Ayodhya verdict contradicts our secular credentials

Alas, the Allahabad High Court’s rather desperate verdict didn’t please the petitioners. After the initial politeness, all three parties — the Sunni Wakf Board, the Nirmohi Akhara and Ram Lalla, the unearthly litigant — are appealing against the verdict in the Supreme Court (SC).

With good reason. The Wakf Board’s claim to the land where their Masjid stood for almost five centuries has been dismissed as time-barred. And it is not clear why they are being given a third of the land while two-thirds go to the two Hindu litigants. If it was a conciliatory gesture to end an impossibly politicised sectarian
problem, the two communities should have got half and half.

And the two Hindu parties have come together to deny the Wakf Board even the third of the pie allotted to them. Since the court has declared the site to be Lord Ram’s birthplace, what right do Muslims have on it? They want the whole plot for their grand Ram temple.

So the Ayodhya case seems all set for the SC. This is the one chance India has of rectifying the outrageous chain of flaws that threatens to choke the life-breath out of our secular democracy. And hopefully, the SC will not fail us.

Unlike the Allahabad high court, which has. Its verdict ignores the palpably obvious (like a heritage mosque being illegally destroyed in front of our eyes and on international television), while focusing on intangibles (like where exactly a god was in remote antiquity).

It relies on dubious evidence to declare that a Hindu temple was demolished at the site almost 500 years ago, and attempts to rectify that imagined wrong while roundly ignoring the demolition of the Babri Masjid 18 years ago, and makes no attempt to rectify that wrong witnessed by the whole nation. It accepts that the idols of Ram Lalla had been placed inside the Masjid in 1949, triggering the present dispute, but seems to reward that and later acts of desecration by ruling in favour of the vandals.

Sure, the danger of going against majority sentiment in an increasingly intolerant, polarised society was clear. The court had effectively taken on the task of providing a political solution to an incredibly politicised problem of faith. And allowed the muscle-flexing majority to influence legal justice disregarding the Constitutional guarantee of equality before the law.

That it treats the disputed land as occupied only by Ram Lalla legitimises the demolition of the mosque. That the verdict places faith over facts and the majority’s faith over the minority’s is disturbing. That it relies on myth and political expediency to decide a legal matter sets a worrying precedent. In effect, the verdict undermines justice and contradicts the secular, democratic credentials of India.

Thankfully, the HC is not the final word. In the Supreme Court, the
case could be fast tracked and due procedure followed more diligently. The SC has been involved with the Mandir/Masjid issue earlier. Meanwhile, the government could act on the Liberhan Commission’s report, set up a specialised committee of social scientists to examine the historicity of the Ram Janmabhoomi and punish those guilty of razing the mosque.

In 1991, a BJP prime minister had said that the Ram temple was necessary to save the honour of the Hindu community. Two decades later, to save the honour of India and its Constitution, our ‘secular’ government and the Supreme Court must prevent a Ram temple at the site of the criminally demolished Babri Masjid.