Our Ayodhya, and Ram’s

Though at first sight the Bombay blasts appeared to be a one-off, we have found that they were instead the first salvo in a mounting war. Bombay has suffered regular terrorist attacks since 1993, which have multiplied following the Gujarat riots of 2001. Those riots too were set off by an Ayodhya-related destruction — the burning alive of a carriage-load of temple activists by a small group of angry Muslims.

The retaliatory riots that ensued in Gujarat, in which upwards of 2,000 Muslims were killed, sent shock waves through Muslim countries worldwide. The impact was greatest in West Asia, whose Muslim states had generally been sympathetic towards India, especially over Kashmir. Antipathy towards India has become so deep in West Asia that the Organisation of the Islamic Conference is considering admitting Russia as a member, but is resolute in refusing India’s longstanding application.

The Gujarat riots were also a shot in the arm for groups such as the Lashkar-e-Toiba, whose leader Hafeez Sayeed lost little time in calling on all Muslims to launch a jihad on all Hindus. Prior to the riots, the Lashkar was composed predominantly of Punjabi Pakistanis — it was unable to recruit non-Pakistanis, even in Kashmir. The latest terrorist attacks in Bombay, however, indicate the Lashkar and similar jihadi groups have begun to find recruits within India.

This is not to say that the temple movement is the root cause of Muslim terrorism in India — nor, for that matter, are the Gujarat riots. If there is one root cause, which many would debate, it is surely the failure of India’s elites, both Hindu and Muslim, to integrate their communities or offer them hope of betterment and justice.

This failure is glaringly obvious when the Gujarat government points to the scandalous record of the Congress in the 1984 Hindu-Sikh riots as justification for its own unlawful acts 18 years later.

A less glaring but equally obvious failure is when some human rights campaigners accuse temple activists of deliberately setting fire to their own brethren in order to provoke riots. Is there no limit to the evil we are prone to imagine?

India appears to have become so inured to communal brutality that its response to it is more and more tepid. Thus we hear the ruling party’s spokesman accuse the Central Bureau of Investigation of being ‘‘politically motivated’’ when it presents evidence that several ministers of the present government stood and watched the mosque being destroyed — some even celebrated.

Couldn’t M. Venkaiah Naidu have, instead, praised his party in government for letting justice take its course? And why, when Murli Manohar Joshi so creditably resigned as minister for human resource development upon the court’s ruling that charges be framed against him, did the Prime Minister persuade him to withdraw his resignation?

With the temple activists demanding that the government enact legislation for a Ram temple to be built on the Babri Masjid site, the Ayodhya dispute is once again set to become violent. As a result many Indians now feel Hindu and Muslim leaders should arrive at a settlement that will allow the temple to be built, with provision for a new mosque nearby.

But such a solution will not settle the problem — indeed, the danger is it might exacerbate it. Muslim radicals will see the solution as further evidence of Hindu fiat, and more of them will turn to violence in revenge. And Hindu radicals will take it as an invitation to force similar solutions for Kashi, Mathura and a long list of other contentious Hindu-Muslim sites, to which Muslim radicals will again respond with terrorism. In other words, terrorism will increase rather than decrease.

The tragedy of it all is that there is a way out of the problem if India’s leadership were willing to espouse it. The Archaeological Survey of India’s excavations show a prior structure existed under the site and have turned up artefacts that go back 1,000 years. Why not continue the excavations with the goal of turning the site into a public monument of the richness of India’s history, warts and all?

One part of the site could preserve the ruins of the Babri Masjid as an object lesson in what happens when India’s different religious groups seek to forcefully impose their demands rather than negotiate them peacefully, while maintaining the Ram lalla shrine as it is.

Another part of the site could display the different levels of excavation and their finds in situ, as a type of physical history lesson that we still don’t have in this country whose archaeology is so great.

A solution of this kind would rescue the Ram of Tulsidas, Valmiki and Gandhi from the degradation the temple activists have inflicted upon him. Most important of all, it could pave the way for Indians to say that they will never again turn to violence as a way of settling religious disputes, nor to revenge as a substitute for justice.

That in turn could pave the way for seeking a collective solution to the disputes in Mathura and Kashi, two tinderboxes waiting to be lit.

India is on the threshold of a bright future. Isn’t it time to say goodbye to the iniquities of the past, both real and imagined?

The author is an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, New York