Only days after the Ram Lalla Pran Pratishtha, 350 Muslims embarked on a 6-day padayatra to reach the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya. These ‘devotees’ who reached Ayodhya after walking 150 kilometres belonged to the Muslim Rashtriya Manch – an organisation inspired by the RSS.
Shahid Saeed, the media in charge said, “Journey began on January 25, with the devotees covering 25 kilometres each day until they reached Ayodhya. The moment of the darshan of Imam-e-Hind Ram was viewed as an echo of enduring unity, integrity, sovereignty, and harmony from the Shri Ram Temple complex.” “The Manch strongly advocates participation in the joys and sorrows of the citizens as a way of promoting unity and strengthening the culture of love and harmony in the country,” Shahid added.
These Muslim devotees who reached Ayodhya also spoke about “respecting all religions” and how Indians should be united.
The statements by the Muslims who reached Ayodhya and their spokesperson Shahid Saeed are perfectly acceptable, just as most other tropes of Sarva Dharam Samabhava are – they are statements that display much bombast, with very little practical merit to them.
Of course, as this news emerged, the visuals of Topi-wearing Muslims taking Darshan of Ram Lalla were splashed all over social media, with the common theme being a sense of victory about the changing civilisational moorings of the Muslim community and the dawn of a new era of possible unity, harmony and brotherhood. The underlying messaging of this trope often is that the strife between the Hindu and the Muslim community is the eventual result of a minority within the minority – a few bad apples disturb the peace, the price of which has to be borne by the larger population of India – Hindus and Muslims both.
When one has done the job that I have done for almost a decade, the anger one feels while hearing such statements very quickly turns into pity – it is after all pity that one feels when one watches a pigeon close its eyes upon seeing a lurking cat hoping that the danger has disappeared in the darkness too. I have to at the very outset clarify that I truly have nothing against Shahid Saeed or any of the 350 Muslims who reached Ayodhya. I am positive that they genuinely believe this gesture would lead to better inter-religious understanding and acceptance. I genuinely believe that the Muslims who reached Ayodhya did so because they wanted the 500-year-old wound to heal – signalling to Hindus that they celebrate this victory with us.
However, one major fallacy while analysing such issues is that most people tend to focus on the micro while discussing the macro. As an experiment, try talking to a centrist, liberal Hindu about the ongoing Islamic onslaught against the Hindu community and try imposing upon them the importance of the Hindu community realising that demographic change heralds fresh, unyielding challenges. Very often, their natural response would be to tell you that their Muslim neighbour is lovely and has never treated them differently. Or that they have had a Muslim friend for the past 10 years and she is the nicest woman you would ever meet – never making her Hindu friends feel like any strife exists between the communities – “they are just like us!”, they say enthusiastically, with deer eyes. What they fail to realise is that the temperament or inherent goodness of the individual is never a question. Only a lunatic would say that one community would across the board have no decent people living among them. It is simply statistically impossible. However, the discussion is about the conduct of the community as a whole – conduct that is repeated over and over again across centuries – against other communities, particularly Hindus. Does that mean all Muslims are bad? Certainly not. Does that also mean that the community as a whole poses grave danger to Hindus owing to their religious doctrine and societal behaviour? Absolutely.
Now that the customary disclaimers are out of the way, we must proceed to examine the central premise of this article. To do so, it becomes important to first understand why Hindus celebrate such scenes with such enthusiasm – why are Hindus today so ecstatic about 350 Muslims showing some basic respect for their faith?
I don’t think there is any debate that Hindus are inherently plural. The Hindu community by and large simply wants to co-exist and is more than willing to concede space to other religious beliefs. Religious pluralism assumes that not only do all religions claim that their truth is the ‘only truth’ that exists, but that all religions are based on the principles of Universal Truths and thus, these are the two tenets that need to be dealt with if religions are to co-exist peacefully.
Religious Pluralism essentially says that firstly, all religions must acknowledge that certain truths exist in other religions as well, thereby declaring that it is not only their religion that is the ‘only truth’. Further, it says that all religions must acknowledge that every religion teaches basic universal truths that have been taught since before the advent of religion itself – certain universal goods and universal bads – killing is bad – raping is bad – torture is bad – honesty is good – charity is good – so on and so forth.
Hindus tend to see the world through their prism. They truly believe that being plural is the nature of humanity and that anyone who is pious would believe in certain basic acceptable principles of human co-existence assuming that every religion is equal in the sense that any faith in any form of divinity would make one far more tolerant than the unfaithful. Therefore, the moment they see Muslims grant even basic respect to their faith, it feeds their confirmation bias about religion, making them heave a sigh of relief – oh thank God they are not as bad as we are being told, they think to themselves. Besides that, the Hindus have been so humiliated by Muslims for over a thousand years and continue to be humiliated, that any basic decency extended seems like a victory – we may call this bigotry of low expectations.
