Idea of India wasn’t demolished at Ayodhya. That happened in our ‘liberal’ homes

[Crixus]

Hey I don't know about your perception about me but bullying a kid, is not at all acceptable. No one should be allowed to do that absolutely no one.

@Joe Shearer,

Nothing surprising here. This is something most of us Muslims believe. The fascists that are in power today are because of the normalization of hate within Hindu society. Even well meaning Hindus, who detest what is going on in the name of Hinduism in India, still have a difficulty in accepting Muslims as being "different".

How many times, liberal Hindus have held discussions among themselves and often derided the Sanghis narrative as fake, because the "Abdul" or "Ahmed" is not like how the Sanghis make the Muslims out to be. That is precisely the problem. So many times, I have been told by my Hindu friends, that I am not like the "other Muslims", whatever that is supposed to mean. This "otherization" is what leads to dehumanization that culminates in the society that we have now become.

Here is a story that I have posted previously....but bares repeating. When I was first called a Pakistani, at an age when I did not even know what Pakistan was, and I came home and told my parents that so-and-so kids called me a Pakistani in a bullying way, my father said to my mother, and I still remember it vividly - this is what their parents have been talking inside their houses about us, that is why the kids are repeating it.

 

[jaibi]

I'm not sure what I can add to the conversation. If you've seen I've deliberately avoided political topics.

Friends I have been tagged multiple times here in this thread, and I am merely on page 6 somewhere, and with a whole paper I am avidly going through given to us by @Moonlight too.

I will get to giving some more replies a bit later hopefully...as time is a bit constrained right now.

As far as possible I hope people do not troll/cheap shot too much, there is lot of good content here for people to peruse.

In case they haven't been tagged (and missed the thread too) as I haven't seen most of the later tags/posts yet...they might find the article and conversation interesting:

@SQ8 @Jungibaaz @niaz @VCheng @waz @PanzerKiel @jaibi @WebMaster @T-123456 @Vergennes @Quwa

@Chak Bamu @That Guy (not sure if you two have been around lately, but let me see heh)

 

[jaibi]

OK.

Idea of India wasn’t demolished at Ayodhya. That happened in our ‘liberal’ homes

The 1992 Babri Masjid demolition was no sudden act. All of our family conversations contributed to the pickaxes that hit the mosque in Ayodhya.



If Ram is the presiding deity of Ayodhya, then its political god is Lal Krishna Advani. Even though Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah and Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath are lining up for the bhoomi pujan on 5 August.

Interesting premise.

Actually, a lot of people can claim credit for bringing India to this penultimate step of bhoomi pujan before the grand Ram Mandir is built in Ayodhya — Advani, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the Vishva Hindu Parishad, and the Congress. But, most importantly, Indian families.

How would that philosophy take hold if was not already taking hold of something present? The Congress party had quite a bit of stint in power; they could have achieved a wholesome change just by focusing on one thing: education. That clearly did not happen. I remember arguing with another Indian member who stated that social science education is a waste of time; knowledge is purely utilitarian. This attitude in the region is a reflection upon this mentality. Moreover, the desi liberal whether from here or any other nation in the region is an interesting hypocrite, i.e. let’s go to the West and enjoy freedom but marry a Brahmin when it comes to us. Let’s do absolutely nothing when we see the racism in our people but enjoy nightclubs and drinking on our own. Is liberalism the liberation to enjoy? Liberty = hedonism?

Undoubtedly, L.K. Advani not only set the ball rolling but also introduced the new language of Hindutva pride in the early 1990s. He single-handedly dismantled the word ‘secularism’ from India’s aspirational pulpit, and gave it the adjective ‘pseudo’. In every stump speech from the rath, he spoke of the historical Hindu wound and made Babri Masjid a buzzword for hate in Indian living rooms.

Goes back to this region from the start; the societal structural hierarchy is not based on achieved status but the one you’re born with. That seems to never have gone away and the tutelage of power houses who have claimed to be one thing or another has only cemented that.

