It’s Nearly Five Hundred Years: Sri Ramachandra is Awaiting his Return to his Own Home

Asaduddin Owaisi, the chief of the All India Majlis-e-Ittehad-ul Muslimeen (AIMIM), dared the government to put out an ordinance “if it had the courage”.The same Asaduddin Owaisi earlier had also thundered, correctly, that Hindus shouldn’t blame Muslims for cow slaughter because the same Hindus who worship cows are also involved in cow smuggling and selling them off to slaughterhouses and that even a good number of Brahmins eat beef.

It is with profound regret but with honesty that we must admit that Owaisi is absolutely right in his diagnosis at least in its essence.

We as mere, scared Hindu mortals dare not question the wisdom of the Supreme Court. Or of any court. We as mere Hindu mortals must merely obey the diktat immortally elucidated by Tennyson and modified by the present writer to suit the context:

To provide a gist of what the Learned Court has said, here’s the NDTV report on it:

In other words, the January 2019 timeframe will be to decide the date when the daily hearings will be set, and not that the Ayodhya hearings will actually begin in January 2019.

Suffice to say that this is just the latest addition to the never-ending list of such Learned Lordly Wisdom that continues to open the eyes of Hindus who pollute the environment with their festivals and continue to horribly oppress their women in the name of a pilgrimage to a Boy-God who will be tempted by the sight of menstruating women. Suffice to say these judgements might have well emanated from a court in the United States or the Vatican. Perhaps this tweet best sums up the wisdom of their Lordships:

I suppose further observations after this will be superfluous.

This year marks the 26th anniversary of the demolition of Babur’s Masjid. Or more accurately, it marks one of the most decisive and irreversible turns in reclaiming at least a significant facet of Bharatavarsha’s battered soul. But a fundamental question arises when we survey the events that transpired in these 26 years: is there such a thing as an indefinite delay in the path of irreversibility?

The answer seems to be yes.

The deeper we dig both into the present and history, it becomes the more apparent that there must be something fundamentally amiss in the wiring of the Hindu psyche to allow repeated destructions of their own people, temples, institutions, values, and their way of life and still not learn anything from it.

Let it be said that this delay in constructing the Sri Rama Devasthana in his very birthplace, Ayodhya is unforgivable. You lose your civilisational memory that much longer, it fades away into oblivion that much faster until you reach a point where you forget what you stand for.

Let it also be said that the galling sight of the Structure of Peace smack in the ramparts of the grand Sri Krishna Temple complex in Mathura is a painful reminder, a centuries-old, festering open wound . It is a double tragedy because while we seem to have lost even the ability to ask for healing it, we also dare not scratch it, patiently bearing the flies feasting upon it and the maggots munching on it.

Let it further be said that the fabled Viswanatha Temple in the most sacred city of Kashi, remains just that: a mere fable read in text, recited in verse, and narrated in oral legends. The reality is best described by the character of Razia, the protagonist who visits this Punyabhoomi in Dr. S L Bhyrappa’s classic novel, Aavarana:

This is what Hindus have done to their own invaluable cultural heritage and inheritance. They have internalised the Grand Lie that their own cultural memory is a crime against the Indian state.

Let it also be unequivocally, unapologetically said that yours and my reverence for the sacred is not the subject for “logical” debates. These are merely three instances of what a Peaceful Religion has done, and done repeatedly over such a vast sweep of time to a philosophy, culture and civilisation that has absolutely no parallel anywhere in the world. It is the culture that embodied the operational ethic that sustains the universe in just one word: Rta. You lose this, I guarantee you won’t find anything better to replace it.

And these three instances show two things: one, the farsighted and diabolical genius of the Peaceful wreckers of civilisations across the globe for centuries without end; two, the deep psychological damage, inferiority complex, self-shame, confusion, and inertia on the part of the wrecked. This diabolical genius in our case lies in the precise choice of the sites held as the most sacred by Hindus: Shiva in Kashi, Sri Rama in Ayodhya, and Sri Krishna in Mathura. The gauntlet thrown, as numerous firsthand accounts of Muslim histories reveal, was this: look at what we’ve done to these temples so highly revered by you; the fact that you were unable to protect them shows how powerless the greatest of your Gods are.