So how do we dissect the claim that all religions are equal? At the outset, we have to acknowledge that Islam lays out a doctrine for the humiliation of Kafirs. When verses of the Quran ordain its followers to slay Kafirs and Polytheists, one has to wonder how can a religion that is at odds with Polytheism be equal and aspire to the same goals as that of a Polytheistic religion? When Islam is at odds with Polytheism and the religious texts explicitly mention the subjugation of any Polytheist faith, how accurate is it to say that all religions are the same?
It is a fact that Islam lays out the doctrine for religious warfare and strict rules as to what is to be done with the ‘spoils of war’. No other religion in the world has left behind a trail of mangled bodies, blood and gore in its wake as much as Islam and what is worse is that this carnage was sanctified in their religion it is one of the necessities of their religion.
What separates Islam from other religions, decrying the notion that all religions are equal, is that Islam is perhaps the only religion in the world that doctrines the use of unbridled and unashamed violence against those who refuse to believe in their doctrine and perhaps the only religion where the very existence of a non-Muslim is in itself an affront, enough to justify the worst form of violence known to man. What is far worse is perhaps the fact that the literal implementation of the religious doctrine ordaining such brutality is piously implemented to this day by a large swath of its adherents.
In fact, we don’t even need to go into Islamic theology to understand that their hate for Polytheists comes from their deep faith in their scripture. We don’t need to talk about Surah 2 (Al-Baqarah) Verse 191, Surah 3 (Ali ‘Imran) Verse 151, Surah 4 (An-Nisa) Verse 56, 89, 101, Surah 5 (Al-Ma’idah) Verse 14, 51, 57, Surah 8 (Al-Anfal) Verse 65, 69, Surah 9 (At-Tawbah) Verse 5, 14, 23, 28, 29, 37, 58, 111, 123, Surah 21 (Al-Anbya) Verse 98 so on and so forth. We just need to look at documented evidence about their collective conduct towards Hindus.
When Hindus are up against an ideology where the principles of religious warfare are embedded in their piety, it is impossible to be the pigeon who believes that all religions are the same and therefore, if there is someone from another faith (Islam for this article) who wishes to accord respect to Hindus by visiting their temples, they should be allowed to do so.
As the logic flows, I have held the belief that Muslims specifically should not be allowed to enter any Hindu Temple. Now, I could say that no ‘non-Hindu’ must be allowed to enter Temples and that would certainly make my argument far more palatable – however – I would be dishonest if I took that line and reduced other Indic faiths to the same playing field as Islam. There are several faiths in this world, including other Indic faiths, that perhaps don’t subscribe to the Hindu faith, in the strict sense of the term. However, they have not launched murderous conquests against Hindus and neither does their doctrine ordain violent subjugation of Hindus. Islam in that sense has a unique place in the history of the Hindu people and an honest recognition of that is imperative.
It is also important at this juncture to take a moment and reflect upon the deep significance of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya specifically. The construction of the Ram Temple is the successful culmination of a battle against the Muslim world, fought by Hindus, for over 5 centuries. It is the manifestation of a dream that Hindus lived and died for, generation after generation. Thousands of Hindus marched to their deaths with a smile on their face in the hope that someday, Raja Ram would return to his throne, a throne that was demolished by barbaric invaders. The Ram Mandir in Ayodhya is a unique symbol of the reclamation of not just the holy site itself, but of Hindu self-respect and dignity that for 500 years was crushed by Islamic barbarians. To this date, sections of Muslims have continued to unleash violence against Hindus in the name of Ram Mandir. Up until 7 days ago, OpIndia documented 18 incidents of violence against Hindus by Muslims as they celebrated the return of Bhagwan Ram. ISIS released its latest magazine and threatened Hindus with beheadings over the construction of Ram Mandir in Ayodhya. Hundreds of Islamists continue to insult Bhagwan Ram, vow retribution and the reconstruction of the abomination they called Babri on the sacred land of Hindus.
With a Temple that was wrested from Islamic barbarians and would forever continue to be under threat from the Islamists, the notion that those who belong to the very faith we fought against would be allowed inside the Temple, however well-meaning they are, simply for Sarva Dharam Samabhava optics, is an affront that the Hindu community must not mount against itself. The Hindu community needs to realise that those who chant “there is no God but Allah” 5 times a day and are willing to go to great lengths to ensure the world believes in it too have no place in a Temple – a space for Dhyan and Bhakti – for the very Gods sections of their community wish to annihilate. Perhaps the greatest testament to harmony and brotherhood would be Muslims like those 350 who walked to Ayodhya, reaching out to members of their community to convince them to right historical wrongs by handing over Hindu Temples, where mosques were built by invaders, back to the Hindu community. Perhaps the greatest testament to brotherhood and harmony would be for the good Muslims to tell the members of their community to stop being perennially outraged and unleashing violence against the Hindus. Perhaps the greatest testament to brotherhood and harmony would be an acknowledgement of historical truth since reconciliation is a pipe dream unless it is based on cold, hard, uncomfortable truths. What is certainly not needed is for Hindus to compromise on the sanctity of their places of worship simply to convince themselves that Muslims don’t hate them. Bigotry of low expectations certainly cannot replace the truth as the foundational stone of reconciliation.
