back to Hindu trusts, in the form of a mega-billion sum of petrodollars earmarked for public works in the sphere of Hindu civilisation. The signs are that such �compensation� is not on the cards. No Hindu organisation connected with the Rama-Janmabhoomi controversy has formulated its wishes in those terms. Let us not get sidetracked by the numerous semantic manipulations with which India�s secularists are trying to blur this issue. Muslims are not the objects of �revenge�, they are not asked to �compensate� anything, not even to �restore� anything. All they should do, is to abandon their claim to what is not theirs: a Hindu sacred site. To put it even more briefly, all they should do is nothing, except to get on with their lives. To Wahiduddin Khan and others who attach strings to their offer of leaving the disputed site to the Hindus, it should be clear that Muslims are not in a position to expect any kind of reward for this long-overdue step. There is, however, one reward which they would certainly be getting: a positive feeling among Hindus, who have never overlooked the fact that Muslims are human beings like the rest of us. Meanwhile, the prospect of Muslims �gifting away� the Rama-Janmabhoomi site remains academical. The Government of India could of course have chosen to promote these conciliatory 32 Muslim leaders (who are still militant enough) as acknowledged representatives of their community. But it preferred to cultivate fanatics like the recently deceded Ali Mian, director of a theological academy which doubles as a sanctuary for Pakistani spies, on the assumption that they have more of a following among the mass of Muslim voters. At the time of writing, the focus of the ongoing war of Islam against India has shifted to other arenas (Kashmir, reservations for Muslims, Urdu), but there is as yet no reason to believe that the Ayodhya normalisation process 33 will be completed in a peaceful manner anytime soon. Let it be clear that that is not the Hindus� fault: they should not bear any cross on their chests for minding their own business at their own sacred site. 9.5. Rama�s birthplace: a matter of faith? The terms of the Ayodhya debate have often been blurred, sometimes deliberately and mischievously, sometimes out of intellectual incompetence or sloppiness. Both types converge in the affirmation that the Hindu claim to Ayodhya is a matter of �faith�. Anti-temple polemicists have blurred the matter further by pretending that the pro-temple spokesmen who clumsily described the question of Rama�s birthplace as a matter of faith, had also tried to reduce the

plainly historical and archaeological question of medieval temple demolition to a matter of faith, which they have not. Let us now at any rate focus on the belief concerning Rama�s birth. Some RSS leaders have repeatedly claimed that the Rama-Janmabhoomi site should be left to the Hindus out of respect for the �faith� of the Hindu masses in the tradition that Rama was born at that very site. Even the noted historian Prof. K.S. Lal has gleefully been quoted by JNU historian Prof. K.N. Panikkar as declaring: �In religion, it is a matter of faith and not of proof... So by faith alone Christians embrace Jesus Christ to be the Son of God, by faith and faith alone Muslims believe Muhammad to be the Prophet of Allah, and by faith and faith alone Hindus 34 believe Ram-Janmabhoomi in Ayodhya to be the birthplace of Lord Rama.� This presentation of the Hindu claim to Ayodhya as being a matter of �faith� is inaccurate and unnecessarily weakens the Hindu position. For one thing, the status of the enumerated items of faith is different. Christianity stands or falls with the belief that Jesus was God�s Only-Begotten Son. Islam stands or falls with the belief that Mohammed is Allah�s Prophet. But Hinduism (and within Hinduism even the particular tradition of Rama worship) does not in any way depend on the belief that Rama was born at that or another site, just as Christianity and Islam are not really dependent on their respective claims 35 to specific pilgrimage sites. However, it just so happens that the Mohammed whom we talk about when formulating the dogmas of Islam, according to those very texts in which his career is described and given a Prophetic interpretation, was a man from Mecca in Arabia, brought up in the respect for the Pagan Arab sanctuary there, the Kaaba; there is no other Prophet Mohammed than the 36 Mohammed from Mecca. Similarly, it so happens that Rama, according to the texts describing his career and glorifying him, was a member of the Ikshvaku dynasty ruling in Ayodhya; there is no other Rama than the Rama from Ayodhya. The agreement among all those concerned that Mohammed was born in Mecca and Rama in Ayodhya may have certain ritual consequences, but is by no means the defining dogma of the respective religions embodied in Mohammed and Rama. The second fundamental objection to the formulation of the Hindu position regarding Ayodhya in terms of �faith�, is that the term �faith� is not respectable among post-Enlightenment intellectuals, much less among India�s secularists. It has a connotation of irrational attachment to unproven and even absurd claims. Thus, �by faith alone Christians embrace Jesus Christ to be the Son of God�: that is an accurate description of an irrational behaviour. The notion that a human being, a creature, can be the Creator�s only-begotten son, is quite absurd. To believe it, is irrational, is an injustice to man�s status as a creature equipped with the faculty of Reason. The defiantly anti-rational position of the Christian faith was summed up by the Church Father Tertullian: Credo quia absurdum, �I believe it because it is absurd�. Similarly, �by faith and faith alone Muslims believe Muhammad to be the Prophet of Allah�: that is an accurate description of an irrational belief, seen for what it was by Mohammed�s Pagan contemporaries. They dismissed his �revelations� as hallucinations, poetic inventions or fits of demonic possession. It is simply not true that Mohammed heard the voice of the archangel

Gabriel, nor that the text he �received� was a special message from God. Everything in the Quran can perfectly be explained from the psychology and the cultural and social circumstances 37 of the Meccan trader Mohammed. No fact in and about the Quran makes it intellectually necessary for a rational reader to think up the intervention of an outside and superhuman being, be it Gabriel or Allah. It is only by faith that one can accept the irrational claim which is the basic tenet of Islam, viz. that Mohammed received a special message from the Almighty. By contrast, it is simply not true that �by faith and faith alone Hindus believe Rama-Janmabhumi in Ayodhya to be the birthplace of Rama�. In common with the Muslim reverence for the Kaaba, the Hindu reverence for the Rama-Janmabhoomi site is a ritual convention, a category which may or may not have a basis in history. In the case of the Kaaba, the convention is demonstrably based on a deliberately concocted myth. The case of Ayodhya is altogether different. Is it by faith alone that we believe Napoleon lost the Battle of Waterloo? Of course, we have no eye-witnesses, and even if we had, we could not be sure that they weren�t lying to us. It is, in a sense, an act of faith (underlying all reliance on man-made historical evidence) to assume that the wealth of documentary material mentioning Napoleon and directly or indirectly confirming the traditional belief that he was defeated at Waterloo, is trustworthy. However, the scholarly discipline of historical method has developed ways of discerning trustworthy from untrustworthy sources, so that it can raise the mere possibility that the traditional claims of Napoleon�s defeat at Waterloo are true, to a degree of probability bordering on certainty. This is not the absolute certainty of faith, but a rational form of knowledge which always remains open to correction, and which is merely the best and most practical instrument with which we can face the historical dimension of reality. We have fewer sources about Rama than about Napoleon, but essentially the situation is the same: while we have no direct evidence in the form of eye-witnesses, we do have documentary sources giving particular information about his career. The tradition that Rama was born in Ayodhya, even on that very site, may well be historical. it is supported by a fairly consistent Epic and Puranic tradition, a type of source spurned by 19th-century Orientalists, and still ridiculed by westernized Indian scholars who are not up-to-date with developments abroad, where it has been rehabilitated. The core of the Greek story of Troy, the Biblical histories of the Israelite kings and the Chinese records of the Shang dynasty were once dismissed by scholars as �obviously unhistorical�, but are now accepted as remarkably accurate or at least as having a core of historical truth. It is only in India that people are still ignoring their own ancient historical tradition, and keep on treating some haughtily prejudiced 19th-century speculations as Gospel truth. By Puranic chronology, Rama lived in a pre-Harappan age which has left few durable buildings, so chances are slim that anything about him could ever be archaeologically verified or falsified. Unlike the fictional traditions conferring sanctity on the Muslim and Christian pilgrimage sites in Mecca, Jerusalem and Bethlehem, the historicity of the Ayodhya tradition remains an undisproven possibility. The geographical prominence of the site, coupled with the consistent Epic and Puranic tradition that the Suryavamsa (solar) dynasty (including Rama) ruled in Ayodhya, add to the probability of the conventional assumption that that very site once carried Rama�s castle. JNU historian Romila Thapar, a leading militant of the Babri Masjid cause, has claimed in an interview with Le Monde that �the real question� is not whether a mosque had forcibly replaced 38 a temple, but whether Rama had lived at that site in the first place. We notice the strategic retreat from a question on which hard proof is readily available, and where she knows her side

has lost the battle, to a question buried in the deep past which is probably beyond verification. Her position that the historicity of the tradition underlying the sacred status of the site is what ought to be proven, is an insulting application of double standards: it subjects Hindus to a test which is out of the question with Islam and Christianity, and which these two religions are totally unable to pass. The fact that a community considers a site sacred in the present is sufficient reason for respecting it as such, regardless of history. The Israeli government is protecting Christian access to the places where Christians claim that Jesus was born, crucified and buried. This correct policy is not altered just because modem research has shown these claims to be 39 unfounded. Two of these sites originally had Pagan temples on them, which the Church destroyed. The Church�s claim on the supposed site of Jesus� crucifixion was based on a dream in which Jesus himself revealed the location to the Emperor Constantine�s Christian mother. One imagines the scornful secularist reaction if the Vishva Hindu Parishad had based its Ayodhya claims on a dream; yet, the numerous Christians in India�s secularist coalition have not made any plans to relinquish the Church�s dream-based claims on the pilgrimage sites in Palestine. Similarly, the Islamic claims on the Kaaba in Mecca and on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem are completely unhistorical and are based on transparent ad hoc myths. In this case, we know the circumstances of the myths� deliberate creation with even more exactitude, from the Islamic sources themselves. Prophet Mohammed abandoned his fad of imitating Jewish tradition, including the choice of Jerusalem as the direction of prayer, when the Jews proved to be unimpressed with his claims to prophethood. Therefore he stole Abraham, the presumed founder of the monotheistic tradition which he had adopted, from the Jews, and declared that the Arabs were Abraham�s true heirs through Ishmael. The logic of this mythical construction forced him to claim that the Arab national sanctuary at Mecca had been built by Abraham. The fact that it had been in use as a temple of Hubal and other Arab Gods and Goddesses since time immemorial, was explained away by the totally unhistorical speculation that the idolaters had at one time usurped the temple which originally belonged to Abraham and his religion. In reality, no pre-Islamic Arab text or inscription mentions Abraham, his religion, or his son Ishmael. Conversely, the Bible, the only authentic source on Abraham, never makes him go anywhere near Mecca, nor does it make him build the Kaaba. These two inconvenient facts are explained away by means of a conspiracy theory: the Jews censored their own Scripture and destroyed the existing references to the future prophet Mohammed, and the Pagan Arabs must have done likewise with their inscriptions and oral tradition. The truth of the matter is that Mohammed stole the Kaaba from its rightful owners, who had never practised any Abrahamic or Islamic worship there. Yet, because the Islamic use of the Kaaba is now a long-standing ritual convention, it is respected as such without any question. The Islamic claim to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem is even more transparently fraudulent. Prophet Mohammed is supposed to have used it as a landing platform on his night journey through heaven on a winged horse. Any secularist willing to uphold this claim as historical? Or otherwise ready to show the courage of his conviction and demand that the Muslims relinquish their claim to the Temple Mount so as to be morally in a position to demand a similar abandonment of , �mythical� claims from the Hindus? Most Jews believe that it is up to the Messiah to rebuild King Solomon�s temple on its original site, so they are in no hurry to make the Muslims hand it back. That saves the Israeli government a dilemma: for apart from respecting Jewish sensibilities, it is also committed to the principle that sacred sites, including

Islamic ones, are to be respected irrespective of the validity of the claims underlying that status of 40 sacredness. No secularist is brandishing the mythical nature of these Islamic claims in support of a demand to hand the Temple Mount back to the Jews, nor to seize it and declare it a secular �national monument�. In the case of Christians and Muslims, no one demands that they prove the historicity of the stories underlying the sacred status of their places of pilgrimage. Demanding the same of Hindus is an insulting display of double standards, a candid statement that one intends to treat Hindus as dirt. But for the sake of argument, let us assume that �the real question� concerns Rama�s historical birthplace. There are two competing answers to that question. One is the traditional answer, based on a corpus of traditional literature. The other is Romila Thapar�s not very precise answer, which is essentially ready to let Rama come into this world at any site except at the traditional one. That traditional location may be hard to prove, but there is even less proof for any alternative location. The traditional location has at least documentary evidence in its favour, viz. the tradition itself. Romila Thapar�s alternative, by contrast, is only backed by her own eagerness to put Hindus in the wrong. To be sure, it remains possible that the tradition is mistaken, but the point for an objective scholar is that Romila Thapar has not given one iota of evidence for that scenario. In her overview of the development of different Ramayana versions, she mentions a lot of differences (relationship between Rama and Sita, Janaka and Sita, status of Ravana, of Hanuman) but no two different 41 birthsites. It was left to the Babri Masjid Action Committee office-bearers to claim, on the basis of a collection of articles by various modern crank writers, that they had �proof� of Rama�s birth at no less than seven different places (from Andhra Pradesh and Varanasi via Nepal and Afghanistan all the way to Egypt), apart from having cited �proof� that Rama had never existed 42 at all. To stay within their logic, I suggest that someone who has taken birth at seven different places was certainly able to take birth at yet one more place, viz. that hilltop in Ayodhya. At any rate, the BMAC�s frontal display of contempt for logic and rational method has not pitted any secularist against the BMAC position. For them no allegations of replacing historical knowledge with myth or �faith�; which adds further illustration to our view that the whole rhetoric of historicity vs. faith was never anything else than a dispersionary tactic to put the Hindus on the defensive. Albeit one in which some Hindu spokesmen were unwitting accomplices by their own mindless adoption of the term �faith�. 9.6. A Babri Masjid, not a Rama-Janmabhoomi problem Though the Supreme Court judgment was correct in its effective decision, the commentatorial parts of the verdict come in for some serious criticism. This is especially true of its allotment of guilt. The bias showing from these passages should warn against the optimism with which some Hindu commentators have welcomed the verdict. I suppose I am not the first to notice the glaring contradiction between the following two statements made by the eminent judges in two successive paragraphs. In Para 56, Hindu society

is explicitly dissociated from the �guilt� of the demolition on 6 December 1992: ��The miscreants who demolished the mosque had no religion, caste or creed except the character of a criminal and the mere incident of birth of such a person in any particular community cannot attach 43 the stigma of his crime to the community in which he was born.� This clear position is reversed in the very next Paragraph, n 57: �...However, confining exercise of the right of worship of the Hindu community to its reduced form within the disputed area as on 7th January 1993, lesser than that exercised till the demolition on 6th December 1992, by the freeze enacted in Section 7(2) appears to be reasonable and just in view of the fact that the miscreants who demolished the mosque are suspected to be persons professing to practice the Hindu religion. The Hindu community must, therefore, bear the cross on its chest, for the 44 misdeed of the miscreants reasonably suspected to belong to their religious fold.� o

Remark first of all the Christian imagery in the last sentence: �The Hindu community must bear the cross on its chest.� This illustrates what we had suspected all along: the English-speaking elite in India has preserved the mind-set of the Christian-British colonial rulers. The ruling class has borrowed its religious imagery from Western Christianity, just as it has borrowed its secularism from the anti-religious reaction in the late-Christian West. Mentally, India is to an extent still under Brown Sahib colonial domination, and the legal apparatus which denies Hindus the right to their sacred site can, in circumstances critical to the establishment�s legitimacy, still be used as an instrument of colonial oppression. Within this anti-native, anti-Hindu colonial system, it is the latter (n0 57) of the two mutually contradictory statements which represents the true spirit: Hindu society is guilty of trying to manage its own affairs at its own sacred site, so it deserves to be punished with administrative restrictions on its access to the Rama-Janmabhoomi, and perhaps with further judicial restrictions later. The judges simply confirm what is explicitly laid down in article 30 of the Constitution: minorities enjoy privileges which are denied to Hindus, including the non-interference by the government in the affairs of their places of worship. Hindus have no right to complain when the government takes over Hindu temples, nor when it works hand-in-glove with Islamic activists trying to take over a Hindu sacred site. They should be satisfied with the status of second-class citizens, to which they have been so well accustomed by centuries of colonial rule, Islamic as well as Christian. The former of the two statements (n0 56), by contrast, is quite dishonest. It is just a typical exercise in the mendacious secularspeak of the Nehruvian elite: claiming that the religions are not themselves responsible for communal strife, that it is the handiwork of evil political opportunists and �miscreants�. In reality, Islam is directly responsible for the communal conflict as a whole; and a group of committed Hindus are responsible for the demolition of the Babri Masjid. It is simply not true that the demolishers of the Babri Masjid �had no religion, caste or creed except the character of a criminal�. Though not all Hindus agreed on this type of strategy for achieving the reconstruction of a proper temple at the site, it is undeniable that the demolishers acted out of a commitment to Hindu concerns. They certainly belonged to a Hindu caste (say, Maratha) or a Hindu sect (say, Naga sadhu) and professed the Hindu religion. Of course the �stigma� of their intervention does not attach to the whole of Hindu society, but nevertheless every Hindu is entitled to feel some pride that �our boys� have stood up for Hindu dignity on 6 December 1992. They did what many

BJP supporters in their heart of hearts had wanted to do but were too afraid or too politically domesticated to put into practice. It is sad that such a symbolic event like the demolition of the misplaced Babri Masjid architecture had to be performed surreptitiously by an unruly crowd of mostly unemployed youngsters. But then, perhaps it was just their task in these circumstances. Under India�s secularist regime, Hindu society is an underground society, and sometimes it is inevitable that moral imperatives in the service of Hindu society can only be realised by such surreptitious surprise action. Considering the foolish haughtiness with which the Allahabad High Court had just decided, days before the gathering scheduled for 6 December, to postpone once more their verdict on the acquisition of some of the Ayodhya land by the UP government (intended as part of a strategy towards a peaceful solution), after a full 42 years of endless litigation, it is not fair to accuse the over-enthusiastic Rama devotees of disrespect towards the judicial process and the democratic order which it is supposed to uphold. Rather, they have shown disrespect towards the misuse of the courts for political games, and they have rightly revolted against the judges� contempt for Hindu society, which was evident from their unwillingness to settle the dispute brought before them, concerning no less a site than the Rama-Janmabhoomi.

Footnotes: 1

Sushil Srivastava: The Disputed Mosque. A Historical Inquiry, Vistaar Publ., Delhi 1991, p.90.

As for the calligraphy of the inscription attributing the building of the mosque to Babar�s lieutenant Mir Baqi, Srivastava argues (p.89) that it is in a style typical of the 19th century, so that the inscription constitutes but a very weak proof for dating the mosque to Babar�s reign. 2

R. Nath: The Babri Masjid of Ayodhya, Historical Research Documentation Programme, Jaipur 1991, p.11. 3

About the Babri Masjid in the decades before the Hindu-Muslim clashes in the 1850s, the

region�s first British district commissioner, Patrick Camegy, wrote: �It is said that up to that time the Hindus and Mohamedans alike used to worship in the mosque-temple.� Quoted by Peter Van der Veer: Religious Nationalism, p. 153. R. Nath: The Babar Masjid of Ayodhya, p.38. With �1001-1030�, the period of Mahmud

4

Ghaznavi�s raids is meant. 5

Sushil Srivastava: The Disputed Mosque, p.88.

6

Sushil Srivastava: The Disputed Mosque, p.78.

Susan Bayly: �History and the fundamentalists: India after the Ayodhya crisis�, Bulletin of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, April 1993. 7

8

We are not considering here the cases of outright provocation, like the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust(Sahmat) Ramayana exhibit, or the disgusting performance of some journalists at the Ayodhya site prior to the demolition, when they were offering cookies to the Kar Sevaks, as if to monkeys in a zoo, in order to verify the rumour that these were just hungry street kids lured to the

Kar Seva in exchange for food. Since these have nothing to do with the historical debate on Ayodhya, we understand that they are not included in Susan Bayly�s paean to �bravery� of anti-temple Indiarls. Against the said provocations, some Hindu activists have lost their temper, but even then, nobody was killed. E.g. Soma Wadhwa: �Historians rained with hate mail�,Sunday Observer, 17-1-1993.

9

10

In 1998, a BJP-led alliance gained a working majority in the Lok Sabha, but many coalition

parties refuse to have anything to do with �communal� issues, and even in the BJP the interest in and commitment to the Ayodhya temple is unimpressive. 11

This stand is still taken by most contributors to Sarvepalli Gopal ed.: Anatomy of a Confrontation, the Babri Masjid/Ram Janmabhoomi Issue (Penguin, Delhi 1991), which probably contains the final Marxist position in this debate. The book (and the sycophantic reviews it has received) avoids mentioning the pre-British testimonies and carefully ignores the scholars� debate as well as other scholarly expositions of the Hindu case. 12

Edward Desmond reviewing S. Gopal, ed.: Anatomy of a Confrontation, in New York Review of Books, 14-5-1992. Gérard Heuzé: Où va l�Inde moderne? L�Harmattan, Paris 1993, p.59.

13

Gérard Heuzé: Où va l�Inde moderne?, p. 12 2.

14

Gérard Heuzé: Où va l�Inde modems?, p.7-8.

15

16

Vide Harsh Narain: Ayodhya Temple-Mosque Dispute, esp. p.18 and p.91 for the Jaipur

maharaja�s Janmasthan map (1717), p.10-11 for Father Tieffenthaler�s testimony (1767), p.23-26 for the Persian �Bahadurshahi Book of Forty Sermons� (around 1710). 17

Peter Van der Veer: Religious Nationalism. Hindus and Muslims in India, University of California Press, Berkeley 1994; Christophe Jaffrelot: Les Nationalistes Hindous, Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, Paris 1993; Susan Bayly: �History and the Fundamentalists: India after the Ayodhya Crisis�, Bulletin of the Academy of arts and Sciences, April 1993. 18

Published by Ajanta Publ., Delhi 1990.

19

Published by Ajanta Publ., Delhi 1990 c.q. 1992.

Antony Copley: �Secularism Reconsidered�,Contemporary South Asia 1993, 2 (1), p.47-65, spec. p.64 n.38. 20

21

Quoted by Peter Van der Veer: Religious Nationalism, p.219, n.55.

22

Peter Van der Veer: Religious Nationalism, p.218 n.51. A.R. Khan�s rebuttal to the JNU

historians, �In the name of �history��, along with the ensuing polemic, has been included in S. R. Goel, ed.: Hindu Temples, vol. 1, 2nd ed., p.243-263. 23

Peter Van der Veer: Religious Nationalism, p.161, referring to Hans Bakker: Ayodhya,

Groningen 1987, and to Peter Van der Veer: ��God must be liberated!� A Hindu liberation movement in Ayodhya�, Modern Asia Studies, 1987. Antony Copley: �Secularism Reconsidered�,Contemporary South Asia 1993, 2 (1), p. 57.

24

Antony Copley: �Secularism Reconsidered�,Contemporary South Asia 1993, 2 (1), p. 58.

25

Antony Copley: �Secularism Reconsidered�,Contemporary South Asia 1993, 2 (1), p.58.

26

27

Peter Van der Veer: Religious Nationalism, p. 160.

28

Important contributions to the debate from the Hindu side include the official argumentation by the Vishva Hindu Parishad, published as History vs. Casuistry by Voice of India 1991; The Ayodhya Temple-Mosque Dispute, Focus on Muslim Sources by Prof. Harsh Narain, Penman Publ., Delhi 1993; and, in a broader perspective, Hindu Temples, What Happened to Them (2 vols.), by Sitaram Goel et al., Voice of India, 1990-1993. 29

Syed Shahabuddin�s letter in Indian Express, 13-12-1990.

30

Paul Teunissen in the Dutch bimonthly India Nu, January 1993. Note that he accepts my

argumentation that the temple existed, so that �Shahabuddin will have to get serious about his demolition promise�. 31

This point has been developed in the VHP�s official rebuttal to the BMAC�s evidence bundle: History vs. Casuistry, p.57 and p.67. Of course, that document is absent from the bibliographies of practically all secularist publications on Ayodhya in India and abroad eventhough it represents the official position of the secularists� own chosen enemy, the position which their publications purport to be rebutting. 32

Wahiduddin Khan is an ideologue of the Tabligh movement (propagation of pure Islamic ways and abolition of remnants of Hindu culture among Muslims); A.A. Engineer routinely publishes prefabricated �reports� on communal riots in which the Muslim hand is systematically concealed, comparable to the pre-Partition Pirpur Report. Their commitment is to Islam, and their conciliatory stand on Ayodhya is only motivated by the calculation that at this point, Islamic interests are served better with a non-confrontational strategy. 33

Though written in 1995, these words do not need serious amending even in January 2002. Quoted in K.N. Panikkar: �A Historical Overview�, in S. Gopal ed.: Anatomy of a

34

Confrontation, p.37 of the Penguin reprint 1993, from K.S. Lal: �Ramjanmabhumi - Some

Issues�, in Organiser, October 1989. Remark that all the historical arguments developed by Prof. Lal, like all those of other competent scholars, have been carefully kept out of view in S. Gopal�s book (which for most foreigners is theonly source about the Ayodhya affair), while this one clumsy phrase has been seized upon to demonstrate the �unhistorical� and �irrational� basis o the Hindu position. 35

To be sure, during the Ayodhya crisis, journalists managed to find an illiterate Rama devotee

who, quoted from memory, declared: �We cannot attain moksha (liberation) unless we can worship Rama at his very birthplace.� In a political sense, one could argue that Hindu society is not really free as long as it has to suffer the occupation of its sacred sites by Islam; with that view, I agree. But the interviewee was apparently talking about spiritual liberation, which of course has nothing to do with the location of the place of Rama�s birth. 36

I cannot mention Jesus at this point, because his birthplace is in doubt. The claim for Bethlehem was made only in an attempt to convince potential Jewish converts that Biblical predictions about the birth of the Messiah in Bethlehem had come true in Jesus. 37

A brilliant and thoroughly scientific analysis of Mohammed�s psychology, strictly based on the authentic Islamic sources, has been developed by the Flemish psychologist Dr. Herman H. Somers in his Dutch-language book Een Andere Mohammed, Hadewijch, Antwerp 1992. His conclusions are, of course, not compatible with the fond beliefs of Islam. Since for some reason no English translation has been forthcoming, I am preparing an English summary myself. 38

Romila Thapar�s interview to Le Monde was reproduced in the September 1993 issue of India, bimonthly of Shanti Darshan Belgo-Indian Association. 39

That the claims to these sites were deliberately made up on non-historical grounds by the triumphant Church in the 4th century, is the thoroughly researched thesis of the New Zealand historian Joan Taylor: Christians and the Holy Places, Oxford University Press 1993. 40

This peculiar Messiah-centred Jewish attitude to the Temple Mount is only one of the fundamental differences between the Jerusalem and the Ayodhya situation. It is only a symptom of laziness if not worse to describe the Temple Mount controversy as a �Jewish Ayodhya�. Romila Thapar: �A historical perspective on the story of Rama�, in S. Gopal, ed.: Anatomy of a Confrontation, p.141-163. 41

42

This claim was made in writing during the very first round of the Government-sponsored

scholars� debate. Embarrassed about their poor performance (which has gone strictly unreported in the media as well as in all academic publications), the BMAC negotiators have never published their argumentation; I could inspect a copy at the Deendayal Research Institute, Delhi. The specific pieces of �proof� are commented on in the VHP rebuttal: History vs. Casuistry, p.38-41. �The Supreme Court Judgment�, in Swapan Dasgupta et al.: The Ayodhya Reference, p.43.

43

�The Supreme Court Judgment�, in Swapan Dasgupta et al.: The Ayodhya Reference, p-44.

44

10. Mohammed Habib�s history-rewriting It is but rarely that a secularist or a Muslim actually takes issue with what I have written. Mostly they resort to swearwords and the use of institutional power to deny me access to important forums. So, when someone does take the trouble of reading a book of mine and even writing a rebuttal, I will gladly oblige and take my turn to comment on the comment. 10.1. Mohammed Habib�s revolutionary project �The writings of the Dutch historian Koenraad Elst have recently become popular among the Hindutvavadis of India. He claims that official (or officially sanctioned) history in India is subject to �negationism� - the denial or playing down of Muslim crimes in the past, as well as of a history of Hindu-Muslim conflict.� Thus writes Amber Habib in an article titled �Elst on Habib�, published on his private website.1 My attention was drawn to it by a friend in 1999, but it may be a few years older, being a reaction to my 1993 book Negationism in India: Concealing the Record of Islam. According to his homepage, Amber Habib turns out to be a Communist, son of Prof. Irfan Habib, grandson of Prof. Mohammed Habib, as well as grandnephew of Badruddin Tyabji, a leading Congress Muslim. The young mathematician living in Model Town, Delhi, has married a young lady with a Hindu name and Hindu looks, and after that he has started neglecting his website. Well, 1 happiness is a sleeping website. He seems to be a jolly good fellow, but having grown up with a reverence for Nehru and Lenin, his view of the Hindu-Muslim conflict is rather unfair. That is to say, by sounding balanced when commenting on a highly asymmetrical conflict, it does injustice to one of the parties. He sums up his view in this verse from Kabir: �Hindu says Ram is the beloved, the Turk [Muslim] says Rahim. Then they kill each other. No one knows the secret.� Kabir belonged to a breed of Hindu converts to Islam who had retained their Hindu spiritual consciousness but poisoned it by imbibing categories of Islamic monotheism. He was the founder of the Santa-mata which had Hindu Bhakti of the Purans as its stock-in-trade but which paraded a monotheistic facade and poured contempt on the Hindu Pandit and the Muslim Mullah without knowing even the ABCD of Islam. That explains his great popularity in Nehruvian circles who know their Islam quite superficially but have developed contempt for Hinduism about which they know even less. Anyway, picking up a quarrel in the middle is pretty safe and mentally undemanding. But Kabir�s symmetry is false. No Hindu ever killed a Muslim simply for not worshipping Rama, but numerous Hindus were killed by Muslims purely for not worshipping Rahim. Let us come to the point. Amber Habib has better things to do than to argue with me: �Due to the volume of charges thrown around by him, I cannot enter into a lengthy discussion of his views.� This is convenient for the author, but I readily agree that life is too short and too precious to spend it on polemics. Habib jr. is willing to make one exception, though: �However, I feel his discussion of Prof. Mohammad Habib�s writings provides a useful example, by which his worth can be judged. The quotes below are from his bookNegationism in India: Concealing the Record

of Islam. The readers who care, may make some judgments for themselves by reading excerpts from Prof. Habib�s writings.� Here we go: �Elst begins with: �Around 1920 Aligarh historian Mohammed Habib launched a grand project to rewrite the history of the Indian religious conflict. The main points of his version of history are the following.� Prof. Habib�s specialization was the history of the Delhi Sultanate. Therefore he did write about what Elst sees only as �Indian religious conflict�. But this was not part of a larger �grand project�.� By �grand project�, I did not mean a grand research project, only a grand project of launching a new interpretation of the behaviour of Muslim conquerors in India. Given its far-reaching implications and its role as a model emulated by the dominant school of Indian historians, I believe that it is fair to call Prof. Habib�s project �grand�. Amber Habib continues: �From the prefaces to his essay on Mahmud of Ghazni, it is also clear that Prof. Habib meant mainly to criticise the image of Mahmud as a religious hero among certain Muslims, and not to defend him in any way: �There has recently grown up a tendency among some Musalmans of India to adore Mahmud as a saint, and to such [people], a scientific evaluation of his work and his policy will appear very painful. There is only one thing I need say in my defence. Islam as a creed stands by the principles of the Quran and the �Life� of the Apostle. If Sultan Mahmud and his followers strayed from the �straight path� - so much the worse for them. We want no idols.�� But that was exactly my point. The consensus view, shared by Muslims (not only recently), Hindus and Westerners, was that Mahmud acted as a Muslim, implementing the code of the mujahid as laid down by the Prophet. Habib�s new view was diametrically opposed to the centuries-old consensus: he claimed that Mahmud�s behaviour �strayed from� the properly Islamic path. That he innovated by describing Mahmud�s behaviour as un-Islamic is what I wrote, and Amber Habib has now confirmed it. Habib jr. correctly relates: �His first critics, therefore, were the self-same Muslims.� And he quotes from Habib sr.�s foreword of a reprint of his essay: �The book was hailed by a storm of criticism in the Urdu press. But as this criticism - vindictive, bitter, hostile - was based on a complete� ignorance of the originals, I took no notice of it. I reprint the book as it was written.� So, here we have it from the horse�s mouth: the Muslims applauded Mahmud�s behaviour and they considered it impeccably Islamic. I only disagree with the professor�s claim that their conviction was due to ignorance. 10.2. Absolving Islam Amber Habib then quotes me: �Firstly, it was not all that serious. One cannot fail to notice that the Islamic chroniclers (including some rulers who wrote their own chronicles, like Teimur and

Babar) have described the slaughter of Hindus, the abduction of their women and children, and the destruction of their places of worship most gleefully. But, according to Habib, these were merely exaggerations by court poets out to please their patrons. One wonders what it says about Islamic rulers that they felt flattered by the bloody details which the Muslims chroniclers of Hindu persecutions have left us. At any rate, Habib has never managed to underpin this convenient hypothesis with a single fact.� This is followed by the rebuttal: �Prof. Habib made no such claim. Again, it is best to quote him directly: �No honest historian should seek to hide, and no Musalman acquainted with his faith will try to justify, the wanton destruction of temples that followed in the wake of the Ghaznavid army. Contemporary as well as later historians do not attempt to veil the nefarious acts but relate them with pride.� He does say that much of what was written about Mahmud, was written hundreds of years after the fact, by a group seeking to legitimize itself by first canonizing Mahmud and then using him as a prior example setter.� Here, Amber Habib may have a point. The quotation given should not be used to represent the whole of the eminent historian�s writing on Mahmud and the Sultanate, but judged all by itself, it does indeed acknowledge as factual the atrocities committed by Mahmud. In that respect at least, he did better than some of the later secularists, with whose more crassly negationist claims I seem to have confused Habib�s position. As for those who glorified Mahmud centuries after the fact, they based their stories on contemporary accounts, of which Habib sr. himself admitted that they accurately described Mahmud�s atrocities and destruction. Next, my turn again to be quoted: �Secondly, that percentage of atrocities on Hindus which Habib was prepared to admit as historical, is not to be attributed to the impact of Islam, but to other factors. Sometimes Islam was used as a justification post factum, but this was deceptive. In reality economic motives were at work. The Hindus amassed all their wealth in temples and therefore Muslim armies plundered these temples.� That Habib sr. made this claim concerning Mahmud, is already clear from the quotations given above. His whole point was to absolve Islam and attribute the crimes Mahmud committed to other factors such as, here, the desire for booty. Habib jr. comments: �Prof. Habib says this for the example of Mahmud of Ghazni. If he has made a more general claim to this effect, I have not been able to find it in his Collected Works. Which brings up the matter of Elst�s method - one should note the lack of direct quotation or reference.� It is funny how often I, as a writer of heavy books overburdened with quotations and footnotes, have been attacked for not providing footnotes in my book Negationism in India, which had been started as a mere review article (of Sita Ram Goel�s book Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them) and was retained in that format even after growing to the size of a book in its own right. I referred to Habib�s writings purely from memory, having read some of them in India months or years before penning that review. Professor Habib, described here as a specialist on the Delhi Sultanate, had to deal with many more Muslim fanatics and iconoclasts, the Delhi Sultanate being one of the most violent regimes in history. Invariably, sultans oppressing Hinduism invoked the tenets of Islam as justification. If we are to believe Amber Habib, it was only in the case of Mahmud Ghaznavi that the august

professor disconnected behaviour from religion. So in all the other cases, say Malik Kafur, Alauddin Khilji or Sikander Lodi, Habib admitted their Islamic motivation? Habib can be quoted as confirming the Islamic injunction to idol-breaking as demonstrated by many Muslim rulers in India? That is still not what I recall, but, not having Habib�s Collected Works handy even now, I am willing to take Habib jr.�s word for it. Let us assume that I wrongly extrapolated Habib sr.�s view of Mahmud Ghaznavi to Muslim rulers in general. Note, however, that this extrapolation would be accurate for most of Habib�s followers among today�s AMU and JNU faculty, and even foreign scholars like Richard Eaton, who do make these exonerating claims about Islam in the case of Muslim conquerors in general. 10.3. The ethnic factor The next quotation from my own text is this: �Thirdly, according to Habib there was also a racial factor: these Muslims were mostly Turks, savage riders from the steppes who would need several centuries before getting civilized by the wholesome influence of Islam. Their inborn barbarity cannot be attributed to the doctrines of Islam.� I readily admit that my choice of the word �racial� was cheap and demagogic. Nowadays, racism passes for the ultimate mortal sin and I could not withstand the temptation to insinuate an allegation of racism against my opponents. Given the looseness with which the term �racism� is used nowadays, the massacres of Hindus by Muslims and the concentrated hatred of secularists for the Hindus could easily qualify as �racist�. But coming back to reality, the fact remains that Habib and many others have described the pre-Islamic and freshly-islamized Turks as barbaric, and used that classification to explain some of their behaviour without implicating Islam. Amber Habib sets the record straight: �Prof. Habib did talk about relatively �uncivilized� Turks, but this was in the context of their conflicts with the Persians. In his descriptions, these are not the Turks who made it to India - and further the first Muslim invaders of India were not Turks in any case. Phrases such as �inborn barbarity� seem quite foreign to Prof. Habib�s world-view and writing style and are more likely a projection by Elst of his own weird classifications of peoples. Prof. Habib�s argument is quite the opposite of what is presented here. He did not describe barbarians who were not yet soothed by Islam - but a sophisticated ruling class that perverted the ideals of Islam to its own ends.� Before replying, allow me to quote one more round of Amber Habib�s argument. I am quoted as writing: �Mohammed Habib�s exercise in history-rewriting cannot stand the test of historical criticism on any score. We can demonstrate this with the example of Sultan Mahmud Ghaznavi (997-1030), already mentioned, who carried out a number of devastating raids in Sindh, Gujarat and Panjab. This Ghaznavi was a Turk, certainly, but in many respects he was not a barbarian: he patronized arts and literature (including the great Persian poet Firdausi, who would end up in trouble because his patron suspected him of apostasy, and the Persian but Arabic-writing historian Albiruni) and was a fine calligraphist himself. The undeniable barbarity of his antiHindu campaigns cannot be attributed to his ethnic stock.�

Habib jr. comments: �Prof. Habib does not attribute Mahmud�s behaviour to his being a Turk �barbarian�, but (to the extent that background can be blamed) to the spirit of the �Persian Renaissance� and the subsequent submission of the Islamic ideal to the whims and desires of the rulers. To say Mahmud patronised Alberuni is a bit of a stretch - for Alberuni was a captive from one of Mahmud�s western campaigns and, while he travelled in Mahmud�s train, he enjoyed no special privileges. (his bitterness towards Mahmud is quite explicit in his Kitab-alHind.)� Thank you, Amber, for this detail about Alberuni�s life story. It is most interesting to learn that one of the greatest scholars of the Muslim Golden Age, an admirer of India moreover, was not honoured in proportion to his exceptional merits, but was actually a captive and treated as one. But to return to the main point: as I already admitted, it is possible that at some points I have conflated Habib�s views with those of other secularists. It is very common in those circles to explain away the misdeeds of Muslims with ethnic factors of barbarity, e.g. numerous modem publications on the Prophet justify his use of violent means in imposing Islam as a regrettable but inevitable effect of the prevalent barbarity of the Arabs. The allegation of ethnic barbarity against Arabs or Turks is not my �own weird classification of peoples� but standard fare in pro-Islamic apologetics. My point is that this ethnic-cultural explanation of Islamic behaviour is wrong, for the Arabs were not at all barbaric. They had many tempering conventions concerning warfare, and Prophet Mohammed�s novel contribution was precisely to break these and wage a total war. Mohammed Habib and Amber Habib have certainly not convinced me that Mahmud�s crimes are in any way due to the Persian Renaissance. Firdausi was the prime exponent of this trend, and he was never guilty of such crimes. And it was precisely because he took the Persian heritage too seriously that he got in trouble with the Islamic establishment including Mahmud. But even if we accept the Habib theory, and if we agree that Habib�s line in exonerating Islam of Mahmud�s crimes is unrelated to considerations of ethnic barbarity, we still maintain that his line was wrong. The explanation of Mahmud�s behaviour as un-Islamic, whether from savageness or from decadent oversophistication, is wrong in any case. The �sophisticated ruling class� in Mahmud�s kingdom has not �perverted the ideals of Islam to its own ends�. Those who cultivated the Persian heritage did not destroy Hindu temples, while those who did persecute Hindus and destroy their cultural treasures have not done more than to faithfully apply the Islamic ideals. They emulated the precedents set by the Prophet of Islam himself. 10.4. Conversion by force, or was it by fraud? Amber Habib has no quarrel with my following paraphrase of Mohammed Habib�s position: �Finally, the violence of the Islamic warriors was of minor importance in the establishment of Islam in India. What happened was not so much a conquest, but a shift in public opinion: when the urban working-class heard of Islam and realized it now had a choice between Hindu law (smriti) and Muslim law (shariat) it chose the latter.� There, I was merely paraphrasing a very famous phrase of Prof. Habib�s, one not pertaining to Mahmud Ghaznavi but to Mohammed 2 Ghori and his lieutenants.

