Author: Daniel Pipes
Publication: National Post of Canada
Date: January 18, 2001
As Israeli intelligence services
raise alarms about the prospect of radical Jewish groups attacking
the mosques atop the Temple Mount, an eerily similar controversy is simultaneously
developing in India, with possible lessons and implications for Israel.
According to legend, the god-king
Lord Ram, one of Hinduism's principal deities, was born in Ayodhya, about
300 miles southeast of New Delhi. The Muslim conquerors of India, destroyed
the temple commemorating his birthplace centuries ago and built a mosque,
known as the Babri Masjid, on the ruins.
This was by no means a unique replacement;
"in their zeal to hit Hinduism and spread Islam," one study notes, the
Muslim rulers had the knack of desecrating or demolishing Hindu temples
and erecting mosques, etc., in their place." A preliminary survey
finds some 1600 temples destroyed and replaced by Muslim edifices.
Ayodhya's temple was the most prominent
of those destroyed Hindu sites, and that made the Babri Masjid especially
unacceptable to the fundamentalist Hindus in the Bhartiya Janata party
(BJP), which made Ayodhya the central plank of its 1991 election plank.
These efforts culminated on Dec 6, 1992, when BJP officials led a march
to the Babri Masjid and an out-of- control crowd climbed the centuries-old-mosque,
furiously demolishing it by hand and with explosives.
This led to India's worst outbreak
of communal rioting since the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan, with
some 2,000 to 3,000 people losing their lives and violence spreading to
several countries (including Britain). Despite its high drama, this
episode resolved nothing. Where a temple and a mosque once stood
now lies an empty plot of land (and many policemen). Some Hindus
insist on rebuilding the temple to Ram; some Muslims demand the Babri Masjid
be rebuilt. A court case disputing the land's ownership has been
wending its way through the torpid Indian legal system since 1949, with
no end in sight.
Since coming to power in 1998, Prime
Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and the BJP have down played their goals
in Ayodhya. As recently as October last year the BJP's president
assured Indians that rebuilding the temple was not on his party's agenda.
But the issue has resurfaced anyway
and it may come to an explosive head shortly. Near the disputed site
in Ayodhya, a Hindu nationalist group, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP),
is building a pre-fabricated temple that it plans soon to assemble on the
site as a three-storied building. The first floor, it declared last July
is "almost ready".
Responding to the heightened fervour
of his constituency, Prime Minister Vajpayee commented in December that
this work on reconstructing the Hindu Temple "is an expression of national
feeling." The parliamentary opposition jumped on his statement, paralyzing
the government for more than a week and relenting only when the Prime minister
more or less retracted his words ("I never supported the destruction
of the structure in Ayodhya, I criticized it then and I still do not support
it"). He also made it clear he would not permit the VHP to build
a Hindu temple in Ayodhya unless it first secured legal permission.
Ignoring Vajpayee, the VHP plans
soon to begin on-site construction of the temple, perhaps as early as March.
Muslim groups have threatened to stop this, with force if necessary.
Ayodhya prompts several thoughts
relating to the Temple Mount:
*** It shows that the Temple
Mount dispute is far from unique. Muslims have habitually asserted
the supremacy of Islam through architecture, building on top of the monuments
of other faiths (as in Jerusalem and Ayodhya) or appropriating them (e.g.,
the Kaaba in Mecca and the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople). This
pattern still continues - as recently as October, it happened at Joseph's
Tomb in Nablus;
***These situations are not conducive
to compromise; in general, one side wins, the otherside loses. Achieving
otherwise in Jerusalem would be a remarkable feat;
***Religious hotheads can trump
governments (Al-Aqsa's fire in 1969, Ayodhya's destruction in 1992),
showing the deeply unpredictable nature of holy sites and the high priority
for governments to control them;
*** The timetables are strikingly
similar: Jewish schemes to avenge the murder of Binyamin Kahane by destroying
the Islamic sanctities in Jerusalem parallel VHP plans for a Hindu temple;
***Although the Babri Masjid is
a far lesser Islamic holy place than Jerusalem's Haram ash- Sharif, should
plans to rebuild the Hindu temple go ahead, this could diffuse the
Islamic attention that for months has been heavily focused on Jerusalem.
(Daniel Pipes is director of the
Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum)
This article was published by national
Post of Canada on Thursday, January 18, 2001. National Post is a
Hollinger/ Can West publication. Paper can be read on: www.nationalpost.com