But Indian family conversations should also be a big claimant for this credit. They kept chipping away at India’s founding ‘narrative template’. This is why scholars erred early on by locating the so-called ‘idea of India’ in saving the Babri Masjid. That idea wasn’t demolished at a religious site, it was taken apart brick by brick in our living rooms.

This is an interesting premise: from a minority’s perspective, please, look at what is happening. How is this statement correct? Secularism is another step but what is required is tolerance. Symbolically the treatment of the mosque is the demolition of tolerance. That confused notion shows that there is this fault in the lines of our mentality. Political philosophy does not develop in a vacuum: can western notions of liberalism be applied to the region? Should it? We would have our own version because the societal factors shaping us are different. The societal system exists and persists because whether for good or worse it anchors and stabilizes the society the shift whenever it has been long lasting has been structural and never abrupt. It seems none of the Indian intelligentsia ever came to that conclusion and therefore, why would the indian family? Moreover, this very notion is stumping out the narrative of the oppressed or the minority in its treatment.

Re-doing history

Many in the Indian liberal commentariat have said that the demolition of the Babri Masjid was the biggest blow to Nehruvian ideals. But to invest an old dilapidated mosque with the burden of secularism and an ‘idea of India’ was never going to fly. First, a religious structure can’t be and shouldn’t be a site to preserve secularism. Second, and more importantly, many Hindus, over generations, had been taught to view the mosque as a site of historical humiliation. They acted as ‘mnemonic communities’ (thick-memory communities) self-identifying as wounded.

Again, the focus on the problem and the retrospect of history beyond the context in which it originally formed is incorrect. For instance, Mughals had a lot of Hindu generals and soldiers; clearly it was a political discourse and not a religious one. However, that narrative never took hold in the popular imagination. Bollywood seems to be having a field day with this one because there is a reception of it. Focusing on secularism instead of the simple tolerance which also every religion preaches is an important step and it is up to the people whether or not they go for the next step. Clearly its imposition did not take the hold it was supposed to and was relatively easy to dismantle. That hypocrisy did not change the real life conditions of the people living there: Sikhs faced that fault lines, Muslims continue to others will as well and therefore, we see a militantization of identity but the sore point is that the majority group sees itself as the victim because the lens being adopted is not the right one.

There is an interesting tradeoff here: does a liberal democracy have to be embedded in capitalism? The only reason I see in terms of practice is that people like Shah Rukh Khan, Amir Khan etc,. had no problem whatsoever defending their positions or political views in front of its dismantling because either they’re divorced from that reality or see to it that doing so would damage them. Stephen Cohen once stated that Indian progress came from its city centres which Pakistan lacked and had a community of ‘middle class’ who would judge each ideology on the basis of business pragmatism instead of loyalty. That’s a man who does not know our culture speaking, I highly respect him but that’s completely misinformed but that’s what he’s been told by reviewing the literature of research produced in India.

And that wound, reminded Arun Shourie, was strewn across India, not just Ayodhya. According to a book that he co-wrote — Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them — which was published much before the demolition in 1990, there are 2,000 mosques that stand on top of demolished temples. The red book listed each of these mosques with name, village and some photographs, and gave intellectual fodder to the Vishva Hindu Parishad’s campaign in the 1990s that said Hindus are ready to give up their claims over these 2,000 mosques if Muslims would give them the Ayodhya, Varanasi and Mathura sites.

People are moved by perceptions not reality. Our people haven’t been taught critical thinking when it comes to social attitudes. This is the price to pay.

I visited a handful of these 2,000 mosque sites back then but found no knowledge, folklore, collective memory, let alone wounds, about demolished temples among local villagers. People did not know or did not care or had just accepted what they had inherited by way of built heritage. Popular memory is constructed through deliberate acts of retelling, which were manifest in Ayodhya, Varanasi and Mathura, but not the 2,000 sites listed in Shourie’s book.

Clearly it’s important but no one took notice.

