The Secularist History-Sheet on Ayodhya

WE CAN BEGIN WITH Prime Minister Modi's post on X (formerly, Twitter) five days ago.

The key words in Narendra Modi's X-post are, "in my lifetime, I will witness this historic occasion." 

Evidently, Prime Minister Modi voiced the sentiment of millions of Hindus throughout the world when he wrote this. What he left unvoiced was his own significant role in the long train of momentous events that will fructify on January 22, 2024 when the grand Sri Rama Mandir will be consecrated in Ayodhya. The starkest contrast for Modi downplaying his role in the Ayodhya movement is available in the protracted history of credit-swindling by the Congress party. Both its party members and its sprawling ecosystem would have us believe that India itself didn't exist until Nehru invented it.      

In the heady and uphill years of the Sri Rama Rath Yatra, hardly anyone in the country had even heard of Narendra Modi's name. The Christian Lord might work in mysterious ways but Clio's diktats are unfathomable. We're reminded of this memorable quote from Will Durant: 

I am loath to recount personal anecdotes but this profound occasion justifies a bit of personal indulgence, and so I may be forgiven.

From the time the Sri Ramajanmabhoomi Movement began to crystallise in my formative years, and all the way up to my initial forays as a writer in 1999, a misshapen inkling had always nagged me.

I intuitively knew that the Sri Ramajanmabhoomi Movement was never about politics.

It was not a "movement" even in the ideological sense.

It wasn't solely about devotion to Sri Rama although He was its Katru, Karma and Kriya.

And then around the end of 1999, it dawned on me that the struggle to reclaim the Sri Rama Mandir was just a powerful billow blowing apart the clouds of dust that had enclosed the millennial war to reclaim Hindu civilisation in the land that had birthed it.

I realised that the political system, after India achieved political independence, was the greatest obstacle blocking this reclamation.

In this process of realisation, I have sat at the feet of past Masters and have been guided by original trailblazers, directly and indirectly.

Consonant with the Sanatana ethos, realisation should always triumph over the intellect, and realisation is the womb of conviction. 

What made thousands of ordinary Hindus depart from their faraway homes to travel to Ayodhya with just a brick in their hands and unshakeable piety for Sri Rama in their hearts? What made them suffer the gruelling plight of filthy train travel in the chaotic '90s and brave the bullets of police forces let loose by insensitive governments manned by people with Hindu names? What made them die by the hundreds when Mulayam Singh Yadav hunted them down like street dogs? What fuelled their spirit and kept the light of their fight aflame in the face of multiple hostile governments supported by a global cabal that has explicitly declared its intent to dismantle Hindu Dharma? What made them persist, despite knowing that they might never witness the dawn of success in their own lifetime?  It was Sri Rama... but it also transcended Sri Rama... it was their stainless faith in a spiritual civilisation that created Sri Rama. 

From that turbulent era to the present period witnessing a slow civilisational recovery, the journey has been epoch-making. In retrospect, it is tragic that there is no comprehensive volume that narrates this virtuous story.  

But there is another, familiar and darker side to this saga. 

TWO UBIQUITOUS THEMES emerged from my extensive conversations with the people of Ayodhya on a fairly recent trip to this sacred Tirtha-kshetra, the birthplace of Sri Ramachandra.

1. The moment I mentioned the word “Babri Masjid,” the reply was uniform from every person: “Kaun sa Masjid?” (Which mosque?)

2. “All these people... the then government, historians, experts, secularists, film-walahs…all of them ganged up together and transformed this Punyabhumi into an international crime scene, and have portrayed all Hindus as criminals solely because they worship Prabhu Ram ji. In those days, if we said we were from Ayodhya, in some circles, we were looked upon as if we were murderers.”

This... is the precise contribution of the squalid Nehruvian-Progressive-Secularist-Left-Liberal-Communist-Marxist squad of eminent phonies masquerading as archeologists, historians, editors, journalists, intellectuals columnists and commentators to the discourse on Ayodhya.

And this was also the exact technique that Lenin, Stalin and Hitler had employed: a systematic and lethal demonisation of entire communities — the Tsars, the so-called bourgeois, the Jews, the Gypsies, etc. Over time, this pile of targeted slander was mainstreamed as truth and enabled all such dictators to legitimise, and then justify their genocide. 

In the case of India and in the specific case of the Sri Rama Mandir, the target of a similar, sustained slander was the Hindu community. To get the briefest glimpse of the heartless psyche of the slanderers, recall that till date, not a single secularist has condemned Mulayam Singh Yadav's mowing down of fifty-plus innocent kar sevaks.     

On the contrary, they began to poison public discourse on an epic scale thanks to their absolute stranglehold over institutions: universities, intelligentsia, media, etc. This stranglehold helped them unleash a flurry of deranged articles, which in reality, were mere variations of exactly one sentence: secularism died in India the day Babri Masjid was demolished.

IN HINDSIGHT, it was the Congress party that was really demolished as a consequence of their unrestrained anti-Hindu activism. The demolition of the disputed-structure was the true preface to the measly 44 Lok Sabha seats that the Congress got in 2014. 

In this light, a reasonable case can be made that this secularist cabal actually sealed the fate of the Congress party thirty years ago. 

But an even more fundamental case needs to be made against this secularist cabal. This relates to the industrial-scale crimes they have committed against the Sanatana civilization and against three generations of living Hindus through their relentless and vicious propaganda... a propaganda inspired by Communism, a savage and soulless ideology responsible for the maximum genocides in the twentieth century.

Unfortunately, the secularists have gotten away with it.