Opinion After Ram Mandir, before Republic Day, the two futures of India

So, quo vadis, India?

Any prognosis must take the stance of all major stakeholders into consideration. The conspicuous absence of triumphalism has become the hallmark of statements emerging from the Modi regime. The Prime Minister’s new mantra — “Dev se desh; Ram se rashtra (from God to country, and from Ram to nation)” — seeks to transcend the boundaries of religion and embrace the full spectrum of faith, caste, creed and region in India. He has said that the opening of the temple was a moment not just of “vijay (victory)” but also “vinay (humility)” and invited those who opposed the Ram Janmabhoomi movement to “visit the temple and experience the feeling”. His message to the opponents of the temple is that the “construction of this temple of Ram Lalla is also a symbol of peace, patience, harmony, and coordination in Indian society”. It is a call to “all of us citizens, to pledge to build a capable, magnificent, and divine India [which is] a step towards nation-building”. RSS Sarsanghchalak Mohan Bhagwat has called for an end to the “bitterness”, “dispute” and “conflict”, and that the pran pratishtha ceremony will be the beginning of the campaign for “reconstruction of Bharatvarsh”.

As regards the Islamic clergy, the stance of Imam Umer Ahmed Ilyasi, Chief Imam of All India Imam Organization (AIIO), which claims to represent half-a-million imams across three lakh mosques in India is significant. He said, “this is the face of new India. Our biggest religion is humanity. For us, the nation is first”. Iqbal Ansari, the son of Hashim Ansari who spent a lifetime in courts as a litigant in the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid title suit case, was a special guest at the consecration ceremony. Ansari’s position is typical of people closely involved with the litigation who wish to put it behind. Accosted by the press, he said, “They (the journalists) want me to say something controversial. I have no time for reporters who try to dig up the past. That battle is over… the Supreme Court gave an order which we accepted”. Dissident voices have come from the Shankaracharyas — Hindu seers — who stayed away from the consecration of what they considered “an incomplete temple”, and from major Opposition parties which saw the ceremony essentially as a BJP event, aimed at mobilising support from the Hindu community, with the forthcoming parliamentary election in view.

All these opinions — pro and contra — need to be seen in the context of the vigorous electoral process of India which turns rebels into stakeholders, and generates social choices whose locations shift after each electoral cycle. Contrary to the empirical assertions of those who see the nemesis of Indian democracy in the rise of Hindutva, neither Hindus nor Muslims of India are dense, socially homogeneous bodies. They are composed of groups based on caste, class, region, language, gender and belief systems. Vote-hungry political parties, under the pressure of electoral competition, engage in serious poaching into all possible groups. India’s national, regional and local elites, leaders of ethnic groups and social activists operate within a malleable political space, marked by continuity with the past which is re-used and hybridised in the form of indigenous modernity. The conservative dynamism of the system, one can assume, will yet again generate a new equilibrium to emerge from the parliamentary elections of 2024 that are months away, packing in as many of the voices as possible within the big tent of India’s political arena.

Stateness entails the existence of a sacred core — an imaginary of values, norms, rules and symbols — which serves as the moral fulcrum around which everyday political competition revolves. Historically, this core evolves through long, often painful sequences. The juxtaposition of the two “commemorations” — the Ram temple and the festive 75th Republic Day — in the public sphere, within the short span of four days, shows how the past in India is present, not just as an exotic relic of distant memory but instead, as a contender, jostling for space at the high table of the state. The Supreme Court of India — like its equivalents, the Bundesamt fuer Verfassungsschutz in Germany and the Conseil constitutionnel in France — has become both the creator of this sacred space, blending the old and the new and generating the vital pivot of Indian politics, and its defender. One can be cautiously optimistic that emergent India is on its way to redeeming the pledge of purna swaraj, made on January 26, 1930.

The writer is an emeritus professor of Political Science at Heidelberg University, Germany