Amber comments: �Prof. Habib did believe that the sword failed to win any significant number of converts to Islam. In his view, the sword-wielders were only out for gain in this world and were not interested in conversions. Nor does he believe they would have succeeded had they tried. He gives credit instead to the Sufis and such preachers who spread a more egalitarian version of Islam through the country.� In Prophet Mohammed�s biography by Ibn Ishaq, we find that practically all Arab conversions to Islam were the fruit of the sword. When Pagan tribes saw that their chances to hold out against Mohammed�s military onslaught had become very small, most agreed to acquiesce in the lesser evil, viz. to give up their culture rather than their lives. Others had joined Mohammed earlier for another sword-related reason: as fellow fighters in Mohammed�s Jihad, they would be entitled to a share in the war booty. Yet others, typically unthinking youngsters including the daughter of the leading family of Mecca, were eager to join what seemed to them to be the wave of the future, the army that went from victory to victory. It was only a very small minority that joined Mohammed because of a heartfelt belief that his claim of hearing Allah�s own voice was genuine. In India and other countries, the percentages of the different categories of converts may have been divided differently, but the military superiority of Islam was practically always the overriding factor, directly or indirectly. Many were literally converted at swordpoint, but the largest number of converts were probably those, mostly in the urban artisanal castes, who wanted to escape the jizya tax and the numerous other disabilities imposed on non-Muslims, - a legal discrimination which supposed the existence of an Islamic regime, and this regime was invariably established by force. But I will concede that in some cases, gullible people were taken in by Muslim preachers or sufis who managed to link Islam with certain virtues or mystical experiences in the minds of their audiences. Even today, absolutely any self-styled prophet or cult leader manages to get a following, so why not in the Middle Ages? But that does not mean that an opinion poll was held in which the Indians were given a reasoned choice between the Smriti and theShariat (Hindu c.q. Muslim law) and then decided on the basis of their preference between these two. In any event, the law governing their day-to-day lives didn�t change much upon conversion, for most recent converts retained their Hindu customs (which in turn were generally not determined by the abstract Smriti but by caste tradition) for generations. To most converts, their first bite into beef, the classic test of abandonment of Hinduism, tasted very bitter, but they judged it was worth the nausea because it would increase their chances in life under an Islamic regime. The key fact here was not any �egalitarian� pretence of Islam, but precisely the inequality which it imposed between Muslims and Hindus of comparable social standing. 10.5. Ghaznavi vs. other Muslim conquerors About Mahmud Ghaznavi, I am quoted as writing: �There is no record of his being welcomed by urban artisans as a liberator from the oppressive Hindu social system. On the contrary, his companion Albiruni testifies how all the Hindus had an inveterate aversion for all Muslims.� Amber Habib comments: �No such claim is made for Mahmud by Prof. Habib. Let us quote him again: �It was inevitable that the Hindus should consider Islam a deviation from the truth when its followers deviated so deplorably from the path of rectitude and justice. A people is not conciliated by being robbed of all that it holds most dear, nor will it love a faith that comes to it in

the guise of plundering armies and leaves devastated fields and ruined cities as monuments of its victorious method for reforming the morals of a prosperous but erratic world ... the policy of Mahmud secured the rejection of Islam without a hearing.� Amber Habib�s whole argument hinges on a supposed contrast in behaviour between Mahmud and the other sultans. But that contrast is in most cases false. The real conqueror of India for Islam, Mohammed Shihabuddin Ghori, has left a trail of destruction behind him of entirely similar proportions. The same thing is true, on a geographically smaller but otherwise similar scale, for other Muslim conquerors, including Timur, Babar, Ahmad Shah Abdali and down to the Pakistani irregulars who conquered parts of Kashmir in 1947. If Mahmud could not win the hearts of the Indians, then neither could his successors. They all set the Hindus firmly against Islam, precisely because they did ensure that Islam got a proper hearing. They showed Islam in the true colours of Prophet Mohammed. But for their military superiority, they would have welcomed extremely few Hindu converts into the Muslim fold. But what about Mahmud�s chief predecessor, Mohammed bin Qasim? I am quoted thus: �His [Mahmud�s] massacres and acts of destruction were merely a replay of what the Arab Mohammed bin Qasim had wrought in Sindh in 712-15. He didn�t care for material gain: he left rich mosques untouched, but poor Hindu temples met the same fate at his hands as the richer temples. He turned down a Hindu offer to give back a famous idol in exchange for a huge ransom: �I prefer to appear on judgement Day as an idol-breaker rather than an idol-seller.� The one explanation that covers all the relevant facts, is that he was driven to his barbarous acts by his ideological allegiance to Islam.� Amber Habib comments: �Prof. Habib points to many significant differences between Mohammed Qasim and Mahmud. The former was interested in setting up a fair government and in obtaining the consent and approval of the local population. He dealt harshly with opposing soldiers but left the civil population alone. It is not clear why Elst refers to mosques being left untouched. Mosques contain no riches - so this would be entirely in consonance with Prof. Habib�s view of Mahmud as a grand looter. Further, there could not have been many mosques at this time in India, let alone �rich� ones. Perhaps he is referring to Mahmud�s western campaigns. Prof. Habib�s thesis is that Mahmud�s desire was to expand his empire to the west, and the raids in the east were to provide finance as well as the mantle of a religious warrior. It is quite consistent with this that he would be more destructive in the east than the west. The story of the ransom is likely a latter day fabrication by those seeking to enhance Mahmud�s status as a religious hero - it makes little sense for Mahmud to be bargaining with those he has just utterly defeated. Further, there are accounts of other occasions when Mahmud left a town alone on receiving a ransom.� It is true, as I discovered later on, that the story about Mahmud refusing the ransom is a. later fable retailed by the sufi poet Attar. I mentioned it at that time as I found it in almost all books on Mahmud and very popular among Muslim in praise of Mahmud as an idol-breaker. But even if it was true, the secularists would have ignored it or called it another bit of court poetry. Whenever the secularists find historical testimonies inconvenient, they fatally hear words like �myth� or �fabrication� crossing their lips. In this case it happens to be true that a later poet dramatized Mahmud�s well-known religious zeal into this story of his refusing the ransom and preferring to

break the idol. But it is only an extra to a sizable body of evidence, and declaring it a fabrication won�t alter our solid knowledge about Mahmud�s Islamic zeal. It is possible but by no means certain that Mahmud only came to India to plunder, not to conquer. This thesis is put forward by historians who want to avoid the impression that Mahmud was, in a way, defeated by Hindu strength and hence unable to incorporate India into his kingdom. Habib, though critical of Mahmud because of his poor public relations job for Islam, seems to have been among those eager to uphold Mahmud�s military reputation. The effort seems to be in conflict with elementary logic. Since Mahmud saw India as a source of wealth useful in financing his western campaigns, it would have been more logical to conquer India and enjoy a regular supply of its wealth. In fact, he did annex those parts of India where Hindu resistance could be overcome, that is, Gandhar (northern Afghanistan and Panjab upto Sindh), and western Punjab upto Lahore from which parts he was able to drive away the Hindu Shahiyas after a series of tough battles. In the rest of India he encountered unyielding resistance and we can surmise that though (like Mohammed Ghori) he intended to conquer India, he settled for mere material plunder and religious destruction simply because he wasn�t strong enough for a durable conquest. But for now, let us go with the convenient secularist theory that he merely came to India with a limited agenda of plundering. In that case, pray, why did he have to break stone idols? These cannot be melted and turned into gold coins or iron swords. Why did he have to desecrate temples in all kinds of ways apart from merely taking out their golden objects? Clearly, his concern was not merely financial, it was also religious. I am quoted thus: �The contention that Hindus stored their riches in temples is completely plucked out of thin air (though some of the richer temples contained golden statues, which were temple property): it is one among many ad hoc hypotheses which make Habib�s theory a methodologically indefensible construction. In fact, Habib is proclaiming a grand conspiracy theory: all the hundreds of Islamic authors who declared unanimously that what they reported was a war of Islam against Infidelity, would all have co-ordinated one single fake scenario to deceive us.� And Amber Habib comments: �Even in present times, temples are recipients of considerable donations. Certainly, the writers of the time describe the temples as sources of immense wealth. Prof. Habib gives the following quote about Mahmud�s sacking of Somnath: �Not a hundredth part of the gold and precious stones he obtained from Somnath were to be found in the treasury of any king of Hindustan.�� Habib jr. does not answer my main point, viz. that Muslim conquerors including Mahmud destroyed many Hindu religious statues and buildings regardless of financial value. Numerous Muslim sources testify to the religious motive. Alright, some religious objects in temples were made-of precious material, but they were not the only ones targeted by Muslim iconoclasts; stone and terra cotta sculptures were also destroyed. Finally, the distinction which Mohammed Habib and Amber Habib keep on making between plundering and Jihad, between material gain and religious zeal, is a false one in the case of Islam. For a Muslim, emulating the Prophet Mohammed it is the religious act par excellence. The Prophet himself organized numerous raids on caravans and Jewish as well Arab settlements, 82 according to an oft-quoted count. Looting the wealth of the merchants, taking the passengers as hostages and raping the women among them: all this was performed by the Prophet and his

most trusted companions. Mahmud Ghaznavi accomplished a very pious mission when he repeated all these prophetic precedents. 10.6. Not the Muslims are guilty, but Islam My conclusion about this topic is quoted thus: �Habib tried to absolve the ideology (Islam) of the undeniable facts of persecution and massacre of the Pagans by blaming individuals (the Muslims). The sources however point to the opposite state of affairs: Muslim fanatics were merely faithful executors of Quranic injunctions. Not the Muslims are guilty, but Islam.� But Amber Habib disagrees: �On the contrary, Prof. Habib drew a careful distinction between the original Islamic ideal, and the corrupted version adopted by the Muslim invaders and ruling classes in India. He spared no effort in taking the latter to task, while espousing the former as a worthy ideal.� Well, that is exactly my point. Mohammed Habib tried to convince his readers that a consistent behaviour pattern of Muslim conquerors was un-Islamic eventhough it was nothing but an application of the precedent set by Prophet Mohammed himself. On that understanding of his position, at least, we seem to be in agreement. We only differ in evaluating the eminent historian�s opinion: Amber thinks he was right, I have argued that he was mistaken. About my essential conclusion, Amber Habib writes: �Elst�s distinction: �Not the Muslims are guilty, but Islam�, is a perplexing one. What does this mean in practice? Is the religion of Islam to be tried and convicted but its followers left in peace? It is clear this cannot be. His distinction therefore is mere sophistry.� The word �therefore�, which implies that a reasoning is being concluded, is a little too much honour for the lone sentence: �It is clear this cannot be.� Someone who is on his own admission �perplexed� by a statement, should not go on to claim that its meaning and implications are �clear� to him. It seems to me that he hasn�t understood my position that �not the Muslims are guilty, but Islam�. My position is exactly the one which in Amber Habib�s opinion �cannot be�. Yes, I think that �the religion of Islam is to be tried and convicted but its followers left in peace�. Just as geocentrism should be tried and thrown out but its believers should be left in peace. Galilei didn�t think his opponents should be burned at the stake or otherwise troubled. All they needed was some exposure to free thinking about their cherished but untenable belief. Amber Habib concludes: �To summarise, it is clear that Elst�s case against Prof. Habib rests mainly on a wholesale fabrication of his views and arguments - these are distorted till they become less feasible, and then attacked using rather questionable �facts�. Why does Elst need to take recourse to such tactics? it would suggest an attempt to hide the weaknesses and gaps in his own arguments, by shifting attention to the ones he has constructed in his opponent�s.�

I will not try to snatch the last word from my worthy opponent. By now, the reader is sufficiently informed to judge the matter for himself. It is usual for Muslim apologists of Islam to proclaim that Islam was and is being misrepresented by the mujahids of the past and the present and that true Islam stands for peace and tolerance. But they never tell us where to find the �true� Islam they are talking about. Let them proclaim once for all that true Islam has nothing to do with the Quran and the Sunnah of Prophet Mohammed. Surely they cannot claim a monopoly over studying and interpreting Islamic scriptures. The world has not yet become an Islamic theocracy; kafirs are still and most likely to continue to be in majority and they have freedom to find out what lot those scriptures prescribe for them.

Footnotes: 1

Vide www.geocities.com/a_habib/Dada/elst.html. Not that it is important, but I am Flemish, i.e. Dutch-speaking Belgian. Quoted e.g. by Prabha Dixit: �Prof. Mohammed Habib�s historical fallacies�, in Devahuti, ed.: Bias in Indian Historiography, D.K. Publ., Delhi 1980, p.202, from K.A. Nizami, ed.: Politics and Society in the Early Medieval Period (Collected Works of Professor Mohammed Habib), Delhi 1974, vol. 1, p.72. 2

11. The Ayodhya evidence debate This paper was written as an adaptation from an earlier paper, �The Ayodhya debate�, published in the conference proceedings of the 1991 International Ramayana Conference, which 1 had taken place in my hometown, Leuven. The present version represents my own text prepared for the October 1995 Annual South Asia Conference in Madison, Wisconsin, U. S.A. A few notes have been added. The atmosphere at the conference was frankly hostile. After the academic authorities, who may have been ignorant of my controversial reputation, had allowed my paper to be read, the practical organization of the panel session was entrusted to graduate students belonging to the Indian Communist organization, Forum of Indian Leftists (FOIL). They scheduled me as the last speaker in a panel of four, chaired by an Indian female graduate student, a nice girl but obviously unable to perform the most difficult duty of a panel chairperson, viz. keeping the speakers to their allotted time. Moreover, they arranged for our session to be held in a room where another panel was scheduled at noon, making it impossible for the last speaker to read his paper in excess of the panel session�s allotted time. Two panel speakers played along by comfortably expounding and repeating the points they could easily have made in half the time. It was up to people from the audience to protest and oblige the chairperson to allow me to read out my paper. When it was my turn, I was heckled somewhat by the Leftist crowd, especially by a well-known Indo-American Communist academic, who was rolling his eyes like a madman and making obscene gestures until an elderly American lady sitting next to him told him to behave. At the end, Mathew came to collect a copy of my text (the book version, of which I had some author�s copies handy), called me a �liar�, and told his buddies that they needed to write a scholarly rebuttal. Which is still being awaited today. 11.1. Introduction

One of the contenders in the Ayodhya history debate, the �hypothesis� that the Babri Masjid had been built in forcible replacement of a Hindu temple, had been a matter of universal consensus until a few years ago. Even the Muslim participants in court cases in the British period had not challenged it; on the contrary, Muslim authors expressed pride in this monument of Islamic victory over infidelity. It is only years after the Hindu take-over of the structure in 1949 2 that denials started to be voiced. And it is only in 1989 that a large-scale press campaign was launched to deny what had earlier been a universally accepted fact. In normal academic practice, the debate on an issue on which such a consensus exists, would only have been opened after the discovery of new facts which undermine the consensus view. The present debate is between a tradition which numerous observers and scholars had found coherent and well-founded, and an artificial hypothesis based on political compulsions instead of on newly discovered facts. In an effort to move the debate forward, the Government of India provided the contending parties with an official forum in which experts could go through the evidence produced for both sides. This scholarly exchange took place around the turn of 1991, and was briefly revived in the autumn of 1992. Both rounds of the debate were unilaterally broken off by the Babri Masjid party. This paper is intended to fill the gap left by the general media in the information on the debate about the historical claims concerning the Rama-Janmabhoomi/Babri Masjid site in Ayodhya. As the only non-Indian scholar to have followed this dispute closely, I will argue that the scholars� 3 debate has ended in an unambiguous victory for one of the two parties. 11.2.The object of the debate As is well-known by now, on Rama�s supposed birthplace in Ayodhya there used to stand a disputed mosque structure. It was called the Babri Masjid because according to an inscription on its front wall it was built at the orders of the Moghul invader Babar in 1528, by his lieutenant Mir Baqi. But until the beginning of this century, official documents called it Masjid-i-Janamsthan, �mosque of the birthplace�, and the hill on which it stands was designated asRamkot (Rama�s fort) or Janamsthan (birthplace). Since 1949, the building is effectively in 4 use as a Hindu temple, but many Hindus, and especially the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) , want to explicitate the Hindu function of the place with proper Hindu temple architecture, which implied removing the existing structure. On the other hand, theBabri Masjid Action Committee (BMAC) and its splinter, the Babri Masjid Movement Coordination Committee (BMMCC), want the building, and after its demolition at least the site, to be given back to the Muslim community. In December 1990 and January 1991, at the request of the Chandra Shekhar Government, the BMAC and the VHP exchanged historical evidence for their respective cases. it was broken off on 25 January 1991 when the BMAC representatives, without any explanation, failed to show up at the meeting scheduled for that day. The debate was revived in October 1992 by the Narasimha Rao Government, with essentially the same teams, but the next month, the BMAC withdrew in protest against the VHP�s announcement of a Kar Seva (building activity) due on 6 December 1992. It is strange (but perfectly explainable, as we shall see) that this debate has not received more attention in scholarly and journalistic writings. It was, after all, the only occasion where both parties could not manipulate �evidence� without being subject to pointed criticism from the opposing side. Many reporters on the Ayodhya conflict have made tall claims about the

�concoction� of �bogus evidence� (not to mention �Goebbelsian propaganda�), and to substantiate these, there could hardly be a better mine of information than this Governmentsponsored debate. Yet, most of them refuse to even mention it. A report on this debate should distinguish between three possible debating issues: 1) Is the present-day Ayodhya with all its Rama-related sites, the Ayodhya described by Valmiki in his Sanskrit Ramayana? In the course of this debate, no new facts have been added to Prof. B.B. Lal�s conclusion that Valmiki�s Ayodhya and present-day Ayodhya are one and the same 5 place. It is a different matter that his conclusions have been disputed, without any evidence, by the JNU historians among others. Of course, it is nobody�s case that the Valmiki connection has been established in an unassailable manner; but at least, what much of research is available, points in that direction. However, even if B.B. Lal�s assertion is correct, this leaves open the possibility that the writer who styled himself Valmiki, may have written his version of the Rama story long after it actually took place, and that he relocated the scene of a tradition coming from elsewhere into his own area. Therefore, the next, more fundamental question might be: 2) Is the present-day Ayodhya, and more specifically the disputed site, indeed the birthplace of a historical character called Rama? The BMAC has argued that such a thing cannot be proven, assuming that Rama was a historical character at all. The VHP has refused to consider this question, arguing that religions do not have to justify the sacredness of their sacred sites: if the site was traditionally associated with sacred events and characters (as it was, at least from Valmiki onwards), or if it was treated by Rama devotees as somehow sacred (as it was since at least several centuries), then that should be enough to command respect, regardless of the historical basis of this claim to sacredness. Compare with the Muslim sacred places: there is no historical substance at all in Mohammed�s claim that the Kaaba in Mecca had been built by Abraham as a place of monotheistic worship. This story had to justify the take-over of the Kaaba from its real owners, the �idolaters� of Arabia. And yet, in spite of the starkly unhistorical nature of the Muslim claim to the Kaaba, this claim is not being questioned. Nobody is saying that the Muslims can only have their Kaaba if 6 they give historical proof that it was built by Abraham. Therefore the VHP insists that if the disputed site is a genuine traditional sacred site, this must be enough to make others respect it as such. However, if it was really a Hindu sacred site, it is reasonable to expect that this status was explicitated with a temple, which must have adorned the site before the Babri Masjid was built. So, the third question is: 3) Was the Babri Masjid built in forcible replacement of a preexisting Rama temple? The Muslim fundamentalist leader Syed Shahabuddin, convenor of the BMMCC (and initiator of the campaign 7 against Salman Rushdie) agrees with the VHP that this is the fundamental question. He has said repeatedly: �If it is proven that the Babri Masjid has been built in forcible replacement of a Hindu temple, I 8

will demolish it with my own hands.� So, the subject matter of the debate can be limited to the question whether a Hindu temple had been destroyed to make way for the Babri Masjid. In November 1990, in a letter to the newly appointed Prime Minister Chandra Shekhar, the late Sri Rajiv Gandhi (whose Congress Party was supporting the new Government) had also proposed to narrow down the debate to this one question. Sri Gandhi suggested that the

decision of whether to leave the disputed building to the Hindus (who were using it as a temple) or to give it to the Muslims (who had used it as a mosque), should be taken on the basis of historical and archaeological evidence regarding the specific point whether the Babri Masjid had replaced a preexisting Hindu temple. It is this letter from Rajiv Gandhi which prompted Chandra Shekhar to invite the contending parties to have a scholarly exchange of historical evidence. 11.3. Chronicle of the semi-official debate Both parties met on 1 December and 4 December 1990, and they agreed to submit and confront historical material supporting their respective viewpoints. On 23 December, the VHP and the BMAC submitted their respective bundles of evidence. On 10 January 1991, both sides submitted rejoinders to their opponents� evidence bundles. At least, the VHP scholars gave a detailed reply to all the documents presented by the BMAC. But the latter merely handed in yet another pile of newspaper articles and more- such non-evidential statements of opinion. This created the impression that the BMAC was effectively conceding defeat. On January 24, the parties met in order to discuss the evidence. But the BMAC team leader, Prof. R.S. Sharma, a well-known Marxist historian, said that he and his colleagues had not yet studied the VHP material (to which the BMAC had agreed to reply by January 10). This is most remarkable, because the week before, he had led 42 academics in signing a much-publicized statement, saying that there was definitely absolutely no proof whatsoever at all for the preexisting Rama temple. He had issued more statements on the matter, and even published a 9 small book on it. There he was, pleading a lack of familiarity with the very material on which he had been making such tall statements. The other historians for the BMAC were Athar Ali, D. N. Jha and Suraj Bhan, apart from the office bearers of the BMAC itself. The four BMAC historians have published their argumentation some months later: Ramjanmabhumi Babari Masjid, A Historians� Report to the Nation. Tellingly, they do not mention the outcome of the debate, but reiterate the ludicrous demand they made while attending the debate as BMAC advocates, viz. that they be considered �independent historians� qualified to pronounce scientific judgment in a debate between their employers and 10 their enemies. Of course, the government representative dismissed this demand as ridiculous. Yet, the BMAC has continued to call them �the independent historians�, and they themselves have continued to demand that the VHP submit its case to �independent arbitration�, i.e. by their own kind. These two telling details of the Ayodhya debate story have, of course, been withheld from the reader in the booklet published by the BMAC team, and in all subsequent publications by the antitemple party. The next meeting was scheduled for the next day, January 25. But there, the BMAC scholars simply did not show up. The unambiguous result of the debate was this: the BMAC scholars have run away from the arena. They had not presented written evidence worth the name, they had not given a written refutation of the VHP scholars� arguments, they had wriggled out of a face-to-face discussion on the accumulated evidence, and finally they had just stayed away. Thus ended the first attempt by the Government of India to find an amicable solution on the basis of genuine historical facts. In October 1992, the Narasimha Rao Government tried to revive this discussion forum. Due to personal differences, Prof. R.S. Sharma stayed away from the BMAC team, which otherwise consisted of the same people. The debate focused almost entirely on the interpretation of the

archaeological findings of June 1992: a large number of Hindu sculptures and other temple remains, found in the terrain in front of the disputed building. The BMAC team argued that these findings had all been planted. It also demanded that in view of the ongoing negotiations, the VHP cancel its programme scheduled for 6 December 1992 in Ayodhya. When the VHP refused, the BMAC stayed away from the talks once more. 11.4. The pro-temple evidence On Ayodhya, there has always in living memory been a consensus: among local Muslims and Hindus, among European travellers and British administrators. As late as 1989, the Encyclopedia Brittannica(entry Ayodhya) reports without a trace of hesitation that the Babri Masjid was built in forcible replacement of a temple marking Rama�s birthplace. When there is such a consensus on a given issue, the academic custom is not to reopen the debate until someone comes with serious evidence that the consensus opinion is wrong and that a different scenario is indicated by newfound (or newly interpreted) facts. But the only evidence to surface during the debate was presented by the VHP-mandated team and merely reconfirmed the old consensus. 11

The VHP�s evidence bundle was not just a pile of separate documents. It was centred around a careful argumentation, which can be summed up in three points: 1) A single hypothesis. Only one hypothesis is put forward, viz. that the disputed place was traditionally (since before the Muslim period) venerated as Rama�s birthplace, that a Rama temple had stood on it, and that this temple was destroyed to make way for the Babri Masjid. All the material collected goes to confirm this one hypothesis. Not a single piece of documentary or archaeological evidence contradicts it. The contrast with the anti-Janmabhoomi polemists is striking they have so far not produced any document that positively indicates a different scenario from the one upheld by the VHP scholars. The BMAC effort has been only. negative, viz. trying to pick holes in the pro-temple evidence, but the VHP has posited its own hypothesis that takes care of all the relevant data. 2) Temple foundations. Archaeological findings in Prof. B.B. Lal�s excavation campaign Archaeology of the Ramayana Sites 1975-80 and more recent ones as well as a large number of documents writtenin tempore non suspecto confirm the hypothesis. Findings of burntbrick pillar-bases dated to the 11th century in trenches a few metres from the disputed structure, prove that a pillared building stood in alignment with, and on the same foundations system as the Babri Masjid. The written documents do not include an eye-witness account of the temple destruction, the way we have eye-witness accounts of the destruction of many other temples. But then, a wealth of documents, written from the 17th century onwards, by European traveller,-, and by local Muslims, confirm unanimously that the Babri Masjid was considered to have been built in forcible replacement of a Rama temple. These witnesses also describe first-hand how the place was revered by the Hindus as Rama�s birthsite, and that Hindus always came back to worship as closely as possible to the original temple site: they would not reasonably have done this except in continuation of a tradition dating back to before the Babri Masjid. 3) The single hypothesis is consistent with known patterns. No ad hoc hypotheses are needed to support the main hypothesis, no unusual scenarios have to be invented, no unusual motives have to be attributed to the people involved, no conspiracy theory has to be conjured up. The VHP hypothesis merely says that well-established general patterns of Hindu and Muslim behaviour apply to the specific case under consideration. Among these are to be noted: Firstly, the fact that a temple stood on the now-disputed site, which is a hilltop overlooking Ayodhya, is in perfect conformity with a world-wide practice of putting important buildings, like

castles and temples, on the topographical place of honour. By contrast, the hypothesis that the Babri Masjid had been built on an empty spot presupposes an abnormal course of events, viz. that the people of the temple city Ayodhya had left the place of honour empty. Secondly, the demolition of Hindu temples and their forcible replacement by mosques has been a very persistent behaviour pattern of the Muslim conquerors. These temple demolitions were consistent with the persecution of �unbelief� carried out by Islamic rulers from Mohammed bin Qasim (who conquered Sindh in 712) to Aurangzeb (the last great Moghul, d. 1707), and more recently in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Kashmir. Though there is no lack ofnegationists who try to deny or conceal it, the historical record bears out Will Durant�s assessment that �the 12

Mohammedan conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history�. It is safe to affirm that the majority of pre-1707 mosques in India has been built in forcible replacement of Hindu temples. Outside India, the Islamic take-over of the most sacred sites of other religions was equally systematic, e.g. the Ka�aba in Mecca, the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the Aya Sophia in Istambul, the Buddhist monastery in Bukhara etc. Thirdly, the fact that Hindu temple materials (14 black-stone sculptured pillars) have been used in the Babri Masjid is not an unusual feature requiring a special explanation; on the contrary, it was a fairly common practice meant as a visual display of the victory of Islam over infidelity. It was done in many mosques that have forcibly replaced temples, e.g. the Gyanvapi mosque in 13 Varanasi (in which a part of the Kashi Vishvanath temple is still visible) , the Adhai-Din-kaJhonpra mosque in Ajmer, the Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque in Delhi, or, outside India, the Jama Masjid of Damascus (which was a Christian cathedral). Fourthly, the fact that Hindus used to keep on revering sacred sites even after mosques had been built on them, is attested by foreigners like Niccolo Manucci in the 17th and Alexander 14 Cunningham in the 19th century. By contrast, the hypothesis that Hindus started laying an arbitrary claim on a place firmly occupied by the Muslims (so that they courted repression for no reason at all), is pretty fantastic and without parallel. 11.5. No direct evidence The VHP evidence bundle also contained a large number of quotes from ancient literature to prove that the Rama cult is not a recent development, and that the status of Ayodhya as a sacred city has been uninterrupted since at least 2000 years. The one thing that is missing is the ultimate clinching evidence: a contemporary description of the forcible replacement of the temple with the mosque. But even in the absence of this item of primary evidence, the amount of secondary evidence is so overwhelming, coherent and uncontradicted, that in another, less contentious historical search, it would be considered conclusive. It may be recalled that, in the course of the public debate on the opinion pages of the newspapers, the pro-BMAC polemists had at first demanded non-British evidence, because the whole Janmabhoomi tradition was merely a British concoction. In A. G. Noorani�s categorical words: �The myth is a 19th-century creation by the British.�

15

Next, they demanded pre-19th-century evidence, because Hindus and Muslims had already �interiorized the British propaganda� early in that century, as is clear from a number of writings by local Muslims, brought to light by Prof. Harsh Narain. Thus, Mirza Jan, a Muslim militant who participated in an attempt to wrest from the Hindus another sacred site in Ayodhya, the Hanumangarhi, wrote in 1856 that �a lofty mosque has been built by badshah Babar� on �the

original birthplace of Rama�, in application of the rule that �where there was a big temple, a big mosque was constructed, and where there was a small temple, a small mosque was 16

constructed�.

Therefore, Muslim leader Mohammed Abdul Rahim Qureishi has asked the pro-

Janmabhoomi side �to produce any historical evidence, not only independent of the British 17

sources but also of the period prior to the advent of the 19th century�.

But this type of evidence was also produced: most publicly the Austrian Jesuit Joseph Tieffenthaler�s 1767 account, presented by Mr. Abhas Kumar Chatterjee in Indian Express. Tieffenthaler describes how Hindus celebrated Ram Navami (commemorating Rama�s birth) just outside the Babri Masjid, and recounts the local tradition that the mosque was 18

built in forcible replacement of Rama�s birthplace temple.

It was also pointed out that the Muslim writer Mirza Jan, already mentioned, had given an extensive quotation from an (otherwise unknown) letter by a daughter of Aurangzeb�s son and successor, Bahadur Shah. He quotes her as writing in about 1710 that the temples on the sacred sites of Shiva, Krishna and Rama (including �Sita�s kitchen�, i.e. part of the Ramkot complex) �were all demolished for the strength of Islam, and at all these places mosques have been constructed�. She exhorted the Muslims to assert their presence at these mosques and not to 19 give in to Hindu compromise proposals. Furthermore, a letter dated 1735 by a Faizabad qazi (judge) was shown, describing Hindu-Muslim riots in Ayodhya over �the Masjid built by the emperor of Delhi�, i.e. either a pre-Moghul sultan or Moghul dynasty founder Babar (Aurangzeb moved the Moghul capital from Delhi/Agra to the Dekkhan). This is only a secondary indication for the actual temple destruction, but it is first-hand evidence for the existence of the Hindu claim on the Babri Masjid site well before the 19th century. Only when this type of evidence was shown, did the pro-BMAC polemists move on to demand strictly contemporary evidence. About this demand for eye-witness accounts, Arun Shourie has remarked: �Today a contemporary account is being demanded in the case of the Babri Masjid. Are those who make this demand prepared to accept this as the criterion - that if a contemporary account exists of the destruction of a temple for constructing a mosque, the case is made?� Shourie goes on to quote from Aurangzeb�s court chronicles: �News came to Court that in accordance with the Emperor�s command his officers had demolished the temple of Vishvanath at Benares (2/9/1669)� In this month of Ramzan, the religious-minded Emperor ordered the demolition of the temple at Mathura� In a short time by the great exertions of his officers the destruction of this strong centre of infidelity was accomplished... A grand mosque was built on its site... (January 20 1670)� These accounts are as contemporary as you can get. Shourie concludes: �If the fact that a contemporary account of the temple at Ayodhya is not available leaves the matter unsettled, does the fact that contemporary accounts are available for the temples at Kashi, Mathura, Pandharpur and a host of other places settle the matter? One has

only to ask the question to know that the �experts� and �intellectuals� will immediately ask for something else.�

21

11.6. The anti-temple evidence The BMAC presented a pile of some eighty documents, which can be divided into three groups: legal documents, statements of opinion, and historical documents. The largest group consists of court documents, from court disputes over the Rama-Janmabhoomi and other contentious places in Ayodhya, most of them from the British period, a few from after independence. However, what these court documents prove is: Firstly, that the Hindus kept on claiming the site in principle, even if for the time being they were willing to settle for a licence to worship on a platform just outside the contentious building; Secondly, that the Muslim pleas always focused, not on questioning the temple destruction tradition, but on the accomplished fact that they had owned the place for centuries, long enough to create an ownership title no matter how and from whom they had acquired it; And thirdly, that the British rulers did not want any raking-up of old quarrels, and therefore upheld the status-quo, but without questioning the common belief that the Masjid had replaced a Hindu temple. British judges have explicitly not subscribed to the thesis, now defended by the BMAC and the BMMCC, that there had never been a Hindu temple on the contentious spot. On the contrary, in his verdict in 1886 a British judge observed: �It is unfortunate that a mosque should have been built on land held specially sacred by the Hindus, but as that happened 356 years ago, it is now 22

too late to remedy the grievance.� So, the court verdicts that upheld the Muslim claim to the site (and have been cited by the BM-AC scholars to this effect), by no means imply that the judges doubted the contention that a temple had been demolished to make way for this mosque. All the British sources, such as Edward Balfour in 1858 and Archaeological Survey of India�s field explorer A. Fuhrer in 1891, confirm the tradition that the Babri Masjid had replaced a Rama temple. One British source, Francis Buchanan�s survey (written in 1810 and edited by Montgomery Martin in 1838), has been quoted by pro-BMAC historians (who have otherwise dismissed British testimonies as �prejudiced�, �part of a British tactic to foment communalism� etc.) as calling the tradition of the Rama-Janmabhoomi temple destruction �very ill-founded�.

23

However,

Buchanan did not denounce as ill-founded �the temple-destruction theory�, as the BMAC historians claim, but only referred to the fact that �the destruction is very generally attributed by the Hindus to the furious zeal of Aurangzeb�, which allegation was misdirected: as proof for Aurangzeb�s non-involvement Buchanan cites the inscription attributing the mosque to 24 Babar. As the last large-scale temple-destroyer, Aurangzeb had become the proverbial representative of the old Islamic tradition of iconoclasm, which had already destroyed thousands of temples before his own time.

Buchanan opines that Babar had built the mosque not on empty land, but on the site of the Ramkot �castle�, which to him may well have been the very castle in which Rama himself had lived. This claim only differs from the local tradition and the VHP position by being even bolder. According to him, the black-stone pillars (with Hindu sculptures defaced by �the bigot� Babar) incorporated in the Masjid had been �taken from the ruins of the palace�, and at any rate from �a Hindu building�. Obviously, the site was considered by the devotees as Rama�s court, 25 originally a castle and only later a temple. At any rate, the quarrel over whether the Babri Masjid replaced a �castle� or a �temple� is a false problem, considering Rama�s double-role as a God-King. Buchanan gives no facts supporting an alternative origin for the Babri Masjid, and upholds the essence of the local 26 tradition, viz. that the Masjid has replaced a Hindu building. The British judges have consistently accepted the view of the British surveyors and scholars. The second largest group of BMAC documents consisted of book excerpts and newspaper articles, mere statements of opinion. They give the well-known or at least predictable opinions of politicians like Jawaharlal Nehru and Ramaswamy Naicker, of secularist journalists like Arvind N. Das and Praful Bidwai, of Marxist intellectuals like the JNU historians and Prof. R.S. Sharma (who was invited to lead the BMAC team only after this first round). In this collection of opinions, essentially four points have been argued: Firstly, Rama was not a historical character; Secondly, Rama may have been a historical character, but Ayodhya is not his real birthplace; Thirdly, Rama worship in Ayodhya is fairly recent, and hardly existed prior to the period when the Babri Masjid was built; Fourthly, the Babri Masjid was not built in forcible replacement of a Rama temple. However, the cited opinions on each of these four points are not even convergent or in mutual agreement. For instance, several authors say that the Babri Masjid was built on empty land; others say it replaced a �Buddhist stupa�; yet others say it replaced a Jaina temple, or a Shaiva temple, or a secular building. About Rama�s birthplace, one source cited says Rama was born in Nepal; another says it was in Afghanistan; yet another says it was in Ayodhya, but on a different spot; one writer says that Rama was in fact a pharaoh of Egypt. in all, the BMAC has given �proof� that Rama was born at 8 different places. Methodologically speaking, these documents do not form a body of evidence supporting one hypothesis. The BMAC has merely collected all kinds of opinions which happen to be in conflict with the thesis that the Masjid replaced a Rama temple, without minding that these opinions are also in conflict with each other. Of course, this collection of contemporary, often politically motivated articles and statements does not have any proof value. At best, some of the names under the articles could constitute an �argument of authority�, but even that is diluted by their juxtaposition with political agitators and plain cranks. More than an argumentation, this presentation of many conflicting opinions is a dispersionary tactic to keep the opposing party busy with refuting the weirdest viewpoints.

An important feature of the collected pro-BMAC opinions is that they have in fact limited themselves to an attempt to discredit the evidence cited in favour of the Rama-Janmabhoomi tradition. They have not given any evidence (valid or otherwise) at all for an alternative scenario that explains the presence of the Babri Masjid and the well-attested Hindu opposition against it. They have tried to explain away the Janmabhoomi tradition by means of a conspiracy theory: as the outcome of a 19th century rumour campaign by the British rulers, out to �divide and 27

rule�. In fact, such a rumour campaign is totally unheard of in the well-documented history of British India, and would have left testimonies which the pro-BMAC historians have not been able 28

to produce.

It is an ad hoc hypothesis based on nothing but the fond belief that India�s

�communal problem� is a British creation and not the necessary result of any religious doctrine 29 of hostility towards alternative forms of worship. The only seemingly valid point scored by some of the BMAC sympathizers cited in the BMAC evidence bundle, is the argumentum e silentio that the temple destruction is not mentioned in near-contemporary sources, notably Abul Fazl�s Ain-i-Akbari and the poems of Tulsidas. However, neither Abul Fazl nor Tulsidas have written catalogues of demolished temples or even just devoted some pointed attention to the buildings of the cities mentioned in their works: they are simply not the sources that are supposed to carry the required information. Also, they are not 30 really contemporary with Babar, but with his grandson Akbar (around 1600 A.D.). For them too, the temple destruction was history, and the Babri Masjid just one of the thousands of mosques built on demolished Hindu temples. The third part of the evidence bundle for the Babri Masjid side, is the historical evidence properly speaking. It consists of three pieces. One is the text of the inscriptions on the Babri Masjid and its gate, declaring that the mosque was built in 1528 by Mir Baqi, who worked under Babar�s command. Of course the Hindu side has no quarrel with that: the Babri Masjid was built, so it must have been built by someone. However, in spite of the inscription, the identity of the Masjid�s builder happens to be disputable. It has 31 been argued (by Sushil Srivastava and R. Nath, independently) that, judging from the architecture, the mosque must have been built during the preceding Sultanate period. Sushil Srivastava even claims that the inscription attributing the Masjid to Babar (or at least to his 32 lieutenant Mir Baqi), is a 19th-century forgery. At any rate, the scenario that it was built under Babar is not in conflict with the thesis that it was built in forcible replacement of a Rama temple. This dispute is not about who built the mosque, but about what preceded the mosque. The second piece is Babar�s memoirs. In it, no mention is made of a temple demolition in Ayodhya. Unfortunately, the pages for the months when he must have been in Ayodhya and perhaps also ordered the demolition of a Hindu temple, are missing from the manuscripts. So we simply do not have Babar�s own report on this matter. And if Sushil Srivastava and R. Nath are right, Babar was not the builder and his testimony is irrelevant, except insofar as it might explain why the already existing mosque got attributed to him. For instance, the Afghan rulers (against whom the invader Babar fought) or the city�s inhabitants may have defended Ayodhya from the Ramkot hill, so that the existing mosque got damaged in the fighting (Babar was the first one in India to use cannon), and was subsequently rebuilt by Babar�s men. But all this will remain speculation, because the relevant part of Babar�s report is missing.

