India's Past Becomes a Weapon
By SHASHI THAROOR
I'll tell you what your problem is in India," the American businessman said. "You
have too much history. Far more than you can use peacefully. So you end up
wielding history like a battleaxe, against each other."
The businessman does not exist; I invented him for a novel, "Riot," that came out
last year and concerns a Hindu-Muslim riot that erupts during a campaign to erect a
Hindu temple on the site occupied for four and a half centuries by a mosque. Yet
the views of this fictional character seem more real each day as reports describe a
renewed cycle of killings and mob violence over plans to build a temple to Ram
above the ruins of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya, in northern India. In a nonfiction
afterword to "Riot," I alerted readers to the threat by Hindu extremists to
commence construction in mid-March this year. I take no solace whatever from
prescience. The tragedy in India is that even those who know history seem
condemned to repeat it.
It is one of the ironies of India's muddled march into the 21st century that it has a
technologically inspired vision of the future yet appears shackled to the dogmas of
the past. The temple town of Ayodhya, in India's most populous state, Uttar
Pradesh, has no software labs; it is devoted to religion and old-fashioned industry.
In 1992 a howling mob of Hindu extremists tore down the Babri Masjid, which
occupied a prominent spot in a town otherwise overflowing with temples. The
mosque had been built in the 1520's by India's first Mogul emperor, Babur; the
Hindu zealots vowed to replace it with a temple to Ram. In other words, they want
to avenge history by undoing the shame of half a millennium ago.
India is a land where history, myth and legend often
overlap; sometimes Indians cannot tell the difference.
Some Hindus claim the Babri Masjid stood on the exact
spot of Ram's birth and had been placed there by Babur to
remind a conquered people of their subjugation. Historians
— most of them Hindus — reply that there is no proof that
Ram ever existed in human form, let alone that he was
born where the believers claim he was. More to the point,
there is no proof that Babur demolished a Ram temple to
build his mosque. To destroy the mosque and replace it
with a temple would not be righting an old wrong but
perpetrating a new one.
To most Indian Muslims, the dispute is not about a specific
mosque — Babri Masjid had lain unused for half a century
before its destruction, most of Ayodhya's Muslims having
emigrated to Pakistan upon Partition of British India in
1947 — but about their place in Indian society. For
decades after independence, Indian governments had guaranteed their security in a
secular state, permitting the retention of Muslim "personal law" separate from the
country's civil code and even financing hajj pilgrimages to Mecca. Two of India's
first five presidents were Muslim, as have been innumerable cabinet ministers,
ambassadors, generals and Supreme Court justices. Until the early 1990's, India's
Muslim population was greater than that of Pakistan. The destruction of the mosque
felt like an utter betrayal of the compact that had sustained the Muslim community
as a vital part of India's pluralist democracy.
The Hindus who attacked the mosque had little faith in the institutions of Indian
democracy. They saw the state as soft, pandering to minorities out of a misplaced
and Westernized secularism. To them, an independent India, freed after nearly
1,000 years of alien rule (first Muslim, then British) and rid of a sizable portion of
its Muslim population by Partition, had an obligation to assert an identity that
would be triumphantly and indigenously Hindu. They are not fundamentalists in any
common sense of the term, since Hinduism is a religion without fundamentals: there
is no Hindu pope, no Hindu Sunday, no single Hindu holy book and indeed no such
thing as a Hindu heresy. Hindu "fundamentalists" are, instead, chauvinists, who root
their Hinduism not in any of its soaring philosophical or spiritual underpinnings —
and, unlike their Islamic counterparts, not in the theology of their faith — but in its
role as a source of identity. They seek revenge in the name of Hinduism as badge,
rather than of Hinduism as doctrine.
In doing so they are profoundly disloyal to the religion they claim to espouse,
which stands out not only as an eclectic embodiment of tolerance but as the only
major religion that does not claim to be the only true religion. All ways of worship,
Hinduism asserts, are valid, and religion is an intensely personal matter related to
the individual's self-realization in relation to God. Such a faith understands that
belief is a matter of hearts and minds, not of bricks and stone. The true Hindu seeks
no revenge upon history, for he understands that history is its own revenge.
The Hindu zealots who chanted insultingly triumphalist slogans helped incite the
worst elements on the Muslim side, who set fire to a railway carriage carrying
temple campaigners; in turn, Hindu mobs have torched Muslim homes and killed
innocents. As the courts deliberate on a solution to the Ayodhya dispute, the
violence goes on, spawning new hostages to history, ensuring that future
generations will be taught new wrongs to set right. We live, Octavio Paz once
wrote, between oblivion and memory. Memory and oblivion: one leads to the
other, and back again. And history is not a web woven by innocent hands.
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