New Delhi: The inauguration of the Ram temple is a “golden opportunity” for India’s Muslims to accept the truth and reject the “intellectual treachery” propagated by the “Islamist-secularist conglomerate” in post-Independence India, Organiser has said in a recent editorial.
The editorial, published on 5 February — a fortnight after the idol of Ram Lalla was consecrated in Ayodhya — says that the Archeological Survey of India’s 850-page report had “diminished all the possible arguments of the Islamists and Secularists”.
While the history of “Islamist rulers” from Mahmud of Ghazni and Muhammad Ghori to Aurangzeb is a long and painful one — with repeated attacks and desecration — the “fake conceptualisation of secularism” had sought to cover it up, the editorial said.
“Thanks to this misrepresentation, Muslims of Bharat, whose ancestors were Hindus and victims of the violent and tyrant policies of the invaders, started associating themselves with the supremacist ideology of the invaders,” it said.
Arguing that the ongoing legal dispute over the Gyanvapi structure in Varanasi is a “litmus test” for Indian Muslims, the article said that they should heed the advice given by M.C. Chagla, who served as the chief justice of the Bombay High Court from 1947 to 1958. According to the editorial, Chagla, a Muslim himself, told the minority group “not (to) get trapped in minority politics perpetuated by Congress for vote-bank and accept they also ‘inherit the same tradition and legacy’”.
This, the editorial concludes, would “pave the way for permanently resolving the Hindu-Muslim discord”.
Ram Temple inauguration’s political, so was its demolition
The Ram temple also featured prominently in former Rajya Sabha MP Balbir Punj’s op-ed in The Indian Express on 9 February.
In his article, Punj sought to counter the criticism that the inauguration of the Ram Temple last month was a political statement. If that is indeed the case, then so was the demolition of the “Ram temple” by an Islamic invader and the opposition to its reconstruction in post-independence India, Punj argued in an op-ed in The Indian Express on 9 February.
Punj invoked two historical figures to buttress this point. First, he wrote about Arnold Toynbee, a renowned English historian, who drew a parallel between the Russians building a church in Warsaw, Poland after occupying it in the 19th century to “give a continuous ocular demonstration that the Russians were now their masters” and the construction of the three mosques in Ayodhya, Kashi, and Mathura.
Punj quotes Toynbee as saying: “Those three mosques were intended to signify that an Islamic Government was reigning supreme, even over Hinduism’s holiest of holy places”.
He then goes on to invoke Mahatma Gandhi, who, in his weekly journal Young India — published between 1919 and 1931 — wrote: “The question of mosques built on another’s land without his permission is incredibly simple. If A is in possession of his land and someone comes to build some things on it, be it even a mosque, A has the right at the first opportunity of pulling down the structure”.
Arguing that the building of the Ram temple, is, in fact, a symbol of decolonisation, which those who subscribe to the “Nehruvian consensus” and its disdain for temples do not quite understand, Punj says that the “colonised minds outlive the colonisers”— a symptom of their “Stockholm syndrome”.
Not the right time to be a hawk with Pakistan
Makarand Paranjape, a Right-leaning author and professor of English at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), chose to focus on Pakistan’s National Assembly elections held earlier this month.
While the elections on 9 February threw up a hung house, former prime minister Shehbaz Sharif eventually emerged as the frontrunner for the top job and is all set to take over.
The people of Pakistan seem to rejecting the foundational ideology of their country — the hatred of India and Hindus — Makarand Paranjape wrote in his opinion piece in Open magazine on 16 February, batting for Imran Khan to return.
They finally seem to be recognising that their real enemies are the “selfish ruling elites and the army”, and not India and Hindus, he wrote.
The biggest evidence of this that is the popularity of Imran Khan has “unleashed a political force, a movement even, which cannot be curtailed, let alone bottled up, easily,” Paranjape wrote,
If Khan manages to turn things around in Pakistan — which would include making the ISI and other state and non-state actors shun their anti-India activities — “then the gradual, calibrated and evidence-based thawing of relations is certainly possible”, the author wrote.
“India must wait, watch and — yes — not forgo whatever advantage it can derive from the situation. What is also comforting and different this time round is that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, despite being election-bound itself, is in pole position to do precisely this,” he wrote.
The need for a uniform civil code
Arif Khan Bharti, an assistant professor from Delhi’s Indraprastha Mahila Mahavidyalaya, focussed on the need for a uniform civil code (UCC) in his opinion piece in Panchjanya on 12 February.
The article was published days after Uttarakhand became the first state (not counting Goa with its Portuguese legacy) to pass a Uniform Civil Code law. Significantly, a UCC has been on the Sangh Parivar’s agenda for decades.
In his article, Bharti wondered how those who call themselves secular can oppose the UCC.
Is having different religious laws, despite having equality in criminal laws that apply to everyone, not a “flagrant violation of equality before the law”, he asked.
“In 125 countries of the world, the marriageable age of girls and boys is the same, that is, there are the same rules for everyone,” he writes. “In some countries, it is 20 or 21 years. Secularism here is not based on conflict and neutrality between state and religion like in the West, but it is based on coexistence and fraternity of all religions in a diverse society,” the article said.
(Edited by Uttara Ramaswamy)
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