The third piece of BMAC evidence is Babar�s testament, in which he advises his son Humayun to practise tolerance, to respect Hindu temples, and not to kill cows. This statement of religious 33 tolerance is very nice, but unfortunately it has amply been proven to be a forgery. It is quite bizarre that scholars trying to prove a point discredit their own case by using a proven forgery without any comment. And even if Babar�s testament had been genuine, it would only prove that at the end of his life, Babar had got tired of the jihad which he had been waging (on top of an inter-Muslim war), or that he had come to realize that a prosperous kingdom would be better served by religious amity than by the intolerance of which he himself had given sufficient proof during his life. Babar�s emphatical concern for tolerance would certainly not prove that tolerance had been his way all through his life. There are Hindu temple materials in mosques attributed to Babar in Sambhal (replacing a Vishnu temple, and dated by archaeologists to the Sultanate period, just like the Ayodhya �Babri� Masjid) and Pilakhana. Local tradition affirms that the Babri Masjids in Palam, Sonipat, Rohtak, Panipat, and Sirsa have replaced Brahminical or Jain temples. The contemporary Tarikh-iBabari describes how Babar�s troops �demolished many Hindu temples at Chanderi� when they occupied it. Some tough jihad rhetoric has been preserved from Babar�s war against the Rajputs, such as the quatrain: �For Islam�s sake, I wandered in the wild, prepared for war with unbelievers and Hindus, resolved myself to meet a martyr�s death. 34

Thanks be to Allah! A ghazi I became.�

It is quite plain that Babar, even when he had to fight fellow Muslims (the Afghan Lodi dynasty), never lost sight of his duty of waging war against the infidels. So, these three documents do not prove that the Babri Masjid was built on something else than a Rama temple. The two other groups of documents are not even an attempt to give documentary or archaeological evidence, merely a collection of sympathizing statements of opinion. What is worse, the whole collection makes one wonder whether the BMAC experts had read it at all: not only are many of the documents unconvincing or beside the point, but some even support the VHP case. Thus, a court ruling of 1951 cites testimony of local Muslims that the mosque had not been used since 1936, which means that in 1949 the Hindus took over an unused building - hardly worth the current Babri Masjid movement with its cries of �Islam in danger!� (or its newer version, �Secularism in danger!�) and its hundreds of riot victims. On 3 March 1951, the Civil Judge of Faizabad observed: �it further appears from a number of affidavits of certain Muslim residents of Ayodhya that at least from 1936 onwards the Muslims have neither used the site as a mosque 35

nor offered prayers there... Nothing has been pointed to discredit these affidavits.� Of course, even a judge may be misinformed on occasion; but at least, this is the official view, enunciated by a Court of Law constituted under India�s democratic legal system. In particular, those who have

been lecturing the Hindu movement on �abiding by the Constitution� and �respecting Court verdicts� ought to show some respect for this Court verdict. Another court document shows that the ongoing court dispute (which is the only legal obstacle to the replacement of the present structure with a proper temple) was filed well past the legal time limit. In any case, while the BMAC wants to rule out the British Gazetteers as evidence (because they confirm that the Babri Masjid had replaced a temple), it cites court documents which reproduce excerpts from the Gazetteers as evidence and declare in so many words that Gazetteers are admissible as evidence. A number of court rulings record that Hindus relentlessly kept on claiming the site, �most sacred� to them, and made do with as near a site as possible under prevalent power equations: this refutes the BMAC claim that the Rama-Janmabhoomi tradition is a recent invention for political purposes, whether colonial �divide and rule� or Hindu �communalism�. The leading political analyst Arun Shourie has commented: �On reading the papers the BMAC had filed as �evidence�, I could only conclude, therefore, that either its leaders had not read the papers themselves, or that they had no case and had just tried to over-awe or confuse the 36 government etc. by dumping a huge miscellaneous heap.� When asked in public forums about the results of the scholars� debate, both Prof. Irfan Habib (historian at Aligarh Muslim University) and Subodh Kant Sahay (who was the Home Minister at the time of the debate) have declared that �the VHP has run away from the debate�. Leading newspapers have refused to publish denials of this allegations In fact, this unfounded allegation provides an interesting illustration of the psychology of lies. Liars are often not very creative, and they tend to say things that are partly inspired on the truth. Thus, Prof. Habib and Mr. Sahay are perfectly right in alleging that the debate has ended because one of the parties has �run away from the debate�: to that extent, their version is transparent of the truth. Only, it is not the VHP but the BMAC which has turned its back on the debate. 11.7. The anti-temple debating tactics Meanwhile, the actual course of the debate both in the official forum and in the media could have suggested some conclusions even to non-historians (like the Supreme Court judges who refused to pronounce an opinion on it in 1994). The debate has not genuinely altered the old consensus, but it has been an interesting case-study in manipulation by unscrupled academics. That, at least, seems to be a fair description of learned publications advertising themselves as �objective� studies of the controversy, but systematically concealing the arguments put forth by one of the parties. The VHP has published its argumentation including a detailed refutation of the Babri Masjid Action Committee�s arguments, and like-minded scholars have published detailed presentations of specific types of evidence (e.g. Prof. Harsh Narain and Prof. R. Nath; note how the VHP, lacking a think-tank of its own, was dependent on the help of people with no prior connection to it). By contrast, the BMAC, which had the support of the Indian Council of Historical Research led by Aligarh historian Prof. Irfan Habib and of a team of scholars led by Prof. R.S. Sharma, has not felt sufficiently satisfied with its own performance in the official debate to publish its

argumentation. Its numerous supporters have chosen not to refer to the debate at all and to keep the argumentation of their serious opponents out of view. Instead, these top academics have chosen the poorest Hindutva pamphlettists as their opponents and made some, fun of cranky but irrelevant claims which go around in the semi-literate fringe of the Hindu movement. One point they like to highlight is the spurious claim that on 22 December 1949, the idols �miraculously appeared� in the disputed building. I do not know of anyone who would affirm that except tongue in cheek, but given that placing the idols could be construed as a criminal offence, it has nonetheless been affirmed - as an obvious ad hoc fable for purposes of self-exculpation. But note that this miracle story has long gone out of fashion: in an interview in the New York Times, �Abbot Ram Chander Das Paramahams of an Ayodhya akhara declared 37

openly that he was the one who had put the image inside the mosque.�

Another fairly common tactic was to lump the temple argumentation with the fringe school led by 38 P.N. Oak, which holds that every indo-Muslim building (e.g. the Taj Mahal) was in fact a Hindu temple, not demolished but only transformed. However, this school happened to have aligned itself with the eminent historians against the VHP. Oak himself explained that the Babri Masjid itself was built by Hindus as a temple, that �Babar had nothing to do with the Babri Masjid�, and that neither the Moghul nor any other Muslim ruler had demolished a Hindu temple at the 39

site. Oak�s version of history is of a kind with the contrived scenarios thought up by the eminent historians. Another spokesman of this school, Jeevan Kulkarni from Bombay, claimed that the Babri Masjid was a Hindu temple built by Hindus before the Muslim conquest. He even approached the Supreme Court to obtain permission to prove his point by means of thermo-luminescence and other advanced archaeological techniques, as well as an injunction to solve the dispute by preserving the building (as Muslims demand, in the �mistaken� belief that the building was built as a mosque) but allotting it to the Hindus to serve as the �restored� Rama temple which it was meant to be when it was built. Again, this school was wrongly identified with the VHP position. A similar tactic was to associate the Ayodhya evidence with the eccentric theory of the nonhistorian Bal Gangadhar Tilak, later adapted by the non-historian Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar in his young days, that the Aryans came from the Arctic (Tilak�s attempt to harmonize the Aryan invasion theory with traditional Vedic chronology) or that India itself had been in the Arctic zone 40

then (Golwalkar�s attempt to harmonize Tilak with Aryan indigenousness). These ideas are simply unrelated to the more recent history of Hindu-Muslim conflict, and are only brought into the discussion in order to strengthen the contrast between Hindu amateurishness and secularist professionalism: �After R.C. Majumdar, the communal interpretation has been relegated to the world of school-level textbooks, made-easies, popular magazines, newspapers and comic strips�, - meaning that the positions of prestige had been captured by India�s secularists who 41 imposed denial of Hindu-Muslim conflict as the orthodox explanation. This is an argument not of 42 authority but of status. This way, India�s topmost academics and journalists have avoided confronting the real evidence and concentrated on attacking straw men instead. It is clearly an application of Mao Zedong�s dictum: �Attack where the enemy is weak, retreat where the enemy is strong.� That may be a

legitimate principle in warfare, but in scholarship the goal is not to score points but to establish the truth. 11.8. More on the British concoction hypothesis The eminent JNU historians have claimed that �it is in the nineteenth century that the story circulates and enters official records. These records were then cited by others as valid historical 43

evidence on the issue.� A few years earlier, they were still far more circumspect before making this assertion. in the early days of the Ayodhya dispute, in a letter to the Times of India, a group of JNU academics wrote: �it would be worth enquiring whether there is reliable historical evidence of a period prior to nineteenth century for this association of a precise location with the 44 birthplace of Rama.� Lawyer A.G. Noorani comments on the letter: �They were absolutely right. The myth is a 45

nineteenth century creation by the British.� Note however that in their 1986 letter, the JNU historians had only suggested this in question format, but later many of them, like Noorani in this passage, have asserted it quite affirmatively. Noorani then quotes a letter by Indrajit Dutta and nine others: �The belief that the disputed place of worship in Ayodhya is a mosque built after destroying a temple consecrating Rama�s birthplace originates in the first half of the 19th century. In 1813 John Leyden, a British historian, published his Memoirs of Zehir-ed-din, Muhammad Babar, Emperor of Hindustan (A translation of Babar�s memoirs in Persian). In it Leyden had contended that Babar had passed through Ayodhya in March 1528 during his campaign against the Pathans. This �historical evidence� of Babar�s presence in the area was destroyed by later British authorities to propagate the belief that the �anti-Hindu� Babar had destroyed the Ram Janmabhoomi Temple and got a mosque built on the spot - though Leyden�s work makes no mention of it. Sushil Srivastava of the Department of Medieval and Modern History, University of Allahabad, has worked extensively on the history of Avadh. He substantiates his findings to show how the British authorities, specifically Colonel Sleeman, then resident of Lucknow, anxious to justify the annexation of Avadh, exploited. this controversy superbly at a time when rumblings of the 1857 mutiny were 46 ominous.� Remark the illogical claim that the British �destroyed� the document cited by Leyden to substantiate his hypothesis (and the local tradition) that Babar had passed through the town of Ayodhya, when that very document and that very hypothesis would support the theory that Babar destroyed a Hindu temple in Ayodhya, precisely the theory which the ten signatories try to �unmask� as a British concoction. The claim that the British deliberately �destroyed� this or any other historical evidence is also unsupported by any evidence. This is all the more serious considering the fact that the British archives provide a much more complete testimony of the British policies than anything from the earlier periods, and considering the ten signatories� own contention that their friend Sushil Srivastava has made a detailed study of the British machinations in Avadh. There is little doubt that the British resident was implementing policies designed to bring Avadh under British control, but what is very much in

doubt (at any rate totally unsubstantiated) is the claim that he used temple history concoctions to that end. There is actually some evidence to the opposite effect. P. Carnegy wrote in 1970 that up to 1855 both Hindus and Muslims worshipped at the mosque, which led to a lot of friction, until the British separated them: �It is said that up to that time [viz. the Hindu-Muslim clashes in the 1850s] the Hindus and Mohamedans alike used to worship in the mosque-temple. Since the British rule a railing has been put up toprevent dispute, within which, in the mosque the Mohamedans pray, while outside the fence the Hindus have raised a platform on which they make their 47

offerings.� As Peter Van der Veer comments on Carnegy�s testimony, against the British concoction hypothesis: �The suggestion that the local tradition is entirely invented by the British 48

thus seems disingenuous.�

To quote Van der Veer in full: �The implication here is that the British found the �facts� that fitted their master narrative of the perpetual hostility between Hindus and Muslims. (�) One of the problems with the above argument is that the British were not very interested in the Hindu history of Ayodhya. The most important British archaeologist of India in the nineteenth century was Alexander Cunningham. He did come to Ayodhya, not to dig up evidence of Hindu-Muslim enmity but to look for the Buddhist monuments of Saketa/ Ayodhya - monuments that nobody locally was interested in, then or now. Patrick Carnegy, the commissioner, argued that the pillars of the mosque - which are now ascribed to a Hindu temple by [B.B.] Lal and others - strongly resemble Buddhist pillars, although he did accept the local tradition that Babar built his mosque on the �birthplace� temple. However, he also accepted the local tradition that Hindus and Muslims used to worship together in this mosque-temple until the disturbances of 1855. The 49 suggestion that the local tradition is entirely invented by the British thus seems disingenuous.� Many 19th-century scholars had a strong pro-Buddhist bias in their India studies (setting a trend which continues till today), and the first Ayodhya surveyors display the same intellectual fashion, rather than the politically more useful interest in Hindu-Muslim friction. The dozens of scholars who have floated the British concoction hypothesis are faced with a total absence of 19th-century data supporting it. Patrick Carnegy, the first British commissioner in Faizabad and still very close in time to the episode of communal violence (1852-57) and the British take-over after the Mutiny (1857-58), would have emphasized Hindu-Muslim conflict if the British concoction hypothesis had been true. Instead, he highlights the relative Hindu-Muslim harmony which existed shortly before the time of the British take-over. This moment of harmony may well have been exceptional and may have to be explained by the Muslim rulers� need to strengthen their position against British ambitions. But at any rate it was a fact which the British would not have highlighted if they had wanted to base their divide-and-rule policy on false history of Hindu-Muslim conflict. Moreover, if they had wanted to use historical cases of Hindu-Muslim tension to foment more such tension in their own day; they could have invoked numerous certified instances rather than having to invent any. 11.9. Archaeological evidence The only serious comment on the VHP evidence bundle published in the national press (but still not reporting the outcome of the evidence debate) was a derogatory piece by Bhupendra Yadav

in The Tribune. In his despair at finding that �proven secularists�, like R. Nath and B.B. Lal, �are now nodding assent to the argument for Ram Janmabhoomi�, Yadav does try to propose an alternative to the temple destruction scenario. Acknowledging Lal�s archaeological finding of 11th-century temple foundations underneath the Babri Masjid, he comes up with the following explanation: �After they occupied Ayodhya in 1194 AD, the Turkish sultans found a vacant mound at Ramkot in which lay buried the burnt pillar bases. The sultans encouraged settlements of Muslims on the mound (... ) To help these Muslims pray, officials of the Babar regime built a 50 mosque in 1528 AD.� Bhupendra Yadav�s nice little scenario is of course purely hyothetical and unsupported by any document whatsoever, but that doesn�t seem to trouble him. At any rate, after the cream of India�s secularist historians have used all their resources to create a semblance of credibility for the no-temple case, all that Bhupendra Yadav can come up with, is the hypothesis that: 1) the Hindus of Ayodhya had left the geographical place of honour in the middle of their city �vacant�, unlike the people of every other city in the whole world; 2) they had laid the foundations (the pillar-bases of burnt brick) for a pillared building which they never constructed, and waited for others to come and put these foundations to proper use. This hypothesis is pretty farfetched. But at least Mr. Yadav has the merit of explicitating what most people who deny the temple destruction scenario only claim by implication. A similar howler was launched by archaeologist D. Mandal of Allahabad University in his booklet Ayodhya Archaeology after Demolition (1993). In the first week of July 1992, a team of eight reputed archaeologists, including former ASI directors Dr. Y.D. Sharma and Dr. K.M. Srivastava, had paid a visit to the Ramkot hill in Ayodhya. They went there to verify and evaluate the findings done by labourers who had been clearing the area around the Babri Masjid on orders of the Uttar Pradesh Department of Tourism. The findings included religious sculptures, among them a statue of Vishnu (of whom Rama is considered an incarnation), and a lot of rubble thrown together in a deep cavity in front of the Babri Masjid structure. Team members said the inner boundary of the disputed structure rests, at least on one side, on an earlier existing structure, which �may have belonged to an earlier temple�. of the entire hill.

51

They pleaded for a more systematic survey

52

However, Mandal dismisses the post-demolition (and pre-demolition) archaeological evidence for the temple as invalid because not unearthed in a scientific excavation: they �cannot be placed in context since the stratigraphical evidence is destroyed by arbitrary digging or willful 53 destruction�. By that criterion, much of Egyptian and Harappan history should also be nullified retroactively. Even a few decades ago, archaeological methods were unscientific by present-day standards, and the older findings were therefore not as transparent in terms of stratigraphy and chronology as desirable, yet the artifacts found were still real and did allow for certain conclusions even if less compelling or precise. Moreover, Mandal seems to be trying to over-awe the lay reader with a distinction between strata which is very important in digging at prehistorical sites but becomes far less crucial in more recent sites, where the objects found are known �in context� because a lot of written evidence attests to their use and meaning and chronology. When you find different types of prehistoric stone tools, proper stratigraphy is essential if you want to know their chronological sequence. But when you find (a) a paleolithic flintstone scraper, (b) a medieval metal saw, and (c) a modern electrical sawing-machine, you can safely deduce that (a) precedes (b) which in turn precedes (c), even if

the stratigraphy of the site had been messed up. Likewise, it is not difficult to distinguish Hindu art from Muslim art. it would be for a Martian who knows neither religion, but not for us who are familiar with both religions and their art histories. Unlike findings at pre-literate sites from unknown cultures, the objects in Ayodhya were certainly found �in context�. For starters, they were Hindu objects found at a site where, after centuries of Hindu presence, a mosque had been built. Even if stratigraphically less than perfect, the fact of this multifarious evidence�s existence, certified by a number of leading archaeologists, is undeniable. Mandal also tries to impose a contrived explanation on Prof. B.B. Lal�s old pillar-bases evidence, claiming that these pillar-bases were �certainly not contemporaneous with one another� nor even �components of a single structure�. This would mean that every now and then, these inconsistent Hindus or Muslims just made a hole in the ground, arbitrarily planted a pillar-base somewhere, never to build a pillar on it, then forgot about it till a few decades later, another joker repeated this meaningless ritual, coincidentally yielding an orderly pattern of pillarbases. This is secularist archaeology for you. 54

Another strange line of argument which Mandal uses, is this: he first claims that a demolition must have involved the use of fire, then notes that �neither are there traces of burning, expected 55

when military destruction occurs�. Now, apart from the fact that fire would mostly affect the overground parts while we are only left with the underground remainder, the point is that no one insists that the temple was destroyed by fire. Numerous mosques stand on Hindu temples which were demolished alright without being burnt down. Indeed, any Kar Sevak could have told Prof. Mandal that there are other ways to demolish a building. Could it be that Mandal is only refuting his own straw-man hypotheses because he cannot face the real evidence? For the rest, he repeats the worn-out trick of using the non-mentioning of certain facts in B.B. Lal�s brief (i.e. by definition incomplete) report to �contradict� B.B. Lal�s and S.P. Gupta�s 56 recent revelations of findings which would only appear in the full report. The fact of the matter is that the full report of B.B. Lal�s findings was withheld from publication, and that the brief report which the journalists had seen explicitly refrains from giving details of the medieval findings. It is quite odd to use the brief version of the report to disprove the detailed version of 57 the same report�s relevant part which B.B. Lal himself had just made public. That the full report is still unpublished, is most likely because the secularist authorities objected to its findings. As Peter Van der Veer reported: �However, in this case the government has not allowed the Department of Archaeology to provide evidence. it has thus fallen to B.B. Lal to do 58 so.� The same counts for the inscription found during the demolition, which clearly mentions that the 59

site was considered Rama�s birthplaces. At the time, many academics declared without any examination that the inscription, presented by scholars of no lesser stature than themselves, was a forgery. Thus, according to �a group of historians and scholars� including Kapil Kumar, B.D. Chattopadhyaya, K.M. Shrimali, Suvira Jaiswal and S.C. Sharma, the �so-called discoveries of

artefacts� during and after the demolition were �a planned fabrication and a fraud perpetrated, 60

to further fundamentalist designs�.

If the secularists had really believed this, they would have requested access to the findings, which would readily have been granted by the minister in charge, the militant secularist Arjun Singh. They would have invited international scholars as witnesses, and curtly demonstrated its falseness for all to see. instead, just like B. B. Lal�s report, this inscription became a skeleton in their closet, which they have to keep from public view as long as possible. In fact, the BMAC and secularist side has frequently opposed archaeological research at the site, while the Hindu side wanted more of it, e.g.: �Nevertheless, in a BBC interview in 1991, [B.B.] Lal argued that there had been a Hindu temple for Rama/Vishnu on the spot now occupied by the mosque and that pillars of that temple had been used in constructing the [Masjid]. Lal suggested that further digging should be carried out in order to come up with more evidence - a suggestion that was denounced in the press by the historian Irfan Habib and others as a ploy to demolish the 61 mosque.� The whole anti-temple argumentation has nothing more to offer than such pitiable attempts to wriggle out from under the weight of inconvenient evidence. Only media power has so far saved the �eminent historians� and their ilk from being exposed. 11.10. �The Shariat does not allow temple demolition� Soft-line Hindu nationalists like K.R. Malkani, along with some secularists and Muslims, have often tried to convince us that Islam itself opposes the demolition of non-Muslim places of worship. They even argue that a mosque built on a demolished Hindu temple would be unlawful under Islamic law. The authority claimed as basis for this offer is the injunction in the Fatawa-iAlamgiri (Aurangzeb�s codex of applied Islamic jurisprudence): �it is not permissible to build a mosque on unlawfully acquired land. There may be many forms of unlawful acquisition. For instance, if some people forcibly take somebody�s house and build a mosque or even a jama masjid on it, then namaz in such a mosque will be against the shari�at.� Without reference to the context, this might be read as a prohibition on forcibly replacing Hindu temples with mosques. Sushil Srivastava has even used this injunction as �proof� that mosques simply cannot have been built in forcible replacement of temples. He writes that �the Quran clearly states that prayers offered in a contentious place will not be accepted (�) Thus, the whole purpose of constructing a masjid on the site of a mandir would be self-defeating (�) it is highly unlikely that even the contentious mosques in Varanasi and Mathura are located on 62 the exact sites of temples.� The Gyanvapi mosque in Varanasi is very certainly located on the exact site of the Vishvanath temple, and visibly includes remains of the old temple walls. Numerous other examples can be 63 cited from inside and outside of India, and more cases keep on being discovered. To mention two less-known cases from Iran, the Masjid-i-Biruñ in Abarquh and the Jami Masjid of Aqda (still a Zoroastrian centre of pilgrimage with a shrine in use on a mountain outside the town), �whose 64

origin may be traced back to fire-temples� of the Zoroastrians. The author reporting on them

correctly introduces his finding thus: �In the Islamic world many places of worship belonging to the earlier religion have been converted to mosques.� As is clear from the Islamic law books, and as Prof. Harsh Narain has shown, the injunction against building mosques on unlawfully acquired land only applies to inter-Muslim disputes, because it was quite lawful and in fact also quite common to have mosques built on 65 temple sites grabbed from Hindus and other heathens. Indeed, the forcible takeover of nonMuslim religious places is a practice initiated by Prophet Mohammed himself. The best example of the practice is the Kaaba itself, a Pagan shrine forcibly transformed into the central mosque of Islam. 11.11. Tampering with the evidence In its presentation of evidence in the Government sponsored scholars� debate in December 1990, the VHP scholars have pointed out 4 cases of attempted fraud by their opponents, attempts by BMAC sympathizers to conceal, obliterate or change evidence: removing relevant old books from libraries, adding words on an old map. Recent editions of Urdu books (by Maulvi Abdul Karim and by Shaikh Md. Azamat Ali Nami) have suppressed chapters or passages relating the temple destruction on Ramkot hill which were present in earlier editions or in the manuscript. In an English translation of a book by Maulana Hakim Saiyid Abdul Hai, the relevant passages present in the Urdu original had been censored out, and an effort was discovered to remove all the copies of the Urdu original from the libraries. On maps included in the Settlement Record of 1861, which describe the disputed area as Janamsthan, �birthplace�, someone had added �Babari Masjid�; the interpolation was obvious after comparison with a copy of the document kept in another office. The fact that this official document could be tampered with, may well be related to the fact that the then Revenue Minister of Uttar Pradesh was an office-bearer of the BMAC. In my opinion, these petty and clumsy attempts to tamper with the corpus of evidence, are child�s play compared with the concealment of evidence by professional scholars sympathetic to the Babri Masjid cause. In their publications on this dispute, A.A. Engineer and Prof. S. Gopal have simply kept all the inconvenient (mainly pre-British) testimonies out of the picture, and just acted as if these did not exist. In his reply to the anti-Janmabhoomi statement The Political Abuse of History by 25 historians of JNU, Prof. A.R. Khan shows grounds to accuse the eminent JNU historians of �not only concealment but also distortion of evidence�.

66

It is not unfair to conclude that some of the pro-BMAC authors have committed serious breaches of academic deontology. For me personally, seeing this shameless overruling of historical evidence with a high-handed use of academic and media power, was the immediate reason to involve myself in this controversial question. When A.K. Chatterjee had presented the testimony by 18-century traveller Father Tieffenthaler as evidence, Syed Shahabuddin revealed in his reply that he possessed a copy of this text (in 67 German translation) and that he was thoroughly familiar with the text. This seems to imply that while he was challenging his opponents to come up with any pre-British evidence, he was fully aware that such evidence did exist (or at the very least a document which might reasonably be claimed to contain such evidence, even if one were to be persuaded by Shahabuddin�s extremely contrived attempt to explain it away), but remained sitting on top of it in the hope that nobody would discover it.

The above are cases where the attempts to suppress evidence have failed. It is quite probable that other attempts have succeeded. There may well be documents containing pertinent information, particularly about the site�s history during the Sultanate period (1206-1525), which have escaped the notice of Prof. Harsh Narain (the only scholar of Persian and Arabic in the VHP team) because they had been removed in time from the places where they could normally be found. Such documents would mostly be in Persian and available only in the libraries of Muslim institutions. In some of these, Prof. Harsh Narain has effectively been denied access as soon as his involvement in the Ayodhya argument became known. How many pieces of pertinent material have been concealed, removed, destroyed or altered is anybody�s guess. 11.12. Conclusion The clear-cut result of the Ayodhya evidence debate is still not widely known. Most of the Indian English-language papers, as well as the official electronic media, have all along been on the side of the BMAC, and they have strictly kept the lid on this information. Their reporting on the scholars� debate has been very partial and, from the moment the BMAC�s defeat became clear, increasingly vague. If any proof is needed that the BMAC has been defeated in this de e, it is this: no one sympathetic to the Babri Masjid cause has made any reference to the outcome of this debate all through the subsequent years, eventhough the Ayodhya issue frequently reappeared in the news. Politicians have made a show of their �secularism� and their opposition to �religious fanaticism� by organizing �fact-finding missions� to Ayodhya and issuing statements on the dispute, but they have not made any reference to the outcome of the scholars� debate at all. When reading about the subsequent course of the Ayodhya controversy, one might get the impression that the scholars� debate never took place. However, it did take place, and it has yielded sufficient evidence to consider the matter as practically closed. The Babri Masjid was built in forcible replacement of a Hindu temple. With the historical question decided, that leaves only the political question to be resolved. That political question has not been the topic of this paper, but for those who care to know, I may briefly state my position. The Rama-Janmabhoomi site has been a Hindu sacred site since many centuries. Even the JNU historians admit that it was a pilgrimage site since the 13th century. It may have been one since much earlier, but alright: Catholic pilgrimage sites like Lourdes and Fatima are not even two centuries old and still they are respected. So, seven centuries is quite sufficient to certify its status of sanctity. Today, judges and governments in Australia, New Zealand and the Americas are increasingly conceding the right of indigenous communities to restart worship at their sacred sites. Considering the human right to freedom of religion, it is obvious that communities have a right to their sacred sites, and no modem and humane person would ever countenance thwarting this right for other than the most compelling reasons. So, it is completely evident that Hindus have a right to use and properly adorn their own sacred sites, including Rama-Janmabhoomi at Ayodhya. The problem with Ayodhya, the cause of all this rioting and waste of lives and political energy, is not that Hindus want to adorn their own sacred site with proper temple architecture: that is the most normal thing in the world. The problem is that another party, the Islamist-Christian-Marxist combine in India, is trying to obstruct this perfectly unobjectionable project of architectural renovation. Against the near-universal consensus that all sacred sites are to be respected, Islam is taking the position that it has the right to occupy and desecrate the sacred sites of other religions. Genuine secularists must oppose and thwart this obscurantist design, and allow the normal process of Hindu architectural

renovation to take its course.

Footnotes: Koenraad Elst: �The Ayodhya debate�, in Gilbert Pollet, ed.: Indian Epic Values. Râmâyana and Its Impact, Peeters, Leuven 1995. As is all too common with conference proceedings, this book was assembled only three years after the conference, so the published version of my paper was finalized only in 1994. 1

2

In the 1961 Faizabad Gazetteer, Mrs. E.B. Joshi, while not yet denying the traditional account relayed in the earlier Gazetteers, suppresses it without giving any reason for doing so, probably on orders of the Government of India under Jawaharlal Nehru. But neutral scholarly publications like the 1989 edition of the Encyclopedia Brittannica (entryAyodhya) confirm the temple destruction scenario. 3

One of the first scholarly publications on the dispute was my Ram Janmabhoomi vs. Babri Masjid, A Case Study in Hindu-Muslim Conflict (Voice of India, Delhi, July 1990), partly a reply to the statement The Political Abuse of History: Babri Masjid/Rama Janmabhumi Controversy, by Bipin Chandra and 24 other historians of Jawaharlal Nehru University. A large part of my book has been included in Vinay Chandra Mishra and Parmanand Singh, eds.: Ram Janmabhoomi Babri Masjid, Historical Documents, Legal Opinions & Judgments, Bar Council of India Trust, Delhi 1991. The VHP (Vishva Hindu Parishad, �World Hindu Council�) was founded in 1964 by Guru

4

Golwalkar, chief of theRashtriya Swayarwevak Sangh (RSS, �National Volunteer Corps�) as an instrument for the spread of Hindu culture and religion. It takes its guidelines from an assembly of traditional religious leaders. 5

Prof. B.B. Lal has formulated this conclusion on different occasions, including articles in Purâtitattva no. 16, 1987, and in Manthan, October 1990. In a letter to the Times of India, published on 1-3-1991, he concludes that �what is known as Ayodhya today was indeed the Ayodhya of the ValmikiRamayana�. 6

Prof. Kamal Salibi of Beirut has proposed the theory that all the Biblical sites including

Abraham�s Hebron and king David�s Jerusalem, were situated in the Hejaz area of Western Arabia (in his 1985 book The Bible Came from Arabia: a Radical Reinterpretation of Old Testament Geography). The double political motivation is obvious: undermining Israel�s historical legitimacy and giving a foundation to Islam�s claim to an Abrahamic heritage including the Ka�aba. Established Bible scholars have dismissed this theory as wishful thinking. 7

The Ayodhya dispute and the Rushdie affair are indeed connected. The ban on The Satanic Verses was part of a package of concessions by the Rajiv Gandhi Government to calm down Syed Shahabuddin, who had threatened a Muslim �march on Ayodhya� on the same day when the VHP would hold a rally there. 8

Quoted for rebuttal from Shahabuddin�s own monthly Muslim India by Harsh Narain in his article Ram Janmabhoomi: Muslim Testimony, published in the Lucknow Pioneer (5-2-90) and

in Indian Express (26-2-90), and included in S.R. Goel: Hindu Temples, vol.1, 2nd ed., Voice of India, Delhi 1998. In the ensuing debate between Prof. Narain, Mr. A.K. Chatterjee and Syed Shahabuddin, the latter has never denied nor cancelled his offer. Prof. R.S. Sharma: Communal History and Rama�s Ayodhya, People�s Publishing House, Delhi 1990. 9

R.S. Sharma et al.: Ramjanmabhumi Babari Masjid, A Historians� Report to the Nation,

10

People�s Publishing House, Delhi 1991, p.4. 11

The VHP evidence bundle, its rebuttal of the BMAC argumentation, a press brief, and some articles generally supporting the VHP viewpoint, have been published asHistory versus Casuistry, Evidence of the Ramajanmabhoomi Mandir presented by the Vishva Hindu Parishad to the Government of India in December-January 1990-91, Voice of India, Delhi 199 1. Most of it was also included in Sita Ram Goel: Hindu Temples, vol. 1, at least in its 2nd edition, Voice of India, Delhi 1998. The BMAC evidence bundle has not been published. 12

Will Durant: Story of Civilization, vol. 1, New York 1972, p.459.

13

This incorporation of Hindu temple materials in mosques is cynically held up as a showpiece of

�composite culture� and a �living evidence of secularism� by the friends of Islam such as Congress MP Mani Shankar Aiyar, cited to this effect by Swapan Dasgupta, Sunday, 10-5-1992. 14

A testimony to the same effect is also given by the Portuguese historian Gaspar Correa, who describes how Hindus continued their annual procession to the site of the Kapalishwara temple on Mylapore beach (Madras), even after the temple had been forcibly replaced with a Catholic church, vide Ishwar Sharan: The Myth of Saint Thomas and the Mylapore Shiva Temple, Voice of India, p.18-19 (1st ed., 1991) or p-93-94 (2nd ed., 1995). A.G. Noorani: �The Babri Masjid Ram Janmabhoomi Question� (originally published in Economic and Political Weekly), in A.A. Engineer ed.: Babri Masjid Ram Janmabhoomi Controversy, AJanta, Delhi 1990, p.66. 15

16

Mirza Jan: Hadiqa-i Shahada (�The garden of martyrdom�), Lucknow 1856, included in the VHP evidence bundle: History vs. Casuistry, Voice of India, Delhi 1991, p.14. 17

Indian Express, 13-3-1990.

A.K. Chatterjee: �Ram Janmabhoomi: some more evidence�, Indian Express, 27-3-1990. It is included, with the whole ensuing polemical exchange with Syed Shahabuddin, as appendix 4 in History versus Casuistry. 18

19

The title of the princess�s text is given as Sahifa-i Chahal Nasaih Bahadur Shahi (Persian:

�Letter of the Forty Advices of Bahadur Shah�). It is included in the VHP evidence bundle: History vs. Casuistry, p. 13-14. Percival Spear has the effrontery to declare: �Aurangzeb�s supposed intolerance is little

20

more than a hostile legend� (Penguin History of India, vol.2, p.56). The contemporary records

show Aurangzeb as a pious man who faithfully practised his religion and therefore persecuted the unbelievers and destroyed their temples by the thousands. About the denial of Islamic crimes against humanity, vide Sita Ram Goel: Story of Islamic Imperialism in India, Voice of India, Delhi 1984. A. Shourie: �Take over from the experts�, syndicated column, included in History versus Casuistry as appendix 1, and in A. Shourie: Indian Controversies, ASA, Delhi 1992, p.411-418. 21

22

Quoted by the VHP-mandated experts in their rejoinder to the BMAC: History vs. Casuistry, p.61. This text does not figure in the original BMAC evidence bundle, but its words �very ill-

23

founded� are quoted by Prof. Irfan Habib in a speech to the Aligarh Historians Group (12/2/1992, published in Muslim India, 5/1991). The paragraph containing these words (but not the entire relevant passage) is quoted by R.S. Sharma, M. Athar Ali, D.N. Jha and Suraj Bhan, the historians for the BMAC, in their joint publication: Ramjanmabhumi Babari Masjid, A Historians� Report to the Nation, People�s Publishing House, Delhi, May 1991, p.20-21. 24

Cited in Harsh Narain: The Ayodhya Temple/Mosque Dispute, Penman, Delhi 1993, p.8, emphasis added. Father Joseph Tieffenthaler records that the temple destruction was being attributed to Aurangzeb by some, to Babar by others, but this minor confusion never affected the consensus that the mosque had forcibly replaced a Hindu temple. 25

In 1608, William Finch (quoted in the VHP evidence bundle:History vs. Casuistry, p. 19) had

witnessed the �ruins of Ramkot�, i.e. of the Hindu temple which kept alive the tradition that that very site had once been Rama�s castle. The entire hill was called Ramkot, �Rama�s castle�, and the temple complex was certainly larger than the Babri Masjid, so that Finch may well have seen some leftovers still standing there beside the mosque. 26

Francis Buchanan�s report has been put into perspective by Mr. A.K. Chatterjee, in an article intended as an episode of his Ayodhya debate with Syed Shahabuddin on the opinion page of the Indian Express, sent on 14-8-1990 but not published; but included in History versus Casuistry, appendix 4. For instance, Syed Shahabuddin blames �propaganda by the British� (Indian Express, 12-51990), and according to Md. Abdul Rahim Qureshi, secretary of the All-India Muslim Personal 27

Law Board, �the Britishers... planted false stories and succeeded in misleading the masses to believe that Babri Masjid stood in the premises of a Rama temple which was demolished by Babar� (Indian Express, 13-3-1990). For a rebuttal of the British conspiracy hyothesis, vide K. Elst: �Party-line history-writing�, The Pioneer (Lucknow edition), 19/20-12-1990, reproduced in History vs. Casuistry, app.6. 28

It should be borne in mind that the Qur�an contains dozens of injunctions to wage war against

29

the unbelievers, e.g.: �Make war on them until idolatry is no more and Allah�s religion reigns supreme� (2:193 and 8:39); �Those who follow Mohammed are merciless to the unbelievers

but kind to one another� (48:29); �Enmity and hate shall reign between us until ye believe in Allah alone� (60:4), etc. The same attitude is found in the jihad chapters of the Hadis collections and the Islamic law codices. In Indian history, these verses and the precedent set by the Prophet have been systematically invoked to justify persecutions and temple demolitions. 30

A.G. Noorani (A.A. Engineer ed.: Babri Masjid Ram Janmabhoomi Controversy, p.65) claims

that Tulsidas �was over thirty in 1528 when the mosque was built. He lived and wrote his great work [the Rama-Charit Manas] in Ayodhya.� In fact, he wrote it in Varanasi, on what is now called Tulsi Ghat, and he died in 1623, which means that he was born after 1528. 31

Sushil Srivastava: The Disputed Mosque, Vistaar Publ., Delhi 1991, ch.5; R. Nath: The Babari Masjid of Ayodhya, Historical Research Documentation Programme, Jaipur 1991. The latter has clearly stated that this revision of who built the Masjid, in no way invalidates the claim that it had replaced a Hindu temple: �I have been to the site and have had occasion to study the mosque, privately, and I have absolutely no doubt that the mosque stands on the site of a Hindu temple on the north-western corner of the temple-fortress Ramkot.� (letter in Indian Express, 2-1-91) 32

Srivastava (in A.A. Engineer ed.: Babari Masjid/Ram Janmabhoomi Controversy, p.36) quotes Shamsur Rehman Farooqui, a scholar of Persian, who considers the inscription written in a younger style of calligraphy common in the 19th century, and by someone not well-versed in Persian. The latter observation may as well be explained by the fact that Babar�s Turkish scribes had only recently learned Persian; whereas most literate Muslims in 19th-century India were very well-versed in Persian. 33

Sri Ram Sharma: Religious Policy of the Mughal Emperors (1940), p.24-25. The same position

has been taken by Mrs. Beveridge, the translator of Babar�s memoirs, and other historians. Several hypotheses of who forged this �testament� and why are explored J.N. Tiwari and V.S. Pathak (BHU): �Rama Janmabhoomi Bhavana. The testimony of the Ayodhya Mahatmya�, in Lallanji Gopal, ed.: Ayodhya, History, Archaeology and Tradition, papers presented in the seminar held on 13-15 February 1992, All-India Kashiraj Trust, Varanasi 1994, p.282-296. 34

Quoted in Mrs. A.S. Beveridge: Babur Nama, Delhi 1970 reprint, 574-575. Ghazi has the same

meaning as mujahid, though it is often used in the more precise sense of �one who has effectively killed infidels with his own hands�. Prof. B.P. Sinha claims to know how this disuse of the Masjid came about: �As early as 193637, a bill was introduced in the legislative council of U.P. to transfer the site to the Hindus (... ) the 35

bill was withdrawn on an unwritten understanding that no namaz [be] performed.� (in annexure 29 to the VHP evidence bundle, unpublished) A. Shourie: �Take over from the experts�, syndicated column, 27-1-91, included in History vs. Casuistry as appendix 1. Arun Shourie was sacked as Indian Expresseditor, apparently under government pressure, after revealing that, in October 1990, Prime Minister V.P. Singh had aborted his own compromise arrangement on Ayodhya under pressure from Imam Bukhari, prominent member of the BMAC. 36

37

Cited in Peter Van der Veer: Religious Nationalism, p.157, with reference to New York Times, 22-12-1991. 38

Though the Taj Mahal was obviously never a Hindu temple, the story of its construction may be a bit more complicated than simply one of an original Indo-Saracen construction on virgin land, vide Marvin H. Mills (Professor of Architecture, Pratt Institute, New York): �An architect looks at the Taj legend�, a review of Wayne Edison Begley & Ziyauddin Ahmad Desai: Taj Mahal, the Illumined Tomb, University of Washington Press, Seattle 1989. Padmini Kumar: �Babri: another twist to the issue!�,Maharashtra Herald, 9-12-1990, based on an interview with P.N. Oak. 39

40

B.G. Tilak: Arctic Home in the Vedas, 1903, and M.S. Golwalkar: We, Our Nationhood Defined, 1939. Aditya and Mridula Mukherjee: �No challenge from communalists�, Sunday Observer, 15-31992. 41

42

It may be noted that the no-temple school is not necessarily less communalist, for it imposes

explanations by religious conflict where no such conflicts existed, e.g. in his president�s address before the Panjab History Conference held at Patiala in march 1999, �Against communalising history�, D.N. Jha communalizes history by repeating the myth of Saint Thomas� �martyrdom� at the hands of Hindus as a �well known� fact. [note added in January 2002] Romila Thapar, Bipan Chandra et al.: �The political abuse of history�, in Asghar Ali Engineer: Babri Masjid/Ram Janmabhoomi Controversy, p.235. 43

44

Letter signed by Romila Thapar, Muzaffar Alam, Bipan Chandra, R. Champaka Lakshmi, S. Battacharya, H. Mukhia, Suvira Jaiswal, S. Ratnagar, M.K. Palat, Satish Sabarwal, S. Gopal and Mridula Mukherjee, datelined 21-10-1986, published in Times of India, 28-10-1986. A.G.Noorani: �The Babri Masjid/Ramjanmabhoomi Question�, Asghar Ali Engineer: Babri Masjid/Ram Janmabhoomi Controversy, p.66. 45

Letter in The Statesman, 22-10-1989, quoted by A.G. Noorani: �The Babri Masjid/Ram

46

Janmabhoomi Question�, Asghar Ali Engineer: Babari Masjid/Ram Janmabhoomi Controversy, p.66-67. 47

P. Carnegy: A Historical Sketch of Tehsil Fyzabad, Lucknow 1870, quoted by Harsh Narain: The Ayodhya Temple/Mosque Dispute, Penman, Delhi 1993, p.8-9, and by Peter Van der Veer: Religious Nationalism, p.153; emphasis mine. 48

Peter Van der Veer: Religious Nationalism, p. 160.

49

Peter Van der Veer: Religious Nationalism, p. 159-160.

Bhupendra Yadav: �Temple issue built on weak base�, in The Tribune, 7-3-1992.

50

51

Indian Express, 4-7-1992.

52

Presented in Y.D. Sharma et al.: Ramajanma Bhumi: Ayodhya. New Archaeological

Discoveries, published by Prof. K.S. Lal for the Historians� Forum, Delhi 1992. An earlier smaller find of religious artefacts on 10 March 1992 in diggings by the Uttar Pradesh tourism department was reported in the press, e.g. Anil Rana: �Artifacts found near Babari Masjid�, Statesman, 11-3-1992. A further discovery was made a month after the demolition, vide: �New evidence at temple site found�, Pioneer, 8-1-1993. D. Mandal: Ayodhya Archaeology after Demolition. A Critique of the �New� and �Fresh� Discoveries, Orient Longman, Delhi 1993, p.xi. 53

54

D. Mandal: Ayodhya Archaeology after Demolition, p.63.

55

D. Mandal: Ayodhya Archaeology after Demolition, p.65. E.g.: �No Pillar-bases at Ayodhya: ASI Report�, Times of India, 7-12-90, and A.G. Noorani:

56

�The Babri Masjid Ram Janmabhoomi question�, in A.A. Engineer: Babri Masjid Ram Janmabhoomi Controversy, p.64. B.B. Lal explained this matter and restated his long-held positions in his article: �Facts of

57

history cannot be altered�, The Hindu, 1-7-1998, in reply to a slanderous editorial, �Tampering with history�, The Hindu, 12-6-1998. Undaunted, D.N. Jha attempted to restore the confusion: �We were not shown Ayodhya notebook�, The Hindu, 27-7-1998. [note added in January 2002] 58

Peter Van der Veer: Religious Nationalism, p-157. On several occasions, Marxist historians had insinuated that B.B. Lal, one of the greatest living archaeologists, has changed his conclusions about the pre-existent temple in order to satisfy the �requirements of VHP politics� (thus the JNU historians Romila Thapar, S. Gopal and K.N. Panikkar in Indian Express, 5-121990). Among those who came out in Prof. Lal�s defence and certified his statements are: K.V. Soundarajan (ASI), I. Mahadevan, R. Nath, K.V. Raman, and K. K. Mohammed (ASI, the only Muslim who participated in the Ayodhya excavations, letter inIndian Express, 15-12-1990). In a speech to the Aligarh Historians Group (12-2-1991, published in Muslim India, 5/1991), Prof. Irfan Habib has made similar personal attacks on Prof. B.R. Grover, Prof. B.P. Sinha, Prof. K.S. Lal and Dr. S.P. Gupta, who have represented the VHP in the scholars� debate, and on Prof. B.B. Lal. Presented by Dina Nath Mishra: �Writing in the debris�,Telegraph, 1-1-1993.

