Ram Mandir, NEP, CAA and abrogation of Article 370 are pearls in the same string

Four hundred and ninety two years. That is how long an ancient civilisation patiently waited to reclaim the ravaged heart of its faith. Of these, 134 years were spent since the time Hindus first took the matter to court. Even in Hindu-majority independent India, they fought it legally, peacefully, without taking up the sword. With one exception. When they took up the hammer to demolish the illegal mosque squatting at the heart of their faith for nearly five centuries. Should the Hindus have let it go? After all, it is just a temple. They have lost more than 40,000 temples at the hands of Islamist marauders, why fixate on this? Why not a hospital or a college or an infotech park there? Here is why. This is not about one temple. It is about one people, one faith, one worldview, one very ancient and wise civilisation. Either that civilisation had to turn around and reclaim its dignity, or be in denial and slowly shrink and die because of a perverted sense of political correctness induced by the very ideologies that plundered and colonised this land for centuries. Those forces are very much at work. Even in its angst against the bhoomi pujan of the Ram Mandir where a mosque once stood (on the ruins of a temple), the All India Muslim Personal Law Board couldn’t stop itself from gloating about Hagia Sophia, a church in Turkey which has been taken over for the second time by Islamists. Beneath the irony also lies the brutal instinct and the jihadi threat to break what Hindus hold dear again and again.

Relentless religious invasions, mass murder and conversions have whittled down one of the largest and mightiest empires ever – the Persian-Zoroastrian reign of Cyrus or Darius — to just 1-2 lakh people of that faith left in this world today. Heirs of that glorious civilisation can today fit into a large stadium like Eden Gardens or Melbourne Cricket Ground. For Bharat, something had to give, someone had to come along. In the spirit of the Bhagavad Gita – in which Lord Krishna says, ‘Dharmasamsthapanarthaya sambhavami yugey yugey’ – troubled times have thrown up an individual. Which is why we must look at the scrapping of Article 370 on this very day last year, the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), National Education Policy (NEP) and the Ram Janmabhoomi bhoomipujan as pearls in the same string of thought and action. These are all individual parts of a well-planned and visionary exercise to restore a wounded civilisation whose body and mind has been controlled and colonised. It is a vision document of the next many centuries unfolding at a giddy pace in history. Nothing is knee-jerk or disparate. Every action is tied to a plan, to a certain direction. If the removal of special status of Jammu and Kashmir was aimed at reversing India’s losing trajectory in a 1,000-year demographic war (we have lost Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh and much more), the CAA was to give a natural homeland to the victims of that war. The NEP, by bringing primacy back to the mother languages and a homegrown, multidisciplinary education culture, seeks to correct the colonial control on our minds. Again, the NEP coupled with the forthcoming National Curriculum Framework, addresses the nation’s human software. Our civilisation faltered because of deep intellectual strikes on that software, again in that very war. A nation proud of itself will make it politically impossible for any government to reverse these decisions. And finally, rebuilding the Ram Mandir is a symbol of rise, reclamation and revival. It is a proclamation that this civilisation is too resilient to give in to marauders and their ideology. No jihad or crusade can lull, bully or shame Indianness into submission. An invisible board hangs at the Ayodhya site today: ‘Don’t mess with us again’.