GREEN SIGNAL FOR A WRECKING CAMPAIGN?

Combined with loud street cries, a spate of lawsuits across the land have heightened anxieties in India. These suits and cries demand searches in the foundations of some of India’s mosques, including ancient and deeply cherished ones, for possible signs of earlier Hindu temples.

These activities are in clear violation of India’s Places of Worship Act of 1991, which laid down that whatever a place of worship was on the date of independence (August 15, 1947), so it would remain. Altering its religious or sectarian character would be a criminal offence.

The Act continues to apply to every temple, mosque, church, synagogue, or gurudwara in India. One exclusion was carefully made. The Act specified that it would not apply to Ayodhya’s Babri Masjid. The future of that sixteenth-century mosque in India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh or UP, was left, in 1991, to negotiations or the courts.

In December 1992, as UP’s BJP government and thousands of its police looked on in approval, the Babri Masjid was demolished by mobs who’d been persuaded that the Hindu god Ram was born on its grounds a few thousand years ago. In January this year, thirty-one years after the mosque’s demolition, a grand temple for Ram was inaugurated on those grounds by Prime Minister Modi.

THE PAST CANNOT BE CHANGED

The logic behind the 1991 Act was plain. Whether just or unjust, constructive or destructive, the past’s events could not be changed. You could create a new future. You could build a fine new temple. However, you could not demolish a mosque. That would destroy peace.

Despite the clarity of the 1991 Act, multiple lower courts, psychologically impacted by the conversion in Ayodhya, by media propaganda, and by vigilante demonstrations, have authorized attempts to investigate the antecedents of mosques. In taking such a stand, these lower courts were bolstered by a 2022 remark by the then chief justice of India’s Supreme Court, D. Y. Chandrachud (he retired on Nov. 10), to the effect that the 1991 Act “did not expressly bar” investigations even while it clearly barred the conversion of an existing place of worship into a sacred place for members of another sect or religion.

A stark picture of the dangers invited by Justice Chandrachud’s 2022 remark can be obtained from this conversation for the online platform The Wire between intrepid journalist Karan Thapar and one of India’s most distinguished lawyers, Dushyant Dave:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncNr7qzKlRQ

On November 24 this year, a court-mandated “survey” of the Shahi Jama Masjid in the town of Sambhal in western Uttar Pradesh was opposed by its Muslims who feared for the future of their mosque. In resultant violence and police action, four Muslims were killed. Meanwhile a suit against the masjid was filed locally.

HOW LONG WILL RELIEF LAST?

Five days later, in a step that gives some hope (for how long?), India’s Supreme Court, now led by Justice Sanjiv Khanna, intervened and ordered the Sambhal court not to proceed in the suit against the mosque until a petition filed by Sambhal’s Muslims against the survey order was listed in the Allahabad High Court, which is UP’s highest court. (Justice Khanna’s term is due to end in May next year.)

In the absence of an unequivocal statement from Prime Minister Modi that his government in New Delhi and state governments ruled by his party, the BJP, will enforce the 1991 Act, and that “physical investigations” of allegations about ancient monuments would only destroy peace and therefore will not take place, we should expect a destructive season ahead of us.

Politically, calls for such “investigations” to “pave the way” for avenging “ancient injustice” can carry emotional appeal and could produce local “heroes” in hundreds of places in India. One of the gravest current calls of this kind relates to the famous site in Ajmer, in the western state of Rajasthan, associated with the ancient Islamic mystic, Muinuddin Chishti (1143-1236), who was buried there.

THREAT TO ANCIENT AJMER SITE

Millions love and visit this Ajmer site, repeating pilgrimages done century after century. Most visitors are Muslims, but many are Hindus too, for Muinuddin Chishti is widely known among the people of India as Gharib Nawaz -- the Poor’s Benefactor. The sixteenth-century poet, Tulsidas, whose Ramayana, or the Story of Ram, remains Hindi-speaking India’s most loved religious text, often used this expression, Gharib Nawaz, for God the Almighty.

These two words, Gharib Nawaz, don’t sit well with Hindu extremists, for they descend from Arabic-Persian rather than from Sanskrit and are therefore seen as polluting a pure Hindu culture, which should have nothing to do with anything originating outside India. Another pollutant in this perspective, a major one in fact, is the Urdu language, which uses a great many Arabic or Persian words.

Over the centuries Urdu has been the vehicle for a magnificent literature, apart from being the primary language for immense numbers of Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. From the Hindu extremist perspective, however, if India is to become pollution-free, the sounds and shapes of Urdu, “foisted” centuries ago by “outsiders,” should be removed.

At a time when India should be spearheading a global defence of democracy and equality, campaigns for “cultural purity” and “historical justice”, code phrases for Hindu supremacy, seem to be filling India’s public spaces.

As for the Chishti site, while orthodox Islam may forbid the veneration of graves, this Ajmer memorial, several centuries older than the Taj Mahal of Agra, is as precious to Muslim India, and to all of India, as the latter. Undermining the Chishti site’s future is nothing less than a frontal assault on sanity, on India’s face, and on India’s life, not merely on the Constitution and the 1991 Act.

HATE IS THE DRIVER

Which is not to say that the other “investigations” currently being demanded are not ominous. The unfortunate yet undeniable truth is that these demands, often couched in the language of archaeology, are fuelled by pure hate. Mosques are hated because they exist. Muslims are hated because they exist. “This ancient mosque or this monument should go away” is only another way of saying that India’s Muslims should not exist -- or exist only as serfs or untouchables.

Among India’s Hindus, only a microscopic minority desires the obliteration of Muslim signs, but the loud (and orchestrated) calls of this minority drown the majority’s murmurs for sanity. Threateningly, moreover, calls against a mosque are often accompanied by steps to prevent humble Muslim hawkers from selling their eatables and wares in the vicinity of the hated structure and even beyond. The threats, the pushing and the bullying are inspired by a wild vision of a Muslim-free India. Even a reminder that India’s Muslims number around 220 million cannot evoke the frightening scale of the vision’s insanity.

The campaign for wrecking “humiliating signs” gathers momentum, yet Prime Minister Modi remains silent. His muteness gives the green signal to the wrecking campaign and shatters his reputation.