59

�Historians pick holes in �evidence��, Times of India, 26-12-1992.

60

61

Peter Van der Veer: Religious Nationalism, p. 1 58-159.

Sushil Srivastava: �The Ayodhya controversy�, in A.A. Engineer ed.: Babri Masjid/Ram Janmabhoomi Controversy, p.38. 62

E.g.: �One night during the monsoon of 1991, the rain was so heavy that it washed away the

63

wall that was concealing the frontage of the Bijamandal mosque raised by Aurangzeb in 1682� in Vidisha, and �the broken wall exposed so many Hindu idols that the Archaeological Survey of India had no choice but to excavate�, as mentioned by Prafull Goradia: �Heritage hushed up�, Pioneer, 12-12-2000. [note added in January 2002] M. Shokoohy: �Two fire temples converted to mosques in central Iran�, Papers in Honour of Professor Mary Boyce, EJ. Brill, Leiden 1985, p.546. 64

Harsh Narain: �Ram Janmabhoomi: Muslim testimony�, in Lucknow Pioneer (5-2-90) and Indian Express (26-2-90), included in S.R. Goel: Hindu Temples, vol. 1, 2nd ed. (1998), p. 169-175. 65

Prof. A.R. Khan: �In the name of �history�� (originally published in Indian Express, 25-21990) and the whole subsequent exchange with the JNU historians has been included in History vs. Casuistry, app.2, and in S.R. Goel:Hindu Temples, vol. 1, 2nd ed. (Voice of India, Delhi 1998), p. 243-263. We have to give the JNU historians credit for trying at least this once to refute criticism, but we cannot commend the secretiveness about this exchange in their later writings. On the other hand, their secretiveness is quite eloquent in its own way. 66

67

The whole debate between A.K. Chatterjee and Syed Shahabuddin is included in S.R.

Goel: Hindu Temples, vol.1, 2nd ed., p.176-211; Shahabuddin�s claim to �have the German text� is on p. 198.

12. About the Hindu critique of monotheism This final text was written just recently, after I was given a copy of probably the first book containing a paper devoted specifically to a position taken by Voice of India, viz. its critique of m Monotheism. This was a central theme in the work of the late Ram Swarup and has remained so for those who have learned from him, including Sita Ram Goel and Arun Shourie, the authors specifically studied in the paper under consideration. 12.1. Portrait of the India-watcher as a young lady In March 1998, a Miss Mitsuhiro Kondo, then a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at the University of Tokyo, visited Voice of India�s publisher Sita Ram Goel for an interview. Mr. Goel has a reputation for readily grasping people�s motives and seeing through pretences, but he was quite forthcoming in freely sharing his thoughts with this unknown visitor. In any case, if you have nothing to hide, why not speak out to all corners? Many a Hindu Revivalist keeps foreign (meaning Western) interviewers at arms� length, because most of them only come to collect ammunition for some defamation job. This young lady gave a more open-minded impression, which was partly justified but is also partly belied by the paper she ended up writing.

So, Mitsuhiro Kondo has written an overview of �the criticisms levelled by present-day Hindu nationalists against what they call variously �monotheism� or �Semitic religions�, and to analyse the structure of their discourse as a logic of justification for hostilities�. As we shall see, her paper fails to make the crucial connection between the critique and the �hostilities�. It is 1

an old dictators� trick to associate criticism with crime and disorder, and too often we have seen secularists reduced to this sleight-of-hand of identifying rational criticism of Christianity and Islam with communal riots. She does not cite any evidence for such a connection. Has she ever met a rioter who gave his reading of a scholarly critique as his motive for rioting? Or even one who reads books to begin with? Her paper is included in one of those over-numerous academic books on communalism and �nation-building in South Asia�. As a junior scholar, she may have felt obliged to toe the line laid down by the book's editor, Prof. Mushirul Hasan, and senior contributors like Prof. Gyanendra 2 Pandey. Maybe she tried to please her mentors by taking a more hostile line to Hindu Revivalism than she meant to. But we only have her text in the published version, and unfortunately we find that in essential traits, it is of one piece with the usual biased discourse of the Nehruvian secularists. 12.2. Many faces of Hindu Revivalism In spite of undeniable mistakes, Miss Kondo scores one or two notches higher than most of India�s secularists and their Western loudspeakers. Thus, she takes the trouble to note (at some length) that the term �Semitic religions� in this context means Christianity and Islam, but not Judaism. The recent crop of US-based Hindu-baiters are busy adapting their rhetoric to American conditions, where Jewish opinion carries a lot of weight, so they try to sow confusion around the ambiguous term �Semitic�: though hard-boiled pro-Islamic anti-Zionists themselves, they darkly hint that Hindu Revivalism, a long-standing ally of Israel, is somehow �antiSemitic�. This new propaganda line hasn�t reached Tokyo yet, or the young researcher has commendably spurned the use of such cheap tricks. She also admits that �the Hindu nationalist movement as we see it in India today is as old and 3 deep-rooted as it is diverse in fonnll. Most secularists only mention the RSS and see all other tendencies as mere tentacles of that organisation, not so much as a tactic of �guilt by association� but simply because they never did the mental exercise of distinguishing between the different tendencies within Hindu Revivalism. However, she loses sight of that initial distinction by lumping Sita Ram Goel and Arun Shourie with cruder variants of Hindu nationalism, e.g.: �(�) the Indian people - or the Hindu rashtra(nation) as they prefer to say�, - though the authors cited never use the term Hindu Rashtra, which is typical of Hindu Mahasabha discourse 4 and commonly used. in RSS literature. Our Japanese scholar misses a turn rather badly when she compares Guru Golwalkar�s view of Islam and Christianity with that of what she calls �the Goel/Shourie group�. In her view, the former�s positions �bear a striking resemblance to, and at times are identical to� those of the 5 latter. Not quite. It is true that in criticizing Christianity and Islam, Golwalkar sometimes managed to address the question of the false truth claims on which these

belief systems are based, as Goel and Shourie have consistently tried to do. But most of the time, Golwalkar (and even more so the RSS as such and most of its office-bearers) has gone on questioning the loyalty of Christians and Muslims, hammering at their foreign origins and �antinational� tendencies. He never busied himself with informing the Indian public about the findings of modern scholarship which undermine the core beliefs of Christianity and Islam, as Goel and Shourie have done in a respectable number of hefty volumes. Therefore, it is the very opposite of the truth to deduce that �the common structure between these two ideological currents [viz. Golwalkar and Goel/Shourie], separated by several decades as they are, highlights the core of the Hindu nationalist movement: ethnicism or exclusive particularism�. And it is likewise untrue that Goel and Shourie are playing a �role� within a 6

grand Hindutva strategy, viz. as Gamekeeper of �the hard-line position of ethnic exclusivism�.

7

In sharp contrast with the repetitive-nationalistic and Indocentric approach of Golwalkar and the RSS, Goel and Shourie (and Ram Swarup before them) have developed a historical and philosophical critique of Christianity and Islam that has universal validity. It is part of continuum with Western and other foreign critiques of the said religions. The belief that Prophet Mohammed heard Allah�s very own message, or that Jesus was God�s only-begotten son who freed mankind from sin by his death and resurrection, remains false regardless of whether you study the matter in India or in Europe. The finding that Christians are using many means fair and foul in order to convert Hindus, or that Muslims have destroyed numerous Hindu temples, remains true regardless of whether you study the data in a dusty Hindu ashram or in an air-conditioned classroom in Tokyo. Neither the Japanese author nor her Muslim and secularist mentors in India have ever managed to pick a hole in the advanced criticism of Christianity and Islam. Of course, the approach pioneered by Ram Swarup is �hard-line� in the sense that it in not susceptible to change under the impact of changing political configurations. The BJP and RSS may decide one day that they need to build bridges with padres and mullahs, but that doesn�t alter the truth status of the latter�s belief systems. The Voice of India approach is unflinching in the same sense in which logic is sharper than diplomacy, or uprightness is tougher than compromise, or a diamond is hardier than mud. But that has nothing to do with harshness and hatred at the human level. I have rarely met such humanly warm people as the authors criticized by our scholar from Tokyo. 12.3. Postmodernism and the facts But let us now focus on elements in her paper which are problematic. We need not make much of her gullible acceptance of Christian missionary image-building with �love and service�. if that was all there is to it, there would be no tension in areas of high Christian missionary activity, as any researcher into an ongoing conflict ought to understand. The thought that an aversion to a religion may be based on experience with that religion, or on verifiable facts about that religion, doesn�t seem to cross her mind. And then, like India�s true secularists, she goes on to insinuate that the impression of �violent tendencies inherent in Islam�, is based on mere �clichés about jihad� which are �bandied 8

about� by Goel and Shourie. This, then, is the most serious flaw of her whole argument: the willful confounding of perceptions and facts, of subjective and objective. The jihadic pattern is a

central fact of Islamic doctrine and history, not somebody�s funny little cliché. The violent tendencies of Islam are not a propaganda bandied about by some querrulants, but a daily fact of life for Hindus in Jammu or Dhaka. It is simply impossible to understand Hindu Revivalism for people who are adamant about disregarding or denying these facts. But our aspiring secularist is clearly uncomfortable with facts, as is evident from her diagnosis of the Hindu �use and abuse of �historical facts��. Like all secularists, but with even less camouflage, she has to make do with insinuations that something is wrong with the �historical facts� (quote marks hers) cited by Hindu authors, because she is unable to prove any of them false. She can do no more than notice how �the destruction of temples, the compulsory conversion and persecution by Islamic rulers, and so forth, are held up for all to see as attesting to the �essence of Islam�, all but eclipsing the equally historical �fact� that Islam and 9

Hinduism have enjoyed a peaceful coexistence in many parts of the subcontinent�.

Notice how she keeps on putting the word �facts� in quotation marks, even when referring to something which she herself clearly believes to be factual, i.c. the �peaceful coexistence� of Islam and Hinduism. That is post modernism for you: there are no facts, onlyconstructs. She condemns herself to misunderstanding the Hindu movement which she claims to be studying because she refuses to acknowledge its basis in factual experience, replacing it all with subjective impressions and sheer propaganda. Thus, �present conditions in India give all this talk of violence and menace by alien cultures and religions a certain appeal to the ordinary people�, while �the critique of Pakistan is fed by concrete images of the military power of Pakistan affecting the daily life of the people of India�.

10

Why not admit straightaway that the violence suffered by Hindus from Pakistan-sponsored terrorists is a plain fact and therefore also a legitimate Hindu concern? Either there is something fishy about the �facts�, and in that case an author conveying an opinion about them to the readers should spell out clearly how these claimed �facts� are in dissonance with reality. Or alternatively, if no fault can be found with these �facts�, they should simply be treated as facts. Finally, if an author has no time or space to verify and discuss the reality of the alleged facts, a humble admission should be made that it is simply too early for him or her for a serious evaluation of policies and discourses based on them. But the entire corpus of secularist writing on the Hindu Revivalist position vis-à-vis Christianity and Islam violates this simple rule. 12.4. Criticism and violence In four whole pages devoted specifically to the �violence� aspect of the Goel/Shourie critique, Mitsuhiro Kondo�s text meanders around the definition of �Hindu nationalism� (a term which she finds more appropriate than �Hindu fascism� or �Hindu fundamentalism�), but shifts her attention from the said authors altogether to focus on Veer Savarkar�s much-discussed booklet Hindutva (1923) instead. And while Savarkar was all for �militarization� of the Hindus (which is not the same thing as sheer �violence�, but let that pass), even then she doesn�t manage to show any link between Hindu nationalist doctrine and its alleged violent edge.

So, we are left with no choice but to conclude with a rather different kind of quotation. As a Japanese, Miss Kondo informs us that she or any of her compatriots is �too close ideologically to the Indian (... ) to claim that the Hindu nationalists� critique of �monotheism� iscompletely and radically different from the consciousness that informs the everyday religious, cultural, 11

political and economic life of Japan�. So, both Hindus and Japanese are too sane and mentally relaxed to get obsessed with the unicity of God and the need to destroy His multiplicity among communities who have not yet been infected with that obsession. And finally, we learn that �the fundamental rationality of the ideology of Hindu nationalism has, at least in part, already won for itself the approval of history�. Indeed: �As many scholars have pointed out, it would be far off the mark to dismiss the Hindu nationalist movement as a merely �reactionary� or �fanatic and deviant movement of the poor or deprived brainwashed by 12

grotesque teachings�.� If any expression could sum up what animates Ram Swarup, Sita Ram Goel, Arun Shourie and related authors in their critique of monotheism, it would precisely be their caring concern for fellow human beings �brainwashed by grotesque teachings�.

Footnotes: Mitsuhiro Kondô: �Hindu nationalists and their critique of monotheism�, in Mushirul Hasan and Nariaki Nakazato: The Unfinished Agenda. Nation Building in South Asia, Manohar, Delhi 2001, p.79. 1

She even praises Gyan Pandey for his �clear, terse prose� in which he berates the Hindu

2

nationalists for differing with Mahatma Gandhi (Mitsuhiro Kondo: �Hindu nationalists and their critique of monotheism�, p.92). My own opinion of Pandey�s insight into Hinduism is less deferential. I recall a column of his in the early days of the Ayodhya controversy, where he argued that reclaiming the Rama-Janmabhoomi site would be similar to claiming Sri Lanka on the plea that Rama had taken possession of it. In fact, one of the central messages of Ramayana lore is that Rama refused to take possession of Lanka: after liberating his wife Sita, he left the Lankans to their own devices and handed over the throne to Ravana�s brother who was the only member of Ravana�s family to survive. This is not a peripheral detail but a highly significant application of the Hindu theory of sovereignty: all nations and communities, even conquered states, should be given their autonomy and the freedom to maintain their own mores and traditions (svadharma). This contrasts favourably with the Islamic approach of imposing Islam and suppressing (or at least gradually suffocating) the native culture. Mitsuhiro Kondô: �Hindu nationalists and their critique of monotheism�, p.79.

3

Mitsuhiro Kondô: �Hindu nationalists and their critique of monotheism�, p.84.

4

Mitsuhiro Kondô: �Hindu nationalists and their critique of monotheism�, p.88.

5

Mitsuhiro Kondô: �Hindu nationalists and their critique of monotheism�, p.88.

6

Mitsuhiro Kondô: �Hindu nationalists and their critique of monotheism�, p.95.

7

Mitsuhiro Kondô: �Hindu nationalists and their critique of monotheism�, p.81-82.

8

Mitsuhiro Kondô: �Hindu nationalists and their critique of monotheism� in Mushirul Hasan and Nariaki Nakazato: The Unfinished Agenda, p.83. 9

Mitsuhiro Kondô: �Hindu nationalists and their critique of monotheism�, P.84-85; emphasis added. 10

Mitsuhiro Kondô: �Hindu nationalists and their critique of monotheism�, p.97; emphasis in the original. 11

Mitsuhiro Kondô: �Hindu nationalists and their critique of monotheism�, P.97.

12

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Ayodyha, The Finale Science versus Secularism the Excavations Debate Foreward Chapter I: Science Versus Secularism. Temple Denial Before and After the Ayodhya Excavations Chapter II. Preceding stages of the debate Chapter III. Escaping the ASI�s final conclusions Chapter IV. Secular guilt, secular solution Foreword: This booklet is a synthesis of two articles of mine: �Lost and found: the Ayodhya evidence� (21 June 2003) published in various internet forums; and �The Secularists and the Ayodhya Excavations Report�, published in the online magazine Kashmir Herald, September 2003. At this stage in my life, a polemic on the Ayodhya affair is essentially a blast from the past. In recent years, I have reoriented my scholarly interests towards more fundamental philosophical studies and questions of ancient history, rather than questions in the centre of contemporary political struggles. The nastiness, the personal smears, the sheer heat of this kind of debate now seems most unpleasant to me, though once I enjoyed rushing headlong into it. But the whole polemic is also a blast from the past in a less personal sense. In terms of the development of civilization, it is an anachronism.

Science has made considerable progress, to the point of being able to decide many historical riddles such as whether a given site has a history as a place of worship. With the modern techniques available, it is rather absurd that there should be a controversy over such a simple and easily verifiable matter. It is incredible that there has been a yes/no game over the existence of temple remains at the disputed site for about fifteen years, when the matter could be scientifically decided in no time. Worse; even when science was called in to decide, the procedure was opposed by, of all the people, the most eminent academics. And when the scientific findings were made public, they were furiously denounced by more academics. True, when Galileo made his scientific findings know, he too was opposed by the learned academics of the day, not just by the Pope. But that was a few centuries ago, when they were still steeped in theology rather than in science. I thought we had moved on since then. Given the importance of the Ayodhya dispute and my old familiarity with it, I felt I had to come down from my ivory tower and engage in this polemic once more. When dogmatic ideologues are giving scientists the kind of treatment which the experts of the Archaeological Survey of Indian have been receiving from the �eminent historians�, and assorted Babri Masjid lobbyists, it is time to stand up and be counted. I for one want to be counted among those who defend the freedom of research and the scientific method, rather than among those who shriek and howl about some evil spirit in whose name every lie becomes justified, and whom they call �secularism�. Koenraad Elst 9 September 2003 Mortsel (Belgium)

Chapter I: Science Versus Secularism. Temple Denial Before and After the Ayodhya Excavations In India, political incidents frequently pit Hindu nationalism, or even just plain Hinduism and plain nationalism, against so-called �secularism�. In practice, this term denotes a combine of Islamists, Hindu-born Marxists and consumericanized one-dimensionalists who share a hatred of Hindu culture and Hindu self-respect. What passes for secularism in India is often the diametrical opposite of what goes by the same name in the West. Recent events in the Ayodhya temple/mosque controversy confirm the disingenuous character of Indian secularism. 1.1 Introduction: secularism and the Ayodhya excavations Genuine secular states have equality before the law of all citizens regardless of religion. By contrast, India has different civil codes depending on the citizen�s religion. Thus, for Christians it is very hard to get a divorce, Hindus and Muslim women can get one through judicial proceedings, and Muslim men can simply repudiate their wives. The secular alternative, a common civil code, is championed by the Hindu nationalists. It is the so-called secularists who, justifying themselves with specious sophistry, join hands with the most obscurantist religious leaders to insist on maintaining the present unequal system. Likewise, legal inequality in matters of temple management, pilgrimage subsidies, special autonomy for states depending on their populations� religious composition, and the right to found religious schools is defended by the so-called secularists (because it is invariably to the disadvantage of the Hindus) while the Hindu nationalists favour the secular alternative of equality regardless of religion. In India, shariawielding Muslim clerics whose Arab counterparts denounce secularism as the ultimate evil, call themselves secularists. Just as the worddeception differs in meaning from its French counterpartd�ception (= disappointment), the word secularism has a sharply different meaning in Indian English as compared to metropolitan English.

The point is illustrated once more in the contrived controversy about the recent archaeological findings at the contentious temple/mosque site in Ayodhya, believed to be the birthplace of the deified hero Rama. Here, the supposed Hindu fundamentalists have been abiding by the findings of science, while the so-called secularists have been on the opposite side, the side of dogmatism and obscurantism. The Hindu claim and the Muslim counterclaim to the disputed site have been sub judice at the High Court of Allahabad since 1950, weeks after Hindus had taken control of the mosque by installing statues of Rama, his wife Sita and his brother Lakshman. On 22 August 2003, after 53 years of judicial pussyfooting, the Archaeological Survey of India handed a highly sensitive report to the Lucknow Bench of the Allahabad High Court. The ASI had been mandated by the Court to excavate the foundation level underneath and around the demolished Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. This mosque, attributed to the Moghul dynasty�s founder Babar (1528) was deconstructed in 1992 by Hindu activists eager to see a temple built right there. In the winter of 2002-2003, the Court had secretly ordered a search of the site with a groundpenetrating radar by the company Tojo Vikas International Ltd., which had gained fame with its role in the construction of the Delhi underground railway. Canadian geophysicist Claude Robillard concluded from the scans that �there is some structure under the mosque� (Rediff.com, 19 March 2003). The Court then ordered the archaeologists to verify these findings in greater detail. If you expected secularists to welcome this replacement of bickering between religious hotheads with the objectivity of a scientific investigation, the subsequent developments provide you with an opportunity to learn.

Chapter II. Preceding stages of the debate 2.1. A consensus amply confirmed Strictly, there was no need for the Court-ordered excavation, for the existence of the medieval temple had long been firmly established. There was testimony upon testimony of Hindus bewailing and Muslims boasting of the replacement of the temple with a mosque; and of Hindus under Muslim rule coming as close as possible to the site in order to celebrate Rama�s birthday every year in April, in continuation of the practice at the time when the temple stood. None of the written sources, whether Hindu, Muslim or European, contradicted the pre-existence of a Rama temple at the site. None described a forest chopped down to make way for the mosque, none referred to (or better still, was) a sales contract delivering someone�s secular real estate to the Muslim ruler eager to build a mosque. Until 1989 there had been no dispute about it: �Rama�s birthplace is marked by a mosque, erected by the Moghul emperor Babar in 1528 on the site of an earlier temple�, according to the 1989 edition of theEncyclopaedia Britannica, entry �Ayodhya�. There was already plenty of archaeological evidence as well. In the 1970s, an ASI team led by Prof. B.B. Lal dug out some trenches just outside the mosque and found rows of pillar-bases which must have supported a larger building predating the mosque. Moreover, in the mosque itself, small black pillars with Hindu sculptures had been incorporated, a traditional practice in mosques built in forcible replacement of infidel temples to flaunt the victory of Islam over

Paganism. (There are many examples of this practice inside and outside India, including the two other mosques at sites reclaimed by Hindus: Krishna�s birthplace in Mathura and Kashi Vishvanath, the principal pilgrimage site of Shiva in Varanasi.) In 1992, during excavations around the mosque in June and during the demolition on December 6, many more pieces of temple remains, mainly sculptures of Hindu gods and godlings, were discovered. 2.2. Eminent denial Yet, in 1989, all the existing evidence was brushed aside in a statement, The Political Abuse of History, by 25 so-called �eminent historians� from Jawaharlal Nehru University (Delhi), mostly declared Marxists. In this fatwa, they denounced the history of Islamic iconoclasm in Ayodhya as a myth but didn�t offer any newfound data to overthrow the consensus. Yet, the sympathy of the Indian and international media for their purported motive of �upholding secularism� assured the immediate adoption worldwide of the new party-line: the demolished Rama temple had merely been a malicious invention of the ugly Hindu nationalists. Note that they didn�t just settle for a political rejection of any plans to replace the mosque with a temple. They could have argued that the demolition of the temple happened long ago and could not now be a reason for reversing the event. That exactly had been the verdict given by a BritishIndian judge in 1886 when ordering a status quo at the site. But no, instead they went as far as to base their rejection of a new temple construction on the claim that no demolition had ever taken place because no temple had existed there. This was reckless, for if the political choice for the preservation of the mosque were based on the historical non-existence of the medieval temple at the site, then the eventual discovery of such a temple would justify a contrario the replacement of the mosque with a restored temple. At least in theory, but the Marxists were confident that their opponents would never get the chance to press this point. Under the prevailing power equation, they expected to get away with a plain denial of history rather than a mere insistence on divorcing history from politics. Ever since, the secularist historians have been bluffing their way through the controversy. In December 1990, the government of Chandra Shekhar invited the two lobby groups involved, the Vishva Hindu Parishad and the Babri Masjid Action Committee, to discuss the historical truth of the matter. Misled by the media into believing that the Hindu claims were pure fantasy, the BMAC office-bearers arrived ill-prepared. They were speechless when the VHP team presented dozens of documents supporting its case. For the next meeting, they invited a team of proper historians chaired by Marxist professor R.S. Sharma, who declared that they hadn�t studied the evidence yet. This was a strange statement from people who had just led 42 academics in signing a petition confirming once and for all that there was no evidence whatsoever for a temple. The BMAC team also put forth the demand that they be recognized as �independent scholars� entitled to sit in judgment on the controversy between their BMAC employers and their VHP opponents. The government representative did not grant this hilarious demand. At the meeting scheduled for 25 January 1991, they simply didn�t show up anymore. In a booklet issued months later, pompously called �A Historians� Report to the Nation�, they tried to save face by nibbling at the evidential value of a few of the numerous documents presented by their opponents (and of course, historical evidence is rarely absolute), but failed to offer even one piece of evidence for any alternative scenario. When more temple remains were found in 1992, a cry went up among the Marxist academics that the sculptures had been stolen from museums and planted at the site. The central government

(Congress) had the pieces locked away. During the scholars� debate in 1990-91, the VHPmandated team had discovered no less than 4 documents on which references to the �birthplace temple� had been altered or removed, or which had been removed from public access (and those were only the ones where the foul play was discovered; who knows how many times the tampering succeeded?). Here the secularists had their great chance to get back at them and expose them in turn as cheaters who had planted false evidence. Yet, the minister in charge, Arjun Singh, though a militant secularist and eager to embarrass the Hindu activists, forewent the opportunity to have the sculptures investigated by international experts to certify the allegation of forgery. Once more, it was sheer bluff and the secularists didn�t want it subjected to scrutiny. 2.3. The Demolition In October 1992, the central government of Narasimha Rao (Congress) tried to revive the scholars� discussion. This time, the BMAC team quite reasonably protested that there was no point in talking unless the VHP called off its announced demonstration in Ayodhya scheduled for December 6. The VHP was adamant that Hindu society�s right to the site could not be made dependent on mundane factors such as judicial verdicts and academic disputes. This was an instance of the Hindu nationalist movement�s long tradition of smashing its own windows and of spurning the intellectual struggle which in this case had been going in its favour. On the plea that �you don�t need arguments to love your mother�, meaning Mother India, the Hindu nationalists had always neglected intellectual and favoured a mindless activism. Except for one (S.P. Gupta), all the scholars who had argued their case at the government-sponsored discussion had been outsiders to the movement; the VHP leadership itself, like its BMAC counterpart, never took the evidence debate very seriously. So, activism replaced argument on December 6, 1992. The official leadership represented at the demonstration in Ayodhya by L.K. Advani, the later Deputy Prime Minister, had wanted to keep the affair purely ceremonial, singing some hymns to Rama as a sufficient act of confirming the Hindu claim to the site. But an elusive leadership within the crowd had other plans. A small group had come well-prepared for a demolition job, and once they broke ranks from the official ceremony to methodically pull down the mosque, much of the crowd joined in. Hindu movement officials tried to stop them, even when the police withdrew from the scene, but to no avail. The BJP state government resigned at once, but the central government refrained from physically intervening until the next morning, when the activists had cleared the debris and consecrated a little tent with the three statues as the provisional new Rama temple. In a typical instance of the duplicitous Congress culture, Narasimha Rao declared on the one hand that the mosque should be rebuilt, but on the other, he created an accomplished fact which practically precluded the prospect of rebuilding the mosque. Duplicitous, yes, but under the circumstances perhaps also a wise move. The riots started by Muslims in the following days could have been much larger and more violent if the Prime Minister had not given them this verbal appeasement. It is an odd but highly significant fact that the Indian media subsequently refused to open a search for who exactly organised the demolition. None of them seemed to care for the scoop of the year: �This man (photograph) organized the demolition.� Clearly, they thought it politically most profitable to pin the blame on the so-called �hardliner� Advani, the one Hindu leader who was most definitely not behind it. He had burst into tears upon seeing the fabled discipline of his activists break down and had been narrowly dissuaded from resigning as party leader in his postdemolition confusion.

During the demolition, an inscription tentatively dated to ca. 1140 came to light. It detailed how it was part of a temple to �Vishnu, slayer of Bali and of the ten-headed one�. Rama is considered an incarnation of Vishnu, and the two enemies he defeated were king Bali and king Ravana, often depicted as ten-headed in recognition of his brilliant mind. This evidence too was locked away and strictly ignored by the secularists until 2003, when People�s Democracy, the paper of the Marxwadi Communist Party, alleged foul play. It seemed that the Lucknow State Museum mentioned in its catalogue a 20-line inscription dedicated to Vishnu, satisfying the description of the piece discovered during the demolition, and missing since the late 1980s. However, museum director Jitendra Kumar declared that the piece had never left the museum, even though it had not been on display, and he showed it at a press conference for all to see (Hindustan Times, 8 May 2003). In spite of many similarities, it differed from the Ayodhya find in shape, colour and text contents. So, the only allegation of fraud against the archaeologists or against the Hindu nationalists which was more than a knee-jerk reaction of the losers against the winners in the debate, the only one in which some homework had been done and the outlines of a real intrigue had been sketched, proved to be mistaken. Meanwhile, in 1993 the central government had approached the Supreme Court with a request to evaluate the historical evidence. It is clear that Narasimha Rao, the most pro-Hindu Prime Minister of independent India so far (more so than the wobbly BJP leader Atal Behari Vajpayee), hoped to use a positive verdict as the basis for a settlement favouring the Hindu claim. But in October 1994, the Supreme Court turned down the request. 2.4. Findings, no findings In early 2003, the Court ordered the ASI to start excavations and either confirm or disprove the provisional conclusions of the radar scan. Strictly speaking, the existence or otherwise of the medieval temple never depended on the results of the radar scanning nor on the excavations: it had already been proven by a wealth of documentary and archaeological evidence, which in any other circumstance would have been deemed conclusive. It was only because of the brutal denial of the evidence by a group of vocal academics and allied politicians that the Court considered it wiser to come up with a new and as yet unchallenged type of evidence. We should be clear in our minds about what kind of evidence could be expected, as this digging took place at the foundations level. This is not where sculptures or furniture normally reside (though a few objects were found nonetheless) but where the unadorned foundations of walls and pillars have quietly survived the onslaught that destroyed the �over-ground� constructions they supported. Foundations do not by themselves inform us of the type of building they supported, whether secular or religious; but for that, we can rely on other types of evidence. The temple had never gone underground, had never been covered with layers of soil; instead, it had been demolished and its components removed, destroyed or re-used. Earlier layers, by contrast, may approximate the normal stratigraphic pattern better: a building layer covered with stray debris, then a new building layer, etc. In the months when the digging took place, the newspapers reported new findings once in a while. Thus, �an ancient stone inscription in the Dev Nagari script and a foundation were discovered in the ongoing excavation in the acquired land in Ayodhya today�, while �stone pieces and a wall were found in other trenches� and �a human figure in terracotta, sand stone netting, decorated sand stone in three pieces were found in one trench� (The Hindu, 5 May 2003).

In this light it is understandable that a Babri Masjid supporter, Naved Yar Khan, approached the Supreme Court with a petition to prohibit all archaeological digging at the contentious site (which was rejected: �SC rejects plea against excavation�, The Hindu, 10 June 2003). The secularists had always opposed archaeological fact-finding at the site, arguing that this would open a Pandora�s box of similar initiatives at the literally thousands of mosque sites where temples used to stand. They typically omitted to mention their fear that in Ayodhya itself, this digging was sure to prove them wrong, as it now has. As journalist Bulbul Roy Mishra (�Temple and the truth�,Indian Express, 6 Sep. 2003) recollects: �When the Allahabad High Court ordered the excavation, [Prof. Irfan] Habib and [Prof. Suraj] Bhan insisted there was no need to do so. In their opinion, nothing lay beneath the former site of the Babri Masjid. They also questioned the competence of Tojo Vikas, which had reported anomalies beneath the surface after an imaging survey.� Isn�t that funny: people wearing the mantle of the academic quest for knowledge who denounce the search for knowledge on the dogmatic plea that the outcome is known beforehand? As we shall see (ch.3.8), after the excavation results became known, both Irfan Habib and Suraj Bhan have told the public at some length that all kinds of things were found below the Babri Masjid surface: elements of an earlier mosque, elements of Muslim habitation, anything as long as it wasn�t a temple, but at any rate not �nothing�. This way, they have implicitly conceded that their initial opposition to an archaeological investigation was ill-founded. Even back then, given all the earlier evidence, everything indicated that something would be discovered. They themselves cannot have been ignorant of this, so their opposition was a deliberate attempt to obstruct the progress of scientific knowledge. 2.5. The great Indian vanishing trick On June 11, after the ASI had been registering new findings for months, the world learned to its surprise that the final tally somehow amounted to zero. Readers of secularist newspapers came away with the impression that Habib�s and Bhan�s scepticism had been vindicated, and that nothing had been found: �No proof of structure in Ayodhya: ASI report�, according to Rediff.com, which confidently asserted that �the report also contradicts the Ground Penetration Radar survey�, but didn�t quote the ASI report. It only quoted Zafaryab Jilani, counsel for the Muslim claimant to the site, the Sunni Central Waqf Board, who alleged that �the ASI report does not speak about any such evidence� (viz. evidence of the type revealed by the radar scan). For more of the same: �Nothing found below Babri site: ASI�, titled The Asian Age. �ASI finds no proof of structure below Babri Masjid: report�, claimed the Times of India. The occasion was the ASI�s filing of an interim report, yet none of these papers quoted the report, only �sources�. Most papers attributed the conclusion of �no evidence� to the ASI, which is a pure lie; and this is implicitly revealed even in their own reporting, for none quotes the ASI report to that very effect. Six days later, the Times of India still tried to keep up its story, now citing an unnamed �senior

ASI official� who admitted finding new archaeological evidence such as sculptures and inscriptions but not the type of structural evidence suggested by the radar scan: �But the structural bases so far do not lend credence to the mandir theory.� Questioned further, he turned out not to base this belief on the new digging results but on older ones: �According to him, the theory of �a pre-existing temple because of structural bases� has been demolished �convincingly� over the years. He points to the discovery of pillar bases by B.B. Lal in the mid1970s during his excavation of Ramayana sites in Ayodhya and says: �It has not been found to be fit evidence for a temple�.� (Times of India, 17 June 2003) This when B.B. Lal himself had confirmed that his findings do support the temple theory. Yet, some of these papers clumsily let out the truth indirectly. The Marxist-controlled Chennai daily The Hindu of June 11 claimed the ASI �is reported to have said in its progress report that no structural anomalies suggesting the existence of any structure under the demolished Babri Masjid had been found in 15 of the new trenches dug up at the site�, - but those 15 were not the only ones investigated. So, at the very end of the article, there was an almost laconic addition: �Structural anomalies were, however, detected in 15 other trenches, the report said.� But the impression the paper sought to convey, was summed up in the title: ��No evidence of structures in some trenches��. It is as if someone is hit by two bullets, one scratching his arm but the other lethally penetrating his heart, and a newspaper reports: �Man repeatedly shot at; one bullet harmless�. In disinformation campaigns, the first stage of planting false news must be followed up with a second stage of making the false news into a familiar presence. Once it is repeated in women�s magazines, in TV chat shows, even in jokes, it is becoming part of the collective consciousness. That is the ambition of every disinformation operative worth his salt. In this case, indeed, we have seen secularists grab the ball and run with it from day one. In interviews of Hindu or Muslim leaders, questions were opened with a reference to the �fact� that nothing was found underneath the Babri Masjid. Some Hindu leaders, such as the Kanchi Shankaracharya (who had just led a failed initiative to negotiate an amicable solution), were so little informed that they didn�t even contradict the claim. Columnist Saeed Naqvi, known as a moderate within the spectrum of Muslim opinion, spices an otherwise reasonable opinion piece (�Muslims must be generous�, Indian Express, 13 June 2003) with the off-hand statement: �The ASI has found nothing under the mosque.� Clearly, some people were leaving no stone unturned to make this claim part of the received wisdom. Meanwhile, a few papers did try to be truthful in presenting the findings of the interim report, especially after taking the time to properly read it, e.g. the internet version of The Hindu, Hinduonnet.com (22 June 2003), mentioned �structural anomalies in 46 trenches� of the 84 trenches investigated, as well as �pillar bases and drains in some of the trenches�. In Outlook India (23 June 2003), Sandipan Deb gave a more detailed overview of the report. Finding that �most papers covering the new ASI report last week said that it claims there was no

structure under the Babri Masjid�, he went on to read the actual report: �Among the structures listed in the report are several brick walls �in east-west orientation�, several �in north-south orientation�, �decorated coloured floor�, several �pillar bases�, and a �1.64-metre high decorated black stone pillar (broken) with yaksha [= demigod] figurines on four corners�.� He also points out that �what many people have missed out on � due to bias or sloth � is that these are findings only from the period of May 22 to June 6. This is not the full list. If they read the earlier reports, they would also find listed several walls, a staircase, and two black basalt columns �bearing fine decorative carvings with two cross-legged figures in bas-relief on a bloomed lotus with a peacock whose feathers are raised upwards�.� For good measure, we should also quote a Hindu nationalist�s observations. On the website of the National Volunteer Corps, or RSS (www.rss.org, 24 June 2003), Chetan Merani wrote: �The excavations so far give ample traces that there was a mammoth pre-existing structure beneath the three-domed Babri structure. (�) The bricks used in these perimeters predate the time of Babar. (�) More than 30 pillar bases have been found at equal spans. The pillar-bases are in two rows and the rows are parallel. The pillar-base rows are in North-South direction. A wall is superimposed upon another wall. At least three layers of the floor are visible. (�) These facts prove the enormity of the pre-existing structure. (�) Moulded bricks of round and other shapes and sizes were neither in vogue during the middle ages nor are in use today. It was in vogue only 2,000 years ago. Many ornate pieces of touchstone (kasauti stone) pillars have been found in the excavation. (�) The Gupta and the Kushan period bricks have been found. Brick walls of the Gahadwal period (12th Century CE) have been found in excavations.� And according to Merani, it was not just a �structure�, but definitely a structure with a religious purpose: �Beautiful stone pieces bearing carved Hindu ornamentations like lotus,kaustubh jewel, alligator facade, etc., have been used in these walls. (�) An octagonal holy fireplace (yajna kund) has been found. (�) Terracotta idols of divine figurines, serpent, elephant, horse-rider, saints, etc., have been found. Even to this day terracotta idols are used in worship during Diwali celebrations and then put by temple sanctums for invoking divine blessings. (�) The excavation gives out the picture of a vast compound housing a sole distinguished and greatly celebrated structure used for divine purposes.� Even the attentive reader of the papers which on June 11 starkly denied the findings could have seen that something was wrong, for on the very same day, they carried the following news item: �ASI fabricating evidence in Ayodhya, says Waqf Board� (The Hindu). All the papers carried this news, citing the Board�s counsel, Mr. Zafaryab Jilani: �ASI fabricating evidence: Waqf Board� (Times of India); �Foul play alleged at Ayodhya dig� (The Pioneer). The party most likely to be elated over the non-finding of traces of a temple should have been the anti-temple lobby, including the Sunni Central Waqf Board, yet it complains that the ASI team didfind evidence, only it was of the pro-temple kind, hence �fabricated�. In the free-for-all of Indian secularism, we needn�t fuss over the fact that this grim allegation against the integrity of highly qualified scientists was levelled without any evidence. The decisive point is that, against the

secularist claims and against their own interest, the Muslim plaintiffs admitted that the ASI excavators had not come up from their trenches empty-handed. 2.6. Sheer bluff �Too strenuous an effort to make a point is usually a dead give-away. And if somebody shows an absolute lack of scruple about the methods used in making a point, there is likely to be very little substance in the argument.� Thus opens Sukumar Muralidharan�s comment on the interim report in the Communist fortnightly Frontline (�Excavating truth�, 19 July 2003). While he meant to attack the VHP, his statement neatly described the behaviour of the secularists themselves in the Ayodhya debate from the 1980s till 2003. Their effort has indeed been very strenuous. They were all over the press with petitions and statements and columns, insisting on the temple�s non-existence, or slipping claims to that effect into texts which focused on other aspects of the �communalism� problem. During the latest excavations, they had teams of historians on the spot to scrutinize the ASI team from day to day. They were issuing statements all the time, grim one day, furious the next, scholarly never. By contrast, the VHP took a very lackadaisical attitude towards the excavations, arguably the moment of truth for the temple party. It had never attached too much importance to the history debate, firstly because it was a false and contrived debate about a demolished temple which all honest observersknew to have existed; and secondly because the Hindu claim to the site rested less on past history than on the continuous and present fact that Hindus consider the disputed site as a sacred site today. On Hindutva internet discussion forums, you could see temple enthusiasts criticize the VHP leadership for its passivity. Only at the end of the excavations did the VHP-affiliated archaeological team, led by Dr. S.P. Gupta, give a modest press conference, where the political VHP leaders sat in the back and refrained from commenting. It seems they trusted in India�s national motto, �truth shall prevail�, even and especially against the decibels of those who rely on propaganda rather than on the quiet convincing power of the facts. So, Prof. Muralidharan was quite right: the party which didn�t have the facts on its side, betrayed its lack of confidence in the outcome by displaying �too strenuous an effort to make a point�. But far be it from a Marxist historian to be cowed by mere facts. To his knowledge, the interim ASI findings were either false or non-existent, which is why he saw the VHP smarting under �the disarray within their ranks after the archaeological excavations at the site turned up empty�. This disarray was completely imaginary: the VHP knew perfectly well that the excavations were bringing up more confirmation by the day of the existence of the temple. But if the ASI�s findings had been negative, then the VHP would be in disarray, so Muralidharan posits not just negative findings but also the VHP�s disarray. This shows what accomplished liars the Marxists are: they posit not just one lie, as amateurs would, but also all the ramifications of that lie. Sentence after sentence in Muralidharan�s text is filled with denial and hateful insinuation against scientists doing their jobs. Thus, it was hardly a controversial fact that the Tojo company had carried out radar scans at the site, but under Muralidharan�s pen, even this becomes questionable: �In February, Tojo Vikas (�) claimed to have deployed some of its devices in Ayodhya and discovered �structural anomalies�� (emphasis mine). Nor is there any benefit of

