Hey Ram
How India went from secular state towards Ram Rajya
Hinduism is one of the oldest religions on the planet. It has been practised in India and parts of South Asia that were at various points ruled by Indian kings.
Unlike most other religions, Hinduism divides Hindus rather than unifying its followers.
It has a plurality of gods and hence the gods one worships can be radically different from another. There are regional disparities as well. Bengalis typically worship Durga. Ayyappan is worshipped in Kerala and parts of Tamil Nadu but few in the north would have heard of him. I can go on, but you get the idea.
Much like the Avengers, each has a different power, an origin story and a life story.
Despite all these diversities, all of these gods had co-existed in the Indian psyche for millennia. It has also kept India from rising as an Empire. There was no singular god that could endow a king with divine power to rule all.
Most of the Mughal rulers who had been successful in India allowed secular practice of religion. Some Mughal rulers were extreme such as Aurangzeb but for the most part, they managed to co-exist. The Marathas pushed the cause of Hindu rule during this period.
The Mughals were supplanted by the British. They brought their missionaries to preach the word of the lord.
The very first pushback against the British government came in the form of the Uprising of 1857. The source of the problem was tallow-smeared cartridges that sepoys had to rip with their teeth. Cattle were considered holy in India and the idea of ingesting beef tallow through this act was considered blasphemous. The ensuing revolt almost brought the British to their knees. They could have even lost Delhi but the Indian soldiers did not have the spy network that the British did. Information, or the lack thereof, lost them the battle.
The British divided and ruled.
They divided those in power and ruled them.
They did not care much for the poor.
The people who were diverse in background as well as in language and religion got along rather well. The states south of Mysore did not ever fall to the Mughals. Even so, Kerala had a tradition of welcoming visitors from the Middle East. These men would often marry women in North Kerala and were referred to as Mappila.
Mappila Muslim, in general, is a member of the Muslim community of same name found predominantly in Kerala and Lakshadweep Islands, in southern India. Muslims of Kerala make up 26.56% of the population of the state (2011), and as a religious group they are the second largest group after Hindus (54.73%). Mappilas share the common language of Malayalam with the other religious communities of Kerala.
Source: Wikipedia
At the time of Independence, two power-hungry men were having a prick-waving contest. Jinnah and Nehru both wanted to be Prime Ministers. Jinnah was a whiskey-swigging aristocrat who was educated in England and anything but a devout Muslim. Nehru was a skirt-chasing aristocratic, educated in England as well. More crucially he was chasing the skirt of Lady Mountbatten. In between this mix was another England-educated bigot called Gandhi. Gandhi had strange Hindu leanings to put it mildly.
As I mentioned earlier, the British divided the rich and did not give a damn about the poor.
As the British exit from India seemed imminent, Jinnah decided to weaponise the All-India Muslim League and demand a separate nation if he was not appointed the Prime Minister of the newly formed nation. With a home in the posh neighbourhood of Malabar Hill in Bombay, he was not seeking to create a situation where he may never be able to return to his home. On the contrary, he calculated that the threat would be enough to make all of the parties acquiesce.
Much like Donald Trump’s run for president in 2016 was meant as a reality show, he was gobsmacked when he won the elections.
Jinnah was gobsmacked when he was awarded a nation! Not just one, but two nations. Since the Muslim League had started in West Bengal, Bengal was partitioned in two and East and West Pakistan were created.
The Briton in Nehru wanted a secular state while Jinnah had no other choice but to create a Muslim state given his convoluted reasoning for demanding one in the first place. This sowed the seeds of resentment in the Indian psyche which eventually led to the murder of Gandhi.
In the first few years after the formation of the Indian Republic in 1950. Many debates were held around the slaughter of cows and the rights of the Hindus. Since Pakistan was a Muslim state, the Hindus felt that their rights were not as well guarded in the newly created country.
The economic growth was anaemic at best. The farmers struggled and the “License Raj” meant that the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. The focus of most of the populace shifted towards survival. Unemployment was ripping the roof and the euphoria of Independence was waning and people wanted to see their government make real change.
Despite this, the Nehruvian years were spent making big announcements with little change on the ground. Indira Gandhi made things worse by ushering criminals into politics and creating a nexus that lasts to this day.
It was Indira who decided to play with the fire of Hindutva as her policies kept failing to improve the lives of Indians. She was the first one to embrace nationalism and use that as a rallying cry. She broke all norms of a Democracy and stopped only upon the death of her son and heir apparent Sanjay Gandhi. But the damage had been done, she let the genie out of the bottle.
In the aftermath of her emergency, the Janata Party came to power briefly whose major achievements were undoing all the legislative wrongs that had been done by Indira. She had legislated to give the Prime Minister sweeping powers during the Emergency years. The Janata Party was secular. More importantly they did not have an economic agenda apart. They came to power promising to undo what Indira had done. Once that had been achieved, they were caught flat-footed.
Upon its loss in the elections in 1980, the Janata Party veered towards Hindutva. It became the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
The party was rather small and lacked the backing that was needed to be a national power. They embarked on a Ram Jamabhoomi movement in 1984. Even so, the party was fighting hard to find traction.
The same year Indira Gandhi was shot dead by her bodyguard due to the anger stirred up by Operation Bluestar. Rajiv Gandhi ascended to power. To an office, he did not want, did not understand and did not know how to wield.
