The VHP’s raucous tirades are telling. As its leading lights exhort L.K. Advani to walk out of the government today, and call for Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s resignation on the morrow, they probably spill the beans on the organisation’s growing intimations of its own marginalisation. Could it be that the Kanchi seer has midwived a formula on Ayodhya that can work? Is it possible that a settlement acceptable to both communities is reached with Messrs Singhal, Togadia and Co rendered mere bystanders? Are we really within touching distance of settling an issue that has seemed so unendingly hopeless for so long? With the clock ticking for the unveiling of the Kanchi seer’s formula on Sunday, these are also questions that a nation is asking — with hope. The “Ayodhya issue” has become the byword for a politics of resentments. It has spawned a political idiom of hoary grievance. It speaks of a nation that is unable to solve its problems. One that is doomed, therefore, to be oppressed by their dead weight. For almost as long as Ayodhya has been a political issue, it has been depressingly obvious that a solution would not come from the political class. There is far too much short-term political calculation going around and too few leaders with the imagination, or indeed the courage, to rise above it. It has been equally clear that a legal solution would stand even less of a chance. This is not a property dispute that can be settled by the victory of the claims of one side over the claims of the other, it isn’t a matter on which a tidy judicial decision will hold. What Ayodhya has called for all along is a settlement crafted from a process of negotiation between the two communities. A lasting solution has always called for both sides to give, and for both sides to take. The Kanchi seer’s mediation has created just such an opening which a timid political class could never have achieved on its own. In this moment, Kanchi Kamakoti Shankaracharya Jayendra Saraswathi appears to be the rare personage who commands credibility across the political spectrum, the one who is heard by both communities with respect. Having spectacularly failed the challenge of coming up with a solution to the problem, the political class now owes it to the nation not to stand in the way of the seer’s efforts at the very least and to steer his proposal to success. The people don’t need another election fought over the Ayodhya problem. Nor, parties must heed, an election fought over its solution.
