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great religious fervour is sweeping India over the consecration of the newly built Ram temple in Ayodhya. Even though the construction of the temple remains incomplete, the ruling BJP and its affiliates Sangh Parivar outfits turned the event on 22 January into a national celebration and the Centre gave its seal of approval to it by declaring it as a half day holiday in all Central offices.
India’s stock market too was shut for the day, while millions of people witnessed the event on television screens as the Prime Minister joined priests to inaugurate the temple. The trust in charge of the temple had invited an estimated 7,000 people — politicians, leading industrialists, film and sports stars and other public figures – to be present for the event. The mega program was scripted in a way that it serves as the start of the BJP’s campaign for getting the PM re-elected for a third term in office in the coming Lok Sabha elections. This is the reason why the temple had been made ready for the inauguration with record speed, even ignoring the religious tradition that a temple cannot be consecrated when the construction is not complete. In fact, four Brahmins, the Shankaracharyas of the country, put a spoke in the grand plan by objecting to the opening, saying that consecrating an incomplete temple goes against Hindoo scriptures. They publicly announced that they would not participate in the do. The trust of the temple, however, disregarded the objection and asserted there was nothing wrong in the ritual in a temple under construction. The hurry itself tells all about the intent to make political capital of the religious frenzy for winning the Lok Sabha polls. The event was given the aura of a kind of national celebration almost akin to that of the country’s Independence. The temple’s history, spanning 5 centuries, is grounded in the final attack and demolition in 1992 of the 16th century Babri Masjid, built in 1528-29 AD by Mir Baqi. That single event has shaped the country’s politics since and has resulted in cracking open deep religious fault lines in Indian society.
Without mincing words, it can be stated that the Hindoo-Moslem divide always existed on this sub continent. The Ram Janambhoomi issue has been kept alive for a long period as it has helped sustain many religious verging on politics figures, both financially and socially, for a very long time. Due to the political façade being maintained since Independence, ‘secularism’ had kept these embers burning but hidden. With the sudden eruption in 1992, the temple took center stage in Indian politics that resulted in, eventually, being one of the mainstays for the BJP to come to power and now to retain it. A recapitulation of the sequence of events leading to the culmination of the temple inauguration would be in order. The temple is being built on a contentious piece of land in Ayodhya believed by Hindoos to be the birthplace of Ram. But until the morning of 6 December, 1992, it was the Babri Masjid, a mosque built in 1528 and named after the Mughal king Babur, that stood at that place. A mob of Hindoo nationalists pulled down the mosque, chanting religious slogans after decades of angry and at times violent campaigns by zealots. After years of being closed to the public, the Supreme Court in November 2019 ruled that the site must be handed over to a trust that would be specially set up to oversee the construction of a Hindoo temple.
A separate piece of land in Dhannipur village on the outskirts of Ayodhya was allocated to Moslems for a mosque that may serve as a replacement for the Babri Masjid. Its construction is yet to begin. The saddest part of the tortuous legal process is that the apex court acknowledged that both the surreptitious and illegal manner in which idols were brought into the mosque in 1949 and the demolition of the mosque were crimes, yet it virtually exonerated the offenders and sanctified the offence by allowing the construction of a temple erasing the history of over 550 years. Building the Ram temple at the spot where the Babri Masjid once stood has been one of the BJP’s three foundational promises. The other two being the end of Jammu and Kashmir’s semi-autonomous status enshrined in Article 370 of the Indian Constitution which was scrapped in 2019, and a uniform civil code for personal laws are the others. The consecration of the temple fulfilled that decades-long pledge and came just weeks before national elections. The Ram temple movement has already paid rich dividends to the BJP’s political fortunes. The party won just two seats out of 543 in the Lok Sabha in 1984. A little more than a decade later, in the first national elections after the Babri Masjid’s demolition, it surged to become India’s single-largest party, winning 161 seats. With the growing acceptance of the BJP’s Hindoo nationalism, the BJP is now in an almost unassailable position under Modi’s leadership. The Opposition does not inspire much confidence among the electorate at the moment. It finds itself in a bind as criticism of the temple consecration ceremony further alienates it from the majority Hindoo population, whereas supporting it would give the BJP a virtual walkover in the elections.
However, politics and economy have been the worst affected in present day India. Governments, both at the Centre and in almost all States, are simply vying and competing with rivals with the strength of financial sops to the ever increasing population of poor. This is resulting in excessive taxation on the citizens. It is not just limited to direct taxes as individual Income Tax which is a pittance compared to invisible yet extremely high taxes as Goods & Services Tax (GST) and a plethora of Cess. Examples like Swachh Bharat, education cess and many others would come to mind of most citizens. While taxes are rising, incomes are not. There is no economic road map of the government worth its salt. Religion is, indeed, playing its role successfully of being the opium for the masses in present-day New India.