OK, it was a traumatic incident — the Babri masjid demolition — and it left indelible scars all over the world, but some people are reacting as if the entire world crumbled on that day. Damn it, it was just a monument. Thousands, even hundreds of thousands of monuments have been razed all over the world, and still being razed in countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan and Malaysia and there are just token protests: nobody is traumatized and no hearts bleed. Does the Babri masjid demolition become an earth-shattering phenomenon because it was a Muslim monument and Hindus want a temple there?
I’m not saying it was something we should feel proud of as a society; the demolition shouldn’t have happened and the law and order, and even the intelligence machinery miserably failed to prevent the unfortunate incident from happening. So big deal, again, after all it was just a monument. Aren’t people trying to demolish the Ram setu because it’s a myth?
Shedding crocodile tears for Muslims and berating other religions for all Muslim woes has become a fashion and people just don’t seem to be able to shake themselves out of it. In fact they are perpetually competing with each other to prove who is a greater secular. Excoriate and look down upon everything Hindu and admire and condone everything Muslim and lo and behold! You are a true secular. It has become a Kafkaesque world.
Here is a touching recollection of the fateful day, 15 years ago. In fact this post articulates my real feelings towards the demolition; that it’s not about the monument, it’s about our beliefs, it’s about political favoritism that is going to prove fatal for our country someday, and it is about all pervasive religious confusion. Asad’s thoughts make me clarify my stand: I don’t mean to downplay the incident but it surely is overhyped just because it is a Muslim issue. In the comment section of my previous post Mai said that a movie made on 1984 anti-Sikh riots has been censored by the government and I see no reactions forthcoming from the general intelligentsia. On the other hand, another movie — Parzania — made on Gujarat riots won some official awards (although it surely deserved all the praise that it got but that is another issue). This is where lies the main, the most dangerous problem. When a community is mollycoddled in this way, when all its negative sides are ignored then no intellectual introspection takes place in that community and it both resists change and ceases to grow. Such attitudes are causing the Muslim community irreversible harm.
