There is a simple question which — for those who are lucky enough with parents, teachers, friends and role models — we are taught to ask ourselves as children. What is the difference between right and wrong? As time goes on, the answers become mired in complexity — of life and relationships, politics and justice. People begin to understand that right and wrong are not binaries and that wrongs can be made right. Or can they?
On December 6, 1992 — 31 years to the day — a large group of people demolished a “disputed structure”. The Babri Masjid, and whether a temple preceded the mosque on the site, was already a fraught matter that had challenged the Indian judiciary and political class for decades. The people who demolished it did so on the backs of a chariot that traversed large parts of the country. Many, if not most of them, claimed allegiance to the same political ideology that rules India today. The legal machinery issued a settlement order — the matter went to the highest court in the land — under which a temple is now being constructed where the mosque once stood.
This temple is the pride of the current government and ruling party. It has been a major plank of its campaigns in election after election, including the ones that led to its massive victories in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh just days ago. The people of (North) India seem to have expressed their support, once again, for a worldview that imagines an oppressed majority and an oppressor minority, despite evidence to the contrary. At the very least, “the people” do not consider the demolition a blot and many probably vote for the ruling party because of its consequences. The justice system, for its part, maintains that the destruction was criminal. Yet, no one is jailed for it, no one is responsible — as though the act in the name of a god was an Act of God.
The people have spoken, through the ballot. The values of the Indian judiciary have spoken through the courts. But does that make the demolition of the Babri Masjid “right”?
It is, perhaps, an irrelevant question. If possession is 9/10ths of the law, maybe those in power, those with the majority behind them, dictate cent per cent of public morality. And why harp on about property destruction 31 years ago when there is so much worse — unemployment, poverty, lynchings, crime — going on today? Or worse, why be blinded by negativity about the past when there is clearly so much to march towards — a booming stock market, international recognition, emulating workaholic marayadapurushottams?
Fair questions, really, all the more difficult to answer for those who feel the certainty of their moral conviction fading in the face of constant support and jubilation about the consequences of December 6, 1992.
There’s one problem, though.
There’s something wrong, viscerally so, about an edifice of pride built on destruction. In the recesses of the mind, the remnants of a basic morality — what’s left behind after you’ve been lobotomised by reels, binge-watching, and the pressures of work, EMIs and responsibilities — whisper to you that it just doesn’t sit right. The things about a country that made you a patriot lie in shambles, like the rubble of a once-disputed structure. It’s possible to shove all of that down most of the time and live on as perhaps you must.
Then December 6 rolls along for another year. And for some time, at least, it is difficult to be a part of the manufactured majority, of the celebration of the “New” nation, as you remember the difference between right and wrong.
aakash.joshi@expressindia.com
