Prime Minister says the Old Wounds are Healing. Are they?

Hoisting the saffron flag, called by the Sangh Parivar as Dharma Dhwaj, at the Ram Temple in Ayodhya this week, marking the completion of temple construction, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that “the centuries old wounds are being healed, long standing pain is finding rest, and a centuries old vow is finally being fulfilled.”

He said that the day the saffron flag was hoisted there, marked the “culmination of a 500-year long yajna or ritual sacrifice”. Making a pointed reference to what exactly this moment of flag hosting actually meant for the people of this country, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Adityanath said that “the saffron fag hoisted at Sri Ram Mandir is a symbol of religion, dignity, truth, justice and national religion.” For him it was a symbol of what a developed India meant for its people and the world.

In fact, this is a moment when the India that its people had known for the past seven decades of its independence is coming to an end. Instead, a new country where its sacred principles of equality, secularism, and dignity for all its people are being sacrificed for the bigotry and intolerance of a particular section who have successfully wrested political power and now seek to destroy the foundations of its constitutional governance, peaceful social fabric and the political system where each of its citizen had his or her own stake and dignified participation.

The speech of the Prime Minister in itself was a shocking example of how low the dignity of the exalted office of the chief executive of this country has fallen, considering that no Prime Minister in the past would have made such an openly parochial, and communally coloured speech as Modi had done when he referred to the 500 years of yajna, only because a Masjid had stood there for the past five centuries. Its wanton destruction was an act of his own fellow travellers, and the tens of thousands of people from the minority Muslim community who had lost their lives and properties in the massive riots in the aftermath of Babri Masjid destruction have never received justice. Still, he speaks of 500 years of yajna, as if the violence perpetrated on India’s Muslims were of no consequence, as if their lives had no value.

It is this total neglect of the responsibility of any self respecting administration to protect all sections of the people including its minorites, that is unambiguously evident in the Prime Minister’s speech that makes it all the more shocking and condemnable. Such a callous and sectarian attitude on the part of a chief executive of a Central Administration is totally unacceptable and deserves to be condemned by all sections of the Indian people.

The talk of a “national religion” in a multi-ethinic, multi-cultured country like India with many faiths, many languages, many cultures, is a matter that should make its citizens worried as it would mean a new country called Bharat, where its majority community’s religion will be its official religion making the country something like Pakistan, created on the theory of religious nationalism which has proved to be a total disaster for its people.

In fact, the BJP and Sangh Parivar leaders are now playing with fire, and the effort to convert India into a Hindu nation would only serve to exacerbate its many internal differences. The fact is that the Hindu community is not a monolithic community, it is internally structured on a stratified caste system which has denied majority of its people in lower castes even the minimum basic human rights and dignity. The more they speak of a national religion, the more internal worries they are likely to provoke as it would send out a warning signal to the tribals and lower caste people that another era of a Brahmanical hegemony is on the prowl, ready to swallow even the minimum rights they had managed to gain in independent India.

Mohammad Shafi
National Vice President