We can begin with PM Narendra Modi’s post on X (formerly, Twitter) five days ago: “Jai Siya Ram! Today is a day full of emotions. Recently, the officials of Shri Ram Janmbhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust had come to meet me at my residence. He has invited me to come to Ayodhya on the occasion of the consecration of Shri Ram Temple. I feel very blessed. It is my good fortune that in my lifetime, I will witness this historic occasion.”
The key words in this 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 is available in the long history of credit-swindling by the Congress party. Both its party members and its sprawling ecosystem would have us believe that India didn’t exist until Nehru invented it.
In the heady and uphill years of the Sri Ram 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: “Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice. The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionists are philosophers and saints.”
I am loath to recount personal anecdotes but this profound occasion merits it 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 always nagged me. I intuitively knew that the Ramajanmabhoomi Movement was never about politics. Nor was it solely about devotion to Sri Rama. And then around the end of 1999, it dawned on me that the struggle to reclaim the Sri Rama Mandir was a large speck in a millennial war to reclaim Hindu civilisation in the land that had birthed it. And the Indian political system, after India achieved political independence, was the greatest obstacle blocking this reclamation. In this 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 the intellect. 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 1990s 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 but familiar 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 Punyabhoomi 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 fetid Nehruvian-rational-Secularist-Left-Liberal-Communist-Marxist squad of eminent phonies masquerading as archaeologists, 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 an entire community — 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 not a single secularist has condemned Mulayam Singh Yadav’s mowing down of fifty-plus innocent kar sevaks.
Let’s take another random example.
When the Supreme Court delivered its final verdict in 2019 in favour of the Ram Mandir, the pro-Babri advocate Rajeev Dhavan almost came unhinged in the court hall.
There are two facets to Rajeev Dhavan’s outburst. The first was his clutching-at-the-straws desperation to somehow save face with his clients, the Muslim bodies in favour of restoring the Babri mosque. The second was actually what led to the first.
In brief, this was the role played by the aforementioned eminent phonies who convinced the Babri Masjid Action Committee (BMAC) that they, the secularists, were the true saviours of the Babri cause. A partial list of their names include historians Romila Thapar, Irfan Habib, RS Sharma, DN Jha, M Athar Ali, and archaeologist Suraj Bhan. Their extensive cabal took a thick file to the Chandrashekhar government claiming that it contained “evidence” that “proved” that Ayodhya was not Rama’s birthplace and that the Rama temple never existed. But what did the “evidence” contain? A bunch of newspaper cuttings, random works of questionable scholarship, opinion pieces, editorials and wild hearsay. To mention a rather hilarious specimen that was cited as “evidence” was a scrap of frenzied imagination that claimed that Rama was actually the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses II! Its author was MV Ratnam.
But as the days went by, the secularist camp realised that the ground was quickly slipping beneath their feet. It was time to adopt more drastic tactics. Accordingly, they inflamed the Muslim side to adopt a more hardened, obstinate stance. Instead of appealing to the reasonable elements in the Muslim community, the secularists instigated the fanatical ulema with a time-tested wile: fear-mongering — if you let go of the Babri Masjid, Islam itself will be in danger!
On a parallel track, they began to poison public discourse on an epic scale thanks to their near-total 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 that was really demolished as a consequence of their unrestrained anti-Hindu activism. The disputed-structure demolition was the true preface to the measly 44 Lok Sabha seats that the Congress got in 2014.
History is also an unending story of irony, and nowhere is this irony more pronounced than here. It was Rajiv Gandhi who, with a brute majority of 413 Lok Sabha seats, ordered the gates to be opened. And to give him credit, he was willing to give a genuine hearing to the Hindus. But what he did not realise was that he had also simultaneously entered a dark tunnel whose door automatically shut behind him. 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 epic crimes they have committed against the Sanatana civilisation and against three generations of living Hindus through their relentless and vicious propaganda… a propaganda inspired by a savage and soulless ideology responsible for the maximum genocides in the twentieth century.
Unfortunately, the secularists have gotten away with it.
The author is the founder and chief editor, The Dharma Dispatch. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
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