Seeing the rising voice of the BJP, he made a fateful call that would change the fabric of the nation. He decided to co-opt Ram. He wanted to do something that would align the Hindus with Congress.
In 1987, he asked the Doordarshan, the state broadcaster, to produce a 78-episode series depicting Ramayan. Televisions were just making a break in India. The show managed to galvanise people around the Television. Often there would be one TV in an entire neighbourhood and all would congregate to watch the show on Sunday mornings.
There could not have been a worse way to score a self-goal. Instead of aligning people with Congress, it acted as a force multiplier for the BJP. The Ram Janmabhoomi issue which did not find too many takers suddenly found purchase. It created fertile grounds to wield the issue.
After having lost the elections in November 1989, L.K. Advani of the BJP decided to do something drastic. This in turn resulted in the eventual demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992. Like that Ram became the cynosure of the Indian Hindu Nationalist movement.
It was this association that made it impossible to project L.K.Advani as a Prime Ministerial candidate. In 1996 and the following elections in 1998 and 1999, Atal Bihari Vajpayee had to be fielded as a candidate by the BJP since he was seen as more moderate.
Vajpayee was the Prime Minister from 1999 - 2004, the extreme factions had not disappeared. They were merely biding their time. One of those members of the BJP was the chief minister of Gujarat in 2002. Narendra Modi presided over one of the bloodiest chapters in the history of Modern India post-partition.
Modi discovered that story matters more than fact much before Trump did. He campaigned during the 2014 elections under the banner of the “Gujarat Model” touting great economic prowess. This while the state had performed mediocre at best on every conceivable metric.
Gujarat’s All-India ranking, based on overall GSP: 2011/12: 5th; 1999/2000: 6th
Gujarat’s All-India ranking, based on per capita state domestic product: 2011-12: 8th, up from 12th in the 2000-2001 fiscal year.
Source: Quartz
Quite frankly while Manmohan Singh was a statesman, he was often seen as a puppet in the hands of the Gandhi family. Also, he did not have a stage presence. People overlooked Modi’s extreme Hindutva credentials and instead lapped up the PR messaging.
That is what they wanted to believe.
He won a mandate, the likes of which had not been seen since the 1960s.
Modi presided over one disaster followed by another. First, he made an impromptu visit to Pakistan one year into his Prime Ministership. The trip was a foreign policy disaster. That was followed by the demonetisation the following year which taxed the poor unnecessarily and caused a drop in economic output while doing little to root out the black money that it was supposed to. Then came the chaotic GST roll-out. A Tax that he had opposed as a Chief Minister.
Finally to distract people an airstrike was ordered in Pakistan just months before the elections in 2019.
The 2019 Balakot airstrike was a bombing raid conducted by Indian warplanes on 26 February 2019 in Balakot, Pakistan, against an alleged terrorist training camp. Open source satellite imagery has revealed that no targets of consequence were hit. The following day, Pakistan shot down an Indian warplane and took its pilot, Abhinandan Varthaman, as prisoner. Indian anti-aircraft fire downed an Indian helicopter killing six or seven airmen on board, their deaths receiving perfunctory coverage by Indian media. India claimed that a Pakistani F-16 fighter jet was downed, but that claim has been debunked. The airstrike was used by India's ruling party to bolster its patriotic appeal in the general elections of April 2019.
Source: Wikipedia
It was absolutely reckless and stupid to be toying with a state that possesses nuclear weapons and is run for the most part by the army just to solidify election prospects.
Indians believe when life gives you shit, turn it into a cake. Hence Modi was elected once more.
Emboldened by this renewed mandate the government passed the Citizenship Amendment Act known as CAA.
The Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 (CAA) was passed by the Parliament of India on 11 December 2019. It amended the Citizenship Act, 1955 by providing an accelerated pathway to Indian citizenship for persecuted religious minorities from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan who are Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis or Christians, and arrived in India before the end of December 2014.[3][4] The law does not grant such eligibility to Muslims from these countries.
Source: Wikipedia
This led to widespread protests and Delhi was paralysed by protests in March 2020.
COVID was a godsend. An onerous lockdown was imposed in 2020 when India had 3000 cases. An argument would have to be made that the lockdown did more to hurt Indian in 2020 than COVID ever could. But the lockdown certainly put an end to the CAA protests.
COVID and the Indian government were nevertheless having a friendly duel to see who could cause greater harm. Hence when the worst of it came, in 2021, there was no lockdown. The state governments were asked to figure their own solutions. Indians were celebrating the Kumbh Mela when the worst of the Delta Wave was sweeping the country in 2021.
Now, one cannot bomb forests in Pakistan once again just months before the elections.
Hence the Ram Temple. The opening of the temple is as much for The Hindu faith as it is a plea for help for the upcoming elections in 2024.
Days before the consecration, there were wooden scaffolding that were still seen all over the temple site. The actual finish data touted by the temple trust is “before the end of 2024”. But the elections will have to be held around April-May 2024, even god has to make way for political agenda.
Hence we all watched the desecration of the constitution and the evaporation of the boundaries between Church and State (temple and state in this case) and the Prime Minister, an elected official, consecrated the temple much like the king would have in the past to show the people that their source of power was divine.