P Chidambaram says the media is over-analysing the Ayodhya judgment. He is right for the simple reason that this is not the last court verdict on this issue. Since this will certainly go up to the Supreme Court, this one is a bit like a semi-final match that ends in a draw but where both contestants enter the final. That is why assessing this judgment is still an academic exercise. More relevant, and interesting, therefore, is the popular and political responses to it and what they say about our evolution as a constitutional state and a secular, liberal, syncretic society and culture.
As investment bankers tell you, a good deal is the one that leaves both sides a little bit dissatisfied. That is the case here. Both sides find the judgment below their expectations, the Muslims more than the Hindus. Yet all criticism and questioning has been tempered with a maturity that surprised all of us, and the world. There were no motives imputed to the judiciary, nobody said it was fixed by the government, and nobody said he had lost his faith in the system.
Of course, the angriest of all were the ultra-secularists of the intelligentsia. But they also criticised the court for giving a panchayati solution rather than a judicial verdict and expected the Supreme Court to rectify it. Nobody said it was fixed, nobody said the judicial approach was not going to work, and the fact that this class that came up with the most articulate criticism of the judgment seemed overwhelmingly inclined towards the Muslim argument, in spite of having been (at least) born Hindu, spoke well for our society and the system.
So here is my first takeaway from this September 30. When all else fails, politics, social dialogue, intellectual and philosophical argument lean on the system of institutions. But for that you have to build great institutions and also tolerate what you might sometimes see as their excesses.
Because it is the institutions that serve as both parent-cum-guardians as well as pressure valves of a democracy. Institutions that are seen as impartial, credible and fair protect us and our rights from the whims of the executive, vagaries of our politics and, most importantly, the tyranny of brute majorities.
Also read: CBI court’s Babri verdict is not the end of Ayodhya movement. There’s Kashi and Mathura too
The second takeaway has to be the pragmatism and wisdom of our politics. So far no political party has tried to exploit the verdict for partisan purposes. The Congress, you can see, is a little lost. Its government is simply relieved that the judgment has been accepted with unprecedented calm and equanimity so far. The party itself, having built its post-2002 politics (following the Gujarat riots) on aggressive, almost Nehruvian secularism, where the BJP was evil and its leadership vermin, if not worse, finds that a compromise such as this might help the larger common good rather than any grand turnaround to undo the injustice of 1992.
That, in fact, will be and should be achieved by pursuing the criminal cases arising from the Babri Masjid destruction more vigorously. This judgment has in fact created space for just that, by distancing a criminal act from a purely civil property dispute. So the Congress needs to study the consequences and fine-tune its electoral politics accordingly. That is why the Congress response has been so measured, avoiding the easy temptation of lunging for the minority vote banks. This is in spite of the fact that in Bihar now, in Assam next year and, most importantly, in Uttar Pradesh in 2012, it will need to win back that Muslim vote it lost between 1989 (shilanyas under Rajiv Gandhi) and 1992 (Babri destruction, under Narasimha Rao).
Our politicians are the shrewdest Indians and it could well be that they are seeing a socio-political change that many of us have been anticipating and wishing for. It is simplistic to say India has moved on. But moved on from when to where? It can only be if the nature of vote-bank politics is changing fundamentally. Without that, India could not have moved on. Probably that is the change the Congress leadership has sensed, and the BJP even more so.
What else would explain their surprisingly muted and mature response to what many of their supporters would have seen as a victory, even if a narrow one on points. L.K. Advani spoke to my colleague, Indian Express Senior Editor Vandita Mishra, expressing satisfaction with the court order but underlining that it did not justify the Babri demolition. Now, if you are a student of contemporary politics, think hard. This is a clearer denunciation and disowning of the crime of 1992 by a top BJP leader than you have heard of the Emergency of 1975 by a top Congress leader. There have been regrets expressed, but only about its excesses. Only a fortnight ago, Advani had told Vandita and Saubhik Chakrabarti (Eye, September 19) that had he known the consequences that followed in either case, he would not have gone to Ayodhya while he would certainly have visited Pakistan.
Advani and his partymen have not discovered a new liberal approach to politics. Just like the Congress, they have also figured that India’s politics has changed. That the insecurities, bitterness and frustration of the ’90s that made Hindutva a propellant in their rise to power, are no longer there. This new India would only buy a new, improved political product. You want evidence: the only political criticism of the judgment has come from Mulayam and Lalu who now sit on the sidelines of power politics, having seen one of the two letters in their MY (Muslim-Yadav) vote banks move away.
Early on in journalism school we are taught the golden three-example rule. So here is my third takeaway. I stuck my neck out to hail the 2009 election result as conclusive evidence that India’s rotten politics of grievance was now yielding to the new politics of aspiration. Let me take a risk again to say two more things. One, that the Congress and the BJP have both seen and embraced this shift and are now recrafting their political response to this new, aspirational electorate. Mayawati’s studied and clinical equidistance and steely administrative control over law and order tells you that she has also understood the change. But three of the biggest, though localised, beneficiaries of the politics of grievance and fear, Mulayam, Lalu and the Shiv Sena, are in denial of this welcome change, and are, therefore, looking down the barrel, electorally.
Postscript: The question everybody is asking is, can a mosque and a temple coexist? India is full of such places. My favourite is Kanchipuram, where the mutt of the Shankaracharya has a sizeable mosque next to it. What makes this spot so unique is that right across the street, sternly overlooking the mutt and the mosque, sits a bust of Periyar, the great atheist, iconoclast and the founder of the Dravida movement. An inscription under it reads:
There is no God,
There is no God,
There is no God at all,
The inventor of God is a fool,
The propagator of God is a scoundrel,
The worshipper of God is a barbarian.
So if you believe in Bhagwan, you go to Shankaracharya; you have faith in Allah, you go to the mosque; and if you do not believe in any god at all, just turn around and bow to Periyar.
Nobody would take any offence any which way. So welcome to Incredible India.
Also read: My camera had ‘evidence’ of Babri Masjid demolition, but it was consigned to bin of history