Open Forum

New Delhi, 17 January 2024

Ram Temple Consecration

FAREWELL TO SECULARISM?

By Dhurjati Mukherjee 

The consecration of the Ram temple on January 22 may well have the country anoint a Hindu religious city in Ayodhya like the Vatican City of the Christians or Mecca of the Muslims, though it has always boasted of being secular. The Father of the nation, Mahatma Gandhi, or even his direct followers and philosophers could have never imagined that secularism would yield place to majoritarianism-- the transformation that has taken place in the last decade raising a lot of heat and dust. 

Apart from the allegation that the consecration of the temple has been timed just before the Lok Sabha elections, what is more surprising is the Prime Minister’s claim that God had chosen him as “an instrument to represent all Indians during the consecration”. This, in response to questions being raised over his pre-eminence at the event. Modi said he had begun his 11-day special observance as prescribed in the scriptures to “awaken divine consciousness” within himself in the lead-up to the consecration. However, he did not specify what he meant by special observance.  

Though the secular spirit is now being slowly vanishing from society, Mahatma Gandhi himself never went to a Hindu temple. Only once he visited the Meenakshi temple in Madurai in 1946 after the shrine was opened to Dalits to enter the premises. Though Gandhiji described himself as a Hindu, his writings bear testimony to his profound religious feelings, his understanding of Hinduism which was completely different from what we see today and his chosen mode of worship was inter-faith meetings, held in open grounds where Hindus, Muslims, Parsis, Sikhs, Jains and Christians would pray together from verses of all scriptures. The Mahatma tried to show that India belonged to all faiths equally and propagated the essence of different religious faiths and doctrines.  

The Mahatma believed in the plurality of religions and abhorred any concept of the superiority of some races or religions. Stressing the need for equal respect for all religions, Gandhiji observed: “While I believe myself to be a Hindu, I know that I do not worship God in the same manner as any one or all of them”. This perception of the Mahatma cannot be said to be the majority view in the society today. The ruling dispensation has made us believe that we should be proud of our religion and in the process, denigrate other religions and the sentiments of those who do not subscribe to the Hindu line of thinking.  

It would be pertinent here to mention that just a few days back, over 3000 Christians from across the country registered a protest against community leaders’ culpable silence on minority rights and other grim realities while participating in the Prime Minister’s Christmas celebrations. In an open letter released recently, it stated: “The hard truth is that the Prime Minister and his government have consistently disregarded their constitutional mandate, be it to the minorities, the Adivasis, the Dalits, the backward castes, the farmers, labourers, migrants etc. hence their gratitude to the Prime Minister was not in our name”. 

The letter further emphasised that since 2014; in particular, Christians in India have been victims of continued attacks and vilification from members of the ruling establishment across the country. It was indeed distressing to note that the letter even referred to Christians and Christian schools which “have been hounded and harassed, their places of worship destroyed, they have been denied their ordinary rights as citizens and been subjected to denigration and demonisation.” 

If this happens to be the attitude of the Christian community, one can easily presume how the Muslims have been treated or, to use the right phrase humiliated, and what they think of the present government and its attitude towards the minorities. Obviously, the present genre of Muslims cannot be blamed for what their forefathers have done, and they have a right to life, being citizens of this democratic country. 

This brings us to the moot question i.e., while Ram is being worshipped and a grand temple being built in his honour, can the country claim to have introduced ‘ram rajya’ in India. The answer obviously is a big no. The ruling dispensation has been rather poor in matters of governance and the entire development process has largely ignored the lower echelons of society. The bottom tiers of society have been greatly affected as the disparity in society has widened. Not just income disparity between the rich and the poor but also between the urban and the rural class, between the formal and the informal sectors, between industrial workers and farmers etc. In the context of such development, all talks of India emerging the third largest economy by virtue of increased wealth of business tycoons such as Ambanis, Adanis and the Tatas appear meaningless. 

Truth, justice, equality are steadily vanishing from today’s society where violence, jealousy and hatred is manifest. Thus, while eulogising Ram without following the principles that he stood for and the way he ruled his kingdom smacks of nothing but hypocrisy. Moreover, unlike Swami Vivekananda, Lord Ram is just a mythological figure as the Anthropological Survey of India (ASI) did not find any scientific evidence of Ayodhya being his birthplace.  

Moreover, religion has always been regarded as a private affair, but the ruling dispensation has made it a political issue, obviously to reap benefits from the coming Lok Sabha elections due shortly. While the Congress has decided to boycott the inauguration on these grounds, the three Shankaracharyas have also decided to skip the event for being held against what they consider scripture-mandated norms. 

It may be mentioned here that Jawaharlal Nehru had adopted a stance, underlining the need for the State to keep its distance from religion. However, the current Prime Minister has projected himself as the sole guarantor of Hindu religion and his party, along with the RSS, to propagate and spread Hinduism in the world, though of a distorted version, much different from Vivekananda’s approach of unity of all religion. 

A section of political analysts and sociologists are quite surprised at the trajectory of the country’s political development to being a Hindu state. All the fanfare about the Ram temple is just to ensure that the BJP is assured of a landslide victory in the elections. And this is destined to happen as education and awareness has yet to trickle down to the masses in the backward areas of the country. They leave their destiny to the almighty.---INFA 

(Copyright, India News & Feature Alliance)