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Ayodhya as identity marker

THE Ayodhya verdict has been a grave disappointment considering it handed over the disputed site to Triloki Nath Pandey of Vishva Hindu Parishad representing the deity, without a judicial closure to the criminal act of the demolition of the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992.

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Rajesh Ramachandran

THE Ayodhya verdict has been a grave disappointment considering it handed over the disputed site to Triloki Nath Pandey of Vishva Hindu Parishad representing the deity, without a judicial closure to the criminal act of the demolition of the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992. Had the mosque been standing, the site could not have been given away for the construction of a new temple. So, does not the decision legitimise the destruction of the mosque? Will those who brought the mosque down be ever punished? What next, Kashi and Mathura? These questions are the troubling legacy of the Ayodhya verdict. But politically, the verdict, the dispute, the demolition and the Babri-Janmabhoomi movement should be analysed and understood as high points in identity politics.

In his book The Guilty Men of Partition, Ram Manohar Lohia has very interestingly pointed out that the estrangement between the Hindu and Muslim communities had only got exacerbated after the Partition. There was no attempt by the Congress to practise the politics of assimilation; instead the Congress post facto legitimised the pre-Partition religious separatist politics of the Muslim League by aligning with it soon after Independence. “This silly belief in the magic properties of industrialisation coupled with the desire for vote catching led, twelve years after Partition and freedom, to such a ghastly situation in Kerala that supposedly nationalist and democratic parties combined with the Muslim League, thereby causing direct recrudescence of outspoken Muslim Leaguism and separatism all over the country. Twelve years after the country was partitioned, Congressism and Praja Socialism found it necessary once again to undertake and complete another foul act of separatism,” Lohia wrote.

The Congress’ conduct in 1959, which Lohia referred to, was actually an attempt to get rid of the first ever democratically elected communist government in the world and this alliance with the Muslim League, which continues till date, sort of legitimised identity politics and religious or caste nationalism. The sad commentary about the Congress’ alliance with the Muslim League in Kerala was that after volubly seeking ‘Pakistan or Kabristan’, the Muslim League leaders did not shift to Pakistan but merely changed their party’s name to Indian Union Muslim League. Yet the Congress helped legitimise this entity simply because it supported the Congress in its quest for power.

Unfortunately, identity politics can only be practised on the basis of separateness, uniqueness or otherness. When a group is formed on the basis of a religious or caste label, it is essentially stepping aside and terming the larger body ‘the other’. The othering, hence, is a two-way process that reinforces one’s identity and decries the other's as hateful, inimical and antagonistic. Thus, the very premise of identity politics is hatred. This is the most obvious reason identity politics often slips into militancy, terrorism and insurgency, be it the Islamist insurgency in Jammu and Kashmir or Tamil militancy in Sri Lanka. But unconsciously the minority group, by the reinforcement of its own uniqueness, is shaping a majority identity too. This majority identity project in competition with a minority group can take a militant turn, as happened during the destruction of the Babri Masjid. And as it gains political heft, this majoritarian militancy often gets validated by various aspects of the State power. Can the judiciary remain immune?

Politically, minority identity politics assumes importance only where the minority group is numerically dominant enough to win elections. This was the case in Kerala, where the Congress used it to its electoral advantage in the 1960 elections. In fact, even the politics played by the CPM over the Sabarimala verdict last year was an attempt to bolster the pro-minority image of the government by proactively helping women activists travel to Sabarimala while not implementing the Supreme Court’s order in a Church issue with similar alacrity.

Ayodhya, too, was the culmination of a series of actions that led to the forging of a Hindu majority identity, which seemed apparently impossible. The Shah Bano verdict of the Supreme Court and its overturning by the Rajiv Gandhi government and the banning of The Satanic Verses were seemingly endorsing right-wing minority politics, but it was actually bolstering right-wing majority politics: regressive political measures by the government of the day breaks the moral backbone of progressive politics. The Mandal politics of the dominant OBCs, and the Bahujan Samaj Party with its slogan of ‘tilak taraju talwar, inko maro jute chaar’ were all forcing the numerically insignificant groups among upper, backward and scheduled castes to come together to form an unconscious social alliance against the numerically dominant communities. Former BJP general secretary KN Govindacharya termed it social engineering of the non-Yadav backward castes in UP and Bihar. In such a scenario, the national leadership of the Hindu identity party ought to have belonged to a person from a numerically insignificant community: LK Advani, a Sindhi.

However, the Hawala scandal and the party’s internal dynamics dictated the anointment of AB Vajpayee as Prime Minister, which upset social engineering altogether and the need for Hindu identity politics. Yet, it has to be remembered that Vajpayee won his second term only with a military victory against Pakistan, the source and symbol of Islamic identity politics. Though Narendra Modi won the 2014 elections on issues of corruption and development, his politics is a throwback to the BJP’s social engineering era, when the party desperately clung on to the support of numerically insignificant groups trying to forge a Hindu platform against dominant castes, and the Muslims who have always aligned with a dominant caste to share power.

The Easter Sunday bombings in Sri Lanka and the Pulwama attack in J&K helped strengthen these majoritarian forces to return to power. The Ayodhya verdict ought to be read in the context of this politics of majority identity. The moot question is whether the Haryana and Maharashtra election results signal a shift or not. Well, every time identities get sharpened, we need to understand that it is not just one community that is getting strengthened, it is also forcing another group to girdle up for a fight.

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