By Sunita Viswanath
Much has been said and written about the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, by Hindu extremists in 1992, the waves of communal violence that have plagued India since then, and the anti-Muslim pogroms that took place in Gujarat under Narendra Modi’s watch as a new Chief Minister.
Today, I am watching in utter despair as most in my extended family and community are celebrating and venerating the Ram Temple being inaugurated in Ayodhya. This feels like the biggest leap being taken by India towards being a Hindu supremacist totalitarian state. Prime Minister Narendra Modi will become the first head of state to also conduct national puja ceremonies, conflating religion and state.
As a progressive Hindu activist, my work has been to build a community and movement of Hindus who are centered on love and unity, an alternative to the path of violence and hatred offered to us by the BJP, RSS, and mainstream Hindu institutions.
Ayodhya is a city every Hindu child learns about. It is the city in the Ramayana where Rama and his siblings Lakshmana, Bharata, and Shatrughna are born; the city that Rama was exiled from for 14 years; and where he returned from exile to rule as King. It is also the city from which Lord Rama himself banished Sita Devi because she had been kidnapped by Ravana and spent time as Ravana’s captive in Lanka. Sita was made to enter fire to prove her chastity, and she emerged untouched by the flames. But Rama banished her anyway. Lord Rama’s reasons for banishing Sita Devi are complex, and we are taught to weigh and consider Lord Rama’s dharma (duty) as a ruler and his dharma as a spouse.
As an ordinary Hindu, I am empowered to make choices in life because my Gods themselves weigh the various priorities, pressures, and limitations, to arrive at difficult decisions. As a Hindu, I am allowed to disagree with some of the decisions made by the very Gods I revere. The oldest scripture, the Rig Veda, instructs us to “let noble thoughts come from all directions.” To me, this is an instruction to keep an open mind, and not fall into the trap of constrained dogmatic thinking.
My mother raised me with the teaching that there is no pure good and pure evil. If Rama was pure good, he would not have unjustly banished Sita. And if Ravana were pure evil, he would have brutalized Sita while she was his captive. We all have the capacity for good and evil, and the best we can do is to strive to be good. Lord Krishna says in the Gita that the ideal devotee is concerned with lokasangraha (wellbeing of all), and is “para dukha dukhi” (seeing the joys and sorrows of others as one’s own).
I have been raised to believe that the best Hindu devotee strives to be kind and generous, compassionate, non-violent, truthful, altruistic, open-minded, and open-hearted when it comes to ideas and people who are considered as “other.”
When the Supreme Court of India made its decision in 2019 that though they declared it a crime that Hindu extremists destroyed the Babri Masjid, the land on which it stood would be granted to Hindus for a Ram Temple anyway. My message was clear: My Ram would not want a temple on the site of such carnage.
“As an ordinary Hindu, I am empowered to make choices in life because my Gods themselves weigh the various priorities, pressures, and limitations, to arrive at difficult decisions.
I expressed support for the efforts of Ayodhya Hindu priest Yugal Kishore Shastry, Gandhian peace activist Sandeep Pandey, and Kudhai Kidmatgar’s National Coordinator Faisal Khan, to build a center for interfaith peace and harmony in Ayodhya. This center never came to be.
When I tried to travel to Ayodhya in January 2020 with Sandeep Pandey to meet Yugal Kishore Shastry to discuss this communal harmony center, we were stopped by the police and barred from entering. I asked why I could not travel to Ayodhya to pray and pay my respects to Mahant Yugal Kishore Shastry, and the police cited Section 144 of the criminal code which exists to prevent people from gathering in large numbers and causing disturbance.
A few days later, I managed to drive to Ayodhya from Varanasi without any trouble. It was our first time in Ayodhya, and we were expecting a town like any other Hindu holy place: streets lined with stores selling flowers and puja items, the sounds of prayers and bhajans, and a general air of festivity. However, we were met by a silent ghost town with armed soldiers on every corner. We needed to get permission to enter the road that led to Sastriji’s humble Ram Janki temple. His family fed us, and local Muslim and Dalit community members came to meet us. We felt menacing eyes on us as we took some photos of the fenced-off site of the demolished mosque, where construction was yet to begin.
I traveled to India again a year ago, on Hindus for Human Rights’ “Prema Yatra” (Pilgrimage of Love). Spurred by the hatred and genocidal intent that was shared by Hindu religious leaders in Haridwar in December 2021, we made this pilgrimage to ashrams throughout North and South India. We spoke to Hindu religious leaders – mahants, swamis, sadhvis – about their feelings about the country at large, but also about the Hindutva ideology that has taken over Hindu religious spaces. The more progressive and inclusive Hindu religious leaders we met were isolated and alone, rather despondent, and some spoke only on condition of anonymity. Our Prema Yatra report did not divulge their names but shared our findings.
One of the places along our Prema Yatra route was Ayodhya: the most challenging stop of all. Because we weren’t traveling with any of India’s heavily surveilled human rights defenders, we had no problem entering Ayodhya. We stayed in a new and modern hotel in the adjacent town of Faizabad. In fact, Faizabad was full of construction, clearly being readied for an influx of religious tourists from all around the world. Ayodhya itself was not the ghost town I had visited just three years before. The town was crowded, and there were bulldozers everywhere, demolishing old structures and getting ready for new constructions. We went to the old part of town where the Babri Masjid once stood, and now the Ram Mandir was being constructed. Armed police guarded the entrance to the area known as RJB Corridor. Ram Janma Bhoomi (birthplace of Lord Rama) was now an acronym with a corporate logo.
We weren’t allowed to take phones and cameras past the entrance, or into the temple. The winding, meshed-in corridor leading to the main shrine had huge advertisements all along the way, not advertisements for the temple or for anything to do with the temple. Rather, they were advertisements for all the major Indian banks. Every leg of this pathway to the inner sanctum had armed guards, many of them women, watching us silently. There was a female recorded voice telling us about the temple, its timeline, its designer, its cost, and other facts that must be impressive to most pilgrims. When we reached the main sanctum, we were greeted with the ironic truth that this whole temple, the destruction and death that paved the way here, the business and tourism venture that this temple has become, all of it, center in this inner sanctum, where Ram Lalla will reside. Ram Lalla is the name given endearingly to Baby Rama, since this site is believed to be his birthplace.
My colleague and I looked at each other in horror and disbelief. No Lord Rama we could embrace would tolerate this. And no baby, God or Human, would care about any of this. It took us some days to recover from the dystopian reality that was Ayodhya. The only saving grace was that the religious leaders we met in Ayodhya (I will not share their names, to protect them) were deeply saddened by this aberration and perversion of the Hindu faith.
Today sees the inauguration of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya by Modi himself. Progressive priests and renunciants who have voiced any opinion in opposition to this temple have not been permitted to come to Ayodhya this week. Hindu religious leaders who live in Ayodhya, and have spoken in the past against this temple have all left Ayodhya this week for their own safety. Our one brave Ayodhya-based Hindu religious leader who has not left town, Mahant Yugal Kishore Shashtri, will be holding a multi-faith satsangh in his tiny Ram Janki Mandir.
At least there will be one space in Ayodhya representing my Hinduism and my Lord Rama.
Jai Siya Ram.
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Sunita Viswanath is the Executive Director of Hindus for Human Rights.
21 January 2024
Source: americankahani.com