Lord Ram and the politics of faith

Does the Ram Mandir issue rouse strong passions anymore? In a tight election, it very well might, especially in Uttar Pradesh.
Lord Ram and the politics of faith

Devout Hindus offer morning and evening prayers in the ancient temple town of Ayodhya at the birth place of Lord Ram. The pujas proceed peacefully, oblivious to the political storm brewing. 
The Sangh parivar was blindsided by the Supreme Court’s decision to postpone the Ayodhya title suit to January 2019 after a cursory four-minute hearing by CJI Ranjan Gogoi’s Bench on October 29. The CJI’s predecessor, Dipak Misra, had ordered day-to-day hearings in the title suit. Clearly the mood in the Supreme Court has changed with a change in guard. 

Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, has meanwhile been vocal about making the delay in the long-pending Ayodhya case an electoral issue. BJP ministers though have been careful not to be seen undermining the Supreme Court. But it is clear where their sympathies lie. As the momentum to build a Ram temple gathers force among Sangh parivar followers, the BJP will play good cop to the parivar’s bad cop, urging restraint till the Supreme Court hears the matter in January 2019. 

CJI Gogoi has made it clear that the Ayodhya title suit is not a priority for him. The apex court will decide in January 2019 which Bench will hear the case and when. The urgency shown by former CJI Misra has evaporated. First up will be adjudication of the Allahabad High Court’s split 2-1 verdict in 2010 of the title suit dividing the disputed 2.77 acre site in Ayodhya between three claimants (the Sunni Wakf Board, the Nirmohi Akhara and the parties representing the deity Ram Lalla). Even if the Allahabad HC verdict is upheld, the next step—building a Ram mandir at the site—could take years to be settled. For the BJP, the issue is therefore purely electoral. For the Congress, the priority is to sit on the Ayodhya fence without falling off. 

Congress president Rahul Gandhi’s recently acquired soft Hindutva mien is designed to inveigle moderate Hindu votes which fled to the BJP in 2014 after the Congress coined the term saffron terror. The lesson of 2014 has been learnt by the Congress. The questions therefore are: How electorally evocative is the Ram Mandir today? Don’t development and jobs matter more to millennials? An estimated 100 million first-time voters who were between the age of 13 and 17 in 2014 will be eligible to vote in 2019. Do they really care about the Ram Mandir? 

India remains a deeply religious country. The Sabarimala temple issue has clearly demonstrated the feelings faith and tradition can evoke. For the Congress, the Ram Mandir poses a particularly awkward problem. Party members have invoked the Congress’ Brahmin DNA. Party president Rahul Gandhi recently declared that he had a better understanding of Hinduism than the BJP. He has tactically distanced himself from the Kerala Congress’ position on the Sabarimala temple controversy. While acknowledging that his party’s unit has a different view on Sabarimala, Rahul said he supports the entry of women of all ages into Sabarimala. 

For the BJP though there is no pretence. Party president Amit Shah has backed the Sabarimala traditionalists even though that conflicts with the Supreme Court’s order. Sceptics now ask: If the BJP can back faith over law in Sabarimala, what prevents it from doing the same in Ayodhya despite its pledge to abide by the Supreme Court’s verdict? The delay by the apex court to hear the Ayodhya title suit before it can take up arguments on building a Ram temple at the disputed site gives the BJP the pretext to again place religion above legal due process. 

Both the BJP and the Congress have crafted specific strategies to deal with the issue. The Congress believes the Ram Mandir no longer significantly influences elections. The BJP believes the opposite. To cover every eventuality, however, the Congress’ battery of lawyers spent the first half of 2018 trying to ensure that former CJI Misra delays the Ayodhya verdict. Using the January 2018 press conference by four members of the Collegium to make vague complaints of bench fixing (later dropped), Congress lawyers managed to put CJI Misra on the back foot. They followed it up with a contentious narrative on Judge B H Loya’s death and launched impeachment proceedings against Misra which were pre-ordained to fail but achieved the purpose of rattling the CJI. 

Misra, burdened with key cases (Aadhaar, Section 377 and others), was gradually pushed into a corner though he did, in his last few days as CJI, order day-to-day hearings on the Ayodhya title suit. His successor CJI Gogoi, one of the four Collegium justices who took part in the press conference, within weeks of taking office, put off the hearings to January 2019. The BJP’s strategy will now be to officially await the Supreme Court’s verdict on the title suit followed by hearings on building the Ram Mandir. It will, however, turn a blind eye to RSS affiliates like the VHP raising the temperature over Ayodhya. 

To return to the original question: Does the Ram Mandir issue evoke strong passions anymore? In a tight election it very well might, especially in Uttar Pradesh where the BJP is likely to face the fight of its life against the combined forces of the SP and BSP. The BJP also knows that the hard right fringe of the party will punish it with NOTA if it doesn’t take the Ram Mandir issue forward. An ordinance is ruled out, though introducing a bill in the Winter Session of Parliament could be a tactical move to force the Congress to take a position. The sight of saffron-clad ramsevaks marching towards an ancient temple town may not be the image of modern India PM Narendra Modi wants to project. But as the Sabarimala issue has demonstrated, in India faith supersedes reason.

Minhaz Merchant

The author is an editor and publisher

Tweets @MinhazMerchant

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