http://expressbuzz.com/opinion/columnists/demolitions-1528-to-911/205682.html


BRILLIANT ESSAY ON BABRI TO GROUND ZERO !

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Demolitions, 1528 to 9/11

Aditya SinhaFirst Published : 11 Sep 2010 11:52:00 PM ISTLast Updated : 11 Sep 2010 12:43:33 AM IST

In Delhi the speculation this week is about September 24, when the Allahabad High Court’s Lucknow bench will announce its verdict on the 60- year-old title dispute in Ayodhya, the birthplace of the deity Rama. Very likely, it will remain reserved and be referred to the Supreme Court. Yet even Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was worried enough to wonder before a group of editors over breakfast about how India would react to the judgment, and how that would reflect on our evolution as a nation. Many feel the chances of a verdict favourable to the Waqf Board are low, since the 2003 dig by the Archaeological Survey of India showed that a temple had indeed existed long before the Babri Masjid was built in 1528.


The Congress party is murmuring that a verdict at this juncture would be inconvenient as it might spoil the coming Delhi Commonwealth Games. This is bizarre because (a) for the UPA there will never be a convenient time for the Ayodhya verdict, and (b) the CWG are anyway spoilt already (built on a former Yamuna riverbed, the CWG village is plagued by mosquitoes, monkeys, flood worries, bad traffic, unfinished infrastructure and diminishing international participation). The actual cause of UPA anxiety is that a verdict saying that the archaeological evidence supports the claim of Hindu groups will anger Muslims and endanger princeling Rahul Gandhi’s plans of winning the next Lok Sabha elections.

A verdict in favour of the Waqf Board will hurt the Congress party in the coming Bihar elections as it will anger the upper castes, who are disgruntled with Nitish Kumar’s government and whose votes the Congress has the best chance of capturing after a long electoral drought (depending on how much the princeling campaigns in north Bihar, given that Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi has been asked to stay away). The party is in a bind.

They are not the only ones for whom a verdict is inconvenient. Though Mayawati is leaving nothing to chance, throwing a heavy security blanket in and around Ayodhya (and there’s still a fortnight left till the verdict), she would have preferred endless postponement. Whatever the verdict is, it will help the young rising star of UP politics — no, not the princeling, but Akhilesh Yadav, the son of Samajwadi Party supremo Mulayam Singh. Akhilesh is so politically active on the ground these days that he threatens to monopolise the opposition space in UP. That may not damage Mayawati in the 2012 UP assembly polls, but it will destroy Rahul Gandhi. Mayawati perhaps would prefer avoiding Rahul’s electoral demolition; it might suit her to have the boy not strong but not irrelevant either, and thus easier to extort.

In the event that the Hindus win the case, remember that they have long offered to help reconstruct the Babri Masjid if the mosque reconstruction committee agrees to shift it to another place. Contrast this with the other side of the world. Muslim groups want to build a community centre incorporating a mosque at a site close to “Ground Zero”, where the World Trade Center’s twin towers were demolished by Islamist terrorists nine years ago today.

Though US officials like New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and President Barack Obama are not against the mosque (in keeping with their Constitution), American voters are (a NY Times poll shows a slight majority opposed, while an ABC News poll shows more than two-thirds opposed). This makes you wonder why Muslim groups proposed the mosque in the first place. Did they not expect it would be provocative? In pursuing a solution to the Ayodhya dispute, Indian conservatives have been more willing to accommodate Muslim groups than are American conservatives at “Ground Zero”. True, the insistence for the temple has a political aim but frankly, there is nothing wrong with that; this aim is linked to the cultural expression of a growing Hindu middle class. It is also true that the Hindus are being as intransigent as the Muslims in insisting on the disputed spot as their own, but then there is the precedent of the rebuilding of the temple at Somnath in Gujarat: the mosque was peacefully shifted elsewhere, and there is no residual resentment. In fact, Hindu fanatics are laughable compared to Muslim fanatics: M F Hussain never had his hand chopped off, though that might not console T J Joseph, former lecturer at Newman College in Thodupuzha, Kerala.

Hindu fanatics are positively benign compared to the Floridian pastor who is keeping everyone in suspense over his threat to burn the Quran. To say that he’s a fringe element looking for publicity is not the point; most Muslims would agree that Osama bin Laden too belongs to the lunatic fringe. This pastor might even have a smaller congregation than the 1.2 lakh readers of Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, whose 2005 series of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed led to worldwide turmoil.

It merely underscores the point that in America, the land of radical individualism, freedom of expression is sometimes taken to absurd extremes, and it is scary to think of where this spiral of competitive nonsense will one day lead.

Perhaps comparing India, with the world’s third largest Muslim population, to America is invalid. India’s history, geography and demography compel it to be egalitarian and mutually accommodative. America, isolated by the two largest oceans, is a country that was violently settled by Europeans, where immigration of non-whites was not possible till a few decades back, and where Christianity is overwhelmingly the dominant religion. America is the most powerful nation in the world; India is still struggling to be taken seriously (an endeavour not helped by the CWG).

Indian leaders never speak of crusades so if the Ayodhya verdict is not in the Waqf Board’s favour, it ought to end the chapter and move on. Some may argue that defusing this issue will just encourage the BJP to find another religious issue to politicise, so it is pointless to concede the fight. Yet even the BJP realises that religion in politics lately follows the law of diminishing returns, so there is an argument for letting bygones be bygones post-verdict.

Yet if either of the parties were amenable to compromise then we wouldn’t be sitting around waiting for the judgment. All that is likely to happen after the verdict is further litigation, and continuing resentment.

A day will come when someone will ape former US Speaker Newt Gingrich, who said there should be no “Ground Zero” mosque until Saudi Arabia allows churches or synagogues; someone will make a polemical point about temples and Mecca.

Frankly, you can’t help but be pessimistic about religious tolerance, and therein lies the importance of today’s anniversary

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Sunny Leone a true Canadian DESI now back in India !.