the doubt for the ASI, whose professional excavations with the most careful modern methods are put down as follows: �With the ASI�s ongoing excavations, the entire archaeological record has been destroyed.� If at all the ASI has behaved properly, it must have been due to outside pressure: �Indications, however, are that the relentless vigil exercised by observers on both sides has induced a degree of discipline amongst the ASI excavators.� The Marxist hate campaign targets the ASI, a scientific institution, as much as it targets the VHP. 2.7. Ad hoc crank theories Like the secularist dailies, Frontline reports on the ASI findings without reference to any ASI documents, citing its own handpicked experts instead: �After the thorough excavation of 52 trenches in the area � each four metres square � the ASI filed a preliminary report before the Lucknow Bench on April 24. With inputs from this and other sources on the ground, a team of historians put forward the conclusion that every significant fact recorded either pertained to the Babri Masjid or to the many preceding years of Muslim settlement. These findings, announced at a press conference organised by the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust (SAHMAT) in Delhi on May 6, have so far remained uncontested.� It may be true that nobody bothered to reply to the wild claim made at the press conference of the Communist forum SAHMAT, but the implication that everyone has accepted the claim is as ridiculous as the claim itself. The archaeologists have found objects dating as far back as 1300 BC, and then all through the Sunga, Kushana and Gupta periods, all of them predating the genesis of Islam, let alone the arrival of Islam in Ayodhya in 1194. Yet, the SAHMAT historians want us to believe that all those ancient artefacts belonged to a Muslim settlement. Just how silly can you get? While papers and columns keep on being written about the true meaning of �secularism�, shouldn�t someone try the meaning �buffoonery�? At the same time, this secularism also has traits more commonly found in revealed religions, such as a terrifying intolerance of those who break ranks. Thus, reporting on Prof. B.B. Lal�s statement in 1990 that pillar-bases had been found during excavations in the 1970s, Muralidharan claims: �The professional community of historians and archaeologists was appalled at the veteran archaeologist�sapostasy.� (emphasis mine) Well, not all of them, to be sure, but at least the vocal Marxist group which was then still firmly in control of the guiding history institutions. For those unfamiliar with modern Indian history: the Marxists, already pushy for acquiring as much power in the institutions as they could grab, were handed a near-monopoly on institutional power in India�s academic and educational sector by Indira Gandhi ca. 1970. Involved in an intra-Congress power struggle, she needed the help of the Left. Her confidants P.N. Haksar and Nurul Hasan packed the institutions with Marxists, card-carrying or otherwise. When, during the Emergency dictatorship (1975-77), her Communist Party allies threatened to become too powerful, she and her son Sanjay removed them from key political positions but, in a typical instance of politicians� short-sightedness, they left the Marxists� hold on the cultural sector intact. In the good old Soviet tradition, they at once set out to falsify history and propagate their own version through the official textbooks. After coming to power in 1998, the BJP-dominated government has made a half-hearted and not always very competent attempt to effect glasnost (openness, transparency) at least in the history textbooks. This led the Marxists to

start a furious hate campaign against the so-called �saffronization� of history. Since some ignorant dupes of these Marxists denounce as �McCarthyist� anyone who points out their ideological inspiration, it deserves to be emphasized that acclaimed secularist historians like Romila Thapar, R.S. Sharma and Irfan Habib are certified as Marxists in standard Marxist sources like Tom Bottomore�s Dictionary of Marxist Thought. The BMAC team�s argumentation of 1991 and several other anti-temple pamphlets were published by the People�s Publishing House, a Communist Party outfit. One of the textbook innovations most furiously denounced as �saffronization� was the truism that Lenin�s armed seizing of power in October/November 1917 was a �coup d��tat�. And while they were unchaining all their devils against glasnost, in early 2003, the Marxists ruling West Bengal deleted from a textbook a passage in which Mahatma Gandhi�s biographer Louis Fischer called Stalin �at least as ruthless as Hitler�. Such are the true concerns of the �secularists� warning the world against the ongoingglasnost in India�s national history curriculum. The Marxists� power position also led to a development of which Muralidharan inverts the meaning, viz. that after B.B. Lal�s excavations, �the ASI proved curiously reticent about yielding up the records that could clear the confusion�. Why was this? He insinuates that over a decade ago the ASI, the same institution which has now embarrassed the secularists by finding temple foundations, was unwilling to reveal evidence of the mendaciousness of B.B. Lal�s claims. The real reason is the exact opposite. Of course the ASI proved reticent: the records confirmed B.B. Lal�s statement, while the ASI administrators, then still beholden to the Congress-cum-Leftist establishment, had preferred to stick to the secularist party-line and pretend that no pillar-bases had been found. To drive a final nail in the coffin of his own credibility, Muralidharan quotes the Marxist archaeologist D. Mandal who has, at least since the publication of his booklet Ayodhya after Demolition (Delhi 1993), led the charge against the evidence of the pillar-bases. In Mandal�s view, these were but �brickbats laid haphazardly�. Most people who plan a building first conceive a plan and then lay foundations in a pattern dictated by the building-plan. Hindus, by contrast, are like perennial children playing in the sand: they put some stones in the ground here, and a few more there, then a next generation puts in a few more, all without rhyme or reason and definitely without building anything on all these buried stones, so as to keep the site empty for any incoming Muslim invaders to build their mosque on it. Fifty-three years after India adopted a Constitution which calls on all citizens to �develop the scientific temper� (Art. 51.A.h), the country�s academic positions are occupied by crackpots. Half-educated people, including many journalists, tend to judge a statement by the status of the speaker rather than by its contents. That is one reason why Marxist academics have been quoted as Gospel in the media, no matter how transparently unbelievable their explanations were. D. Mandal�s cranky theory has reappeared in many newspaper stories, e.g. in the Times of India: �Babri pillar bases do not support temple theory� (17-6-2003). At least the article acknowledged the existence of some pre-Babri artefacts, viz. the pillar-bases, but it insisted on denying the existence of the temple. Now, how can there be foundation structures such as pillar bases in the ground unless they had been put there to support a building? The paper cites an

unnamed �ASI official� as saying: �The excavated structural bases are neither aligned nor belong to a single period.� For most human beings, it must be inconceivable to just put a pillar base into the ground once in a while, and then another one, without alignment, without any plan to make them support a preconceived building. But I suppose this has to be the secularist way of doing things. 2.8. The world press as blind amplifier In spite of a very aggressive campaign of lies by a few spearheads of �secularism�, the broad outline of the true story was in the public domain for anyone with the curiosity to find out. Yet, the international media�s reporting on the interim report consisted exclusively in copying the most mendacious version. The Reuters despatch for 11 June 2003 was titled: �Dig finds no sign of temple at Indian holy site�. More than 90% of the text rehashes the story of riots and other incidents that have punctuated the whole Ayodhya dispute. What little it says about the new findings, is this: �A three-month excavation has found no evidence yet to back nationalist claims of a Hindu temple under the ruins of a mosque in northern India (�) The state-run Archaeological Survey of India has submitted an interim report saying digging so far at the site in Ayodhya town had �not found remains of any structure that remotely resembles a temple�, a source at the Survey said on Wednesday.� Note that the actual report is not quoted, merely what �a source� at the ASI has claimed about it. Note also the slanted phrase about �nationalist claims of a Hindu temple�, as if there were anything typically nationalist about acknowledging historical facts. The existence of that temple had been a matter of consensus among Muslims, Europeans and Hindus, both nationalist and anti-nationalist, until the JNU professors issued their fatwa to disregard the evidence and deny history. Note also that no mention is made of the wealth of evidence extant before the radar scanning and the recent diggings: a fine example of how the public is led by the nose into seeing only a very small selected part of the matter rather than the full perspective which one is entitled to expect from quality media. Like a babe in the wood, the world press never thought of taking a critical look at the secularist version. The BBC Newstitled: ��No sign� of Ayodhya temple� (11 June 2003). Here again, no information from the horse�s mouth, only from �widespread reports across the Indian media�. The next day, the peripheral part of the world press was relaying the story, e.g. the Flemish tabloid De Morgen (12 June 2003) called the fact that a temple had been forcibly replaced by a mosque �an evil fairy-tale�, for: �The temple, it turned out yesterday, is a phantom. For three months, experts have dug for traces of it, all in vain. By the end of the month their definitive report should follow, but for now Rama�s home remains unfindable. Bad luck for the ultranationalists, who had hoped to base their next election campaign on the fairy-tale. But they still might manage to, some fear. Yesterday already, the first politicians expressed doubts about the archaeologists� findings. Other Hindu leaders said, and this is even more dangerous, that the facts don�t matter. What counts is what you believe. We now know that Rama didn�t live in

Ayodhya, while Allah did until 1992.� This passage is symptomatic for most of what is wrong with India reporting. Firstly note the ignorance about a rather significant detail: Allah is unlikely to have stayed around in the idolhouse which His mosque had become after three idols had been installed in it on December 22, 1949. Clearly the paper�s Asia desk editor didn�t know that the building had functionally been a temple for almost 43 years before the demolition. The article is totally based on sources which are not only unreliable on facts and background data, but are also quite open about their partisan involvement, indeed about their unreserved hatred for the Hindu nationalists. Attributing a claim that �the facts don�t matter� to �Hindu leaders� is a pure lie, though they may have said something to the effect that the Marxist historians� opinion doesn�t matter, even if falsely presented as fact. In defence of the overseas babes in the wood, we acknowledge that it is uncertain at which point along the line of transmission this lie was inserted. (Most probably close to the source, by an Indian correspondent of a Western news agency.) Another striking aspect of this particular instance of distorted reporting is that much of it is purely deductive: from a small core of primary information, all manner of seemingly logical assumptions are added to put flesh on the bones of the poorly understood Indian situation, and these speculations are presented as fact. Thus, it may seem plausible that the BJP wants to use Ayodhya in its elections campaigns, which it did in 1989 and 1991. However, to the frustration of its more activist sympathizers, the BJP has effectively disowned the Ayodhya issue immediately after reaping the benefits in the 1991 elections (when it became the leading opposition party), and has stayed away from it in the campaigns of 1996, 1998 and 1999. Indeed, the demolition was partly an outcry of the activists against the BJP leadership, whose participation in the ceremony they correctly saw as perfunctory and insincere. Once the BJP came to power and proved time and again how it was in no mind to build the temple, criticism from the hardliners has only increased. Given the infighting between temple loyalists and pragmatists, the last thing the BJP now wants is an election campaign focused on Ayodhya. A second example of this deductive reporting is the deduced claim that Hindu nationalists object to the archaeological investigation of the site. In reality, the first politicians to express doubts about the archaeologists� findings have not been the Hindu nationalists but the Babri Masjid lobbyists. All through the past 14 years, the secularists have always opposed archaeological research at the site. Yet, because the interim report was falsely presented as going against the Hindu nationalist position, distant India-watchers deductively assume that the opposition against the diggings must have come from the Hindu nationalists. Many Western media have devoted more attention to the interim report on June 11 than on the final report on August 25. Within the logic of the media, even politically neutral media, this was normal. The interim report was the first, and India being only of marginal interest, many editors didn�t think the issue worthy of a second look when the final report came out. Moreover, the handful of Delhi correspondents who control almost the whole information flow from India, had presented the interim report to them as having very clear-cut conclusions, viz. �no evidence for the temple at all�. By contrast, the final report was falsely presented as indecisive, hence less newsworthy and less apt to inspire catchy headlines. Indeed, it is likely that those who misinformed the world about the interim report�s findings had foreseen and planned that this

would help in neutralizing the inevitable pro-temple impact of the final report. 2.9. Why the anti-Hindu distortions? Distorted or even totally false reporting on communally sensitive issues is a well-entrenched feature of Indian journalism. There is no self-corrective mechanism in place to remedy this endemic culture of disinformation. No reporter or columnist or editor ever gets fired or formally reprimanded or even just criticized by his peers for smearing Hindu nationalists. This way, a partisan economy with the truth has become a habit hard to relinquish. And foreign correspondents used to trusting their Indian secularist sources have likewise developed a habit of swallowing and relaying highly distorted news stories. Yet, in the instance under consideration, the brutal distortion of the facts pertaining to the recent archaeological findings may be a matter of more than just a bad habit. Some people learn from their failures, but these disinformation specialists may also have learned from their successes. Consider a few earlier instances. After the BJP came to power in 1998, India should have witnessed a genocide of the minorities, gas chambers and what not. At least if you believed the predictions made by the secularists in the preceding years. Nothing of the kind happened, so in the next two years the secularists tried to make the most of what few incidents did take place. In particular, all manner of small incidents within the Christian community were at once blamed on the evil hand of Hindu nationalism. In Kandhamal, Orissa, a Christian man murdered a girl and her little brother. At once, a cry went up in the secularist and Christian media that Hindu nationalists had perpetrated the crime. When the official investigation revealed the true story, it was reported only marginally in Indian papers and not at all in the international media, which had eagerly carried the initial allegations. Likewise, in the Central-Indian town of Jhabua, a quarrel among mostly christianized tribals led to the rape of four nuns. With no Hindu nationalists in sight, the media decided nonetheless that this was an act of Hindu nationalist cruelty against the poor hapless Christian minority. Though the official investigation confirmed the total innocence of the Hindu nationalists in this affair (more details on these and similar cases in Arun Shourie, Harvesting Our Souls, ch.1), their guilt has been consecrated by endless repetition in the media. While the media in India couldn�t prevent the truth from quietly making itself known, the international media have never published a correction, and the story of �four nuns in Jhabua raped by Hindu nationalists� now keeps on reappearing as an evergreen of anti-Hindu hate propaganda. Similarly, a series of bomb blasts against Christian churches in South India was automatically blamed on the Hindu nationalists. In that version, the story made headlines around the world: Hindu bomb terror against Christians. Hindu organizations alleged that it was a Pakistani operation, a blame-shifting exercise which only earned them ridicule and contempt. Yet, when two of the terrorists blew themselves up by mistake, their getaway car led the police to their network, and the whole gang was arrested. It turned out to be a Muslim group, Deendar Anjuman, with headquarters in Pakistan. But this was not reported on the front pages in India nor made the topic of flaming editorials; and in the international media, it was not reported at all. In the worldwide perception of Hindu nationalism, the association with raping nuns and bombing churches has stuck. So, moral of the story: feel free to write lies about the Hindu nationalists. Even if you are found out, most of the public will never hear of it, and you will not be made to bear any consequences. Striking first is what counts. Any second round in which the truth comes out, will hardly be noticed. Indeed, conditioned by the initial lie, many readers and viewers will deride the correction as an attempt at �denial� of the grim facts which �everybody knows well enough�. And the

audience abroad will never even be informed that there has been a correction. In the present case, lying about the interim report was a very clever move. When the Ayodhya issue came up again with the presentation of the final report, many an editor dismissed it as uninteresting: �Haven�t we already done something on those Indian excavations lately?� And even where the report did get adequate coverage, it could never entirely undo the impression created by the initial story. So, apart from being the natural implementation of a bad habit, this particular lie about the interim report may well have been part of a deliberate ploy to condition public opinion against the true story if and when it was to come out. For fourteen years, the secularists had worked hard to keep the lid on the Ayodhya evidence and they didn�t want some puny radar scanner or muddy-handed archaeologist to bring the facts to light and thereby expose their mendaciousness. Chapter III. Escaping the ASI�s final conclusions 3.1. Denial encore After all the wild claims made about their findings, the experts themselves have finally spoken. Their report confirms that the disputed site contains the foundations of a large building complex. And this time too, the religious purpose of the building can be inferred from the numerous religious artefacts found in between the pillar-bases. In a normal setting, the ASI findings should finish once and for all the campaign of history denial by the Marxists and their Muslim camp followers. But the world of Indian secularism is a fantasy-land where hard facts don�t count for much. So, a great many diehards unflinchingly reject the findings of science. We will look into what few arguments they could muster. Predictably, the unflinching deniers were parroted by many uncomprehending foreign correspondents, e.g. the Flemish broadsheet De Standaard (26 Aug. 2003) relays an Associated Press report opening thus: �Four months of excavations could not answer the question whether there ever stood a Hindu temple underneath the mosque of Ayodhya.� In fact, the excavations did answer the question of the temple�s existence unambiguously. Perhaps the journalist didn�t express himself carefully, calling the report indecisive when he meant that the most vocal segment of public opinion was indecisive, i.e. divided. If not, it is the kind of bold-faced lie so common throughout the secularist interventions in the debate for fourteen years, but one would have hoped to see it banished from the debate by this very report. And effectively, other reporters and commentators of a less extremist temper have made concessions to the newly published conclusions of science, though they downplay them and continue their struggle against the Hindu project of a new temple. 3.2. Deflecting attention The editorial of the Hindustan Times (�Structural flaws�, 27-8-2003) refuses to accept that any discovery worth the name was made. But it sets out first of all to deflect attention from the historical findings by emphasizing the alleged political implications over the obvious historical contents of the report.: �The �discovery� of an ancient �structure� underneath the demolished Babri Masjid by the Archaeological Survey of India has far more political overtones than historical or legal ones. (�) Nor does the �discovery� make any difference to the various court cases, including those concerned with the title deeds of the site.�

Whether the findings have any legal implications is for the judges to decide, not for the newspaper editors. And it is they who ordered the excavation in the first place, clearly on the assumption that the findings do make a difference to the court cases. Rajiv Dhawan, an antitemple lawyer quoted by BBC News (Jyotsna Singh: �Experts split on Ayodhya findings�, 26-82003) indirectly admits the relevance of the findings to the court case: �However, Mr. Dhawan says, as the land was owned by the Sunni Waqf Board (an elected body of Muslim theologians) until 1945, the Hindus could have only moral right over the land if the existence of a temple were proven.� But the dominant position certainly is to minimize the importance of the ASI findings. This is a general phenomenon in the whole secularist press: instead of a thorough analysis and a lively debate worthy of the importance and unequivocal verdict of the report, the page is turned as quickly as possible. This is, of course, a strong indication that the report�s findings are embarrassing for the secularists because they go against what the secularists have been saying for all these years. Like spoilt children, the secularists are used to having it all their own way, and when reality interferes, they close their eyes, shut off their ears and refuse to know. And they will lie and cheat in order to prevent others from knowing. For anti-temple lawyers too, this same hurry to get past the archaeological findings is the favourite approach. In their case it is almost defensible, as their concern is not the truth but courtroom victory. Jyotsna Singh reports: �But although the study is expected to have farreaching implications in moves to solve who holds claim over the site, legal experts say it cannot be taken as a conclusive evidence. �As far as the legal case in concerned, it is a title suit about the ownership of the land between Hindus and Muslims�, lawyer Rajiv Dhawan told the BBC. �The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) report cannot be taken to be conclusive. This is only part of the evidence. The report will be analysed, its authors will be cross-examined to find out whether they are right or wrong. It will be a long, drawn-out process�, he said.� At first sight, Dhawan seems to be announcing a very thorough analysis of the findings. It is, however, sheer bluff when a lawyer pretends that his cross-examination is going to decide on the truth of archaeological findings, for how does he hope to make scientists renounce in a boisterous courtroom the conclusions they arrived at in the quiet and concentration of their study? By threatening and bullying them? To be sure, court debates are not very scientific, and a clever lawyer may well succeed in fooling the judges into believing that the scientists had it all wrong while the secular agitators were right all along. But Dhawan doesn�t intend to seriously discuss archaeology. The whole juristic point is precisely that the archaeological truth is not the point: �Mr. Dhawan said the legal case did not relate to the question of whether a temple existed on the site or not.� Another way to deflect attention from the evidence is to dismiss the whole historical dimension of the Ayodhya dispute as an unwanted extra load imposed on everyone by history-crazy Hindu fanatics. Thus, Jyotsna Singh claims: �The existence of the temple became part of Hindu rhetoric in the dialogue process begun in 1989 between the All India Babri Mosque Committee and the hard-line Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP).� This is a plain lie, which I assume she has borrowed in good faith from influential secularist sources. In reality, the existence of the medieval temple was a matter of long-standing consensus. What became part of someone�s rhetoric towards 1989 was its denial, launched by the secularists and picked up by the Muslims. As for the

VHP, it didn�t base its claim on historical events (not truly in doubt anyway) but on the permanent and present status of the site as a Hindu sacred place. By the way, note how our BBC correspondent reserves the qualification �hard-line� for the Hindu side and withholds it from the Muslim side. It�s always useful when a medium is so candid about its partisan predilections. 3.3. The interim report�s second life The Hindustan Times editor then goes on to denounce the report as contrary to facts established earlier: �Doubts have already been cast on the findings, not least because there was no hint of such a �structure� in the earlier reports on the excavation although their accuracy may be questioned. Even then, if a massive structure of the kind which has been mentioned in the final report had been located, surely reports about it would have filtered out.� So, this is one paper which chooses the option of total denial of the findings, continuing the line taken since at least 1989. As its only argument against the veracity of the final report, it uses the media�s misrepresentation of the interim report on June 11. Reports about the structure did of course filter out, but the Hindustan Times didn't want its readers to know about it in June, and it still wouldn�t tell them about it in August. This is really quite rich: the Hindustan Times falsely pretended that the interim report�s finding was negative, and later used the purported interim report�s negative result as a �fact� contradicting and overruling the final report�s positive findings. The same argument has been used by the lawyers of the Muslim lobby groups, such as the AllIndia Muslim Personal Law Board: ��This report is totally inconsistent with the interim reports submitted earlier�, Board secretary Mohammed Abdul Rahim Quraishi (�) said in a statement.� (Hinduonnet.com, 25 Aug. 2003) As a general rule, you can predict what the secularist position on any issue will be once you know what the militant Islamist position is. From justifying terrorism to misrepresenting the Ayodhya evidence, the two are rarely very different. 3.4. Ad hominem The Hindustan Times editor (�Structural flaws�, 27-8-2003) also questions the integrity of the archaeologists: �Insinuations have also been made about the ASI coming under political pressure. Since the first among the ruling parties at the Centre has long been insistent on the existence of a demolished temple at the disputed site, it is obvious that a government organisation would have been uncomfortably aware of the stance, although that doesn�t mean that it affected its professional judgment.� Alex Perry in Time magazine (�Bloody Monday�, 8 Sep. 2003) quotes historian Prof. D.N. Jha to the same effect, except that the academic feels entitled to use more extreme language than a mere journalist would: �This is a totally doctored report. They�ve created this temple out of

nothing.� And he is not the only one, reports Perry: �Last week, on the same day as the latest Bombay blasts, the government-run Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) lent official support to the Hindu fundamentalist cause, declaring that new excavations at Ayodhya reveal the mosque was built over an elaborate Hindu temple. Several academics scornfully dismissed this as a BJP political manoeuvre rather than a legitimate archaeological revelation. (�) To many Indian Muslims, this timely discovery is just the latest example of continuing discrimination by the Hindu majority�. Of course, the ASI is not a �government-run� institution. Like most universities, it is supported by state funds but enjoys functional independence and academic freedom. How historical findings can constitute �discrimination� is not explained. Perhaps Perry thinks findings should be proportionately satisfying to all the contending parties? Or is only fifty-fifty non-discriminatory? No mention is made of the findings supporting the ASI�s conclusion, all the attention goes to its deniers, except: �ASI archaeologists declined to comment, saying they are forbidden to talk to the media.� That was indeed part of the deal given them by the Court. But surely Perry could have found at least one other scholar capable of defending the ASI and its excavation results? Even if the archaeologists had wanted to manipulate the findings, one wonders how they would have been able to pull it off. They were permanently scrutinized by archaeologists and historians employed by the Muslim parties. Moreover, many of the excavators were Muslims, unlikely to be willing accomplices in a pro-Hindu manipulation. Thus, according to the Press Trust of India (11 June 2003): �There were 131 labourers including 29 Muslims engaged in the digging work today�. Jyotsna Singh of BBC News (�Experts split on Ayodhya findings�, 26-8-2003) quotes Prof. Irfan Habib with the same allegation: �The ASI is using the same language that the VHP uses by calling the mosque a disputed structure. The ASI has said what the Hindu nationalists wanted to hear. There is a legal issue and this is a long debate. The ASI report has only confirmed the fears about the objectivity of this exercise." This allegation against the integrity of the archaeologists is loosely made, without any evidence, on no other grounds than that their findings are to the liking of the Hindu nationalists. As if it could have been otherwise. The findings have uncovered the material remains of historical facts, and these facts were public knowledge for centuries, viz. that a Hindu temple had been forcibly replaced by a mosque. Before and after 1989, the Hindu nationalists have simply stood by this public knowledge, while the secularist lobby led the Muslims into disbelieving their own chronicles (which amply attested their pride in having performed the Islamic duty of iconoclasm at Ayodhya) and denying the facts. Jyotsna Singh casts suspicion on those who hesitate to join in this slandering exercise by identifying them with the �Hindu hardliner� party: �Archaeologists supported by Hindu hardliners dismissed these allegations, saying the report justified their long-held observations.� In reality, at the present state of the argument, any neutral observer or judge would throw out the allegations against the archaeologists and condemn Irfan Habib and his ilk for libel. The accused is innocent until proven guilty, and no proof nor even the faintest indication has been given for foul play by the archaeologists.

Jyotsna Singh�s presentation exemplifies a more sophisticated form of secularist disinformation. A false semblance of even-handedness is created: she mentions some who uphold and some who deny the allegations against the archaeologists. But first of all, to report on a document only in the most general terms (�the report said there was indeed evidence��: one sentence) and then devote half your space to a discussion of the archaeologists� integrity, means you are already leaving the public with the impression that bias rather than hard evidence is the news of the day. Moreover, the two sides quoted are presented very differently. On the pro-archaeologist side, she quotes Dr. S.P. Gupta. She tells us nothing about his status as a leading archaeologist, e.g. as former director of the Allahabad museum, and merely locates him in an ideological corner: �S.P. Gupta, of the Indian Archaeologist Society (IAS), a VHPbacked organization�. By contrast, Irfan Habib, whose support base is not at all described as �hardliner�, is introduced as simply a �professor of history at Aligarh Muslim University�. Though he collected the scholars� team that had to save the Babri Masjid Action Committee during the government-sponsored debate in 1990-91, we are not expected to know that he is as closely involved with the Muslim lobby as Gupta is with the Hindu lobby. Likewise, Prof. D.N. Jha�s status as a BMAC employee is left unmentioned in Time (�Bloody Monday�, 8 Sep. 2003), as is Prof. Suraj Bhan�s in the Times of India (�No evidence of temple at Ayodhya: expert�, 25 Aug. 2003). Fortunately, the Times of India did once reveal that �Shereen Ratnagar, Suraj Bhan, D. Mandal and Sita Ram Rai� constituted the �[Sunni Waqf] Board�s own team of archaeologists� (�ASI fabricating evidence: Waqf Board�, 11 June 2003). It is best to keep that in mind when you see those names cited as arguments of authority. Now that we are at it, we may as well quote Jyotsna Singh�s report on the �Hindu� findings: �S.P. Gupta, of the Indian Archaeologist Society (IAS), a VHP-backed organisation, said: �The ASI report is nearly the same as our reports, because we are also archaeologists. We have seen the digging. It is a science so our observations based on scientific facts are bound to be similar.� A colleague of Mr. Gupta, K.N. Dixit, added: �Our excavations in Ayodhya in 1978 proved the existence of a temple dating to the 11th century. The ASI report just pushes it back by 50 or 100 years.� Another archaeologist, R.K. Sharma, said the motifs found �proved the existence of a 7th century Shiva temple�." Gupta�s team also seems to agree with the ASI team on a point which refutes the charges of manipulative pro-Hindu bias for both of them. An archaeologist who would like to please the VHP with the desired digging results at the Rama Janmabhoomi site, would claim to find habitation down to a depth corresponding to the traditional date of Rama, viz. at least 3700 BC. Yet, the ASI reports only on finding remains of human habitation down to the level corresponding to 1300 BC. Perhaps a thick layer of soil conceals a far older and deeper layer of human remains, but the report doesn�t even hint at such a possibility. The stated result is compatible with the Western chronology of ancient India, with the �Aryan invasion� in ca. 1500 BC and Aryan heroes like Rama a little later. In that scheme of things, Krishna is moved from ca. 3130 BC to ca. 900 BC, at which rate Rama�s date should be brought down to ca. 1200 BC. But it so happens that Hindu

nationalists have recently gotten rather excitedly involved in the debate over ancient history, insisting on a high chronology. That school at least should not be pleased with the ASI findings. For this and other reasons, it is only logical, then, that some observers have dismissed the allegations against the ASI as politically motivated propaganda. Dilip Chakrabarti, lecturer in Archaeology in Cambridge University, asserts: �To cast a slur on the findings of what is undoubtedly the best and most dependable professional archaeological organization in the country is an act of pure political expediency. Whatever we can accuse the ASI of, conscious falsification of data cannot be one of them. (�) I have no doubt that they have done their duty professionally and faithfully.� (�It�s the archaeology, stupid!�, Hindustan Times, 29 Aug. 2003). In a normal situation, the reckless accusations against the ASI team�s integrity should not go unpunished. In academe, reputation is almost everything, and personal smears by professors against fellow scholars are not treated lightly. So, unless Prof. Habib, Prof. Bhan, Prof. Jha and their followers come up with evidence to back up their allegations, they themselves stand guilty of libel and deserve to be punished accordingly, whether by their academic superiors or by the judiciary. 3.5. False explanations for Islamic iconoclasm Let us return to the Hindustan Times editorial of August 27. The editor makes an implicit concession to reality: "The point, however, is not whether a temple has been found, but its historical relevance." He wouldn't have written that if he had been confident that no temple had been found. In that case, he would have focused on the truth of the matter and not hidden behind the question of its "relevance". Then follows an explicit concession to reality: "On this count, the �discovery� adds nothing to what is already known. It is an accepted fact that Muslim invaders had demolished any number of temples..." Which at once he tries to explain away: "... when tolerance of the faiths of others was virtually unknown." As if a tick of the clock, viz. the arrival of the Middle Ages, could cause the widespread destruction which India suffered. Tolerance remained the rule in medieval Hinduism: for all its untouchability and other flaws, it did tolerate Syrian Christians, Parsis and Jews in its midst (who, unlike in their countries of origin, also learned to tolerate one another in India), and the lively debates between its own numerous sects rarely if ever spilled over into physical confrontations. The problem was not the age but the Islamic doctrine of iconoclasm. Unfortunately, secularists have developed a habit of staring past uncomfortable historical facts, particularly those disturbing the progressive image of any anti-Hindu group or movement or religion. And then we are served another old lie, peddled so often in the preceding years by the secularists: "Moreover, the places of worship were regarded with suspicion since they were the meeting places of ordinary people and, hence, could facilitate the hatching of a conspiracy. So if Babur�s general, Mir Baqi, did demolish a temple and built a mosque in its place, it is not surprising.� But conspiracies were typically the work of those close to the ruling clique (and not of "the ordinary people", as this pop-Marxist interjection wants us to believe), which in those days meant that they were Muslims and their places of worship were mosques. Yet these mosques were never destroyed by Muslim rulers. The conspiracy gambit is one of those escape routes used by

people who realize that the massive Islamic destruction of Hindu temples cannot be denied forever, but who refuse to pin any blame on Islam itself. At any rate, in the case of the Hindustan Times editorial, the whole concession about medieval Muslim iconoclasm was only meant as a background setting for blaming the Hindus: �However, that doesn�t justify the emulation of medieval norms, as on December 6, 1992.� This is an all too predictable diversion: now that a report puts the spotlights on the demolished Hindu temple, the Indian media insist on eclipsing it behind their evergreen pet reference to �December 6, 1992�, the most glorious/shameful (cross out the wrong alternative) day in independent India�s history. 3.6. The Buddhist gambit More or less since the beginning of the historical dispute, some secularists have felt that the denial of Islamic iconoclasm in general and of its application to Ayodhya in particular would be unsustainable. So, to weaken the Hindu position vis-�-vis the historical debt which Islam has incurred, they attributed a similar iconoclasm to Hinduism, with Buddhism as the victim. But in the present round of the Ayodhya debate, there has not been more than a vague hint at this scenario, and for good reason. There was a little problem with this thesis, viz. the inconvenient fact that Buddhism has flourished in India for 17 centuries under almost uninterrupted non-Buddhist Hindu rule, and that many Buddhist monasteries and universities were still functioning in India at the time of the Muslim invasions. It was the Muslim conquerors who destroyed the entire Buddhist establishment of North India in just a few years following the fatal battle of Tarain (1192), where Mohammed Ghori defeated Prithviraj Chauhan to storm into the Gangetic plain. But here again, the secularists counted on their own overwhelming grip on the influential media to get away with their newly launched myth. So now, numerous people in India and abroad (most damagingly in Buddhist countries which should have been India�s natural allies) actually believe that there was a time when Hindus demolished Buddhist temples and slaughtered Buddhist monks. From there, it was but a small step to claiming that, if the Ayodhya site had been taken by Muslims from a native Indian religion at all, the aggrieved party must have been the Buddhists, not the Hindus. Or better still, if there had been a Hindu temple at the site when the Muslim conquerors came to level it, that temple itself had forcibly replaced an earlier Buddhist building as part of the massive Hindu persecution of the poor hapless Buddhists. However, in the documentary record, there is not the slightest indication of a Buddhist presence at that particular site, even though elsewhere in Ayodhya the Buddhist presence (including that of the prominent philosophers Asanga and Vasubandhu) is well-attested. The Jains still have a number of sites in Ayodhya associated with several of their Tirthankaras, but neither Buddhist nor Jain tradition ever laid claim to the Rama Janmabhoomi site. The material implication of anti-Buddhist iconoclasm at the site, whether Hindu or Muslim, is that distinctively Buddhist temple remains should be found below the mosque, either directly below it or underneath a layer of Hindu architecture. However, the archaeological search in the 1970s and in 1992 has not uncovered any such exclusively Buddhist artefact. And in 2003 again, nothing specifically Buddhistic has surfaced at the site. To be sure, it is rather artificial to conceive of Buddhism as a separate tradition from Hinduism, and in their artistic conventions, the two have a lot in common. So, some artefacts could be Buddhist as well as Hindu, e.g. the new ASI report, in describing the �massive structure below

th

the disputed site�, states that one of the architectural fragments belonging to the 12 century, is �similar to those found in Dharmachakrajina Vihara of Kumaradevi at Sarnath which belongs to the early 12th century� (quoted by Anjali Mody: �ASI report raises more questions�, The Hindu, 27 June 2003). Kumaradevi was the Buddhist wife of Govindachandra, king of Kanauj, and the remains of the building she patronized have been interpreted as those of a Buddhist monastery. But this interpretation has been disputed (as Mody recounts), and the said type of architectural fragments could not decide the matter precisely because it formed part of a panIndian culture in evidence in both Hindu and Buddhist buildings. By contrast, what was found at the contentious site in Ayodhya, when not part of this indistinctive pan-Indian register, was distinctively part of the non-Buddhistic traditions of Hinduism. Interestingly, in the pre-medieval layers, indications of Shiva and Devi (goddess) worship have been found, so the history of the temple site was not exclusively Vaishnava. But it was definitely not Buddhist. So far, the Buddhist escape route has not been tried anymore after the ASI report was presented. Apparently the evidence for the site�s non-Buddhist history is just too overwhelming, and the secularists already have enough to deny. 3.7. A tactical retreat from the evidence debate Some commentators simply accept the scientific findings. Thus, in his regular column in the Indian Express (�A tale of three cities�, 28 Aug. 2003), T.V.R. Shenoy acknowledges that the ASI report �makes it clear that a temple existed on the site dating back at least to the tenth century�. Others hasten to assure us that they won�t let the scientific findings stand in the way of their ongoing crusade against Hindu nationalism and particularly against the project of building a new temple, but they do renounce the struggle against the scientific evidence as such. Among these, surprisingly, we meet the editorialist of the Times of India(�Temple tide: ASI report a green signal for saffron�, 27 Aug. 2003), who effectively throws in the towel as far as the historical aspect of the Ayodhya affair is concerned, for he opens thus: "Let's drop the charade." In the next sentences, he still tries to identify the scientific findings with the VHP, he also puts the word �evidence� in quotation marks, but he never actually tries to challenge the truth of the findings anymore. That doesn�t mean that this war-horse of secularism is giving up the struggle, but it shifts the debate definitively to the purely judicial level: "The 'findings', of course, have no force in law", etc. And then the editor reverts to some good old moralizing on the 1992 demolition, clearly avoiding any further focus on the evidence. For on the issue of the historical facts, he knows that his side has lost the debate for good. We must at any rate thank him for admitting that all those years of polemic against the historical consensus on the temple demolition were merely a �charade�. The Pioneer (�What lies ahead�, 27 Aug. 2003) betrays the same attitude. It likewise acknowledges the ASI�s findings, it even rejects the allegations of bias and fabrication against the ASI, but then swiftly shifts the focus to the judicial dispute: �For, the ASI�s findings can scarcely be the sole determinant in finding light at the end of the Ayodhya tunnel.� So, it�s back

to Court now with the message: �We were wrong, Your Honour, to deny the existence of the temple, but we plead you still don�t grant the Hindus the right to rebuild it.� All very well, but we should not forget that that point could have been reached fourteen or more years ago. What the recent excavations have merely confirmed was already well-known in 1989. The only problem was the mendacious denial of the historical facts by screaming and bullying secularists. Which, in turn, emboldened the Muslim hardliners into the most intransigent position in Court, in the political arena and on the streets. Think of the riots and the waste of energy that India could have been spared if the secularists had not obstructed the course of justice (or intercommunal negotiations, or a political settlement) with their denial of the historical reality underlying the Ayodhya dispute. I venture to put forth the view that these secularists have blood on their hands. 3.8. A mosque before the mosque? Jyotsna Singh (�Experts split on Ayodhya findings�, BBC News, 26-8-2003) reports: �Although there is no dispute that objects were recovered from the site, the interpretation is the key. Professor of history at Aligarh Muslim University, Irfan Habib, told the BBC: �The floors of the mosque have been declared to be a temple. Broken bricks and stones used for filling up the floor of the mosque have been declared as pillars of the temple. Glazed pottery common to Muslim architecture has been completely ignored. Flower motifs are common to Muslim architecture but the ASI has interpreted it as a Hindu pattern.�" Of course, any dispute about the Hindu or Muslim origin of artefacts only makes sense for the time when there were Muslims in that part of India, i.e. after the Ghorid conquest in 1192, which reached Ayodhya itself in 1194. As Mohammed Ghori and his lieutenants destroyed all the temples and monasteries they came across, literally thousands of them, it is nearly impossible that a large temple overlooking a city could have survived. By contrast, it is possible that Babar did find some kind of minor makeshift Hindu temple at the site, not necessarily in a proper temple building (just as the Babri Masjid itself served as a Hindu temple in 1949-92), because Hindus often managed to wrest or negotiate concessions from Muslim rulers in times when the latter were weak and in need of Hindu goodwill. A well-known case in point is the Somnath temple in coastal Gujarat, which was destroyed, restored as a temple and destroyed again no less than eight times. At any rate, the decisive destruction of the large medieval temple took place in 1194, not in 1528. Therefore, I for one have never had any problem with the hypothesis of a mosque and Muslim habitation at the disputed site in much of the pre-Moghul Muslim period, i.e. between 1194 and 1528. But the ASI�s search was precisely for the Hindu temple built in the preceding period. And of this temple, they did find appropriate foundations. This hasn�t kept them from acknowledging the existence of Muslim habitation around the mosque, obviously in the centuries when the mosque was standing. But glazed ware was not the decisive evidence in this regard: though this is found in late-medieval Muslim buildings, it cannot be identified exclusively with Muslim culture. As archaeologist Nayanjot Lahiri (�Not a treasure hunt�,Hindustan Times, 2 Sep. 2003) admits: �I am surprised that the Survey�s critics think that it is with the establishment of the Sultanate that what they call �Muslim� glazed tiles and pottery came to be used�, with reference to 11-

th-century pre-Sultanate counter-evidence from Multan and Tulamba. Likewise, Bulbul Roy Mishra (�Temple and the truth�,Indian Express, 6 Sep. 2003) remarks: �Habib and Bhan continue to mislead the public by contending the presence of glazed tiles, mortar and lime proves the structure beneath the Babri mosque was a Muslim one, as Hindus did not know the use of these materials. Glazed ware has been found used as early as the Kushan period. Lime and mortar were used in the Sanchi stupa, second century BC, as well as in the Gupta period.� Moreover, apart from such objects, of which the Hindu or Muslim origin is disputable, plenty of artefacts are unambiguously Hindu. As Mishra notes: �It is not understood how Habib and Bhan ignored numerous terracotta figurines and divine sculptures suggestive of Hindu origin. Their silence in this regard is baffling.� Irfan Habib is also counting on the readers� forgetfulness concerning one of the central findings in the ASI report: there was a very large temple, the foundations of which far exceed the circumference of the Babri mosque. He wants us to believe that the pillar-bases were actually the floor of the Babri Masjid, but a large part of the foundations was located outside the confines of the mosque and hence cannot possibly be confused with the mosque floor, except by a highly prejudiced mind. Along the same lines as Habib, Muslim Personal Law Board secretary Mohammed Abdul Rahim Quraishi �said a team of well-known archaeologists including Prof. Suraj Bhan had visited the site and inspected the excavated pits and was of [the] opinion that there was evidence of an earlier mosque beneath the structure of the Babri Masjid�. (�ASI �finds� temple, Muslim front says no�, Hinduonnet.com, 25 Aug. 2003) The two agree on a pre-Babri Muslim presence, but note how Quraishi�s �interpretation� of the findings is already starkly at variance with Habib�s: the latter saw no mosque underneath, while Quraishi�s employee Bhan did. This indicates the non-seriousness of at least one of these interpretations, possibly both: clutching at straws, they hurriedly fell for any interpretation as long as it could contradict the ASI reading. By contrast, the ASI team could settle for a single interpretation, just one, which also converges with S.P. Gupta�s, K.N. Dixit�s and R.K. Sharma�s reading. That�s what you get when you stay close to the empirical data rather than imposing a contrived interpretation on them. But never mind, we gladly concede a Muslim presence, mosque and all, in the period from 1194 to 1528. In fact, this point had been made a decade ago by anti-temple historian Prof. Sushil Srivastava (The Disputed Mosque, Delhi 1991, p.90-92) as well as by pro-temple archaeologist Prof. R. Nath (The Baburi Masjid of Ayodhya, Jaipur 1991, p.18), independently from one another. They did not posit the existence of a mosque beneath the mosque, but suggested that the Babri mosque itself preceded Babar by two or three centuries, because its architectural style was more in keeping with fashions and construction skill levels known from 13th-century buildings. Also, the circumstances of Babar�s and his lieutenant Mir Baqi�s brief stay in Ayodhya, viz. in the middle of a hectic war campaign, are hardly compatible with the construction from scratch of an important building. What is certain is that a major Hindu temple at the site was demolished by Islamic iconoclasm and replaced with a mosque symbolizing the victory of Islam over Infidelism. Of that, evidence is

