The Gyanvapi Case

Why should an academic and that too of business and the economy,?be worried about Gyanvapi Mosque/Temple case? I cannot help but think about what the case means for democratic India – nay for the idea of India itself. ?My sleeplessness has forced me to write out this piece.?

First, the arguments used by the Mosque side. The surveyor was biased. This could at best only delay the inevitable. The court could also order a new survey. Next, the “linga” is not what is claimed to be. Actually, the claim of a temple is easy to establish (and impossible to disprove).

In any case, the structure itself strongly suggests that there was a temple out there, the details apart. Therefore, the real argument that India cannot /should not go back before a certain cut-off date (Independence) was diluted. That is the only argument that the Mosque Committee had. All others are meaningless. Here, is a typical case of weakening one’s argument by having a subsidiary argument that has a negative effect on the main. But the Mosque Committee as much as the Babri Mosque committee earlier has taken the loser stand. [Babri was originally a title case. By keeping it festering and by not agreeing to a compromise, the court had to turn the case to an imaginative but perhaps illegitimate use of archeology! The naivety of the Muslim side is difficult to understand. They should have donated the entire parcel and got the nation to commit to a standstill on places of worship].

The Hindu side claimed the site as a temple. To buttress its position, it claims that a site (geographical area) where worship/sacrifice happened is forever holy. By that token, all of India is holy given its great antiquity, ?and nothing should /can be developed the modern way, forget about Mosques being built over temple areas. [Not unrelated to the fact that we have not been able to use the Himalayan resources, while China exploits even ours in the Himalaya]. And can India (modern) go by the ritual/ books /wisdom of religion even that of the majority? So also all public spaces (roads, junctions, etc.) used by "templettes" that have grown or have the potential to grow into temples, have to be suffered forever? And now should we not be open to claims that under the Victoria Terminus, your house, my house there could have been a temple? Or that of Buddhist or a Jain or a Shaivate, that this or that Vishnu temple has been built over another place of worship?

The Hindu side also made the point that by Muslim law a mosque cannot be built by destroying /using the material of a place of worship. While true it is not relevant since the law was to apply to the places of worship of the peoples of the book and not more generally? More importantly, should a court go by Muslim law?

Now consider the Places of Worship Act. The Hindu side again contends that there is an exception for archeological assets. True, but then both the Mosque and the temple that stood there (I am assuming this to be true) have value, ?under the 100-year-old aspect that the law lays out. Archeological value has to be judged by archeologists, and this, in the case of a standing structure of some antiquity vis-à-vis another of similar antiquity (the Indo-Saracenic nature of the temple part of the structure is most obvious), can go either way. Should /would archeologists recommend destroying a standing structure to find incomplete pieces of what once stood precariously? Digging under the Mosque to find whatever remnants is fine, but it is difficult to believe that ASI would find this to be more important than the diggings they need to do in Keezhadi or of pre-Harappan sites in India, or of pre-Islamic iconic monuments.

Archeology’s primary aspect is study and research, not rendering a place for worship, ?which is what the Hindu argument seems to be all about. And implicitly the Muslim side’s as well. ?That the ASI itself may have been compromised is evident more generally. The extreme neglect of Islamic structures other than a few iconic like the Taj, and the politico-religious creeping in, in its operations, is also evident. Thus, in Vadnagar, a very interesting and ancient village outside Ahmedabad, construction around a girls’ school in the heart of the old urban part lead to the uncovering of a sinkhole and the finding of an ancient Jain temple of great beauty. ?The temple was apparently uninfluenced by Indo-Saracenic trends and therefore ought to have been of high value to the ASI. But post digging, the white marble idols (to which current day Jains are partial) were brutally chiseled out of the fallen temple to be put inside a modern Jain temple for worship. It left the wonderful structure of beautiful black and sandstone pillars and the temple itself, which could have been restored, to rubble. This is ASI for you!

What should be the way forward? It is obvious that it cannot be otherwise than to go by a cutoff date and 1947 is most logical. Not having a cutoff date would forever engage the country in the inane. And modernization by which India can reach its greatness would have been set aside to leave India in a low income (forget middle income) trap forever. No society with a religious state has been able to modernize. One is the antithesis of the other – never mind how great the religion is or its philosophy. The western world had struggled for over 600 years before the modern state could emerge. India thanks to the tolerant nature of Hindu philosophy, its avoidance of hard beliefs, and the great nation creating aspect of India’s constitution, due to the leadership then (Nehru, Ambedkar, Tagore, etc), the construction of the idea of India as unity in diversity, and the cement of our unity in progressiveness and in the common struggle against the British, take us very close to modernity. Any deviation will be impossible to undo since the logic of “identity” based on religion and therefore of necessarily creating “others” is inevitable. ?Recognize that the greatest political event of the 20th Century is potentially independent India going democratic. Vitiating that, through a dilution of constitutionalism, is a sure-shot way to the abyss. And if it is not prevented by all modernists, India can also be the greatest tragedy of the 21st Century.

23rd May 2022, Goa