But we live in fashionable times in a climate that has long since dismissed the sacred as having any intrinsic or even human value. I use the word “sacred” in the sense of Sattva and Pavitra which, while operating unseen, from behind the scenes, provides the equanimity and motive power to accomplish grand and ennobling feats both in the spiritual and temporal realms. It is this notion of the sacred that gave us all these grand temples etc. Therefore, when the sacred is banished as superstition, the profane gets Z-Category security.

Which is what explains the brutal, state-sponsored murder of hundreds of Kar Sevaks by the then Mulayam Singh Yadav government and last year, Kapil Sibal’s arguments in court aimed at further prolonging the construction of the Sri Rama Temple. The same Mulayam Singh who on numerous occasions, flaunted his Yadav credentials, claiming that he was the descendant of Sri Krishna himself. Perhaps Sri Krishna, somewhere in the vicinity of the Yamuna Nadi, continues to play a melancholic Raga on his flute, a wry smile on his lips at his own failure of perhaps leaving the work, which he had begun in the Mausala Parva, unfinished.

Or to put it bluntly, these Hindu political eminences, using a multi-pronged approach, are resuming the interrupted work that the numerous Peaceful Dynasties and Emperors had carried on for centuries. V S Naipaul precisely describes the nature of this work.

And what has survived of this Hindu India continues to be undone at a more feverish pace by Hindus themselves under the Indian State’s Religious Orthodoxy called Secularism, which continues to promote Jihadism and predatory variants thereof. What does the fact that Hindus can do nothing at what’s happening for example, in Kerala show? Sure, the protesting devotees of Swami Ayyappa did put up a great resistance but what of the aftermath in which the entire brute-might of the Pinarayi Government came knocking on the doors of these devotees?

Of course, somewhere around the corner, I spot the familiar mealy-mouthed meaningless nothings of “correcting historical wrongs” and Ganga-Jamuni Tehzeeb, and variants thereof.

The only unswerving answer to this sweet nonsense is this: reclaiming one’s civilisational soul and sanctity, no matter how long ago it was wounded isn’t called correcting historical wrongs. It is called repair and restoration.

Embedded right within the spurious homily of Ganga-Jamuni Tehzeeb (the Ganga-Jamuni Culture) lies the language of the imperialist: calling it Jamuni instead of Yamuna or Jamuna, and the alien word, “Tehzeeb.” Of course, there’s no shortage of Hindus wearing this homily around their necks as a proud inheritance. But the fact is that it almost always means “Indo-Sarcenic architecture,” Sufi Music, Ajmer Sharif Dargah, Ghazals, Mushairas, wearing attires derived from the Mughal court, Lucknow mutton biriyani etc. Or to put it bluntly, Ganga-Jamuni Tehzeeb is as real as the Tehzeeb of a predator who has made temporary truce with the potential prey. Indeed, why do those folks who extoll the virtues of Ganga-Jamuni Tehzeeb conveniently fail to mention the fact that when Yamuna merges with Ganga at Prayaga, she herself becomes Ganga?

Ayodhya, Kashi, Mathura and countless such other punya-tirthas represent precisely this: the yearning of an ancient, vibrant, and living civilisation to cleanse the Ganga of her pollution accumulated over centuries. The Ganga that is their spiritual and cultural ethos should merge once again in her bosom. This civilisation has long lost its road en route this profound journey of recovery and restoration. But given this latest Lordly Wisdom, it is also in terminal danger of losing even its direction.

Even if one takes a compassionate view, Hindus haven’t exactly covered themselves in glory in this long and continuing journey. Kaikeyi banished Sri Ramachandra for a mere fourteen years. But Sri Rama Bhaktas need to honestly ponder over this: they have, for various reasons, allowed him to remain in exile for nearly five hundred years, exiled him from his own birthplace. Are we worse than Kaikeyi? She had her reasons. What reasons do we have?

A major reason why Hindus have reached such a pathetic, impotent state is because Hindus have drawn no red lines for others that should not be crossed. However, these red lines are precisely the first and the most visible ones that Hindus see when they are dealing with either Peace or Love.

Postscript

Ironically, the NDTV report that I cited in the beginning of this piece carries this poignant picture.

Sri Ramachandra’s illustrious ancestor Dilipa put his life on the line to save the cow Nandini from the clutches of a lion.

|| Om Tat Sat ||

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