plentiful and of many types. But it remains an open question why the mosque was attributed to Mir Baqi and named after Babar. Anomalies in style between different parts of the building, some in Moghul and some in earlier styles, indicate repair after serious damage, reports R. Nath (The Baburi Masjid, p.11). �Mir Baqi might have had the mosque renovated and then re-dedicated to Babur�, opines Srivastava (The Disputed Mosque, p.88), leaving open the question why this was needed at all. One possibility is that in the declining years of the Lodi dynasty, Hindus had gained control of their sacred site including the mosque building, and the victorious Mir Baqi chased them from there and restored it as a mosque. In that case, he also gave some finishing touches to the mosque architecture in replacement of any Hindu elements that had come to adorn it. But in science, one has to be able to live with provisional ignorance, which is always better than a false pretence at knowledge. So, let us drop all speculations and accept that there is still a lot we don�t know about the site�s history, particularly for the time between 1194 and 1528. Given that Prof. Harsh Narain, Dr. Arun Shourie and others have discovered attempts to conceal or alter Muslim documents confirming the temple tradition (discussed in the VHP evidence bundle, � 7.3: History vs. Casuistry, Delhi 1991, p.28-29), we cannot exclude that in some cases, similar attempts at concealment of highly informative documents have succeeded and remained undiscovered. In that case, a secret drawer in some library may contain a written testimony to the events of Hindu-Muslim interaction under the declining Sultanate, waiting to be found and clear up our ignorance. Otherwise, or until then, we will just have to live with a hole in our knowledge. But we may at any rate accept that there are indications for a Muslim presence at the site in that very time bracket, 1194-1528. Prof. Habib and Mr. Quraishi may not realize it, but their insistence on a Muslim presence before Babar actually fits the traditional consensus and the Hindu interest better. For suppose the opposite scenario: the magnificent medieval Hindu temple had remained standing all through three centuries of harsh Muslim rule until Babar�s arrival. Given the temple�s importance and its central location in what became a provincial capital of the Muslim (Sultanate) regime, its continued presence would have been a remarkable counter-example against the consensus view of Islamic iconoclasm for that period, viz. that no Hindu temple was left standing if the Muslim rulers could help it. That the Muslim occupation of this Hindu sacred site started with the Ghorid conquest, is consistent with all we know about that conquest as an unparalleled orgy of iconoclasm. A second reason why the pre-Moghul date of the mosque supports the Hindu position concerns the presence of Hindu temple artefacts inside the building�s walls, including an inscription describing the building as a Rama temple, which came to light during the demolition. Hindu masons who were employed in the construction, either as slaves or as paid labourers, worked remains of the demolished temple into the mosque in an apparent bid to preserve some of the site�s sanctity. But how could they do this in 1528 if the temple had been destroyed in 1192? One can think up scenarios, but it is simpler if the mosque�s construction followed more closely in time upon the temple�s demolition. This way, Habib�s and Quraishi�s insistence on a Muslim presence at the site in 1194-1528 actually adds to the credibility of the most sensational proof for the temple. We may repeat R. Nath�s conclusion (The Baburi Masjid, p.78): �The foregoing study of the architecture and site of the Baburi Masjid has shown, unequivocally and without any doubt, that it stands on the site of a Hindu temple which originally existed in the Ramkot on the bank of the

river Sarayu, and Hindu temple material has also been used in its construction.� Science has been speaking for so many years already, but some undeserving professors just refuse to listen. 3.9. Counterbalancing the findings Internationally, the most popular approach to the unwelcome ASI findings has been to swiftly concede the essence of the report�s conclusions, then to elaborate the thesis that even this final report isn�t conclusive because it is counterbalanced by other opinions. Whence the title in the conservative Daily Telegraph: �Archaeologists fail to end Ayodhya temple site row� (26 Aug. 2003), by its Delhi correspondent Rahul Bedi, who incidentally is a collaborator of the Communist fortnightly Frontline. The leader of this trend was predictably the BBC. Jyotsna Singh of BBC-News (�Experts split on Ayodhya findings�, 26-8-2003) claims: �A key report by Indian archaeologists on the disputed Ayodhya religious site has split not only Hindus and Muslims but experts too.� She acknowledges: �The report said there was indeed evidence of an earlier temple built beneath a 16th century mosque that was destroyed by Hindu activists in the northern city in 1992.� So, science has spoken, but it doesn�t have the last word. For, there is a split of opinions. Firstly and predictably: �Hindus welcomed the findings while Muslims rejected the report.� As if any scientific study is ever invalidated, even partially, just because some outsider doesn�t like its conclusions. Secondly and less trivially: �Several historians opposed to the VHP's claim have questioned the validity of the ASI findings.� Then follow Irfan Habib�s comments, just discussed. While the true fanatics led by Irfan Habib simply deny the new evidence as they have denied the old, we see the slightly more cautious secularists retreat to the next line of defence. They use these fanatics as a counterbalance to the scientific findings, which they in turn conflate with the "Hindu hardliners", to create a semblance of even-handedness with themselves in the reasonable middle position between two fanatical parties, one of these in effect including the ASI. This way, they can still maintain that there is no conclusive proof for the temple, as if dogmatic denials are equal in value with the scientific findings of a team of top archaeologists. The BBC correspondent and most Western media claim that the issue remains unresolved. But if you read on, you find that this only means that some of the long-standing evidence deniers merely keep on denying the evidence. So yes, there are still two positions: those who stand by the evidence and those who deny it or explain it away with contrived stories. But no fair reporter would treat those two positions, science and anti-science, as being of equal validity or equal seriousness in any other controversy. When scientific investigations pin-pricked fond beliefs, e.g. concerning the purported Roswell UFO extraterrestrials or the Shroud of Turin (a medieval artefact believed by some to have covered Jesus), the press did report the feeble protestations of the devotees; but it never gave them equal rank with the findings of science. It never used these opposing voices to argue that the scientific findings were less than solid and definitive.

This remains true when some of the objectors are people of academic status but whose ideological constraints are known. Of course Soviet historians have kept on denying that the Katyn massacre was Stalin's rather than Hitler's work. Given that they risked their lives if they took the opposite position, they would, wouldn't they? And their supporters in the West stood by them as long as feasible. But nobody in his right mind thought that these predictable denials by the usual suspects added any weight to the contrived case against the evidence. Likewise, the politically motivated protests of an Irfan Habib or a Zafaryab Jilani deserve to be treated as so much sound and fury signifying nothing. Science has spoken. All responsible citizens will now repudiate the anti-scientific campaign of temple denial and allow justice to be done. 3.10. Public opinion engineering These days, much-acclaimed characters like John Dayal, Harsh Mander and Arundhati Roy lie in waiting for communal riots and elatedly jump at them when and where they erupt. They exploit the anti-Hindu propaganda value of riots to the hilt, making up fictional stories as they go along to compensate for any defects in the true account. John Dayal is welcomed to Congressional committees in Washington DC as a crown witness to canards such as how Hindus are raping Catholic nuns in India, an allegation long refuted in a report by the Congress state government of Madhya Pradesh. Arundhati Roy goes lyrical about the torture of a Muslim politician�s two daughters by Hindus during the Gujarat riots of 2002, even when the man had only one daughter, who came forward to clarify that she happened to be in the US at the time of the �facts�. Harsh Mander has already been condemned by the Press Council of India (decision 14/106/02-03 dd. 30 June 2003, Dr. Krishen Kak vs. Times of India) for spreading false rumours about alleged Hindu atrocities in his famous column Hindustan Hamara (Times of India, 20 March 2002; incidentally a title borrowed from a poem by Mohammed Iqbal, who claimed �our India� for Islam and became the spiritual father of Pakistan). These riot vultures do a lot of damage to India, among other reasons because they are so eagerly believed abroad. Yet they don�t interest me too much, if only because they pale in comparison with the past master of their art, the one who was already doing the same job long before these newcomers had discovered the uses of riot �reporting� in anti-Hindu hate-mongering. I mean Asghar Ali Engineer. Since approximately the Stone Age, Engineer has been travelling to riot spots in India (butchering of minorities in Pakistan and Bangladesh somehow doesn�t interest him as much) with prefabricated riot reports invariably showing the same ingredients: Hindu pre-planning, Muslim victimhood, anti-Muslim complicity of the police and some local politicians. With the �facts� of the matter fixed beforehand, the main purpose of his visits is to note down some local names in order to give his reports more credibility. Admittedly, Engineer is of a different calibre than his followers, in the sense that he doesn�t mix his mendaciousness in the service of the hate cause with mendaciousness for self-promotion. People like Harsh Mander and Arundhati Roy easily come across as laughable because their corrupting concern for their own image-building detracts mightily from the force of their propaganda against Hinduism: Roy posturing as an environmentalist all while setting up shop in a villa in a protected forest zone, Mander taking early retirement in peacetime from the civil service but falsely claiming that he had �resigned� (which implies loss of pension rights and other

privileges) as an act of protest against the Gujarat riots, etc. Engineer won�t be an impeccable human being, but at least his human defects don�t come in the way of his effectiveness as an anti-Hindu campaigner. In the present debate, he has predictably contributed his two cents� worth: �Archaeological excavations and temple�,Secular Perspective, 1 Sep. 2003. The text goes through most of the tactical moves discussed in the preceding sections. Engineer is not an archaeologist nor a historian, but he makes the most of newspaper reports as if these were primary and reliable sources. He is not above quoting even anonymous sources as arguments of authority. His best source, a �senior archaeologist� who was �speaking on condition of anonymity�, has �stated categorically, �There is no evidence of a temple. In fact, as we go deeper, we are seeing more evidence of Islamic influence.�� Surely Mr. Engineer should know that Islam originated in 7th-century Arabia, yet at the Ayodhya site where findings date back two thousand years earlier, it only gets more Islamic as you recede deeper into the past? Could it be that under Hindu influence, Islam in India had a few previous incarnations? Predictably, Engineer invokes the authority of �noted archaeologist� Suraj Bhan and of �historian� Irfan Habib without informing the readers about their status as long-standing servants of the Babri Masjid lobby. Yet, in his case this may be due to mere carelessness, as elsewhere he does reveal that one Supriya Verma of Panjab University �spent months in Ayodhya as an expert of the Sunni Waqf Board�. Indeed, he knows from lawyer Zafaryab Jilani that the Waqf Board has six archaeologists under contract to follow the diggings and study the conclusions at length. It just makes you wonder where the Waqf Board is getting all this money from. But it�s good to see what Engineer quotes Habib for: �When digging was ordered, many historians like Irfan Habib had warned that excavation could not lead to a clinching evidence for the existence of a temple.� Which merely amounts to saying that those historians, knowing how the evidence would go against them, had prepared their escape from facing the facts by declaring these impossible beforehand. As for Waqf Board emissary Supriya Verma, she makes the most of the animal bones found at different layers: �If any shrine and a temple existed, how can anyone account for the animal bones?� As per the ASI findings, the site lay in ruins several times, circumstances in which animals may have made their home in it. Is she really an archaeologists that she doesn�t know how the strangest objects accumulate at sites of interest over the millennia? Or did she mean to say that the animals indicate a Muslim rather than a Hindu presence, with mosques as sanctuary for our four-legged brethren? It seems the anti-temple experts are clutching at straws in desperation. Like so many others, Engineer uses the counterbalancing posture, pretending that the ASI�s scientific findings are evened out by the obstinate anti-scientific protests of the usual suspects: �However, the report will be subject to different interpretations and would not go

unchallenged.� Yes, just as even the most cast-iron evidence in a court case never goes unchallenged by the disfavoured party�s lawyer. It�s also what he had heard Irfan Habib predicting: �The artefacts could be interpreted differently.� True enough, Engineer notes with satisfaction: �And this is precisely what is happening. The final report submitted by ASI seems to be highly controversial and is bound to be challenged.� Well, well, those who were predicting trouble are now exulting in the realization of their prediction. Only, everyone can see that it�s merely they themselves who are creating the predicted trouble. Like many others, Engineer disingenuously plays off the interim report with its allegedly �negative� result against the final report: �Now we have the final report of the ASI which says that there could have been a temple-like structure below Babri Masjid. Is it not a glaring contradiction? All through the digging no definite indications of any temple-like structure were found and suddenly the final report discovers temple-like structure there.� Once more, old lies are falsely presented as facts to counter new facts. This had been done before, viz. with B.B. Lal�s findings. Like most secularists in 1990-91, Engineer is still contrasting B.B. Lal�s public statements about his excavation results with his remark in his published ASI report summary that �the late period was devoid of any special interest�. To our crusading secularist, this means that B.B. Lal speaks with forked tongue: �But later in 1990 Lal began to claim that certain brick bases he had excavated in the seventies were meant to support pillars and thus suggested �the existence of a temple-like structure in the south of the Babri Masjid�.� The true story has been explained threadbare long ago, but for poor listeners like Mr. Engineer, we may repeat that Lal�s excavation focused on the ancient period and that from the viewpoint of Ramayana studies, the medieval layer with its unmistakable temple foundations was indeed devoid of much interest. The discovery of temple remains was nothing unexpected or controversial at the time, given the consensus (still prevalent in the late 1970s) on the site�s known history of Islamic iconoclasm. Yet, after the normal bureaucratic and human-inertial delays, as the 1980s were advancing, the ASI started deliberately postponing the formal publication of Lal�s findings because secularist opinion had started mobilizing against the longstanding historical consensus. The reason for the endless procrastination must have been the same reason why the court case has been dragging on for decades: fear of getting involved in controversy, particularly one where the facts would force a stance favoured by the Hindu side. In other words, fear of being demonized by the secularist establishment with its bloodhound attitude towards dissent. If anyone expected Mr. Engineer to be above personal attacks on the ASI experts, he�d better wake up. Taking umbrage behind two Waqf Board lawyers whom he quotes with approval, he has Abdul Mannan dismiss the report as a �saffron report�, while Zafaryab Jilani is quoted as saying: �It was prepared under political pressure.� Not meaner than what most secularist reporters have alleged, but just as unfounded. [Engineer of course does not mention, just as Irfan

Habib and �secularist� publications never do, that four out of the twenty authors of the ASI report itself were Muslims. Are these Muslim archaeologists also �saffronized�? It seems more likely that Irfan Habib is an Islamist masquerading as a Marxist. � Vishal Agarwal] Finally, another false semblance of balance in Engineer�s text is the one between two evaluations of the report. All manner of experts and so-called experts are quoted as denouncing the excavation report, but neither the ASI team, nor other archaeologists nor even VHP-affiliated experts were called to contribute even one sentence in defence of the ASI findings. For his semblance of balance, however, Engineer had to also relay a pro-evidence voice. So he has picked one, only one, and that one is the voice of �RSS spokesman Ram Madhav�, not an expert but a political leader. This way, our spin-doctor creates the impression that on the one hand you have �the expert archaeological opinion�, which �may not give much credence to the ASI report�, while on the other hand you only have partisan Hindu nationalist opinion. When in reality, the opposite asymmetry holds good: genuine expert opinion supports the ASI report and only politically motivated secularists, whether sporting academic titles or not, denounce it. Undeniably, Asghar Ali Engineer remains a formidable master of disinformation. This makes him an excellent representative.

Chapter IV. Secular guilt, secular solution We could look at the Ayodhya affair from the Hindu angle. The contentious site is a Hindu sacred site, it is not a Muslim sacred site, so it should simply continue as a Hindu place of pilgrimage and be adorned with the appropriate architecture. We could look at the Ayodhya affair from a Muslim angle. Of course Ayodhya is not sacred to Muslims. It would amount to blasphemy to claim any sacredness for Ayodhya: Allah is everywhere so He doesn�t need sacred sites, and to the extent that any place on earth can be called sacred, it is Mecca, not Ayodhya. Yet, Muslim warriors have performed their duty of iconoclasm, replacing an idolatrous temple with a mosque. This creates a clear new situation under Islamic law: once a mosque, always a mosque. Muslims should fight to re-conquer the site, and in case Hindus manage to rebuild their temple, a well-planned bomb attack should remedy that anomaly. But let us rather look at the Ayodhya affair from a secular viewpoint. To a secularist in the Western tradition, the whole Ayodhya controversy was a non-issue. For that very reason, he would have favoured a solution that satisfied the community which is the largest, the most attached to the contentious site, and already in possession of the site. That solution would cause the least amount of bad blood, an amount that could certainly be compensated for somehow. The Muslims would get something in exchange for the abandonment of their claim to the site, which doesn�t have any special significance in the Islamic worldview. They would even receive something expensive, just to make sure that all sides would be sufficiently accepting of the deal. Appease the clerics on all sides a little bit, so they don�t cause any trouble for the rest of us. Not the most principled policy, but a highly secular one and, thank God, a blood-less one. One such secularist, a modern man ready to deal with the matter pragmatically, was Rajiv Gandhi. He allowed the Hindus to prepare for the construction of a new temple with the ceremonial laying of a foundation stone (shilanyas) on November 9, 1989. He pressured the

Chandra Shekhar government, which was dependent on Congress support, into organizing the scholars� debate about the historical evidence, in the full knowledge that the temple party would win such a debate hands down. The thrust of his Ayodhya policy was to buy off Muslim acquiescence with some of the usual currency of the Congress culture: maybe nominating a few more Mians as ministers, banning a few Islam-unfriendly books (hence the Satanic Verses affair), raising the Hajjsubsidy, providing cheap loans to the Shahi Imam�s constituency, donating government land for some Islamic purpose, things like that. Meanwhile, Hindus would get their temple. Muslims would have scolded their leaders for selling out, Hindus would have lambasted theirs for cheapening a noble cause with such horse-trading, but in the end, everybody would have accepted it. Whatever may be said about and against Rajiv Gandhi, he had the calibre and the cool secular distance from religious passions to see such a policy through. Even his anti-temple confidants M.J. Akbar and Mani Shankar Aiyar, the self-described �secular fundamentalist�, could certainly be brought (or bought) into line. But in 1991 India�s top pilot was killed, and worse, in his years as India�s most important politician, dark forces had started fighting his reasonable and pragmatic policy tooth and nail. The problem was not with the obscurantist Mullahs, because in those days, a seasoned Congress leader knew how to strike win-win deals with them. The poison issued from the secularist intellectuals who raised a media storm against the historical consensus, the one factual certainty underlying all the political confusion. Their stance hardened Muslim intransigence, emboldened the Left in its anti-Hindu strategy and created international public opinion against the temple plan. The irresponsible and downright evil campaign of history denial by the secularist opinion-makers has prolonged the Ayodhya dispute by at least a decade. Denouncing all pragmatic deals, these secular fundamentalists insisted on having it their way for the full 100%, meaning the total humiliation of the Hindus. They exercised verbal terror against Rajiv Gandhi, Narasimha Rao and all politicians suspected of wanting to compromise with the Hindu movement, making them postpone the needed steps towards the solution. This way, they exacerbated the tensions in return for the pleasure of indulging their self-image as implacable secularists. A real secularist would have sought to minimize a religious conflict, but this lot insisted on magnifying it and turning it into a national crisis. For them, it was a holy war, a jihad, just as it was for their Islamist pupils and paymasters. So, the blood of all the people killed in Ayodhya-related riots from 1989 onwards is at least partly on their heads. The spate of violence in Gujarat in 2002, the �genocide� about which they can�t stop talking, and which was triggered by the Godhra massacre of Hindu pilgrims returning from Ayodhya, may well have been a late result of their slanderous effort to identify Ayodhya with deceitful Hindu fanaticism. Those holier-than-thou secularists are not so innocent. But now, the historical evidence has definitively been verified. After every single historical and archaeological investigation had confirmed the old consensus, the secularists have now been defeated in the final test. The deceit turns out to be their own. Their lies stand exposed and recorded for all to see. Their strategy to sabotage peace and justice in Ayodhya was based on history falsification. With all the blood on their hands, they have disgraced the fair name of secularism. Henceforth, we should be kind enough to ignore them except to hear the confession of their sins. Ideas have consequences, and so do lies. Before the �eminent historians� and other militant secularists are called up to purgatory, they would do well to clear their conscience by offering restitution to the scientists and Hindus they have smeared. And by begging forgiveness from the

families of the Hindu and Muslim victims of riots triggered by a controversy that could have been old history already by 1989, had there not been the secularist obstruction.

The Ayodhya Evidence Debate by Koenraad Elst

[The present article is adapted, with minor modifications, from the chapter of the same name in the book �ELST, Koenraad. 2002. Ayodhya, The Case Against the Temple, New Delhi: Voice of India, pp. 146-188.� The article assumes importance in view of the ongoing archaeological excavations at the disputed site, at the orders of the Indian courts of law. The reader will note that the same set of Marxist political scholars (Irfan Habib, D. N. Jha, R. S. Sharma, D. Mandal, Suraj Bhan, Sushil Srivastava etc.) who had served as counsel to the BMAC are now again siding with the Islamist party in their current media blitzkrieg. The article serves to expose, in brief, the lack of ethical behavior as well as the academic dishonesty exhibited by these political scholars � Bharatvani Team, 9 July 2003].

PART I

This paper was written as an adaptation from an earlier paper, �The Ayodhya Debate�, published in the conference proceedings of the 1991 International Ramayana Conference which had taken place in my hometown, Leuven.[1] The present version represents my own text prepared for the October 1995 Annual South Asia Conference in Madison, Wisconsin, U.S.A. A few notes have been added. The atmosphere at the conference was frankly hostile. After the academic authorities, who may have been ignorant of my controversial reputation, had allowed my paper to be read, the practical organization of the panel session was entrusted to graduate students belonging to the Indian Communist organization,Forum of Indian Leftists (FOIL). They scheduled me as the last speaker in a panel of four, chaired by an Indian female graduate student, a nice girl but obviously unable to perform the most difficult duty of a panel chairperson, viz. keeping the speakers to their allotted time. Moreover, they arranged for our session to be held in a room where another panel was scheduled at noon, making it impossible for the last speaker to read his paper in excess of the panel session�s allotted time. Two panel speakers played

along comfortably expounding and repeating the points they could have easily have made in half a minute. It was up to people from the audience to protest and oblige the chairperson to allow me to read out my paper. When it was my turn, I was heckled somewhat by the Leftist crowd, especially by a well-known Indo-American Communist academic, who was rolling his eyes like a madman and making obscene gestures until an elderly American lady sitting next to him told him to behave. At the end, Biju Mathew came to collect a copy of my text (the book version of which I had some author�s copies handy), called me a �liar�, and told his buddies that they needed to write a scholarly rebuttal. Which is still being awaited today. 1. Introduction One of the contenders in the Ayodhya history debate, the �hypothesis� that the Babri Masjid had been built in forcible replacement of a Hindu temple, had been a matter of universal consensus until a few years ago. Even the Muslim participants in court cases in the British period had not challenged it; on the contrary, Muslim authors expressed pride in this monument of Islamic victory over infidelity. It is only years after the Hindu take-over of the structure in 1949 that denials started to be voiced.[2]And it is only in 1989 that a largescale press campaign was launched to deny what had earlier been a universally accepted fact. In normal academic practice, the debate on an issue on which such a consensus exists, would only have been opened after the discovery of new facts which undermine the consensus view. The present debate is between a tradition which numerous observers and scholars had found coherent and well-founded, and an artificial hypothesis based on political compulsions, instead of on newly discovered facts. In an effort to move the debate forward, the Government of India provided the contending parties with an official forum in which experts could go through the evidence produced for both sides. This scholarly exchange took place around the turn of 1991, and was briefly revived in the autumn of 1992. Both rounds of the debate were unilaterally broken off by the Babri Masjid party. This paper is intended to fill the gap left by the general media in the information on the debate about the historical claims concerning the RamaJanmabhoomi/Babri Masjid site in Ayodhya. As the only non-Indian scholar to have followed the dispute closely, I will argue that the scholars� debate has ended in an unambiguous victory for one of the two parties.[3] 2. The Object of the Debate

As is well known by now, on Rama�s supposed birthplace in Ayodhya, there used to stand a disputed mosque structure. It was called the Babri Masjid because according to an inscription on its front wall it was built at the orders of the Moghul invader Babar in 1528, by his lieutenant Mir Baqi. But until the beginning of this century, official documents called it Masjid-iJanmasthan, �Mosque of the birthplace�, and the hill on which it stands was designated as Ramkot (Rama�s fort) or Janmasthan (birthplace). Since 1949, the building is effectively in use as a Hindu temple, but many Hindus, and especially the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP)[4], want to explicate the Hindu function of the place with proper Hindu temple architecture, which implied removing the existing structure. On the other hand, the Babri Masjid Action Committee (BMAC) and its splinter, the Babri Masjid Movement Coordination Committee (BMMCC), want the building, and after its demolition at least the site, to be given back to the Muslim community. In December 1990 and January 1991, at the request of the Chandra Shekhar Government, the BMAC and the VHP exchanged historical evidence for their respective cases. It was broken off on 25 January 1991 when the BMAC representatives, without any explanation, failed to show up at the meeting scheduled for that day. The debate was revived in October 1992 by the Narasimha Rao Government, with essentially the same teams, but the next month, the BMAC withdrew in protest against VHP�s announcement of a Kar Seva (building activity) due to 6 December 1992. It is strange (but perfectly explainable, as we shall see) that this debate has not received more attention in scholarly and journalistic writings. It was, after all, the only occasion where both parties could not manipulate �evidence� without being subject to pointed criticism from the opposing side. Many reporters on the Ayodhya conflict have made tall claims about �concoction� of bogus evidence� (not to mention �Goebbelsian propaganda�), and to substantiate these, there could hardly be a better mine of information than this Government-sponsored debate. Yet, most of them refuse to even mention it. A report of this debate should distinguish between three possible debating issues: 1) Is the present-day Ayodhya with all its Rama-related sites, the Ayodhya described by Valmiki in his Sanskrit Ramayana? In the course of this debate, no new facts have been added to Prof. B. B. Lal�s conclusion that Valmiki�s Ayodhya and present-day Ayodhya are one and the same place.[5] It is a different matter that his conclusions have beend isputed,

without any evidence, by the JNU historians among others. Of course, it is nobody�s case that the Valmiki connection has been established in an unassailable manner, but at least, what much research is available, points in that direction. However, even if B. B. Lal�s assertion is correct, this leaves open the possibility that the writer who styled himself Valmiki, may have written his version of the Rama story long after it actually took place, and that he relocated the scene of a tradition coming from elsewhere into his own area. Therefore, the next, more fundamental question might be: 2) Is the present-day Ayodhya, and more specifically the disputed site, indeed the birthplace of a historical character called Rama? The BMAC has argued that such a thing cannot be proven, assuming that Rama was a historical character at all. The VHP has refused to consider this question, arguing that religions do not have to justify the sacredness of their sacred sites: if the site was traditionally associated with sacred events and characters (as it was, at least from Valmiki onwards), or if it was treated by Rama devotees as somehow sacred (as it was since at least several centuries), then that should be enough to command respect, regardless of the historical basis of this claim to sacredness. Compare with the Muslim sacred places: there is no historical substance at all in Mohammad�s claim that the Kaaba in Mecca had been built by Abraham as a place of monotheistic worship. This story had to justify the take-over of the Kaaba from its real owners, the �idolaters� of Arabia. And yet, in spite of the starkly unhistorical nature of the Muslim claim to the Kaaba, this claim is not being questioned. Nobody is saying that the Muslims can only have their Kaaba if they give historical proof that it was built by Abraham.[6] Therefore the VHP insists that if the disputed site is a genuine traditional sacred site, this must be enough to make others respect it as such. Moreover, if it was really a Hindu sacred site, it is reasonable to expect that this tatus was explicitated with a temple, which must have adorned the site before the Babri Masjid was built. So, the third question is: 3) Was the Babri Masjid built in forcible replacement of a pre-existing Rama temple? The Muslim fundamentalist leader Syed Shahabuddin, convener of the BMMCC (and initiator of the campaign against Salman Rushdie)[7] agrees with the VHP that this is the fundamental question. He has said repeatedly: �If it is proven that the Babri Masjid has been built in forcible replacement of a Hindu temple, I will demolish it with my own hands.�[8] So, the subject matter of the debate can be limited to the question whether a Hindu temple had been destroyed to make way for the Babri Masjid.

In November 1990, in a letter to the newly appointed Prime Minister Chandra Shekhar, the late Sri Rajiv Gandhi (whose Congress Party was supporting the new Government) had also proposed to narrow down the debate to this one question. Sri Gandhi suggested that the decision of whether to leave the disputed building to the Hindus (who were using it as a temple) or to give it to the Muslims (who had used it as a mosque), should be taken on the basis of historical and archaeological evidence regarding the specific point whether the Babri Masjid had replaced a pre-existing Hindu temple. It is this letter from Rajiv Gandhi which prompted Chandra Shekhar to invite the contending parties to have a scholarly exchange of historical evidence.

3. Chronicle of the semi-official debate Both parties met on 1 December and 4 December 1990, and they agreed to submit and confront historical material supporting their respective viewpoints. On 23 December, the VHP and the BMAC submitted their respective bundles of evidence, On 10 January 1991, both sides submitted rejoinders to their opponents� evidence bundles. At least, the VHP scholars gave a detailed reply to all the documents presented by the BMAC. But the latter merely handed in yet another pile of newspaper articles and more such nonevidential statements of opinion. This created the impression that the BMAC was effectively conceding defeat. On January 24, the parties met in order to discuss the evidence. But the BMAC team leader, Prof. R. S. Sharma, a well-known Marxist historian, said that he and his colleagues had not yet studied the VHP material (to which the BMAC had agreed to reply by January 10). This is most remarkable, because the week before, he had led 42 academics in signing a much-publicized statement staying, that there was definitely absolutely no proof whatsoever at all for the pre-existing Rama temple. He had issued more statements on the matter and even published a small book on it.[9] There he was, pleading a lack of familiarity with the very material on which he had been making such tall statements. The other historians for the BMAC were Athar Ali, D. N. Jha and Suraj Bhan, apart from the office bearers of the BMAC itself. The four BMAC historians have published their argumentation some months later: Ramajanmabhumi Baburi Masjid, A Historians� Report to the Nation. Tellingly, they do not mention the outcome of the debate, but reiterate the ludicrous demand they made while attending the debate as BMAC advocates, viz. that they be considered �independent historians� qualified to pronounce scientific judgment in a debate between their employers and their enemies.[10]

Of course the government representative dismissed this demand as ridiculous. Yet, the BMAC has continued to call them �independent historians�, and they themselves have continued to demand that the VHP submit its case to �independent arbitration�, i.e., by their own kind. These two telling details of the Ayodhya debate story have, of course, been withheld from the reader in the booklet published by the anti-temple party. The next meeting was scheduled for the next day, January 25. But there, the BMAC scholars simply did not show up. The unambiguous result of the debate was this: The BMAC scholars have run away from the arena. They had not presented written evidence worth the name, they had not given a written refutation of the VHP scholars� arguments, they had wriggled out of a face-to-face discussion on the accumulated evidence, and finally they had just stayed away. Thus ended the first attempt by the Government of India to find an amicable solution on the basis of genuine historical facts.

In October 1992, the Narasimha Rao Government tried to revive this discussion foru. Dur to personal differences, Prof. R. S. Sharma stayed away from the BMAC team, which otherwise consisted of the same people. The debate focused almost entirely on the interpretation of the archaeological findings of June 1992: a large number if Hindu sculptures and other temple remains, found in the terrain in front of the disputed building. The BMAC team argued that these findings had all been planted. It also demanded that in view of the ongoing negotiations, the VHP cancel its programme scheduled for 6 December 1992 in Ayodhya. When the VHP refused, the BMAC stayed away from the talks once more.

4. The pro-Temple Evidence On Ayodhya, there has always in living memory been a consensus: among local Muslims and Hindus, among European travelers and British administrators. As late as 1989, the Encyclopedia Brittannica (entry Ayodhya) reports without a trace of hesitation that the Babri Masjid was built in forcible replacement of a temple marking Rama�s birthplace. When there is such a consensus on a given issue, the academic custom is not to reopen the debate until someone comes with serious evidence that the consensus opinion is wrong and that a different scenario is indicated by newfound (or newly interpreted) facts. But the only evidence to surface during the debate was presented by the VHP-mandated team and merely reconfirmed the old consensus.

The VHP�s evidence bundle was not just a pile of separate documents. [11] It was centered around a careful argumentation, which can be summed up in three points: 1)

A single hypothesis. Only one hypothesis is put forward, viz. that the disputed place was traditionally (since before the Muslim period)

venerated as Rama�s birthplace, that a Rama temple had stood on it, and that this temple was destroyed to make way for the Babri Masjid. All the material collected goes to confirm this one hypothesis. Not a single piece of documentary or archaeological evidence contradicts it. The contrast with the anti-Janmabhumi polemists is striking: they have so far not produced any document that positively indicates a different scenario from the one upheld by the VHP scholars. The BMAC effort has been only negative, viz. trying to pick holes in the pro-temple evidence, but the VHP has posited its own hyupothesis that takes care of all the relevant data. 2) Temple foundations. Archaeological findings in Prof. B. B. Lal�s excavation campaign Archaeology of the Ramayana Sites 1975-80 and more recent ones as well as a large number of documents written in tempore non suspectoconfirm the hypothesis. Findings of burnt-brick pillar bases dated to the 11th century in trenches a few metres from the disputed structure prove that a pillared building stood in alignment with, and on the same foundations system as the Banri Masjid. The written documents do not include an eye-witness account of the temple destruction, the way we have eye-witness accounts of the destruction of many other temples. But then, a wealth of documents by European travelers and by local Muslims, confirm unambiguously that the Babri Masjid was considered to have been built in forcible replacement of a Rama temple. These witnesses also describe first-hand how the place was revered by the Hindus as Rama�s birthsite, and that Hindus always came back to worship as closely as possible to the original temple site: they could not reasonably have done this except in continuation of a tradition dating back to before the Babri Masjid. 3) The single hypothesis is consistent with known patterns. No ad hoc hypothesis are needed to support the main hypothesis, no unusual scenarios have to be invented, no unusual motives have to be attributed to the people involved, no conspiracy theory has to be conjured up. The general VHP hypothesis merely says that wellestablished general patterns of Hindu and Muslim behavior apply to the specific case under consideration. Among these are to be noted:

First, the fact that a temple stood on the now-disputed site, which is a hilltop overlooking Ayodhya, is in perfect conformity with a world-wide practice of putting important buildings, like castles and temples, on the topographical place of honor. By contrast, the hypothesis that the Babri Masjid has been built on an emplty spot presupposes an abnormal course of events, viz. that the people of the temple city Ayodhya had left the place of honor empty. Second, the demolition of Hindu temples and their forcible replacement by mosques has been a very persistent behavior pattern of the Muslim conquerors. These temple demolitions were consistent with the persecution of �unbelief� carried out by Islamic rulers from Mohammed bin Qasim (who conquered Sindh in 712) to Aurangzeb (the last great Moghul. D. 1707), and more recently in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Kashmir. Though there is no lack of negationists who try to deny or conceal it, the historical record bears out Will Durant�s assessment that �the Mohammedan conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history�.[12] It is safe to affirm that the majority of pre-1707 mosques in India has been built in forcible replacement of Hindu temples. Outside India the Islamic takeover of the most sacred sites of other religions was equally systematic, e.g., the Ka�aba in Mecca, the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the Aya Sophia in Istanbul, the Buddhist monastery in Bukhara etc. Third, the fact that Hindu temple materials (14 black stone sculptured pillars) have been used in the Babri Masjid is not an unusual feature requiring a special explanation; on the contrary, it was fairly common practice meant as a visual display of the victory of Islam over infidelity. It was done in many mosques that have forcibly replaced temples, e.g., the Gyanvapi mosque in Varanasi (in which a part of the Kashi Vishvanath temple is still visible)[13], and the Adahi-Din-ka-Jhonpra mosque in Ajmer, the Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque in Delhi, or, outside India, the Jama Masjid of Damascus (which was a Christian cathedral). Fourth, the fact that Hindus used to keep on revering sacred sites even after mosques had been built on them, is attested by foreigners like Niccolo Manucci in the 17th and Alexander Cunningham in the 19th century.[14] By contrast, the hypothesis that Hindus started laying an arbitrary claim on a place firmly occupied by the Muslims (so that they courted repression for no reason at all), is pretty fantastic and without parallel. 5. No Direct Evidence The VHP bundle also contained a large number of quotes from ancient literature to prove that the Rama cult is not a recent development, and that the status of Ayodhya as a sacred city has been uninterrupted since at least

2000 years. The one thing that is missing is the ultimate clinching evidence: a contemporary description of the forcible replacement of the temple with the mosque. But even in the absence of this item of primary evidence, the amount of secondary evidence is so overwhelming, coherent and uncontradicted, that in another, less contentious historical search, it would be considered conclusive. It may be recalled that, in the course of the public debate on the opinion pages of the newspapers, the pro-BMAC polemists had at first demanded non-British evidence, because the whole Janmabhoomi tradition was merely a British concoction. In A. G. Noorani�s categorical words� �The myth is a 19th century creation by the British.�[15] Next, the demanded pre-19th century evidence, because Hindus and Muslims had already �interiorized the British propaganda� early in that century, as is clear from a number of writings by local Muslims, brought to light by Prof. Harsh Narain. This, Mirza Jan, a Muslim militant who participated in an attempt to wrest from the Hindus another sacred site in Ayodhya, the Hanumangarhi, wrote in 1856 that �a lofty mosque has been built by badshah Babar� on �the original birthplace of Rama�, in application of the rule that �where there was a big temple, a big mosque was constructed and where there was a small temple, a small mosque was constructed.�[16] Therefore, Muslim leader Mohammed Abdul Rahim Qureishi has asked the pro-Janmabhoomi side �to produce any historical evidence, not only independent of the British sources but also of the period prior to the advent of the 19th century�.[17] But this type of evidence was also produced: most publicly the Austrian Jesuit Joseph Tieffenthaler�s 1767 account, presented by Mr. Abhas Kumar Chatterjee in Indian Express. Tieffenthaler describes how Hindus celebrated Ram Navami (commemorating Rama�s birth) just outside the Babri Masjid, and recounts the local traditions that the mosque was built in forcible replacement of Rama�s birthplace temple.[18] It was also pointed out that the Muslim writer Mirza Jan, already mentioned, had given an extensive quotation from an (otherwise unknown) letter by a daughter of Aurangzeb�s son and successor, Bahadur Shah. He quotes her as writing about 1710 that the temples on the sacred sites of Shiva, Krishna and Rama (including �Sita�s kitchen�, i.e., part of the Ramkot complex)

�were all demolished for the strength of Islam, and at all these places mosques have been constructed�. She exhorted the Muslims to assert their presence at these mosques and not to five in to Hindu compromise proposals.[19] Furthermore, a letter dated 1735 by a Faizabad qazi (judge) was shown, describing Hindu-Muslim riots in Ayodhya was shown, describing HinduMuslim riots in Ayodhya over �the Masjid built by the emperor of Delhi�, i.e., either a pre-Moghul Sultan or Moghul dynasty founder Babar. This is only a secondary indication for the actual temple destruction, but it is first-hand evidence for the existence of the Hindu claim on the Babri Masjid site well before the 19th century. Only when this type of evidence was shown, did the pro-BMAC polemists move on to demand strictly contemporary evidence. About this demand for eye-witness accounts, Arun Shourie has remarked: �Today a contemporary account is being demanded in the case of the Babri Masjid, Are those who make this demand prepared to accept this as the criterion � that if a contemporary account exists of the destruction of a temple for constructing a mosque, the case is made?� Shourie goes on to quote from Aurangzeb�s court chronicles: �News came to Court that in accordance with the Emperor�s command his officers had demolished the temple of Vishvanath at Benares (2/9/1669)�In the month of Ramzan, the religious-minded Emperor ordered the demolition of the temple at Mathura�.In a short time by the great exertions of his officers the destruction of this strong center of infidelity was accomplished�.A grand mosque was built on its site�.January 1670)�[20]. These accounts are as contemporary as you can get. Shourie concludes: �If the fact that a contemporary account of the temple at Ayodhya is not available leaves the matter unsettled, does the fact that contemporary accounts are available for the temples at Kashi, Mathura, Pandharpur and a host of other places settle the matter? One has only to ask the question to know that the �experts� and �intellectuals� will immediately ask for something else.�[21]

6. The Anti-Temple Evidence

The BMAC presented a pile of some eighty documents which can be divided into three groups: legal documents, statements of opinion, and historical documents. The largest group consists of court documents, from court disputes over the Rama-Janmabhoomi and other contentious places in Ayodhya, most of them from the British period, a few from after the independence. However, what these court documents prove is: First, that the Hindus kept on claiming the site in principle, even if for the time being they were willing to settle for a license to worship on a platform just outside the contentious building. Second, that the Muslim please always focused, not on questioning the temple destruction tradition, but on the accomplished fact that they owned the place for centuries, long enough to create an ownership title no matter how and from whom they had acquired it; And third, that the British rulers did not want any raking-up of old quarrels, and therefore upheld the status-quo, but without questioning the common belief that the Masjid had replaced a Hindu temple.

