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Building the future vs remaking the past

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When Chief Justice of India (CJI) Sanjiv Khanna and justices Sanjay Kumar and KV Viswanathan resume hearing petitions involving the Places of Worship Act of 1991, the media will once more call the petitioners “Hindu” or “Muslim”. After the CJI and his fellow justices give their judgment, the media are likely to headline the “victory” of one side. In fact, the judgment will be far more consequential. It will have a bearing on the contest between two clashing visions, one wanting democracy with equality in India, the other promising the majority’s supremacy. The judgment will also influence the world’s perception of Hinduism.

Sambhal: Police personnel keep a vigil near Shahi Jama Masjid, in Sambhal, Uttar Pradesh, Wednesday, Nov. 27, 2024. Two days after violence broke out during a court-ordered survey of a Mughal-era mosque, life in Sambhal was gradually returning to normal on Tuesday with schools reopening and several shops selling daily essentials resuming operations. (PTI Photo) (PTI)
Sambhal: Police personnel keep a vigil near Shahi Jama Masjid, in Sambhal, Uttar Pradesh, Wednesday, Nov. 27, 2024. Two days after violence broke out during a court-ordered survey of a Mughal-era mosque, life in Sambhal was gradually returning to normal on Tuesday with schools reopening and several shops selling daily essentials resuming operations. (PTI Photo) (PTI)

Hinduism’s global image was aided by Swami Vivekananda’s famous words before the Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893: “I am proud to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance. We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true.” Fully aware that reality on the Indian ground did not always match this picture of harmony, Vivekananda said something equally important three years later: “I strongly believe,” he said in London in 1896, “that Indians will embrace democracy (and that) unity and equality will descend upon us.” (quoted in D. Dabholkar, Unraveling the Real Swami Vivekananda)

The democracy that Vivekananda hoped India would embrace, and the plants of unity and equality that he wanted India’s soil to raise, were visible from 1949, when India’s Constitution was adopted. Its Preamble pledged “justice, social, economic and political; liberty of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship; equality of status and of opportunity; and… fraternity, assuring the dignity of the individual and the unity and integrity of the Nation”.

In the 75 years that have followed, if we set aside some serious exceptions, India’s central and state governments have largely refrained from flouting these directives. We know, however, that constitutional promises become dead letters when resentment animates a large number of people, and the authorities refuse to control violence. As the Supreme Court noted in its 2019 Ayodhya judgment, this is what happened in December 1992, when the Babri Masjid was demolished.

In that 2019 verdict, the Supreme Court nonetheless authorised the construction of a Ram Mandir on the ground where the mosque had stood. That masjid had been carefully excluded from the Places of Worship Act, 1991. If now the Supreme Court allows searches of the foundations of other masjids for signs of previous Hindu shrines, the Act would be left without any meaning. Such a verdict would also be taken as a signal for a thousand agitations for correcting “historical wrongs”, whether real or imaginary. In addition, such a verdict would say to the world that Hinduism is intolerant and resentful and that Vivekananda and four subsequent generations of Hindu thinkers who agreed with him were hopelessly wrong.

The “acceptance” of which Vivekananda spoke in his Chicago address was of “other religions” and of “other paths” to God. Some “acceptances” are pretty universal even when they are grudging. We accept, even if slowly, a close one’s death. Reluctantly or cheerfully, we accept “people not like us” as companions on a bus, train or plane, as neighbours and as fellow citizens.

The world agrees that it is not lawful for me to injure someone because his or her forebear harmed my forebear. Indigenous Africans, Americans, Canadians and Australians do not demand the expulsion of descendants of outsiders (including people from India) who had settled in their land without indigenous permission. Whether we credit this “acceptance” to humaneness, common sense, pragmatism or something else, it has marked the story of our world’s progress.

Centuries before India’s Constitution was written, our country’s inhabitants accepted Muslims, Christians, Parsis, and Jews as legitimate sharers of India’s soil. Our forebears understood that humanity was, in fact, a single family, which was the meaning of the ancient Sanskrit phrase, Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, as also of the ancient Tamil verse, Yaadum Oore Yaavaram Kelir.

As I noted in my 1999 book, Revenge and Reconciliation: Understanding South Asian History, from the time of the Buddha, which was close to the period when the great epic, the Mahabharata emerged, our subcontinent’s people have had to choose between the fraternity presented by the Buddha and the revenge that dominates the Mahabharata story.

Even in the Mahabharata, where revenge is a running thread and the culmination is all-round slaughter, there are powerful exceptions where the spirit of reconciliation warms the reader’s heart.

In one of the epic’s most dramatic scenes, after the war is over and almost every hero has been killed, bereaved women and a distraught handful of surviving princes are consoled by the epic’s author, Vyasa, who occasionally enters the scenes himself. Telling the mourners, “I shall dispel your grief,” Vyasa makes the dead emerge from the waters of River Bhagirathi: Cleansed of hate and jealousy/ Son met father and mother, wife met husband/ Friend greeted friend/ The Pandavas met Karna/ And embraced him/ A scene of reconciliation:/ No grief, no fear, no suspicion, no reproach/ Nothing but the meeting of loving minds. (P Lal’s rendering.)

By dawn, however, the dream of reunion was over, and those brought back to life had returned to the Bhagirathi’s depths.

Another reconciliation scene is presented to us during Arjuna’s post-war subcontinental ride, made to proclaim Pandava supremacy. In the Saindhava territory (i.e. in Sindh), Arjuna is met by Duhshala, sister of the defeated and killed Kauravas, who is accompanied by a child. Duhshala had been married to the Kaurava warrior, Jayadratha, whom Arjuna had unfairly killed. Arjuna asks Duhshala about her son Suratha. “He is dead,” says Duhshala, adding: “He died of a broken heart, for he knew that you had killed his father. I now bring to you his son, and I seek your protection.”

Proceeds Vyasa: “Arjuna stared at the ground. Great sorrow afflicted him. ‘I am your sister,’ Duhshala said. ‘You will not refuse me. As Parikshit is to your son Abhimanyu (who was deceitfully killed), this boy is to my son Suratha. I have come to plead for the lives of my people.’… Arjuna embraced Duhshala and asked her to return to her palace. Then he made peace with the Saindhavas.”

We have to ask: Is trying to remake yesterday more important than building a partnership today? Yesterday has gone. We cannot change or restore it. Yes, we must learn from history. One of its lessons is that campaigns to rearrange the past injure the present.

Rajmohan Gandhi is editor,www.weareonehumanity.org.The views expressed are personal

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