When polymath K Parasaran was offered a seat to argue the Ram Janmabhoomi case in 2019, he politely told the bench that his illustrious career was made complete by arguing on his legs for many clients and he would prefer to remain standing to argue for Ram Lalla in what turned out to be his last Supreme Court appearance. Though it was his last, it paved the way for many firsts, as the Supreme Court delivered a historic verdict on the Ram Janmabhoomi case on November 9, 2019 and put to an end the long struggle of the Hindu society in the contemporary history of Bharat. As the nation celebrates its collective cultural conscience for its civilisational moment, anecdotal memories stand out in our minds.
In our numerous interactions with K Parasaran, we have witnessed flashes of wisdom not only covering law but also on the kaleidoscopic cultural contours of India’s heritage. We often wondered and finally asked him why he needed the full text of the Constitution during our discussions despite being an expert on all its provisions. His reply was an eye-opener: “To me, every client’s case is new and every time I read the provisions of the Constitution, I get a new meaning which is relevant to the case in hand. This germinates from my habit of reading the Valmiki Ramayan everyday, and each time it layers itself into a different and varied meaning—poetic, factual and philosophical. What an epic indeed.”
Providentially ordained to represent Ram Lalla, K Parasaran’s persuasive and devotional role during the Supreme Court arguments needs special attention for selfless commitment and nuanced scholarship in everyday advocacy and nuanced arguments.
His scholarly advocacy, interlaced with literary allusions and legal vignettes, illuminated the judicial spectrum of facts, reasons, dates and events so suffused with the ebb and flow of changing times and contexts. It was all marked by his encyclopaedic mastery of civil law. Representing a bundle of values worthy of emulation, he stands tall today as a lodestar radiating values.
Swami Dayananda Saraswati once said, “A value is a value if the value of value is valuable to oneself.” An individual’s value set, if collectively harmonised, charters a nation’s character. The relevance of Lord Ram in a contemporaneously assertive India cannot come at a more appropriate time as the nation’s mood connects with the ideal values of Ram.
In the book Ayodhya and the Future of India, edited by Jitendra Bajaj (1993), he recalls how a newly independent India that appeared to be nobody’s responsibility reverted to its roots. The deep turn towards the civilisational moorings of India was tellingly visible as the people sought refuge in Lord Ram to rediscover the essence of being Indian and recapture the lost spirit of Indianness in the people. The surging cultural nationalism among the people and the alignment with the sixteen-fold qualities of Lord Ram reinforces the civilisational values of India, that is Bharat.
Lord Ram’s credos emphasised the sixteen noble qualities of life—unconditional, righteous, assertive, grateful, truthful, steadfast, charismatic, emancipative, thoughtful, capable, presentable, spiritual, dreaded, radiant, admirable and calm, All of this together made him the ideal Maryada Purushottam. These Shodasha Kalyana Gunas, as they are known in Sanskrit, define the human way of living that transcends boundaries making it globally relevant. The Ram temple movement had its own sixteen dimensions due to its religious, social, cultural, spiritual, anthropological, philosophical, judicial, liberal, historical, local, regional, national, global, geographical, mercurial and political contours.
The 1980s and 1990s saw a nationwide ideological churning that sowed the seeds for the forthcoming celebrations. The scholarly underpinnings of the changing discourse was captured in the commentaries written by a variety of scholars on the Dr M Ismail Farooqui v the Union of India judgement delivered in 1994 and published as the Ayodhya Reference: Supreme Court Judgment and Commentaries (1995). In it, the late Arun Jaitley powerfully wrote on the need for the court to arrive at a judicial solution through legally manageable standards. The unseen presence of Arun Jaitley is best visible now as the Ram temple movement shall soon attain fruition.
Renowned political scientist Samuel Huntington in his seminal work Who Are We (2004) emphasised the core values that defined American identity. The revival of Indian nationalism through Atmanirbhar Bharat and Viksit Bharat@2047 that enables the renewal of individual identity is also being collectively harmonised and diffused into the mainstream cultural narrative of our times. India’s Puranic wisdom believes that the normative values of good and bad—though subjective and hard to define—used to reside in two different worlds during the Krita Yuga, they descended into two different countries at the time of Treta Yuga, it existed between two families of the same clan in the Dwapara Yuga; during the Kali Yuga, it is believed to reside in the same individual. This warrants the reinforcement of the collective civilisational values during epochal challenges with episodic emphasis on epic lessons.
In this stage of India’s rise to becoming Vishwaguru, the value-god, Lord Ram, becomes the pivot of the wheel that steers towards its march for Amrit Kaal. India and Indian values are at the heart of this civilisational memory. The greatest tribute to both will be the consecration of the Ram temple in Janmabhoomi Ayodhya, which is an epicentre of the civilisational karmabhoomi of the world’s largest democracy, for Treta Yuga’s value-god Ram best connects with Kali Yuga’s value-searching humans.
(Views are personal)
With inputs from Amrith Bhargav, advocate and research scholar
S Vaidhyasubramaniam, Vice Chancellor and Tata Sons chair professor of management, SASTRA (Deemed) University