British judges have explicitly not subscribed to the thesis, now defended by the BMAC and BMMCC, that there had never been a Hindu temple on the contentious spot. On the contrary, in his verdict in 1886 a British judge observed: �It is unfortunate that a mosque should have been built on land held specially sacred by the Hindus, but as that happened 356 years ago, it is now too late to remedy the grievance.�[22] So, the court verdicts that upheld the Muslim claim to the site (and have been cited by the BMAC scholars to this effect), by no means imply that the judges doubted the contention that a temple had been demolished to make way for this mosque. All the British sources, such as Edward Balfour in 1858 and Archaeological Survey of India�s field explorer A. Furher in 1891, confirm the tradition that the Babri Masjid had replaced a Rama temple. One British source, Francis Buchanan�s survey (written in 1810 and edited by Montgomery Martin in 1838), has been quoted by pro-BMAC historians (who have otherwise British testimonies as �prejudiced�, �part of a British tactic to foment communalism� etc.) as calling the tradition of the RamaJanmabhoomi temple destruction �very illfounded�.[23] However, Buchanan did not denounce as ill-founded �the temple-destruction theory�, as the BMAC historians claim, but only referred to the fact that �the destruction is

very generally attributed by the Hindus to the furious zeal of Aurangzeb�, which allegation was misdirected: as proof for Aurangzeb�s non-involvement Buchanan cites the inscription attributing the mosque to Babar.[24] As the last large-scale temple destroyer, Aurangzeb had become the proverbial representative of the old Islamic tradition of iconoclasm, which has already destroyed thousands of temples before his own time. Buchanan opines that Babar had built the mosque not on empty land, but on the site of the Ramkot �castle�, which to him may well have been the very castle in which Rama himself had lived. This claim only differs from the local tradition and the VHP position by being even bolder. According to him, the black-stone pillars (with Hindu sculptures defaced by �the bigot� Babr) incorporated in the Masjid had been �taken from the ruins of the palace�, and at any rate from �a Hindu building�. Obviously, the site was considered by the devotees as Rama�s court, originally a castle and only later a temple.[25] At any rate, the quarrel over whether the Babri Masjid replaced a �castle� or a �temple� is a false problem, considering Rama�s double-role as a God-king. Buchanan gives no facts supporting an alternative origin for the Babri Masjid and upholds the essence of the local tradition, viz. that the Masjid has replaced a Hindu building.[26] The British judges have consistently accepted the view of the British surveyors and scholars. The second largest group of BMAC documents consisted of book excerpts and newspaper articles, mere statements of opinion. They give the wellknown or at least predictable opinions of politicians like Jawaharlal Nehru and Ramaswamy Naicker, of secularist journalists like Arvind N. Das and Praful Bidwai, of Marxist intellectuals like the JNU historians and Prof. R. S. Sharma (who was invited to lead the BMAC team only after this first round). In this collection of opinions essentially four points have been argued: Firstly, Rama was not a historical character; Secondly, Rama have been a historical character, but Ayodhya is not his real birthplace; Thirdly, Rama worship in Ayodhya is fairly recent, and hardly existed prior to the period when the Babri Masjid was built; Fourthly, the Babri Masjid was not built in forcible replacement of a Rama temple. However, the cited opinions on each of these four points are not even convergent or in mutual agreement. For instance several authors say that the Babri Masjid was built on empty land; others say it replaced a Jaina temple,

or a Shaiva temple, or a secular building. About Rama�s birthplace, one source cited says that Rama was born in Nepal; another says it was in Afghanistan; yet another says it was in Ayodhya, but on a different spot; one writer says that Rama was in fact a pharaoh of Egypt. In all, the BMAC has given �proof� that Rama was born at 8 different places. Methodologically speaking, these documents do not form a body of evidence supporting one hypothesis. The BMAC has merely collected all kinds of opinions which happen to be in conflict with the thesis that the Masjid replaced a Rama temple, without minding that these opinions are also in conflict with each other. Of course, this collection of contemporary, often politically motivated articles and statements does not have any proof value. At best, some of the names under the articles could constitute an �argument of authority�, but even that is diluted by their juxtaposition with political agitators and plain cranks. More than an argumentation, this presentation of many conflicting opinions is a dispersionary tactic to keep the opposing party busy with refuting the weirdest viewpoints. An important feature of the collected pro-BMAC opinions is that they have in fact limited themselves to an attempt to discredit the evidence cited in favor of the Rama-Janmabhoomi tradition. They have not given any evidence (valid or otherwise) at all for an alternative scenario that explains the presence of the Babri Masjid and the well-attested Hindu opposition against it. They have tried to explain away the Janmabhoomi tradition by means of a campaign by the British rulers, out to �divide and rule�.[27] In fact, such a rumor campaign is totally unheard of in the well-documented history of British India, and would have left testimonies which the pro-BMAC historians have not been able to produce.[28] It is an ad hoc hypothesis based on nothing but the fond belief that India�s �communal problem� is a British creation and not the necessary result of any religious doctrine of hostility towards alternative forms of worship.[29] The only seemingly valid point scored by some of the BMAC sympathizers cited in the BMAC evidence bundle is theargumentum e silentio that the temple destuction is not mentioned in near-contemporary sources, notably Abul Fazl�s Ain-I-Akbariand the poems of Tulsidas. However, neither Abul Fazl nor Tulsidas have written catalogues of demolished temples or even just devoted some pointed attention to the buildings of the cities mentioned in their works: they are simply not the sources that are supposed to carry the required information. Also, they are not really contemporary with Babar, but with his grandson Akbar (around 1600 A.D.).[30] For them too, the temple destruction was history, and the Babri Masjid just one of the thousands of mosques built on demolished Hindu temples.

The third part of the evidence bundle for the Babri Masjid side, is the historical evidence properly speaking. It consists of threepieces. One is the text of the inscriptions on the Babri Masjid and its gate, declaring that the mosque was built in 1528 by Mir Baqi, who worked under Babar�s command. Of course the Hindu side has no quarrel with that: the Babri Masjid was built, so it must have been built by someone. However, inspite of the inscription, the identity of the Masjid�s builder happens to be disputable. It has been argued (by Sushil Srivastava and R. Nath independenly)[31]that, judging from the architecture, the mosque must have been built during the preceding Sultanate period. Sushil Srivastava even claims that the inscription attributing the Masjid to Babar (or at least to his lieutenant Mir Baqi), is a 19th century forgery.[32] At any rate, the scenario that it was built under Babar is not in conflict with the thesis that it was built in forcible replacement of a Rama temple. This dispute is not about who built the mosque, but about what preceded it. The second piece is Babar�s memoirs. In it, no mention is made of a temple demolition in Ayodhya. Unfortunately, the pages for the months when he must have been in Ayodhya and perhaps also ordered the demolition of a Hindu temple, are missing from the manuscripts. So we simply do not have Babar�s own report on this matter. And if Sushil Srivastava and R. Nath are right, Babar was not the builder and his testimony is irrelevant, except insofar as it might explain why the already existing mosque got attributed to him. For instance, the Afghan rulers (against whom the invader Babar fought) or the city�s inhabitants may have defended Ayodhya from the Ramkot hill, so that the existing mosque got damaged in the fighting (Babar was the first one in India to use cannon), and was subsequently rebuilt by Babar�s men. But all this will remain speculation, because the relevant part of Babar�s report is missing. The third piece of BMAC evidence is Babar�s testament, in which he advises his son Humayun to practice tolerance, to respect Hindu temples, and not to kill cows. This statement of religious tolerance is very nice, but unfortunately it has amply been proven to be a forgery. [33] It is quite bizarre that scholars trying to prove a point discredit their own case by using a proven forgery without any comment. And even if Babar�s testament had been genuine, it would only prove that at the end of his life, Babar had got tired of the jihad which he had been waging (on top of an inter-Muslim war), or that he had come to realize that a

prosperous kingdom would be better served by religious amity than by the intolerance of which he himself had given sufficient proof during his life. Babar�s emphatical concern for tolerance would certainly not prove that tolerance had been his way all through his life. There are Hindu temple materials attributed to Babar in Sambhal (replacing a Vishnu temple, and dated by archaeologists to the Sultanate period, just like the Ayodhya �Babri� Masjid) and Pilakhana. Local tradition affirms that the Babri Masjids in Palam, Somipat, Rohtak, and Sirsa have replaced Brahmanical or Jain temples. The contemporary Tarikh-i-Babari describes how Babar�s troops �demolished many Hindu temples at Chanderi� when they occupied it. Some tough Jihad rhetoric has been preserved from Babar�s war against the Rajputs, such as the quatrain: �For Islam�s sake, I wandered in the wild, prepared for war with unbelievers and Hindus, resolved myself to meet a martyr�s death. Thanks be to Allah! A ghazi I became.�[34] It is quite plain that Babar, even when he had to fight fellow Muslims (the Afghan Lodi dynasty), never lost sight of his duty of waging war against the infidels. So, these three documents do not prove that the Babri Masjid was built on something else than a Rama temple. The two other groups of documents are not even an attempt to give documentary or archaeological evidence, merely a collection of sympathizing statements of opinion. What is worse, the whole collection makes one wonder whether the BMAC experts had read it at all: not only are many of the documents unconvincing or beside the point, but some even support the VHP case. Thus, a court ruling of 1951 cites testimony of local Muslims that the mosque had bot been used since 1936, which means that in 1949 the Hindus took over an unused building � hardly worth the current Babri Masjid movement with its cries of �Islam in danger!� (or its newer version �Secularism in danger!�) an its hundreds of riot victoms. On 3 March 1951, the Civil Judge of Faizabad observed: �It further appears from a number of affidavits of certain Muslim residents of Ayodhya that at least from 1936 onwards the Muslims have neither used the site as a mosque nor offered prayers there�.Nothing has been pointed to discredit these affidavits.�[35] Of course,

even a nudge may be misinformed on occasion; but at least, this is the official view, enunciated by a Court of Law constituted under India�s democratic legal system. In particular, those who have been lecturing the Hindu movement on �abiding by the Constitution� and �respecting Court verdicts� ought to show some respect for this Court verdict. Another court document shows that the ongoing court dispute (which is the only legal obstacle to the replacement of the present structure with a proper temple) was filed well past the legal time-limit. In any case, while the BMAC wants to rule out the British Gazetteers as evidence (because they confirm that the Babri Masjid had replaced a temple), it cites court documents which reproduce excerpts from the Gazetteers as evidence and declare in so many words that Gazetteers are admissible as evidence. A number of court rulings record that Hindus relentlessly kept on claiming the site, �most sacred� to them, and made do with as near a site as possible under prevalent equations: this refutes the BMAC claim that the Rama-Janmabhoomi tradition is a recent invention for political purposes, whether colonial �divide and rule� pr Hindu �communalism�. The leading political analyst Arun Shourie has commented: �On reading the papers the BMAC had filed as �evidence�, I could only conclude, therefore, that either its leaders had not read the papers themselves, or that they had no case and had just tried to over-awe of confuse the government etc. by dumping a huge miscellaneous heap.�[36] When asked in public forums about the results of the scholars� debate, both Prof. Irfan Habib (historian at Aligarh Muslim University) and Subodh Kant Sahay (who was the Home Minister at the time of the debate) have declared that �the VHP has run away from the debate�. Leading newspapers have refused to publish denials of this allegation. In fact, this unfounded allegation provides an interesting illustration of the psychology of lies. Liars are often not very creative, and they tend to say things that are partly inspired on truth. Thus, Prof. Habib and Mr. Sahay are perfectly right in alleging that the debate has ended because one of the parties has �run away from the debate�: to that extent, their version is transparent of the truth. Only it is not the VHP, but the BMAC which has turned its back on the debate. 7. The Anti-Temple Debating Tactics Meanwhile, the actual course of the debate both in the official forum and in the media could have suggested some conclusions even to non-historians

(like the Supreme Court judges who refused to pronounce an opinion on it in 1994). The debate has not genuinely altered the old consensus, but it has been an interesting case-study in manipulation by unscrupled academics. That, at least seems to be a fair description of learned publications advertising themselves as �objective� studies of the controversy, but systematically concealing the arguments put forth by one of the parties. The VHP has published it argumentation including a detailed refutation of the Babri Masjid Action Committee�s arguments, and like-minded scholars have published detailed presentations of specific types of evidence (e.g., Prof. Harsh Narain and Prof. R. Nath; note how the VHP, lacking a think-tank of its own, was dependent on the help of people with no prior connection to it). By contrast, the BMAC, which had the support of the Indian Council of Historical Research led by Aligarh historian Prof. Irfan Habib and of a team of scholars led by Prof. R. S. Sharma, has not felt sufficiently satisfied with its own performance in the official debate to publish its argumentation. Its numerous supporters have chosen not to refer to the debate at all and to keep the argumentation of their serious opponents out of view. Instead, these top academics have chosen the poorest Hindutva pamphletists as their opponents and made some fun of cranky but irrelevant claims which go around in the semi-literate fringe of the Hindu movement. One point they like to highlight is the spurious claim that on 22 December 1949, the idols �miraculously appeared� in the disputed building. I do not know of anyone who would affirm that except tongue in cheek, but given that placing the idols could be construed as a criminal offence, it has nonetheless been affirmed � as an obvious ad hoc fable for purposes of self-exculpation. But note that this miracle story has long gone out fashion: in an interview in the New York Times, �Abbot Ram Chander Das Parahamahams of an Ayodhya akhara declared openly that he was one who had put the image inside the mosque.�[37] Another fairly common tactic was to lump the temple argumentation with the fringe school led by P. N. Oak, which holds that every Indo-Muslim building (e.g., the Taj Mahal)[38] was in fact a Hindu temple, not demolished but only transformed. However, this school happened to have aligned itself with the eminent historians against the VHP. Oak himself explained that the Babri Masjid itself was built by Hindus as a temple, that �Babar had nothing to do with the Babri Masjid�, and that neither the Moghul nor any Muslim ruler had demolished a Hindu temple at the site.[39] Oak�s version of history is of a kind with the contrived scenarios thought up by the eminent historians.

Another spokesman if this school, Heevan Kulkarni from Bombay, claimed that the Babri Masjid was a Hindu temple built by Hindus before the Muslim conquest. He even approached the Supreme Court to obtain permission to prove his point by means of thermo-luminescence and other advanced archaeological techniques, as well as an injunction to solve the dispute by preserving the building (as Muslims demand, in the �mistaken� belief that the building was built as a mosque) but allotting it to the Hindus to serve as the �restored� Rama temple which it was meant to be when it was built. Again, this school was wrongly identified with the HP position. A similar tactic was to associate the Ayodhya evidence with the eccentric theory of the non-historian Bal Gangadhar Tilak, later adapted by the nonhistorian Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar in his young days, that the Aryans came from the Arctic (Tilak�s attempt to harmonize the Aryan invasion theory with traditional Vedic chronology) or that Indian itself had been in the Arctic zone then (Golwalkar�s attempt to harmonize Tilak with Aryan indigenousness).[40] These ideas are simply unrelated to the more recent history of Hindu-Muslim conflict, and are only brought into the discussion in order to strengthen the contrast between Hindu amateurishness and secularist professionalism: �After R. C. Majumdar, the communal interpretation has been relegated to the world of school-level textbooks, made-easies, popular magazines, newspapers and comic strips�, - meaning that the positions of prestige by India�s secularists who imposed denial of Hindu-Muslim conflict as the orthodox explanation.[41] This is an argument not of authority but of status.[42] This way, India�s topmost academics and journalists have avoided confronting the real evidence and have concentrated on attacking straw men instead. It is clearly an application of Mao Zedong�s dictum: �Attach where the enemy is weak, retreat where the enemy is strong.� That may be a legitimate principle in warfare, but in scholarship the goal is not to score points but to establish the truth. PART II

Koenraad Elst: �The Ayodhya Debate�, in Gilbert Pollet, ed.: Indian Epic Values. Ramayana and its Impact, Peeters, Leuven 1995. As is all too common with conference proceedings, this book was assembled only three years after the conference, so the published version of my paper was finalized only in 1994. [2] In the 1961 Faizabad Gazetteer, Mrs. E. B. Joshi, while not yet denying the traditional account relayed in the earlier Gazetteers, suppresses it without giving any reason for doing so, probably on orders of the Government of India under Jawaharlal Nehru. But neutral scholarly publications like the 1989 edition of the Encyclopedia Brittannica (entry Ayodhya) confirm the temple destruction scenario. [3] One of the first scholarly publications on the dispute was my Ram Janmabhoomi vs. Babri Masjid, a Case Study in Hindu-Muslim Conflict (Voice of India, Delhi, July 1990), partly a reply to the statement The Political Abuse of History: Babri Masjid/Ram Janmabhoomi Controversy, by Bipin Chandra and 24 other historians of the Jawaharlal Nehru University. A large part of my book has been included in Vinay Chandra Mishra and Parmamand Singh, eds.: Ram Janmabhoomi Babri Masjid, Historical Documents, Legal Opinions & Judgments, Bar Council of India Trust, Delhi 1991. [1]

The VHP (Vishva Hindu Parishad, �World Hindu Council�) was founded by Guru Golwalkar, chief of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS, [4]

�National Volunteer Corps�) as an instrument for the spread of Hindu culture and religion. It takes its guidelines from an assembly of traditional religious leaders. [5] Prof. B. B. Lal has formulated this conclusion on different occasions including articles in Puratattva no. 16, 1987, and in Manthan, October 1990. In a letter to theTimes of India, published on 1-3-1991, he concludes that �what is known as Ayodhya today was indeed the Ayodhya of the Valmiki Ramayana�. [6] Prof. Kamal Salibi of Beirut has proposed the theory that all the Biblical sites including Abraham�s Hebron and king David�s Jerusalem, were situated in the Hijaz area of Western Arabia (in his 1985 book The Bible Came from Arabia: A Radical Reinterpretation of Old Testament Geography). The double political motivation is obvious: undermining Israel�s historical legitimacy and giving a foundation to Islam�s claim to an Abrahamic heritage including the Ka�aba. Established Bible scholars have dismissed this theory as wishful thinking. [7] The Ayodhya dispute and the Rushdie affair are indeed connected. The ban onThe Satanic Verses was a part of a package of concessions by the Rajiv Gandhi Government to calm down Syed Shahabuddin, who had

threatened a Muslim �march to Ayodhya� on the same day when the VHP would hold a rally there. [8]

Quoted for rebuttal from Shahabuddin�s own monthly Muslim India by Harsh Narain in his article Ram Janmabhoomi: Muslim Testimony published in theLucknow Pioneer (5-2-90) and in Indian Express (26-2-90), and included in S. R. Goel: Hindu Temples, Vol. 1, 2 nd ed., Voice of India, Delhi 1998. In the ensuing debate between Prof. Narain, Mr. A. K. Chatterjee and Syed Shahabuddin, the latter has never denied nor cancelled his offer. [9] Prof. R. S. Sharma: Communal History and Rama�s Ayodhya, People�s Publishing House, Delhi 1990. [10] R. S. Sharma et al.: Ramajanmabhumi Baburi Masjid, A Historians� Report to the Nation, People�s Publishing House, Delhi 1991, p. 4 [11] The VHP evidence bundle, its rebuttal of the BMAC argumentation, a press brief, and some articles generally supporting the VHP viewpoint, have been published asHistory versus Casuitry, Evidence of the Ramajanmabhoomi Mandir presented by the Vishva Hindu Parishad to the Government of India in December-January 1990-91, Voice of India, Delhi 1991. Most of it was also included in Sita Ram Goel: Hindu Temples. Vol. 1. at least in its second edition, Voice of India, Delhi 1998. The BMAC evidence bundle has not been published. [12] Will Durant: Story of Civilization, Vol. 1, New York 1972, p. 459 [13] This incorporation of Hindu temple materials in mosques is cynically held up as a showpiece of �composite culture� and a �living evidence of secularism� by the friends of Islam such as Congress MP Manu Shankar Aiyar, cited to this effect by Swapan Dasgupta, Sunday, 10-5-1992. [14] A testimony to the same effect is also given by the Portuguese historian Gaspar Correa, who describes the site of the Kapalishwara temple on Mylapore beach (Madras), even after the temple had been forcibly replaced with a Catholic church, vide Ishwar Sharan: The Myth of Saint Thomas and the Mylapore Shiva Temple, Voice of India, p. 18-19 (1st ed., 1991) or p. 9394 (2nd ed., 1995). [15] A. G. Noorani: �The Babri Masjid Ram Janmabhoomi Question� (originally published in Economic and Political Weekly), in A. A. Engineer ed.: Babri Masjid Ram Janmabhoomi Controversy, Ajanta, Delhi 1990, p. 66. [16] Mirza Jan: Hadiqa-I Shahada (�The Garden of Martyrdom�), Lucknow 1856, included in the VHP evidence bundle: History versus Casuitry, Voice of India, Delhi 1991, p. 14 [17] Indian Express, 13-3-1990. A. K. Chatterjee: �Ram Janmabhoomi: some more evidence�, Indian Express, 27-3-1990. It is included, with the whole ensuing polemical exchange with Syed Shahabuddin, as appendix 4 in History versus Casuitry. [18]

[19]

The title of the princess�s text is given as Sahifa-I Chahal Nasaih

Bahadur Shahi (Persian: �Letter of the Forty Advices of Bahadur Shah�. It is included in the VHP evidence bundle: History versus Casuitry, p. 13-14 [20]

Percival Spear has the effrontery to declare: �Aurangzeb�s supposed

intolerance is little more than a hostile legend� (Penguin History of India, vol. 2, p. 56). The contemporary records show Aurangzeb as a pious man who faithfully practiced his religion and therefore persecuted the unbelievers and destroyed their temples by the thousands. About the denial of Islamic crimes against humanity, vide Sita Ram Goel: Story of Islamic Imperialism in India, Voice of India, Delhi, 1984. [21] A. Shourie: �Take over from the experts�, syndicated column, included inHistory versus Casuitry as appendix 1, and in A. Shourie: Indian Controversies, ASA, Delhi 1992, p. 411-418 [22] Quoted by the VHP-mandated experts in their rejoinder to the BMAC: History versus Casuitry, p. 61 [23] This text does not figure in the original BMAC evidence bundle, but its words �very ill-founded� are quoted by Prof. Irfan Habib in a speech to the Aligarh Historians Group (12/2/1992, published in Muslim India, 5/1991). The paragraph containing these words (but not the entire relevant passage) is quoted by R. S. Sharma, M. Athar Ali, D. N. Jha and Suraj Bhan, the historians for the BMAC, in their joint publication: Ramajanmabhumi Baburi Masjid, A Historians� Report to the Nation, People�s Publishing House, Delhi, May 1991, p. 20-21). [24] Cited in Harsh Narain: The Ayodhya Temple/Mosque Dispute, Penman, Delhi 1993, p. 8, emphasis added. Father Joseph Tieffenthaler records that the temple destruction was being attributed to Aurangzeb by some, to Babar by others, but this minor confusion never affected the consensus that the mosque had forcibly replaced a Hindu temple. [25] In 1608, William Finch (quoted in the VHP evidence bundle: History versus Casuitry, p. 19) had witnessed the �ruins of Ramkot�, i.e., of the Hindu temple which kept alive the tradition that that very site had once been Rama�s castle. The entire hill was called Ramkot, �Rama�s castle�, and the temple complex was certainly larger than the Babri Masjid, so that Finch may well have seen some leftovers standing there beside the mosque. [26] Francis Buchanan�s report has been put into perspective by Mr. A. K. Chatterjee, in an article intended as an episode of his Ayodhya debate with Syed Shahabuddin on the opinion page of the Indian Express, sent on 14-81990 but not published; but included in History versus Casuitry, appendix 4. For instance, Syed Shahabuddin blames �propaganda by the British� (Indian Express, 12-5-1990), and according to Md. Abdul Rahim Qureishi, [27]

secretary

of

the

All-India

Muslim

Personal

Law

Board,

�The

Britishers�..planted false stories and succeeded in misleading the masses to believe that Babri Masjid stood in the premises of a Rama temple which was demolished by Babar� (Indian Express, 13-3-1990). [28]

For a rebuttal of the British conspiracy hypothesis, vide K. Elst: �Party-

line history-writing�, The Pioneer (Lucknow reproduced inHistory versus Casuitry, app. 6. [29]

edition),

19/20-12-1990,

It should be borne in mind that the Qur�an contains dozens of injunctions

to wage war against the unbelievers, e.g.� �Make war on them until idolatory is no more and Allah�s religion reigns supreme� (2:193 and 8:39); �Those who follow Mohammed are merciless to the unbelievers but kind to one another� (48:29); �Enmity and hate shall reign between us until ye believe in Allah alone� (60:4), etc. The same attitude is found in the jihad chapters of the Hadis collections and the Islamic law codices. In Indian history, these verses and the precedent set by the Prophet have been systematically invoked to justify persecutions and temple demolitions. [30] A. G. Noorani (A. A. Engineer ed.: Babri Masjid Ram Janmabhoomi Controversy; p. 65) claims that Tulsidas �was over thirty in 1528 when the mosque was built. He lived and wrote his great work [the Ramacharitmanas] in Ayodhya.� In fact, he wrote it in Varanasi, on what is now called Tulsi Ghat, and he died in 1623, which means that he was born after 1528. [31] Sushil Srivastava: The Disputed Mosque, Vistaar Publ., Delhi 1991, ch. 5; R. Nath: The Baburi Masjid of Ayodhya, Historical Research Documentation Programme, Jaipur 1991. The latter has clearly stated that this revision of who built the Masjid, in no way invalidates the claim that it had replaced a Hindu temple: �I have been to the site and had had the occasion to study the mosque, privately, and I have absolutely no doubt the mosque stands on the site of a Hindu temple on the north-western corner of the temple-fortress Ramkot.� (letter in Indian Express, 2-1-91). [32] Srivastava (in A. A. Engineer ed: Babri Masjid/Ram Janmabhoomi Controversy; p. 36) quotes Shamsur Rehman Farooqui, a scholar of Persian, who considers the inscription written in a younger style of calligraphy common in the 19th century, and by someone not well-versed in Persian. The latter observation may as well be explained by the fact that Babar�s Turkish scribes had only recently learned Persian; whereas most literature Muslims in 19th century India were very well-versed in Persian. [33] Sri Ram Sharma: Religious Policy of the Mughal Emperors (1940), p. 2425. The same position has been taken by Mrs. Beveridge, the translator of

Babar�s memoirs, and other historians. Several hypotheses of who forged this �testament� and why are explored in J. N. Tiwari and V. S. Pathak (BHU): �Rama Janmabhumi Bhavana. The Testimony of the Ayodhya Mahatmya�, in Lallanji Gopal, ed.:Ayodhya, History, Archaeology and Tradition, papers presented in the Seminar held on 13-15 February 1992, AllIndia Kashiraj Trust, Varanasi 1994, p. 282-296 [34] Quoted in Mrs. A. S. Beveridge: Babur Nama, Delhi 1970 reprint, p. 574575.Ghazi has the same meaning as mujahid, though it is often used in the more precise sense of �one who has effectively killed infidels with his own hands�. [35] Prof. B. P. Sinha claims to know how this disuse of the Masjid came about: �As early as 1936-37, a hill was introduced in the legislative council of U. P. to transfer the site to the Hindus (�) the bill was withdrawn on an unwritten understanding that nonamaz [be] performed.� (in annexure 29 to the VHP evidence bundle, unpublished) [36] A. Shourie: �Take over from the experts�, syndicated column, 27-1-91, included in History versus Casuitry as appendix 1. Shourie was sacked as Indian Express editor, apparently under government pressure, after revealing that, in October 1990, Prime Minister V. P. Singh had aborted his own compromise arrangement on Ayodhya under pressure from Imam Bukhari, a prominent member of the BMAC. [37] Cited in Peter Van der Veer: Religious Nationalism, p. 157, with reference toNew York Times, 22-12-1991 [38] Though the Taj Mahal was obviously never a Hindu temple, the story of its construction may be a bit more complicated than simply one of an original Indo-Saracen construction on virgin land, vide Marvin H. Mills (Professor of Architecture, Pratt Institute, New York): �An architect looks at the Taj legend�, a review of Wayne Edison Begley & Ziyauddin Ahmad Desai: Taj Mahal, the Illumined Tomb, University of Washington Press, Seattle 1989. Padmini Kumar: �Another twist to the issue!�, Maharashtra Herald, 912-1990, based on an interview with P. N. Oak [40] B. G. Tilak: Arctic Home in the Vedas, 1903, and M. S. Golwalkar: We, Our Nationhood Defined, 1939 [39]

[41]

Aditya

and

Mrdula

Mukherjee:

�No

challenge

from

communalists�, Sunday Observer, 15-3-1992 [42] It may be noted that the no-temple school is not necessarily less communalist, for it imposes explanations by religious conflict where no such conflicts existed, e.g., in his president�s address before the Panjab History

Conference held at Patiala in March 1999, �Against communalizing history�, D. N. Jha communalizes history by repeating the myth of Saint Thomas� �martyrdom� at the hands of Hindus as a �well known� fact.

The Ayodhya Evidence Debate � Part II Dr Koenraad Elst

8. More on the British Concoction Hypothesis The eminent JNU historians have claimed that �it is in the nineteenth century that the story circulates and enters official records. These records were then cited by others as valid historical evidence on the issue.�[43] A few years earlier, they were still far more circumspect before making this assertion. In the early days of the Ayodhya dispute, in a letter to the Times of India, a group of JNU academics wrote: �It would be worth enquiring whether there is reliable historical evidence of a period prior to nineteenth century for this association of a precise location with the birthplace of Rama.�[44] Lawyer A. G. Noorani comments on the letter: �They were absolutely right. The myth is a nineteenth century creation � by the British.�[45] Note however that in their 1986 letter, the JNU historians had only suggested this in question format, but later many of them, like Noorani in this passage, have asserted it quite affirmatively. Noorani then quotes a letter by Indrajit Dutta and nine others: �The belief that the disputed place of worship in Ayodhya is a mosque built after destroying a temple consecrating Rama�s birthplace originates in the first half of the 19th century. In 1813 John Leyden, a British historian, published his Memoirs of Zehir-ed-din, Muhammad Babar, Emperor of Hindustan (A translation of Babar�s memoirs in Persian). In it Leyden had contended that Babar had passed through Ayodhya in March 1528 during his campaign against the Pathans. This �historical evidence� of Babar�s presence in the area was destroyed by later British authorities to propagate the belief that the �anti-Hindu� Babar had destroyed the Ram Janmabhoomi Temple and got a mosque built on the spot � though Leyden�s work makes no mention of it. Sushil Srivastava of the Department of Medieval and Modern History, University of Allahabad, has worked extensively on the history of Awadh. He substantiates his findings to show how the British authorities, specifically Colonel Sleeman,

then resident of Lucknow, anxious to justify the annexation of Awadh, exploited this controversy superbly at a time when rumblings of the 1857 mutiny were ominous.�[46] Remark the illogical claim that the British �destroyed� the document cited by Leyden to substantiate his hypothesis (and the local tradition) that Babar had passed through the town of Ayodhya, when that very document and that very hypothesis would support the theory that Babar destroyed a Hindu temple in Ayodhya, precisely the theory which the theory which the ten signatories try to �unmask� as a British concoction. The claim that the British deliberately �destroyed� this of any other historical evidence is also unsupported by any evidence. This is all the more serious considering the fact that the British archives provide a much more complete testimony of the British policies than anything from the earlier periods, and considering the ten signatories� own contention that their friend Sushil Srivastava has made a detailed study of the British machinations in Avadh. There is little doubt that the British resident was implementing policies designed to bring Avadh under British control. But what is very much in doubt (at any rate totally unsubstantiated) is the claim that he used temple history concoctions to that end. There is actually some evidence to the opposite effect. P. Carnegy wrote in 1870 that up to 1855 both Hindus and Muslims worshipped at the mosque, which led to a lot of friction, until the British separated them: �It is said that up to that time [viz. the Hindu-Muslim clashes in the 1850s] the Hindus and Mohammedans alike used to worship in the mosquetemple. Since the British rule a railing has been put up to prevent dispute, within which in the mosque the Mohammedans pray, while outside the fence the Hindus have raised a platform on which they make their offerings.�[47] As Peter Van der Veer comments on Carnegy�s testimony, against the British concoction hypothesis: �The suggestion that the local tradition is entirely invented by the British thus seems disingenuous.�[48] To quote Van der Veer in full: �The implication here is that the British found the �facts� that fitted their master narrative of the perpetual hostility between Hindus and Muslims (�) One of the problems with the above argument is that the British were not very interested in the Hindu history of Ayodhya. The most important British archaeologist of India in the nineteenth century was Alexander Cunningham. He did come to Ayodhya, not to dig up evidence of Hindu-Muslim enmity but to look for the Buddhist monuments of Saketa/Ayodhya � monuments that nobody locally was interested in, then or now. Patrick Carnegy, the commissioner, argued that the pillars of the mosque � which are now ascribed to a Hindu temple by [B. B.] Lal and others � strongly resemble Buddhist pillars, although he did not accept the local tradition that Babar built his mosque on the

�birthplace� temple. However, he also accepted the local tradition that Hindus and Muslims used to worship together in this mosque-temple until the disturbances of 1855. The suggestion that the local tradition is entirely invented by the British thus seems disingenuous.�[49] Many 19th century scholars had a strong pro-Buddhist bias in their Indian studies (setting a trend which continues till today), and the first Ayodhya surveyors display the same intellectual fashion, rather than the politically more useful interest in Hindu-Muslim friction. The dozens of scholars who have floated the British concoction hypothesis are faced with a total absence of 19th century data supporting it. Patrick Carnegy, the first British commissioner in Faizabad and still very close in time to the episode of communal violence (1852-57) and the British take-over after the Mutiny (1857-58), would have emphasized Hindu-Muslim conflict if the British concoction hypothesis had been true. Instead, he highlights the relative Hindu-Muslim harmony which existed shortly before the time of the British take-over. This moment of harmony may well have been exceptional and may have to be explained by the Muslim rulers� need to strengthen their position against British ambitions. But at any rate it was a fact which the British would not have highlighted if they had wanted to base their divide-and-rule on false history of Hindu-Muslim conflict. Moreover, if they had wanted to use historical cases of Hindu-Muslim tension to foment more such tension in their own day, they could have invoked numerous certified instances rather than having to invent any. 9. Archaeological Evidence The only serious comment on the VHP evidence bundle published in the national press (but still not reporting the outcome of the evidence debate) was a derogatory piece by Bhupendra Yadav inThe Tribune. In his despair at finding that �proven secularists�, like R. Nath and B. B. Lal, �are now nodding assent to the argument for Ram Janmabhoomi�, Yadav does try to propose an alternative to the temple destruction scenario. Acknowledging Lal�s archaeological finding of 11th century temple foundations underneath the Babri Masjid, he comes up with the following explanation: �After they occupied Ayodhya in 1194 AD, the Turkish sultans found a vacant mound at Ramkot in which lay buried the burnt pillar bases. The sultans encouraged settlements of Muslims on the mound (�) To help these Muslims pray, officials of the Babar regime built a mosque in 1528 AD.�[50] Bhupendra Yadav�s nice little scenario is of course purely hypothetical and unsupported by any document whatsoever, but that doesn�t seem to trouble him. At any rate, after the

cream of India�s secularist historians have used all their resources to create a semblance of credibility for the no-temple case, all that Bhupendra Yadav can come up with, is the hypothesis that: 1) The Hindus of Ayodhya had left the geographical place of honor in the middle of their city �vacant�, unlike the people of every other city in the whole world; 2) they had laid the foundations (the pillar bases of burnt brick) for a pillared building which they never constructed, and waited for others to come and put these foundations to proper use. This hypothesis is pretty far-fetched. But at least Mr. Yadav has the merit of explicitating what most people who deny the temple destruction scenario only claim by implication. A similar howler was launched by archaeologist D. Mandal of Allahabad University in his booklet Ayodhya Archaeology after Demolition (1993). In the first week of July 1992, a team of eight reputed archaeologists, including former ASI directors Dr. Y. D. Sharma and Dr. K. M. Srivastava, had paid a visit to the Ramkot hill in Ayodhya. They went there to verify and evaluate the findings done by labourers who had been clearing the area around the Babri Masjid on orders of the Uttar Pradesh Department of Tourism. The findings included religious sculptures, among them a statue of Vishnu (of whom Rama is considered an incarnation), and a lot of Masjid structure. Team members said that the inner boundary of the disputed structure rests, at least on one side, on an earlier temple�.[51] They pleaded for a more systematic survey of the entire hill. However, Mandal dismisses the post-demolition (and pre-demolition)[52] archaeological evidence for the temple as they �cannot be placed in context since the stratigraphical evidence is destroyed by arbitrary digging or wilful destruction�.[53] By that criterion, much of Egyptian and Harappan history should also be nullified retro-actively. Even a few decades ago, archaeological methods were unscientific by present-day standards, and the older findings were therefore not as transparent in terms of stratigraphy and chronology as desirable, yet the artifacts found were still real and did not allow for certain conclusions even if less compelling or precise. Moreover, Mandal seems to be trying to over-awe the lay reader with a distinction between strata which is very important in digging at prehistorical sites but becomes far less crucial in more recent sites, where the objects found are known �in context� because a lot of written evidence attests to their use and meaning and chronology. When you find different prehistoric stone tools, proper stratigraphy is essential if you want to know their chronological sequence. But when you find (a) a paleolithic flintstone scraper, (b) a medieval metal saw, and (c) a modern electrical sawing machine, you can safely deduce that (a) precedes (b) which in turn precedes (c), even if the stratigraphy of the site had been messed up. Likewise, it is not difficult to distinguish Hindu art from Muslim art. It would be a Martial who knows neither religion, but not for us who are familiar with both religions and their art histories. Unlike findings at pre-literate sits from unknown cultures, the objects in Ayodhya were

certainly found �in context�. For starters, they were Hindu objects found at a site where, after centuries of Hindu presence, a mosque had been built. Even if stratigraphically less than perfect, the fact of this multifarious evidence�s existence, certified a number of leading archaeologists, is undeniable. Mandal also tries to impose a contrived explanation on Prof. B. B. Lal�s old pillar bases evidence, claiming that these pillar-bases were �certainly not contemporaneous with one another� nor even �components of a single structure�.[54] This would mean that every now and then, these inconsistent Hindus or Muslims just made a hole in the ground, arbitrarily planted a pillar-base somewhere, never to build a pillar on it, then forgot about it a few decades later, another joker repeated this meaningless ritual, coicindentally yielding an orderly pattern of pillar-bases. This is secularist archaeology for you. Another strange line of argument which Mandal uses, is this: he first claims that a demolition must have involved the use of fire, then notes that �neither are there traces of burning, expected when military destruction occurs�.[55] Now, apart from the fact that fire would mostly affect the overground parts while we are only left with the underground remainder, the point is that no one insists that the temple was destroyed by fire. Numerous mosques stand on Hindu temples which were demolished alright without being burnt down. Indeed, any Kar Sevak would have told Prof. Mandal that there are other ways of demolishing a building. Could it be that Mandal is only refuting his own straw-man hypothesis because he cannot face the real evidence? For the rest, he repeats the worn-out trick of using the non-mentioning of certain facts in B. B. Lal�s brief (i.e., by definition incomplete) report to �contradict� B. B. Lal�s and S. P. Gupta�s recent revelations of findings which would only appear in the full report.[56] The fact of the matter is that the full report of B. B. Lal�s findings was withheld from publication, and that the brief report which the journalists had seen explicity refrains from giving details of the medieval findings. It is quite odd to use the brief version of the report to disprove the detailed version of the samereport�s relevant part which B. B. Lal himself had just made public.[57] That the full report is still unpublished, is most likely because the secularist authorities objected to its findings. As Peter Van der Veer reported: �However, in this case the government has not allowed the Department of Archaeology to provide evidence. It has thus fallen to B. B. Lal to do so.�[58] The same counts for the inscription found during the demolition, which clearly mentions that the site was considered Rama�s birthplace.[59] At that time, many academics declared

without any examination that the inscription, presented by scholars of no lesser stature than themselves, was a forgery. Thus according to �a group of historians and scholars� including Kapil Kumar, B. D. Chattopadhyaya, K. M. Shrimali, Suvira Jaiswal and S. C. Sharma, the �so-called discoveries of artifacts� during and after the demolition were �a planned fabrication and a fraud perpetrated to further fundamentalist designs�.[60] If the secularists had really believe this, theory would have requested access to the findings, which would readily have been granted by the minister in charge, the militant secularist Arjun Singh. They would have invited international scholars as witnesses, and curtly demonstrated its falseness for all to see. Instead, just like B. B. Lal�s report, this inscription became a skeleton in their closet, which they have to keep from public view as long as possible. In fact, the BMAC and secularist tide has frequently opposed archaeological research at the site, while the Hindu side wanted more of it, e.g.: �Nevertheless, in a BBC interview in 1991, [B. B.] Lal argued that there had been a Hindu temple for Rama/Vishnu on the spot now occupied by the mosque and that pillars of that temple had been used in constructing the [Masjid]. Lal suggested that further digging should be carried out in order to come up with more evidence � a suggestion that was denounced in the press by the historian Irfan Habib and others as a ploy to demolish the mosque.�[61] The whole anti-temple argumentation has nothing more to offer than such pitiable attempts to wriggle out from under the weight of inconvenient evidence. Only media power has so far saved the �eminent historians� and their ilk from being exposed. 10. �The Shariat does not allow Temple Demolition � Soft-line Hindu nationalists like K. R. Malkani, along with some secularists and Muslims, have often tried to convince us that Islam itself opposes the demolition of non-Muslim places of worship. They even argue that a mosque built on a demolished Hindu temple would be unlawful under Islamic law. The authority claimed as basis for this offer is the injunction

in

the Fatawa-i-Alamgiri(Aurangzeb�s

codex

of

applied

Islamic

jurisprudence): �It is not permissible to build a mosque on unlawfully acquired land. There may be many forms of unlawful acquisition. For instance, if some people forcibly take somebody�s house and build a mosque or even a jama masjid on it, then namaz in such a mosque will be against shari�at.� Without reference to the context, this might be read as a prohibition on forcibly replacing Hindu temples as mosques. Sushil Srivastava has even used this injunction as �proof�

that mosques simplycannot have been built in forcible replacement of temples. He writes that �the Quran clearly states that prayers offered in a contentious place will not be accepted (�) Thus, the whole purpose of constructing a masjid on the site of a mandir would be self-defeating (�) it is highly unlikely that even the contentious mosques in Varanasi and Mathura are located on the exact sites of temples.�[62] The Gyanvapi mosque in Varanasi is very certainly located on the exact site of the Vishvanath temple, and visibly includes remains of the old temple walls. Numerous other examples can be cited from inside and outside of India, and more cases keep on being discovered.�[63] To mention two less-known cases from Iran, the Masjid-I-Birun in Abarquh and the Jami Masjid of Aqda (still a Zoroastrian center of pilgrimage with a shrine in use on a mountain outside the town), �whose origin may be traced back to firetemples� of the Zoroastrians.[64] The author reporting on them correctly introduces his finding thus: �In the Islamic world many places of worship belonging to earlier religion have been converted to mosques.� As is clear from the Islamic law books, as Prof. Harsh Narain has shown, the injunction against building mosques on unlawfully acquired land only applies to inter-Muslim disputes, because it was quite lawful and in fact also quite common to have mosques built on temple sites grabbed from Hindus and other heathens.[65] Indeed, the forcible takeover of non-Muslim religious places is a practice initiated by Prophet Mohammed himself. The best example of the practice is the Kaaba itself, a Pagan shrine forcibly transformed into the central mosque of Islam. 11. Tampering with the Evidence In its presentation of evidence in the Government-sponsored scholars� debate in December 1990, the VHP scholars have pointed out 4 cases of attempted fraud by their opponents, attempts by BMAC sympathizers to conceal, obliterate or change evidence: removing old books from libraries, adding words on an old map. Recent editions of Urdu books (by Maulvi Abdul Karim and by Shaikh Md. Azamat Ali Nami) have suppressed chapters or passages relating the temple destruction on Ramkot hill which were present in earlier editions or in the manuscript. In an English translation of a book by Maulana Hakim Saiyid Abdul Hai, the relevant passages present in the Urdu original had been censored out, and an effort was discovered to remove all the copies of the Urdu original from the libraries. On maps included in the Settlement Record of 1861, which describe the disputed area as Janamsthan, �birthplace�, someone had added �Babari Masjid�; the interpolation was obvious after comparison with a copy of the document kept in another office. The fact that this official document could be tampered with, may well be related to the fact that the

then Revenue Minister of Uttar Pradesh was an office-bearer of the BMAC. In my opinion, these petty and clumsy attempts to tamper with the corpus of evidence, are child�s play compared with the concealment of evidence by professional scholars sympathetic to the Babri Masjid cause. In their publications on this dispute, A. A. Engineer and Prof. S. Gopal have simply kept out all inconvenient (mainly pre-British) testimonies out of the picture and have just acted as if these did not exist. In his reply to The Political Abuse of History by 25 historians of JNU, Prof. A. R. Khan shows grounds to accuse the eminent JNU historians of �not only concealment but also distortion of evidence.�[66] It is not unfair to conclude that some of the pro-BMAC authors have committed serious breaches of academic deontology. For me personally, seeing this shameless overruling of historical evidence with a high-handed use of academic and media power, was the immediate reason to involve myself in this controversial question. When A. K. Chatterjee had presented the testimony by 18th century traveler Father Teiffenthaler as evidence, Syed Shahabuddin revealed in his reply that he possessed a copy of this text (in German translation) and that he was thoroughly familiar with the text.[67] This seems to imply that while he was challenging his opponents to come up with any pre-British evidence, he was fully aware that such evidence did exist (or at the very least a document which might reasonably be claimed to contain such evidence, even if one were to be persuaded by Shahabuddin�s extremely contrived attempt to explain it away), but remained sitting on top of it in the hope that nobody would discover it. The above are cases where the attempts to suppress evidence have failed. It is quite probable that other attempts have succeeded. There may well be documents containing pertinent information, particularly about the site�s history during the Sultanate period (1206 � 1525), which have escaped the notice of Prof. Harsh Narain (the only scholar of Persian and Arabic in the VHP team) because they had been removed in time from the places where they could normally be found. Such documents would mostly be in Persian and available only in the libraries of Muslim institutions. In some of these, Prof. Harsh Narain has effectively been denied access as soon as his involvement in the Ayodhya argument became known. How many pieces of pertinent material have been concealed, removed, destroyed or altered is anybody�s guess. 12. Conclusion The clear-cut result of the Ayodhya evidence debate is still not widely known. Most of the Indian English-language papers, as well as the official electronic media, have all along been on the side of the BMAC, and they have strictly kept the lid on this information. Their reporting on the scholars� debate has been very partial and, from the moment the BMAC�s defeat became clear, increasingly vague.