Here is another way collective memory is shaped. When I visited Ayodhya a few years after the mosque’s demolition, I saw street vendors selling little black-and-white flip-books with two dozen picture pages. When you flipped the pages fast, you could see in motion how the Babri Masjid was razed to the ground. The last flip-book I had seen in life was one that showed Kapil Dev’s bowling action in the early 1980s. The Babri flip-book was being sold alongside poster images of Ram, the warrior. There were also books extolling kar sevaks who helped bring the mosque down, sort of like a demolition hall-of-fame. This is how deliberate retelling works. It can keep both wounds and triumphalism alive.

A woman who clearly was a colonial mindset. Hence, part of the problem and not a solution from the position the author takes.

Words to axes

The demolition, however, wasn’t the only, or first, or the last act of vandalism against the unique Indian pluralism that Indira Gandhi called a salad bowl. (Canadians say mosaic, Americans use melting pot to describe diversity). The salad bowl had been regularly chipped away long before 1992 — in deliberate family oral histories and conversations. In families, the idea of the Muslim as the eternal, unforgivable other was kept alive.

Whether women wear burkas or saris; isn’t that supposed to be their choice? Again, tolerance first.

Many parents—even today—tell their children to marry anyone but a Muslim (or some version of that). My own father said this. The marigold flower was not allowed in family prayers because it was associated with Muslims. The flower even has a derogatory Tamil name that refers to it as a Turkish flower. The simple act of banishing a flower keeps the popular memory of Muslim invasion alive. In Tamil and Kannada families, you refer to Muslims not as Muslims but as Turks for the same reason. My father routinely talked about how Muslim neighbourhoods in Madurai were growing (‘from ten houses at the corner to the entire street now’), and how Muslim women no longer wore saris like they did in his generation but had moved on to black burqas.

Yes, something quite strong holds that perception in place, does it not? Why not address that?

Casual prejudiced observations and references like these are routinely made in many Hindu families about Muslims (to emphasise what Ashutosh Varshney called their ‘everlasting disloyalty’), Christians (over religious conversions) and Dalits (over hygiene). It works the other way too. Many Muslim families also warn their children against marrying a non-Muslim. A converted Pentecostal relative of mine once said to me ‘others won’t be saved’.

Precisely, it provides no incentive to change those opinions, does it? That’s the issue here. That’s not up to the families to change but for the society to do so. That comes from the powerhouses and they were not liberals, they were hypocrites.

The 1992 demolition was no sudden act. All of our family conversations contributed to the pickaxes that hit the mosque in Ayodhya. It is easier to blame politicians for religious bigotry or go to Jantar Mantar with ‘Not In My Name’ placards, but more difficult to look in the mirror and speak up in our families.

Their books are just self congratulatory pieces they help no one and this realization would never dawn upon them.

There will be visible triumphalism in the bhoomi pujan event this week. First, history was undone and now it will be ‘corrected’. Liberal intelligentsia will mourn and blame politicians and courts. But they will choose to be oblivious to how public history and social memory is constructed. History isn’t just the sum of built heritage structures. It is also made up of intangible collective memories — the stuff that is not allowed to be ‘disremembered’.

Before that can happen; I think, they should examine themselves and their views first.

A wiser approach for liberals would be to start investing their energies in family oral histories and conversations instead.


https://theprint.in/opinion/idea-of-india-wasnt-demolished-at-ayodhya-but-our-liberal-homes/472935/

 

[Joe Shearer]

The Congress party had quite a bit of stint in power; they could have achieved a wholesome change just by focusing on one thing: education.

My single biggest grievance against them.

 

[Joe Shearer]

I remember arguing with another Indian member who stated that social science education is a waste of time; knowledge is purely utilitarian.

@jbgt90
I am not alone.

 

[Joe Shearer]

Moreover, the desi liberal whether from here or any other nation in the region is an interesting hypocrite, i.e. let’s go to the West and enjoy freedom but marry a Brahmin when it comes to us. Let’s do absolutely nothing when we see the racism in our people but enjoy nightclubs and drinking on our own. Is liberalism the liberation to enjoy?

