Opinion Vandita Mishra writes: Once upon a Ram temple

Something has passed, and in a country with no full stops, something else is in its place.

In days to come, after the temple is consecrated, a full reckoning with what has passed and what has replaced it will not be easy — as the drumbeats of the Lok Sabha election become louder, a moment of pause to look ahead, or a minute of silence to look back, will be difficult to come by.

But today, if you stand on tiptoe and look over the head of January 22, what do you see?

You see a BJP with a long arc. It has achieved what it set out to do. The party of Atal Bihari Vajpayee and LK Advani moved tentatively after December 6 1992. It was seen as a political “untouchable”, compelled to place its “core issues” including the Ram temple “on the back burner”, seen to wear a mask or “mukhauta” to make friends. Now, it is the dominant party winning elections on its own, having redrawn the political lines and reset the terms of debate. The party of Narendra Modi and Amit Shah is aggressive and predatory, it observes no niceties.

Power has not diminished its appetite for absolute power, and it seeks to stamp its imprint in all spaces, those that are governed by the majority principle in an electoral democracy, and even those domains of a constitutional democracy that aren’t. The temple that will be consecrated in Ayodhya consecrates these several successes of the BJP — in pushing its way to the centre of the polity, in forcing its opponents on the back foot, in conquering institutions and bending them to its will, in appropriating words and filling them with new meanings.

From Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath to RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat, a story of “New Ayodhya” that is home to the “National Temple” is being written and told — it is projected as a site of a grand convergence.

This story does not talk of the silences and erasures on which the plinth of New Ayodhya also stands — of the masjid that was, and of the guilt or even remembrance of its demolition. And of the crucial degrees of separation between the majority religion and the state in a diverse country.

The loss is not just of that unlamented notion of secularism which had lost its way, in practice, on the secularists’ watch. It is also a bleaching out of the possibilities of what secularism might have been, of what it could have become, in a plural polity. For the foreseeable future, that particular what-if of history will lie buried deep under the Ram temple at Ayodhya, it will not be resurrected.

This story does not talk, either, of the future challenge that seems to have no owners, and that has not even been given a name. It begins after the temple is consecrated on January 22 — of reaching out to the country’s minorities and reassuring them that while the construction of the temple may have seen an unrestrained majoritarian triumphalism, its consecration would drain the poison, not feed it.

If you are still standing on tiptoe, you will also see a Supreme Court that called the demolition of the Babri Masjid a crime and then handed over the land on which it stood for the construction of a temple.

And an Opposition that, in the face of a political force that knows its mind and has a plan, mainly looks bewildered, and swings into action only to cover the unremarkable political distance between a me-too stance and ambivalence.

Over the years, Opposition parties have had no story to tell that could vie with the one the BJP was telling the people. A story that could invoke larger wholes, and make individuals feel a part of them. A story that, like the BJP’s, also conjured optimism and a sense of forward movement.

Instead, anti-BJP parties only told anti-BJP stories. From religion to culture to nationalism, they ceded vast spaces of emotion and imagination, for the BJP to seize and spin into its narratives, uncontested.

At the same time, though belatedly, you might also see a new tweak in the script. By starting his Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra from Manipur, still strife-torn, while the government is turning the spotlight to shiny Ayodhya, Rahul Gandhi has flung down the gauntlet in a more pointed way than he has so far. His task will now be to remain with it, build on it.

Mamata Banerjee has announced she will visit the Kali temple — the local deity — and hold an inter-faith rally on January 22. And Arvind Kejriwal’s AAP is plucking its own piece from the Ramcharitmanas and attending recitations of the Sundar Kand, Lord Hanuman at its centre, across Delhi. Implicit in both programmes is a questioning of the BJP’s projection of a monolithic piety.

Of course, these Opposition moves may be too little and too late in the case of the Congress, and in the case of AAP-TMC, they are undeniably circumscribed by the BJP’s framework of public religiosity.

Yet, in the pause before January 22, that is the picture and those are the stirrings.

Till next week,

Vandita