Beyond Ayodhya

Ten years have passed but it is the same anxiety on December 6, and the same uneasy question. Will the day go peacefully, in and around Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh? And also this year, in Gujarat, no more as faraway from UP as it has always seemed? Like every year since 1992, a red alert has been sounded in UP and thousands of police and paramilitary forces are deployed on the ground. Another annual ritual has already been observed in Parliament. This time, parties of the Opposition staged a sit-in inside the Parliament House complex and treasury benches threatened to counter their slogans invoking Ayodhya with their own chants of Godhra. No, some things haven8217;t changed, and the ritual of anxiety that has come to be associated with the remembrance of the Babri masjid8217;s demolition ten years ago at Ayodhya revisits us again. Why? Why haven8217;t we laid the ghost to rest? Isn8217;t it past time the nation moved on from this sombre milestone?

There is a reason why December 6, 1992, is still so much with us, and it isn8217;t just the VHP. Of course, the VHP8217;s role cannot be underestimated. The outfit has periodically revived the 8216;temple issue8217; and actively stoked the embers lest they should completely die out. For the VHP, it has to do with its own survival 8212; it thrives on the politics of insecurity and hate that Ayodhya has become a shorthand for. But it would be much too easy and convenient to blame it all on the marching sants of the VHP.

It has suited very mainstream sections of the BJP to let the problem fester, in the hope that the Ayodhya card may yet deliver again at the hustings as it so spectacularly did all those years ago, catapulting the party to political centrestage. Equally, it has also come in handy to those parties in the BJP8217;s opposition that have fed and fattened on anti-BJPism in the absence of a positive agenda they could call their own.

So the Ayodhya tangle remains unresolved and there8217;s no closure in sight after all these years. The demolition case is shunted from court to another, and the dispute over the site defies all the exertions of mediators and emissaries. In official circles, it continues to summon the same opaque piety: resolution, we are told, will come either through the courts or by consensus. Clearly, what it calls for is a political negotiation, a give and take, that the current political leadership on both sides of the communal-secular divide seems incapable of. It is time both the votaries and opponents of Hindutva politics showed the courage, and the plain common sense, to acknowledge that the temple issue has done enough damage and that it has outlived its political charge. It is time they showed the political imagination to frame a new, positive agenda. No more must the anxiety of the December 6 anniversary be allowed to cloud the festivities of Eid.