Not entirely. There were, are and will be self-declared liberals who are exactly what you have described - hypocrites who use their self-description to indulge themselves, before sliding back into their safe and familiar behaviour patterns. There are also others. Generally among the leftists, the Communists and Socialists in particular. Some of their attitudes may have been homicidal, but they had virtues in some ways.

 

[jaibi]

I'm speaking of the class that can use that power and translate those views. This tremendous failure is based on that observation instead of just a villain or boogey-man hypothesis, sir.

Not entirely. There were, are and will be self-declared liberals who are exactly what you have described - hypocrites who use their self-description to indulge themselves, before sliding back into their safe and familiar behaviour patterns. There are also others. Generally among the leftists, the Communists and Socialists in particular. Some of their attitudes may have been homicidal, but they had virtues in some ways.

 

[T90TankGuy]

@jbgt90
I am not alone.

Well luckily for us the concerned member left the forum. As for education, it does not matter what you are taught in school, what matters is the values one picks up at home . we have had the conversation many a times about the reason which triggers such hatred and inferiority amongst the people , Its going no where @Joe Shearer , as i said its the people who have just discovered religion to blame.

 

[Andhadhun]

Well luckily for us the concerned member left the forum. As for education, it does not matter what you are taught in school, what matters is the values one picks up at home . we have had the conversation many a times about the reason which triggers such hatred and inferiority amongst the people , Its going no where @Joe Shearer , as i said its the people who have just discovered religion to blame.

LOL.... that is funny since your claim would exclude the Hindus since they do not have anything called "religion".

Hindus have Dharma and Karma, i.e. Responsibility and Action.

religion
/rɪˈlɪdʒ(ə)n/
noun

1. the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods.

OTOH "born again" xtians and muslims are the rule in this day and age.

 

[untitled]

My single biggest grievance against them.

Do you believe your idea of an all inclusive India making a comeback anytime soon or will it require a lot of blood, sweat and tears?

 

[Vapnope]

A wonderful article. @Joe Shearer kudos.

I believe that the ideas of inclusiveness are being pushed behind because most of the liberals in South Asia are drawing room liberals totally oblivious of cultural impacts and how narrative building happens in our communities. Another problem i believe is that they (Ironic because i consider myself a liberal too) cannot see a problem with West in their praise of liberalism. In context of Pakistan i have seen liberals living in their echo chambers where they cannot listen to a dissenting voice even if it holds a lot of weight.

On topic: If we accept that a mosque/church/temple was built on an existing temple/mosque/Church then demolishing the newer structure might be legal but not ethical in my humble opinion. I have same opinion about Hagia Sophia and Babri Masjid. Someone said in this thread that 200 temples were demolished in J&K and why should only Hindus be liberal, i would say even if the other side is not being fair why abandon your own ideals? (I do not approve damaging any flag/structure/sacred item by any side only because people have attachments and i would hate to hurt people).

 

[alhindi]

As you heard this inside yours.

And that is what you have been repeating here.

Cheers, Doc

Yes this is true , both groups are same , hindus amd muslims talk hate in homes .

 

[alhindi]

I have been half a dozen countries ..met with 1000s of indians..havent seen a single "liberal/progressive indian"
May be your definition and my defination of progressive /liberal are different

Can you give example of any liberal you know ?

 

[Andhadhun]

Yes this is true , both groups are same , hindus amd muslims talk hate in homes .

Muslims are taught hate in their homes, mosques, madrassas, society and religion.

Hindus are taught how to keep themselves safe from those from "peaceful" religions. Not exactly the same thing.

 

[alhindi]

Muslims are taught hate in their homes, mosques, madrassas, society and religion.

Hindus are taught how to keep themselves safe from those from "peaceful" religions. Not exactly the same thing.

Result is same .both become jani dushman .