The Hindu : Raking up the past

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Mar 27, 2002

Opinion

Opinion - News Analysis

Raking up the past

By Sudhanshu Ranade

Forgive and forget has become a popular slogan these days. After the aborted bhoomi puja at Ayodhya on March 15, in an effort to pave the way for an amicable settlement, the Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, appealed to people not to go on and on about the destruction of the Babri Masjid in December 1992 and the thousands of Muslims who lost their lives in the riots that inevitably followed.

How long are we to keep harping on the same old thing, he said; is the mistake never to be forgiven, never to be forgotten?

A similar appeal was made about the vicious and well organised riots that followed in Gujarat after the brutal massacre of innocents in Godhra - is there nothing else to talk about, a BJP MP asked heatedly, even as Ashok Singhal embarked with cold calculation on a hunger strike: to persuade the government to use police to provide protection to Ramjanmabhoomi activists (and the people who follow trustingly in their wake) instead of using them to disrupt the VHP's far-from-devout ``prayers''.

One obvious difference between the events of 1992/1993 and the recent riots in Gujarat is that in the latter case Time has not yet had a chance to work its wonders. There are other important differences.

For example, it is the atrocity that sparked off the riots 10 years ago that we are now being urged to forget. But now it is the riots that we must put behind us, not their unforgivable cause _ which the VHP is doing all it can to keep us from forgetting.

A more important point, however, is that while the BJP is all for selectively forgiving and forgetting (some of) the events that happened earlier this year, and (some of) the events that happened 10 years ago, it is determined, under cover of tactical to-ing and fro-ing, to throw its full weight behind those who insist on remembering and avenging things that happened 50 or even 500 years ago.

The desire to bring into the historical record the heights reached by Hindu civilisation three or four thousand years ago is perfectly understandable; and people are naturally outraged to find ``secular'' historians (who have no compunctions about playing off, say, the ``Aryans'' against the ``Dravidians'') opposing this line of inquiry on the grounds that it would give a ``communal'' twist to history.

But here again there is a big difference between this enterprise and the effort to rewrite the history of the medieval period so as to educate or sensitise people to the ``fate of Hindus during Islamic rule''.

Implicit in the latter goal is the presumption that the decay of Hinduism was caused by the rise of Islam; and the corollary that it is only by putting down the Muslims that Hindus can once again rise. This simplistic formulation gives Islam and Muslims an importance (in a negative sense) that they simply do not deserve.

The question that we really need to ask ourselves is: how long are we to keep tilting at windmills? It is all very well to call on people to forget things that happened earlier this year, and those that happened 10 years ago, as left to themselves they surely will; but unless we are willing to once and for all leave behind, or at least cease to brood over, things that happened 50 or 500 years ago, our problems will not cease - even after the temple at Ayodhya comes into being.

At that time Mr. Vajpayee's successor, today content to stand sympathetically in the wings, awaiting his turn, will discover to his horror that the war of the VHP against a long dead ``enemy'' has only just begun in real earnest.

Speaking of which, I wonder if Mr. Singhal is aware that Akbar, who had silver coins minted in honour of Ram and Sita, had a Hindu wife _ and gems like Tansen in his retinue; that Shah Jehan had a Hindu mother; and that it was Shah Jehan's eldest son and designated successor, Dara Shikoh, who first brought the glories of ancient India to the attention of the modern world _ at a time when, even for Hindus, this was only a vague and distant memory.

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Opinion

Stories in this Section

A sharp indictment

Power play

Gujarat: a plea and a proposal

Situating Arundhati amidst Ayodhya