And build lasting peace

THE Constitution Club is a worn-out building in the heart of Delhi where meetings are held to discuss different problems, contentious or otherwise. Many years ago, I attended one of them. It had been convened to find an amicable way to settle three burning issues: the Babri Masjid, and the temples and the mosques which stood on the same premises in Mathura and Varanasi. The meeting was held long before L.K. Advani’s rath yatra.

The debate at the meeting, attended by Hindu and Muslim leaders, was long and heated but without any acrimony. The Babri Masjid controversy had not, as yet, assumed the proportions which it did subsequently. All the three disputes were taken up together. Muslim leaders wanted the status quo to prevail and did not want to go into history about who owned which structure when. There was no agreement.

But before the meeting broke up, someone made a proposal which made everybody stay behind. It was suggested that Muslims should voluntarily hand over the Babri Masjid to Hindus since it was their confirmed belief that Lord Ram was born at the place. In return, the Hindus should withdraw their claim over the two mosques at Mathura and Varanasi. Muslim leaders, although unhappy, looked like accepting the proposal, presumably to win the goodwill of the Hindu community. But Hindu leaders interrupted to say ‘no’. A Hindu leader’s plea was that the Hindus would forgo claims on hundreds of mosques which had been ‘‘forcibly built by destroying temples’’, provided the Muslims handed them over the mosques at Ayodhya, Mathura and Varanasi.

I do not know what will ultimately bring around Hindu and Muslim leaders to accept something mutually agreeable. But the proposal is doomed because of the destruction of the Babri Masjid. Even if Hindus give an undertaking, a constitutional guarantee, that all the mosques throughout the country will stay protected and the Sangh Parivar, including the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Bajrang Dal, submit to the Supreme Court an affidavit to reaffirm the guarantee, Muslims will generally be sceptical. They do not have the confidence which they had before the demolition of the Masjid.

Most Muslims and many liberal Hindus will also feel hurt because the proposal enables the chauvinists to get away with the crime of destruction. This may look like paying the price for stopping further vandalism. Hindu fundamentalists can do worse. They can whip up frenzy all over again. With the BJP governments at the Centre and in UP, the present uncertain atmosphere can be communalised through official efforts as well. True, the proposal may mean a climb-down by the fundamentalists because they will be giving up their claim on the mosques at Mathura, Varanasi and elsewhere. Also the cases against the leaders involved in the destruction of the Masjid will not be withdrawn. Nor will the commission going into the whole gamut of destruction be wound up. Still, accepting the fundamentalists’ right over the mosque will mean that a wrong has been legitimised. At present, there is at least a hope that there may be a settlement one day and it will not be one-sided. Probably, the ideal solution would have been to keep the site vacant so as to remind the generations to come that the ideology of secularism was murdered at that place on December 6, 1992. The Japanese have kept an area in Hiroshima ‘unbuilt’ to recall how the atom bomb dropped on the city killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese. The place serves as a catharsis for their pent up emotions of anger against the destruction and those who committed it. The vacant site of the demolished Babri Masjid could serve a similar purpose.

When the Babri Masjid was intact, there were many possibilities for a solution to satisfy both Hindus and Muslims. Many leaders, like former prime ministers, V.P. Singh and Chandrashekhar, claim that they had almost rescued a settlement from the jaws of failure. It is no use recalling those attempts because they tell either a story of sabotage or a cursory effort. The fact is that there is no Babri Masjid today. Even the moderate Shankaracharya of Kanchi has changed his stance to say that the makeshift temple from the Ayodhya site cannot be removed. It is a tragedy that the then prime minister, Narasimha Rao, connived at the building of the makeshift temple. Between the night of December 6 and the morning of December 7, when the temple was built, UP was under Centre’s rule. The BJP government, headed by Kalyan Singh, had been dismissed on the afternoon of December 6. Rao did not take the matter seriously from the beginning. History is a mute witness to such moments when the effect of a lapse could last for centuries.

The Muslim Personal Law Board was being churlish when it said that nobody had talked to it. Probably, the time has not yet come for that. The solution Vajpayee has hinted at may yet be very tentative. There are hardliners on both sides. It is not possible for Vajpayee or anyone to tell more.

The law court, where the dispute is pending for years, could have sorted out the matter long ago if it had pronounced its judgement. But the parties concerned have not even gone beyond the preliminaries. Even the Supreme Court has preferred to stay aloof from the issue. Nonetheless, there is a silver lining in the public statements by both Hindu and Muslim leaders that they will accept the court verdict. This assurance should have hastened the process at the court. Babri Masjid is a touchy issue. It evokes strong reactions because no other issue since independence has polarised the nation as much as this dispute has. The slightest disturbance can stir up a hornets’ nest as can be seen from the reaction to the Vajpayee’s statement. Yet the nation cannot live on the brink of a catastrophe. The dispute should not be allowed to hold the future to ransom.

The way in which an unfrequented mosque and a dargah have been destroyed in Rajasthan is tearing the fabric of secularism apart. Let the two communities agree to keep the Babri Masjid site at Ayodhya vacant. Both the temple and the mosque can be built in the adjoining areas. If both communities do this through shramdan (voluntary work), it will strengthen our pluralistic society. The settlement cannot be left hanging. Otherwise, the nation will continue to be buffeted by communal winds, and the real problems like poverty, hunger and unemployment, will continue to go unaddressed.

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