Sure, not everyone may share this optimistic interpretation. Some people do get highly charged by all this (if you had the courage to watch some noisy television debates on Gyanvapi issue, you can see them). To them, all I would say is this – relax, breathe. It’s just a place of worship. And you can worship and pray to God from anywhere in this world (which is created by God anyway.)
While the issue is well known now, here is a quick summary. The Gyanvapi mosque in Varanasi was built on a site that had a temple (no rocket science needed to prove that here by the way). The temple was possibly destroyed by Aurangzeb, in the 1600s, as part of repression strategy. This temple destruction was amongst the many bad things the Mughals did at that time. Mughals were an absolute monarchy. They were brutal. There was no democracy at that time. Mughal era TV experts could not critique the government.
Anyway, what the Mughals did was horrible. Yes, there was a historical wrong committed to the Hindus of that time. We are now a Hindu majority nation, but our history is of Hindu oppression. In that sense, it is tempting to ask for justice. Hence, attempts to correct historic wrongs will and have found resonance in Hindus around the country. The BJP led the Babri masjid-Ayodhya issue. Other sites around the country have similar disputes too.
At the same time, while faith is wonderful, the practical reality of life is also important. If we do start doing historical x-rays of every mosque in the country, we would be opening a pandora’s box. Literally tens of thousands of mosques might be on sites that were originally temples. That is our history.
Forget temples converted to mosques, most of our Indian Muslims today come from forefathers that were Hindus converted to Muslims. What are a few sites, even our people were converted?
The question is this – what do we do now? Should we spend most of India’s time correcting these historic wrongs? Or should we accept the status quo and move on ahead, rather than defend some old sites?
Accepting the status quo is a valid viewpoint. That is exactly what the parliament did in 1991, when it passed the The Places of Worship (Special Provisions) Act, 1991. This act states that “It is hereby declared that the religious character of a place of worship existing on the 15th day of August, 1947 shall continue to be the same as it existed on that day.”
In other words, whatever was the status of a religious site on 15 August 1947, that same status will remain in the future and cannot be changed. (The Babri Masjid – Ram Janambhoomi issue was specifially carved out and not covered in the act.) The rationale for the act was justified as the secular nature embedded in the constitution of India.
This status-quo solution does maintain peace, avoids controversy and prevents unnecessary conflict. However, is this the best way to look at things? The act states that nothing can be changed about any site post-Independence. However, pre-Independence, we weren’t free to demand justice anyway. Before independence, we were ruled by one power or another. Hence, are we to accept that whatever was done before we became free, will be imposed on us after we became free?
These are tough but valid questions. While secularism, practical aspects of maintaining peace may have moved us towards a hard status-quo solution, there is also a valid argument to examine sites based on a case by case analysis.
India is and will remain secular. However, what does it mean to be secular? To never change or challenge anything when it comes to religion? To stay out of each other’s way? Or is it to understand each other better? What might be yet another mosque today might be one of the top-10 holiest sites for Hindus in the past. So should we never even discuss that? These are valid questions and merely discussing them doesn’t make one communal or non-secular.
The status-quo nature of the current act does help in keeping order. It deserves praise for that. However, we also perhaps need to look at certain sites differently. What was the historical significance of the site? What is the current vs past status of the site? Was it a revered, top-10 Hindu temple sites for centuries, and is now just a mosque, which doesn’t hold such meaning? Can we perhaps find a better way to look at such situations than ‘let’s not discuss anything’?
Maybe we allow certain sites to be converted back, using extremely stringent criteria. These criteria may include a) was the site of extremely high importance to another religion for centuries? b) can we have a buy-in from the current community using the site to restore it back?
Perhaps the Places of Worship Act can cover 99.99% of the sites. However, maybe there can be another solution for the 0.01%?
Finally, here another elegant and beautiful solution for a few sites. We can have a hybrid monument – a mosque-temple or a “mosple”. In Turkey, the Hagia Sofia is a church and mosque hybrid of sorts, officially known as the Hagia Sophia Grand Mosque and formerly as the Church of Holy Wisdom. It is one of the top tourist sites in the world today. India, with its unique history of Hindus and Muslims intertwined together, could do with a few of these “Mosples”, a celebration of our conjoined past.
Maybe that’s true secularism, where we celebrate our co-existence, rather than just let each other be.