If any proof is needed that the BMAC has been defeated in this debate, it is this: no one sympathetic to the Babri Masjid cause has made any reference to the outcome of this debate all through the subsequent years, even though the Ayodhya issue frequently reappeared in the news. Politicians have made a show of their �secularism� and their opposition to �religious fanaticism� by organizing �fact-finding missions� to Ayodhya and issuing statements on the dispute, but they have not made any reference to the outcome of the scholars� debate at all, When reading about the subsequent course of the Ayodhya controversy, one might get the impression that the scholars� debate never took place.

However, it did not take place, and it has yielded sufficient evidence to consider the matter as practically closed. The Babri Masjid was built in forcible replacement of a Hindu temple. With the historical question decided, that leaves only the political question to be resolved.

That political question has not been the topic of this paper, but for those who care to know, I briefly statement my position. The Rama-Janmabhoomi site has been a Hindu sacred site for many centuries. Even the JNU historians admit that it was a pilgrimage site since the 13th century. It may have been one since much earlier, but alright: Catholic pilgrimage sites like Loudres and Fatima are not even two centuries old and still they are respected. So, seven centuries is quite sufficient to certify its status of sanctity. Today, judges and governments in Australia, New Zealand and the Americas are increasingly conceding the right of indigenous communities to restart worship at their sacred sites. Consider the human right to freedom of religion, it is obvious that communities have a right to their sacred sites, and no modern or humane person would ever countenance thwarting this right for other than the most compelling reasons. So it is completely evident that Hindus have a right to use and properly adorn their own sacred sites, including Rama Janmabhoomi at Ayodhya. The problem with Ayodhya, the cause of all this rioting and wast of lives and political energy is not that they Hindus want to adorn their own sacred site with proper temple architecture that is the most normal thing in the world. The problem is that another party, the Islamist-Christian- Marxist combine in India, is trying to obstruct this perfectly unobjectionable project of architectural renovation. Against the nearuniversal consensus that all sacred sites are to be respected, Islam is taking the position that it has the right to occupy and desecrate the sacred sites of other religions. Genuine secularists must oppose and thwart this obscurantist design, and allow the normal process of Hindu architectural renovation to take its course. PART I

Romila Thapar, Bipin Chandra et al: �The Political Abuse of History�, in Asghar Ali Engineer: Babri Masjid/Ram Janmabhoomi Controversy, p. 235 [44] Letter signed by Romila Thapar, Muzaffar Alam, Bipin Chandra, R. Champalakshmi, S. Bhattacharya, Harbans Mukhia, Suvira Jaiswal, Shireen Ratnagar, M. K. Palat, Satish Sabarwal, Sarvapelli Gopal and Mrdula Mukherjee, datelined 21-10-1986, published in Times of India, 28-10-1986. [43]

A. G. Noorani: �The Babri Masjid/Ram Janmabhoomi Question�, Asghar Ali Engineer: Babri Masjid/Ram Janmabhoomi Convtroversy, p. 66. [45]

[46]

Letter in The Statesman, 22-10-1989, quoted by A. G. Noorani: �The Babri

Masjid/Ram Janmabhoomi Question�, Asghar Ali Engineer: Babri Masjid?Ram Janmabhoomi Controversy, p. 66-67 [47] P. Carnegy: A Historical Sketch of Tehsil Fyzabad, Lucknow 1870, quoted by Harsh Narain: The Ayodhya Temple/ Mosque Dispute, Penman, Delhi 1993, p. 8-9, and by Peter Van der Veer: Religious Nationalism, p. 153; emphasis mine. [48] Peter Van der Veer: Religious Nationalism, p. 160 [49] ibid, pp. 159-160 Bhupendra Yadav: �Temple issue built on weak base�, in The Tribune, 7-31992 [51] Indian Express, 4-7-1992 [52] Presented in Y. D. Sharma et al.: Ramajanma Bhumi: Ayodhya. New [50]

Archaeological Discoveries, published by Prof. K. S. Lal for the Historians� Forum, Delhi 1992. An earlier smaller find of religious artifacts on 10 March 1992 in diggings by the Uttar Pradesh tourism department was reported in the press, e.g., Anil Rana: �Artifacts found near Babari Masjid�, Statesman, 11-3-1992. A further discovery was made a month after the demolition, vide: �New Evidence at Temple site found�, Pioneer, 8-1-1993 [53]

D. Mandal: Ayodhya Archaeology after Demolition. A Critique of the �New�

and �Fresh� Discoveries, Orient Longman, Delhi 1993, p. xi. [54] ibid, p. 63 [55] ibid, p. 65 [56]

E.g.,: �No pillar bases at Ayodhya: ASI Rport�, Times of India, 7-12-90, and

A. G. Noorani: �The Babri Masjid Ram Janmabhoomi Question�, in A. A. Engineer:Babri Masjid Ram Janmabhoomi Controversy, p. 64 [57] B. B. Lal explained this matter and restated his long-held positions in his article: �Facts of history cannot be altered�, in The Hindu, 1-7-1998, in reply to a slanderous

editorial,

�Tampering

with

history�, The

Hindu,

12-6-1998.

Undaunted, D. N. Jha attempted to restore the confusion: �We were not shown Ayodhya notebook�, The Hindu, 27-7-1998. [58] Peter Van der Veer: Religious Nationalism, p. 157. On several occasions, Marxist historians had insinuated that B. B. Lal, one of the greatest living archeologists, has changed his conclusions about pre-existent temple in order to satisfy the �requirements of VHP politics� (thus the JNU historians Romila Thapar, S. Gopal and K. N. Panikkar in Indian Express 5-12-1990). Among those who came out in Prof. Lal�s defence and certified his statements are K. V. Soundarajan (ASI), I. Mahadevan, R. Nath, K. V. Raman, and K. K. Mohammed (ASI, the only Muslim who participated in the Ayodhya excavations, letter in Indian Express, 15-12-1990). In a speech to the Aligarh Historians Group (12+-2-1991), published in Muslim India, (5/1991), Prof. Irfan Habib has made similar personal attacks on Prof. B. R. Grover. Prof. B. P. Sinha, Prof. K. S. Lal and Dr. S. P. Gupta, who have represented the VHP in the scholars� debate, and on Prof. B. B. Lal. [59]

Presented by Dina Nath Mishra: �Writing in the debris�, Telegraph, 1-1-1993

[60]

�Historians pick holes in �evidence��, Times of India, 26-12-1992 Peter Van der Veer: Religious Nationalism, p. 158-159

[61]

Sushil Srivastava: �The Ayodhya controversy�, in A. A. Engineer ed.: Babri Masjid/Ram Janmabhoomi Controversy, p. 38 [62]

E.g.: �One night during the monsoon of 1991, the rain was so heavy that it washed away the wall that was concealing the frontage of the Bijamandal mosque [63]

raised by Aurangzeb in 1682� in Vidisha, and �the broken wall exposed so many Hindu idols that the Archaeological Survey of India had no choice but to excavate�, as mentioned by Prfaull Goradia: �Heritage hushed up�, Pioneer, 12-12-2000. [64] M. Shokoohy: �Two fire temples converted to mosques in central Iran�, Papers in Honour of Professor Mary Boyce, E. J. Brill, Leiden 1985, p. 546 Harsh Narain: �Ram Janmabhoomi: Muslim Testimony�, in Lucknow Pioneer(5-2-90) and Indian Express (26-2-90), included in S. R. Goel: Hindu Temples, vol. I, 2nd ed. (1998), p. 169-175 [65]

Prof. A. R. Khan�: �In the name of �history�� (originally published in Indian Express, 25-2-1990) and the whole subsequent exchange with the JNU historians has been included in History versus Casuitry, app. 2, and in S. R. Goel: Hindu Temples. Vol. 1, 2nd ed. (Voice of India, Delhi 1998), p. 243-263. We have to give the JNU historians credit for trying at least this once to refute criticism, but we cannot commend the secretiveness about this exchange in their later writings. On the other hand, their secretiveness is quite eloquent in its own way. [67] The whole debate between A. K. Chatterjee and Syed Shahabuddhin is included in S. R. Goel: Hindu Temples, vol. 1, and 2nd ed., p. 176-211; [66]

Shahabuddin�s claim to �have the German text� is on p. 198

Found and Lost: the Ayodhya Evidence Dr. Koenraad Elst (21 July 2003) The North-Indian town of Ayodhya is scene to a controversy over a Hindu sacred site, the Rama Janmabhoomi or �birthplace of Rama�. That is where a mosque, the Babri Masjid, was built in forcible replacement of an earlier Hindu temple, in 1528 under Moghul emperor Babar at the latest, and demolished by a Hindu crowd in 1992. The controversy pits Hindu activists against a combine of Muslim activists and the so-called �secularists�, an array of Hindu-born Marxists and US-oriented �globalists� who share a hatred of Hindu assertiveness. The matter has been sub-judice at the High Court of nearby Allahabad since 1950, when Hindus had taken control of the mosque by installing statues of the deified hero Rama, his wife Sita and his brother Lakshmana. Now, Hindu organisations are preparing to build a proper temple at the site. Muslims organisations are reclaiming the site, and the judges have endlessly been postponing their intervention. At least until the winter of 2002-2003, for then the court secretly asked a specialized firm to scan the underground by radar for traces of the foundation of a temple predating the mosque. One of the questions on which a verdict could arguably be based, was whether there had indeed been a temple at the site before the mosque was built.

A Splendid Consensus Actually, until 1989 there had been no question about the site�s history. All the written sources, whether Hindu, Muslim or European, were in agreement about the pre-existence of a Rama temple at the site. �Rama�s birthplace is marked by a mosque, erected by the Moghul emperor Babar in 1528 on the site of an earlier temple�, according to the 1989 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, entry �Ayodhya�. Neither was there any document contradicting this scenario: no account of a forest chopped down to make way for the mosque (already unlikely in the centre of an ancient town), no sales contract of real estate to the mosque�s builder, nothing of the kind. By contrast, there was testimony after testimony of Hindus bewailing and Muslims boasting of the replacement of the temple with

a mosque; and of Hindus under Muslim rule coming as close as possible to the site in order to celebrate Rama�s birthday every year in April, in continuation of the practice at the time when the temple stood. And if authors of testimonies may be unreliable, there was also the archaeological evidence: in the 1970s, a team of the Archaeological Survey of India led by Prof. B.B. Lal dug out some trenches just outside the mosque and found rows of pillar-bases which must have supported a larger building predating the mosque. Moreover, in the mosque itself, small black pillars with Hindu sculptures had been incorporated, a traditional practice in mosques built in forcible replacement of infidel temples to flaunt the victory of Islam over Paganism. The only remaining question about the site was its status in the period 11921528. In 1192 and the subsequent years, practically all the Hindu temples and Buddhist monasteries in North India were demolished by Mohammed Ghori and his Turkish invaders. It is impossible that the medieval temple at the site could have survived until 1528. The most likely scenario is the one well-attested at another famous temple site: the Somnath temple in Gujarat. No less than nine times did Hindus reclaim it as a temple, until Muslims retook it and turned it into a mosque again. Since Ayodhya was a provincial capital of the Delhi Sultanate, opportunities for wresting the site from Muslim control were certainly more limited than in the case of the outlying Somnath temple. Then again, the frequent infighting among the Muslim elite may have given rebellious Hindus some opportunities too. From peculiarities in the architecture of the Babri Masjid, art historians on both sides of the debate (Sushil Srivastava, R. Nath) have deduced that the main part of the structure had been built well before the Moghul invasion, probably in the 14 th century. In that case, the tradition that it was built by Mir Baqi may be based on the following scenario: towards the end of the Sultanate period, Hindus may have managed to recapture the site and to turn it into a functioning temple, until Babar and his lieutenant Mir Baqi firmly imposed Muslim control again and gave some finishing touches to the mosque architecture in replacement of any Hindu elements that had come to adorn it. But this must for now be kept inside speculative brackets. What is certain is that a major Hindu temple at the site was demolished by Islamic iconoclasm and replaced with a mosque symbolizing the victory of Islam over Infidelism. Of that, evidence is plentiful and of many types.

The JNU fatwa Yet, in 1989, all this evidence was brushed aside by a group of 25 academics from Jawaharlal Nehru University (Delhi), mostly declared Marxists, who issued a statement denying the existence of any evidence for the temple: The Political Abuse of History. Not that they offered any newfound

data to support this dramatic reversal of the consensus, all they had to show was some totally contrived reinterpretations of a few of the existing data plus the worn-out slogans against �Hindu communalism�. But the sympathy of the Indian and international media for their purported motive of �upholding secularism� assured the immediate worldwide adoption of the new partyline as Gospel truth: the demolished Rama temple had merely been a malicious invention of the ugly Hindu nationalists. Note that they didn�t just settle for a political rejection of any plans to replace the mosque with a temple. They could sensibly have argued that the demolition of the temple happened long ago and could not now be a reason for reversing the event. That exactly had been the verdict given by a British judge in 1886 when ordering a status quo at the site. No, instead they went as far as to base their rejection of a new temple construction on the claim that no demolition had ever taken place because no temple had existed there. This was reckless, for if the political choice for the preservation of the mosque were based on the historical non-existence of the medieval temple at the site, then the eventual discovery of such a temple would justify a contrariothe replacement of the mosque with a restored temple. At least in theory, but the Marxists were confident that their opponents would never get the chance to press this point. Under the prevailing power equation, they expected to get away with a plain denial of history rather than a mere insistence on divorcing history from politics.

Secular debate-dodgers In December 1990, the short-lived Socialist-dominated government of Chandra Shekhar invited the two lobby groups involved, the Vishva Hindu Parishad and the Babri Masjid Action Committee, to mandate a team of scholars for discussing the historical truth of the matter. Misled by the media into believing that the Hindu claims were pure fantasy, the BMAC officebearers arrived ill-prepared, expecting a cakewalk over the discredited case of the VHP fanatics. They were speechless when the VHP team presented dozens of documents supporting their case. The BMAC then invited a team of proper historians chaired by Marxist professor R.S. Sharma, who arrived at the next meeting with the demand that they be recognized as �independent scholars� entitled to sit in judgment on the controversy, i.e. to pass a verdict between their BMAC employers and their VHP opponents. The government representative did not grant this hilarious demand. At the next meeting, they declared that they hadn�t studied the evidence yet and needed six more weeks, a strange statement from people who had just led 42 academics in signing a petition confirming once and for all that there was

absolutely no evidence at all for a temple. At the meeting scheduled for 24 January 1991, they simply didn�t show up anymore. In July 1992, the state government of Uttar Pradesh, dominated by the Hindu nationalist BJP (Indian People�s Party), ordered the levelling and cleaning of the terrain around the mosque. Before and during the work, archaeologists were permitted to search the site. They discovered dozens of pieces of temple architecture and Hindu religious sculptures. A cry went up among the Marxist academics that the sculptures had been stolen from museums and planted at the site. The central government (Congress) locked the pieces away. The minister in charge, Arjun Singh, was a militant secularist and eager to embarrass the BJP, yet the academics never asked him to have the sculptures investigated by an international team of experts who could have certified their allegation. Indeed, their behaviour was one of strictly ignoring this new body of evidence, as if they didn�t believe their own claim of a forgery. In October 1992, the central government of Narasimha Rao (Congress) tried to revive the scholars� discussion. This time, the BMAC team quite reasonably protested that there was no point in talking unless the VHP called off its announced demonstration in Ayodhya scheduled for December 6. The VHP was adamant that Hindu society�s right to the site could not be made dependent on mundane factors such as judicial verdicts and academic disputes. This was an instance of the Hindu nationalist movement�s long tradition of smashing its own windows and of spurning the intellectual struggle which in this case had been going in its favour. On the plea that �you don�t need arguments to love your mother�, meaning Mother India, the Hindu nationalists had always neglected intellectual and media work and favoured a mindless activism. Except for one (S.P. Gupta), all the scholars who had argued their case at the government-sponsored discussion had been outsiders to the movement; the VHP leadership itself, like its BMAC counterpart, never took the evidence debate very seriously.

The Demolition So, activism replaced argument on December 6, 1992. The official leadership represented at the demonstration in Ayodhya by L.K. Advani (who today is Deputy Prime Minister) had wanted to keep the affair purely ceremonial, singing some hymns to Rama as a sufficient act of confirming the Hindu claim to the site. But an elusive leadership within the crowd had other plans. A small group had come well-prepared for a demolition job, and once they broke ranks from the official ceremony to methodically pull down

the mosque, much of the crowd joined in. Hindu movement officials tried to stop them, even when the police withdrew from the scene, but to no avail. The BJP state government resigned at once, but the central government did not physically intervene until the next morning, when the activists had cleared the debris and consecrated a little tent with the three statues as the provisional new Rama temple. In a typical instance of the Congress culture, Narasimha Rao on the one hand declared that the mosque should be rebuilt and on the other hand created an accomplished fact on the ground which practically precluded the prospect of rebuilding the mosque. It is an odd but highly significant fact that the Indian media subsequently refused to open a search for who exactly organised the demolition. None of them seemed to care for the scoop of the year: �Thisman (photograph) organized the demolition.� Clearly, they thought it politically most profitable to pin the blame on the so-called �hardliner� Advani, the one Hindu leader who was most definitely not behind it. He had burst into tears upon seeing the fabled discipline of his activists break down and had been narrowly dissuaded from resigning as party leader in his post-demolition confusion. During the demolition, another load of temple sculptures came to light from among the debris, including an inscription detailing how it was part of a temple to �Vishnu, slayer of Bali and of the ten-headed one�, built in ca. 1140 under king Udai Chand. Rama is considered an incarnation of Vishnu, and the two enemies he defeated were king Bali and king Ravana, usually depicted as ten-headed in recognition of his brilliant mind. As the reader will expect by now, this evidence too was locked away and strictly ignored by the �secularists�. Until 2003, when People�s Democracy, the paper of the Marxwadi Communist Party, alleged foul play. It seemed that the Lucknow State Museum mentioned in its catalogue a 20line inscription dedicated to Vishnu and satisfying in every detail the description of the piece discovered during the demolition,-- but which had gone missing since the late 1980s. So it was alleged that someone had stolen this inscription from the museum and planted it at the site shortly before the demolition. During the initial scholars� debate in 1990-91, the VHP-mandated team had discovered that no less than 4 documents kept in Muslim libraries had demonstrably been tampered with in order to remove references to the �birthplace temple�. Here the secularists had their great occasion to get back at them and expose them in turn as cheaters who had planted a stolen inscription. However, museum director Jitendra Kumar declared that the piece had never left the museum, even though it had not been on display, and he showed it at a press conference for all to see

(Hindustan Times, 8 May 2003). In spite of many similarities, it differed from the Ayodhya find in shape, colour and text contents. Meanwhile, in 1993 the central government had approached the Supreme Court with a request to evaluate the historical evidence. It is clear that Narasimha Rao, the most pro-Hindu Prime Minister of independent India so far (more so than the wobbly BJP leader Atal Behari Vajpayee), hoped to use a positive verdict as the basis for a settlement favouring the Hindu claim. But in October 1994, the Supreme Court turned down the request.

Scanning for the underground remains The resumption of the evidence debate took place in late 2002, when the Allahabad High Court secretly ordered the scanning of the site�s underground. The Tojo India Vikas International Company carried out a Ground Penetration Radar survey and found indications of a structure in and around the mosque site. Canadian geophysicist Claude Robillard, invited by Tojo to give his expert reading, couldn�t say just what building had been there, but: �All I know is, there is some structure under the mosque.� (Rediff.com, 19 March 2003) The existence or otherwise of the medieval temple never depended on the results of the radar scanning: it had already been proven by a wealth of documentary and archaeological evidence, which in any other circumstance would have been deemed conclusive. It was only because of the brutal denial of the evidence by a group of vocal academics and allied politicians that the Court considered it wiser to come up with a new and as yet unchallenged type of evidence. To the Court, the radar findings were sufficient encouragement to order a further dig at the site in order to verify that there were foundations of a building predating the Babri Masjid. We should be clear in our minds about what kind of evidence could be expected, as this digging took place at the foundations level. This is not where sculptures or furniture normally reside (though a few objects were found nonetheless) but where the unadorned foundations of walls and pillars have quietly survived the onslaught that destroyed the overground constructions they supported. Also, foundations do not by themselves inform us of the type of building they supported, whether secular or religious. In the months when the digging took place, the newspapers mentioned some new findings once in a while. Thus, �an ancient stone inscription in the Dev Nagari script and a foundation were discovered in the ongoing excavation in

the acquired land in Ayodhya today�, while �stone pieces and a wall were found in other trenches� and �a human figure in terracotta, sand stone netting, decorated sand stone in three pieces were found in one trench� (The Hindu, 5 May 2003). In this light it is understandable that a Babri Masjid supporter, Naved Yar Khan, approached the Supreme Court with a petition to prohibit all archaeological digging at the contentious site; which was rejected (The Hindu, 10 June 2003). The secularists had always opposed archaeological fact-finding at the site; they don�t like science.

The great Indian vanishing trick After the ASI had been registering new findings for months, a handful on Monday, one on Tuesday, several on Wednesday, the world learned to its surprise that the final tally somehow amounted to zero. �No proof of structure in Ayodhya: ASI report�, according to Rediff.com (11 June 2003) The article confidently asserts that �the report also contradicts the Ground Penetration Radar survey�, but it doesn�t quote the ASI report. It only quotes Zafaryab Jilani, counsel for the Muslim claimant to the site, the Sunni Central Waqf Board, who alleges that �the ASI report does not speak about any such evidence�. According to The Asian Age (11 June 2003), �The ASI team that conducted excavations at the disputed site where the demolished Babari masjid once stood in Ayodhya has not found any proof of a structure�. However, when you take the trouble of reading the subsequent fine print, you discover that this paper admits that while the radar findings of structural remains of a preMasjid structure were not confirmed at some indicated spots, they were confirmed at others. Yet the title falsely sums this up as: �Nothing found below Babri site: ASI�. The Marxist-controlled Chennai daily The Hindu of 11 June likewise lets out the truth indirectly: the ASI �is reported to have said in its progress report that no structural anomalies suggesting the evidence [sic; existence?] of any structure under the demolished Babri Masjid had been found in 15 of the new trenches dug up at the site�,-- but those 15 were not the only ones investigated. So, at the very end of the article, there is an almost laconical addition: �Structural anomalies were, however, detected in 15 other

trenches, the report said.� But the impression the paper seeks to convey, is summed up in the title: ��No evidence of structures in some trenches��. It is as if someone is hit by two bullets, one scratching his arm but the other lethally penetrating his heart, and a newspaper reports: �Man shot at, unharmed by one of the bullets�. Likewise, the Times of India of 11 June announced that there was absolutely definitely no sign whatsoever at all of a pre-Babri structure: �ASI finds no proof of structure below Babri Masjid: report�. Six days later, it still tried to keep up this version, now citing an unnamed �senior ASI official� who admitted finding new archaeological evidence such as sculptures and inscriptions but not the type of structural evidence suggested by the radar scan: �But the structural bases so far do not lend credence to the mandir theory.� Questioned further, he turns out not to base this belief on the new digging results but on older ones: �According to him, the theory of �a preexisting temple because of structural bases� has been demolished �convincingly� over the years. He points to the discovery of pillar bases by B.B. Lal in the mid-1970s during his excavation of Ramayana sites in Ayodhya and says: �It has not been found to be fit evidence for a temple�.� (Times of India, 17 June 2003) This when B.B. Lal himself had confirmed that his findings do support the temple theory. The Times of India article is titled: �Babri pillar bases do not support temple theory�. So at least it acknowledges the existence of some pre-Babri artefacts, viz. the pillar-bases. Now, how can there be foundation structures such as pillar bases in the ground unless they had been put there to support a building? The question is logical, but a bit too logical for the fanciful world of Indian secularism. The unnamed ASI official explains: �The excavated structural bases are neither aligned nor belong to a single period.� Now this is sensational. What it means is that we have discovered a culture where people (Hindus, as it happens) once in a while put a pillar base into the ground, and then another one, and another one, without alignment, without any plan to make them support a straight wall or a preconceived building. And then they would leave it at that, and a century later some other fellow would add a few more pillar bases, again without plan, just for the fun of it. And all this foundational work would never be crowned with an overground

building, it would just remain sitting in the ground waiting for the Muslim invaders to build a mosque over it. That�s secularist archaeology for you. In disinformation campaigns, the first stage of planting false news must be followed up with a second stage of making the false news into a familiar presence. Once it is repeated in women�s magazines, in TV chat shows, even in jokes, it is becoming part of the collective consciousness. That is the ambition of every disinformation operative worth his salt. In this case, at least, we have seen secularists grab the ball and run with it from day one. In interviews of Hindu or Muslim leaders, questions were opened with a reference to the �fact� that nothing was found underneath the Babri Masjid. Some Hindu leaders, such as the Kanchi Shankaracharya (who had just led a failed initiative to negotiate an amicable solution), were so little informed that they didn�t even contradict the claim. Columnist Saeed Naqvi, known as a moderate within the spectrum of Muslim opinion, spices an otherwise reasonable opinion piece (�Muslims must be generous�, Indian Express, 13 June) with the off-hand statement: �The ASI has found nothing under the mosque.� Clearly, some people are leaving no stone unturned to make this claim part of the received wisdom.

What was found For those who hadn�t noticed anything wrong in the reports of 11 June claiming that nothing had been found, another news item on the same day should have alerted them. The party most likely to be elated over the nonfinding of traces of a temple should be the Muslim pro-Masjid lobby groups, such as the Sunni Central Waqf Board. And yet: �ASI fabricating evidence in Ayodhya, says Waqf Board� (The Hindu, 11 June 2003). Or in a full sentence: �The Sunni Central Waqf Board, a plaintiff in the Ramjanmabhoomi Babri Masjid title suit, and some Muslim parties have accused the ASI team carrying out excavation work at the acquired land in Ayodhya of �fabricating� archaeological evidence there.� So, according to this witness above suspicion, the ASI team clearly did find evidence, only it wasn�t supportive of pro-mosque and anti-temple claims and therefore had to be dismissed as �fabricated�.

All the papers carried this news, citing the Board�s counsel, Mr. Zafaryab Jilani: �ASI fabricating evidence in Ayodhya: Waqf board� (Press Trust of India, 10 June); �ASI fabricating evidence: Waqf Board� (Times of India, 11 June); �Foul play alleged at Ayodhya dig� (The Pioneer, 11 June). In the free-for-all of Indian secularism, we needn�t fuss over the fact that this grim allegation against the integrity of highly qualified scientists was levelled without any evidence. The decisive point is that, against the secularist claims and against their own interest, the Muslim plaintiffs admitted that the ASI excavators have not come up from their trenches empty-handed. Whereas some Indian papers threw themselves headlong into the mendacious operation of denying the ASI findings, others did set the record straight, or at least gave space to guest authors to do so. As no one in his journalistic hurry seems to have tried to summarize the whole of the report, and everyone was satisfied with bits and pieces if at all they had seen the report, the numbers of finds differ according to the source. According to the Press Trust of India(11 June), �eight articles were found in excavation work in nine trenches on the acquired land around [the] makeshift temple�. Most helpfully, this source adds the communal detail: �There were 131 labourers including 29 Muslims engaged in the digging work today�. The internet version of The Hindu, www.hinduonnet.com (22 June), mentions �structural anomalies in 46 trenches� of the 84 trenches investigated, as well as �pillar bases and drains in some of the trenches�. In Outlook India (23 June), Sandipan Deb gave a more detailed overview of the report: �While most papers covering the new ASI report last week said that it claims there was no structure under the Babri Masjid, what the report actually says is that of the 30 recent trenches, the team has found man-made structures in eight, and none in 16. In five, they couldn�t decide due to �structural activities in the upper levels� (mainly the plinth of the Babri Masjid). One trench they did not survey. Among the structures listed in the report are several brick walls �in east-west orientation�, several �in northsouth orientation�, �decorated coloured floor�, several �pillar bases�, and a �1.64-metre high decorated black stone pillar (broken) with yaksha figurines on four corners�. Now that I am sounding like a �running-dog of the VHP� to the �lunatic lefties�, let me quickly add that they also found

�Arabic inscription of holy verses on stone�. But what many people have missed out on � due to bias or sloth � is that these are findings only from the period of May 22 to June 6. This is not the full list. If they read the earlier reports, they would also find listed several walls, a staircase, and two black basalt columns �bearing fine decorative carvings with two cross-legged figures in bas-relief on a bloomed lotus with a peacock whose feathers are raised upwards�.� For good measure, we should also quote a Hindu nationalist�s observations. On the website of the National Volunteer Corps or RSS (www.rss.org, 24 June 2003), Chetan Merani writes: �The excavations so far give ample traces that there was a mammoth pre-existing structure beneath the three-domed Babri structure. Ancient perimeters from East to West and North to South have been found beneath the Babri fabrication. The bricks used in these perimeters predate the time of Babar. Beautiful stone pieces bearing carved Hindu ornamentations like lotus, kaustubh jewel, alligator facade, etc., have been used in these walls. These decorated architectural pieces have been anchored with precision at varied places in the walls. A tiny portion of a stone slab is sticking out at a place below 20 feet in one of the pits. The rest of the slab lies covered in the wall. The projecting portion bears a five-letter Dev Nagari inscription that turns out to be a Hindu name. The items found below 20 feet should be at least 1,500 years old. According to archaeologists about a foot of loam layer gathers on topsoil every hundred years. Primary clay was not found even up to a depth of 30 feet. It provides the clue to the existence of some structure or the other at that place during the last 2,500 years. More than 30 pillar bases have been found at equal spans. The pillar-bases are in two rows and the rows are parallel. The pillar-base rows are in North-South direction. A wall is superimposed upon another wall. At least three layers of the floor are visible. An octagonal holy fireplace (yajna kund) has been found. These facts prove the enormity of the pre-existing structure. (�) Moulded bricks of round and other shapes and sizes were neither in vogue during the middle ages nor are in use today. It was in vogue only 2,000 years ago. Many ornate pieces of touchstone (kasauti stone) pillars have been found in the excavation. Terracotta idols of divine figurines, serpent, elephant, horserider, saints, etc., have been found. Even to this day terracotta idols are used in worship during Diwali celebrations and then put by temple sanctums for invoking divine blessings. The Gupta and the Kushan period bricks have been found. Brick walls of the Gahadwal period (12th Century CE) have been found in excavations. Nothing has been found to prove the existence of residential habitation there. The excavation gives out the picture of a vast

compound housing a sole distinguished and greatly celebrated structure used for divine purposes (�).�

The world media as amplifier of the secularist version In spite of a very aggressive campaign of lies by a few spearheads of �secularism�, the true story was in the public domain for anyone with the curiosity to find out. Yet, the international media�s reporting on the matter consisted exclusively in copying the most mendacious version. The Reuters despatch for 11 June 2003 is titled: �Dig finds no sign of temple at Indian holy site�. More than 90% of the text rehashes the story of riots and other incidents that have punctuated the dispute. What little it says about the new findings, is this: �A three-month excavation has found no evidence yet to back nationalist claims of a Hindu temple under the ruins of a mosque in northern India (�) The state-run Archaeological Survey of India has submitted an interim report saying digging so far at the site in Ayodhya town had �not found remains of any structure that remotely resembles a temple�, a source at the Survey said on Wednesday.� Note that the actual report is not quoted, merely what �a source� at the ASI has claimed about it. Note also the slanted phrase about �nationalist claims of a Hindu temple�, as if there were anything typically nationalist about acknowledging historical facts. The existence of that temple had been a matter of consensus among Muslims, Europeans and Hindus, both nationalist and anti-nationalist, until the JNU professors issued their fatwa to disregard the evidence and deny history. Note also that no mention is made of the wealth of evidence extant before the radar scanning and the recent diggings: a fine example of how the public is led by the nose into seeing only a very small selected part of the matter rather than the full perspective which one is entitled to expect from quality media. And this is BBC News on 11 June 2003: ��No sign� of Ayodhya temple�. Here again, no information from the horse�s mouth, only from secondary sources: �There have been widespread reports across the Indian media that the exacavation of a disputed holy site in India has produced no evidence of a Hindu temple, according to archaeologists� reports.� Again, most of the article is but a rehashing of stale riot news, and then one

sentence: �In an interim report, the ASI says it has not found any evidence of ruins of a Hindu temple.� Which is a lie, as well as a misrepresentation of the stakes of the present round of digging: ruins normally stand on and above the ground level, what the archaeologists were digging for was the foundational structures. As we move deeper into the periphery, from theTimes of India via the BBC to the local papers in distant countries, we see the last references to the actual findings disappear. By now, the report has been transformed into a morality tale, with the light-bringing secularists exposing the dark lies of the monstrous Hindu nationalists. In the Flemish tabloidDe Morgen (12 June 2003), Asia desk editor Catherine Vuylsteke calls the fact that a temple had been forcibly replaced by a mosque �an evil fairy-tale�. And this is her version of the news: �The temple, it turned out yesterday, is a phantom. For three months, experts have dug for traces of it, all in vain. By the end of the month their definitive report should follow, but for now Rama�s home remains unfindable. Bad luck for the ultranationalists, who had hoped to base their next election campaign on the fairy-tale. But they still might manage to, some fear. Yesterday already, the first politicians expressed doubts about the archaeologists� findings. Other Hindu leaders said, and this is even more dangerous, that the facts don�t matter. What counts is what you believe. We now know that Rama didn�t live in Ayodhya, while Allah did until 1992.� This passage is symptomatic for most of what is wrong with India reporting. It is totally based on a source which makes no secret of its partisan involvement, indeed of its unreserved hatred for the Hindu nationalists. But the most striking aspect of this particular instance of distorted reporting is that much of it is purely deductive: from a small core of facts, all manner of seemingly logical assumptions are added to put flesh on the bones of the poorly understood Indian situation, and these speculations are presented as fact. Thus, it seems plausible to assume that the BJP wants to use Ayodhya in its elections campaigns, which it did in 1989 and 1991. However, to the frustration of its more activist sympathizers, the BJP has effectively disowned the Ayodhya issue immediately after reaping the benefits in the 1991 elections (when it became the leading opposition party), and has stayed away from it in the campaigns of 1996, 1998 and 1999. Indeed, the demolition was partly an outcry of the activists against the BJP leadership, whose participation in the ceremony they correctly saw as perfunctory and insincere. Once the BJP came to power and proved time and again how it was in no mind to build the temple, criticism from the hardliners has only increased. Given the infighting between temple loyalists and pragmatists,

the last thing the BJP now wants is an election campaign focused on the Ayodhya issue. Second case in point, the first politicians to express doubts about the archaeologists� findings have not been the Hindu nationalists but the Babri Masjid lobbyists. All through the past 14 years, the secularists have always opposed archaeological research at the site, saying that this would open a �Pandora�s box� of similar initiatives at the literally thousands of mosque sites where temples used to stand (and omitting to mention their fear that in Ayodhya itself, this digging was sure to prove them wrong, as it now has). Yet, because the recent archaeological findings are falsely presented as going against the Hindu nationalist position, distant India-watchers deductively assume that the opposition against the diggings must come from the Hindu nationalists.

Conclusion Distorted or even totally false reporting on communally sensitive issues is a well-entrenched feature of Indian journalism. There is no self-corrective mechanism in place to remedy this endemic culture of disinformation. No reporter or columnist or editor ever gets fired or formally reprimanded or even just criticized by his peers for smearing Hindu nationalists. This way, a partisan economy with the truth has become a habit hard to relinquish. Yet, in the instance under consideration, the brutal distortion of the facts pertaining to the recent archaeological findings may be a matter of more than just a bad habit. Some people learn from their failures, but these disinformation specialists may also have learned from their successes. Consider a few earlier instances. After the BJP came to power in 1998, India should have witnessed a genocide of the minorities, gas chambers and what not. At least if you believed the predictions made by the secularists in the preceding years. Nothing of the kind happened, so in the next two years the secularists tried to make the most of what few incidents did take place. In particular, all manner of small incidents within the Christian community were at once blamed on the evil hand of Hindu nationalism. Thus, in the Central-Indian town of Jhabua, a quarrel among mostly christianized tribals led to the rape of four nuns. With no Hindu nationalists in sight, the media decided nonetheless that this was an act of Hindu nationalist cruelty against the poor hapless Christian minority. Though the police investigation confirmed the total innocence of the Hindu nationalists in this affair, their guilt has been consecrated by endless repetition in the media. While the media in India couldn�t prevent the truth from quietly making itself known, the international media have never

published a correction, and the story of �four nuns in Jhabua raped by Hindu nationalists� now keeps on reappearing as an evergreen of antiHindu hate propaganda. Likewise, a series of bomb blasts against Christian churches in South India was automatically blamed on the Hindu nationalists. In that version, the story made headlines around the world: Hindu bomb terror against Christians. Hindu organizations alleged that it was a Pakistani operation, which only earned them ridicule and contempt. Yet, when two of the terrorists blew themselves up by mistake, their getaway car led the police to their network, and the whole gang was arrested. It turned out to be a Muslim group, Deendar Anjuman, with headquarters in Pakistan. But this was not reported on the front-pages in India nor made the topic of flaming editorials; and in the international media, it was not reported at all. In the worldwide perception of Hindu nationalism, the association with raping nuns and bombing churches has stuck. So, moral of the story: feel free to write lies about the Hindu nationalists, for even if you are found out, most of the public will never hear of it, and you will not be made to bear any consequences. Striking first is what counts. Any second round in which the truth comes out, will hardly be noticed. Indeed, conditioned by the initial lie, many readers and viewers will deride the correction as an attempt at �denial� of the grim facts which �everybody knows well enough�. And the audience abroad will never even be informed that there has been a correction. In the present case: what are the chances that BBC World will ever broadcast the real results of the ASI investigation in Ayodhya? If the issue ever comes up again, chances are that the editor will dismiss it as uninteresting: �Haven�t we already done something on those Ayodhya excavations lately?� And even if it gets adequate coverage, it will never be able to undo the impression created by the initial story. So, apart from being the natural implementation of a bad habit, this particular lie about the excavations in the secularist Indian media may well be part of a deliberate ploy to condition public opinion against the true story if and when it ever comes out. For fourteen years, the secularists have worked so hard to keep the lid on the Ayodhya evidence that they don�t want some puny radar scanners or some muddy-handed archaeologists to expose the facts now. THE END