The Ayodhya Debate 2.

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• published: 16 May 2015
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayodhya_dispute http://www.bharatvani.org/books/ayodhya/ch5.htm The centuries-old struggle over the Babri Masjid - Ram Janmabhoomi came in a critical phase on November 9, 1989, when the first stone of the Ram Janmabhoomi Mandir was laid, in a grand Shilanyas ceremony. The astrologers who had chosen the time, had clearly picked a very auspicious stellar configuration, for on the very same day, the Berlin wall was broken. Rajiv Gandhi wrote a letter to brand new prime minister Chandra Shekhar, to suggest that the historical and archaeological evidence on whether the Masjid had indeed replaced a Mandir, be considered as a decisive element in the Ayodhya solution. In practical terms : if experts agree that a Mandir had been destroyed to make way for the Masjid, then the government should treat the disputed site as a Hindu site. Still vague enough, and yet a remarkable departure from the earlier anti-historical position that the courts should decide (which meant that the issue had to be treated as purely an ownership dispute). The government then invited the AIBMAC and the VHP to come forward and present the evidence for their respective cases. On December 23, the VHP submitted a carefully prepared argumentation full of exact references to authentic material, with 28 annexures. The AIBMAC submitted nothing but a pile of documents, with no explanation of how it proved what. Most of these documents were just recent newspaper clippings, statements of opinion by non-experts and outright cranks, and Court documents concerning legal disputes emanating from the situation created by force in 1528, totally irrelevant to the question what was on the site before the Masjid was built. On January 6, both sides submitted rejoinders to the other party's evidence. At least, that was what had been asked of them, but only the VHP had done so, The AIBMAC had nothing to offer but an even bulkier pile of documents without any proof value whatsoever. Since the AIBMAC had not even challenged the VHP documents with a formal rebuttal, the objective position was that it conceded the validity of the VHP evidence. Both the press and the Babri activists, who till a month before had been decrying the VHP's "suppression of history in favour of myth" etc., now started downplaying the importance of the historical evidence. With the scholarly contest about the historical evidence yielding only a firm historical conclusion, but not the concomitant political consensus to leave this Hindu sacred site to the Hindus, the matter was again down to its bare essentials : a power struggle. After the killing on November 2, in which many sadhus had also died, the feeling among at least the non-VHP leaders of the movement in Ayodhya itself, was to tread slowly and to avoid more of this mass martyrdom. Hinduism has no cult of martyrdom (to avoid the Islamic term shaheed, the Sanskrit word hutatma, "sacrificed self", was used), and prefers to advance without this waste of human lives. In November 1989, Muslims in Bangla Desh destroyed more than 200 Hindu temples, on the pretext of reacting against the Shilanyas in Ayodhya. Moreover, during this anti-Hindu violence, many women were raped, some people killed and many wounded, and many shops looted and burned down. In November 1990, another forty or fifty temples were razed or burnt down in Bangla Desh. The Hindu-Buddha-Christian Oikya Parishad, the Bangla minorities' association, reported that in the a village in Chittagong district more than fifty Hindu women had been raped, two killed, and that hundreds of temples had been damaged or burnt down. In Pakistan too, Muslims used the Ayodhya news as an occasion for temple-burning, rape, murder, and looting. It is not only the papers who have broadcast lies about Ayodhya. They were hand in glove with the secularist political establishment. As V.K. Malhotra, BJP national secretary, remarked : "The responsibility for what has happened in Pakistan and Bangla Desh is entirely that of the Union and U.P. governments. They have been making so much anti-Hindu propaganda on this issue that those countries are getting all the excuse for this." Incidentally, for those who believe in SAARC and in Indo- Pak friendship, it may be interesting to hear the comment of Abdul Qayyum Khan, the president of Pak-occupied Kashmir. He said the controversy was "paying the way for a movement [in India] for an independent and liberated Islamic country within India". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarayu On Ram Navami, the festival that celebrates the birthday of Lord Rama, thousands of people take a dip in the Sarayu River at Ayodhya.The name is the feminine derivative of the Sanskrit root सर् sar "to flow"; as a masculine stem, saráyu- means "air, wind", i.e. "that which is streaming". http://www.frontline.in/static/html/fl1713/17130170.htm