The silly season

It’s that time of last year again. When the spotlight must veer to the capital’s Kamakshi temple. To track Jayendra Saraswati, the Shankaracharya who has again flown in from Kanchi, to call on Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and to grant audience to union ministers, VHP VIPs, other VIPs. Time, once more, to scratch a festering national hurt called Ayodhya and to throw at it the old opaque jargon — ‘judicial solution’, ‘political solution’, ‘consensus’. Apart, of course, from the threats — VHP’s Ashok Singhal has already warned of ‘santon ka aakrosh’ (the anger of the saints) and their ‘kathor nirnay’ (hard decision) in case things don’t go their way. Yes, it’s that time of last year again. But we have a question: just why has the same vaudeville come to revisit the nation? Last year, the curtains came down on this tense theatre with the apex court ordering that status quo must be maintained on all 67 acres acquired by the Centre in 1994 in Ayodhya until the title suit is decided in the Allahabad High Court. The hearings in that case are proceeding apace, so why this renewed talk of the VHP’s claims on 40 or so acres within the 67?

The answer to that is clear and looming closer with every passing day. The VHP has scheduled a dharam sansad later this month and the outfit must raise the political heat on the temple issue in the run-up. But that is the VHP’s agenda. So why must the national political leadership be dictated by the VHP’s time-table? It is not as if there has been any indication that ‘negotiation’ and ‘mediation’ on Ayodhya will yield any more than it did last year, which was exactly zilch. There is no reason to believe that the process of ‘consultation’ will be more participatory or carry any more credibility, that it will not run into the same dead ends. There has been no evidence over this past year of the leadership and vision required to seize the initiative in this dispute, to encourage the give-and-take that will lead to the political solution it so desperately cries out for instead of the tidy judicial verdict.

There are ominous signs, instead, that a reenactment of last year’s spectacle will be more fraught with dangers. This time, the VHP and Bajrang Dal are riding the crest of hard Hindutva’s victory in Gujarat. The spirit of accommodation will be even harder to come by this time than last year. It is time, therefore, for the Prime Minister’s Office to call a halt before it is too late.