While Modi 2.0 chants “sab ka vishwas”, some BJP leaders have called for the demolition of Jamia Masjid Delhi and over 3000 other mosques. They claim that these mosques were built by demolishing temples on their sites. MP Sakshi Maharaj even offered to be hanged if idols are not found underneath the staircases of Jamia Masjid.
He demanded that Modi 2.0 should ‘bring in a law for the construction of Ram temple in Ayodhya similar to what he did for Somnath Temple before the Lok Sabha elections’ of 2019. Babri masjid was demolished without any ample evidences by Hindu fanatics on December 6, 1992. None of the historical chronicles (Babur’s memoir Baburnama, Humayunnama by Babur’s daughter Gulbadan Begum, Abul Fazal’s Ain-i-Akbari or Tuzk-e-Jahangiri) mentions that Babur constructed a mosque at Ayodhya after demolishing a temple. The first reference to Babri Mosque appears in a travel account by a Christian priest Joseph Tiefenthaler in 1768. The inscriptions, inside the mosque, were fixed in the mosque 280 years after its supposed construction in 1528. Babur did visit Gwalior temples. But, neither he nor his commander Mir Baqi ever visited Ayodhya. Mir Baqi of the Baburnama was never the governor of Ayodhya. The dispute is about the property. The claim that god (Ram) was born there is also fictitious.
The Muslims owned the disputed site since times immemorial. No Hindu ever claimed for the land during the Mughal or British raj. Shankaracharya’s Nyas originally owned only one acre of the land. The rest of it (additional 42 acres of so-called undisputed land) was given to him on lease by Kalyan Singh government in 1992 to develop Ram Katha Kunj (a park).
Another pernicious demand is that Indian Muslims should be pushed into Pakistan. Or, at best, they should live there as `aliens’. It is said that population exchange was integral to the Partition Plan. India’s Constitution drafter R Ambedkar (1941) and India’s president Dr. Rajendra Prasad (India Divided, 1946, Stern Reckoning) also supported this idea of exchange.
When Jinnah left for Pakistan on August 7, 1947, Patel said, ‘The poison has been removed from the body of India’ (HM Seervai, Partition of India: Legend and Reality, 1990, p. 134). He added: “As for the Muslims, they have the roots, their sacred places and their centers here. I do not know what they can possibly do in Pakistan. It will not be long before they will return to us’ (ibid.).
The current wave of anti-Muslim sentiment in Modi 2.0 la-la land caricatures his slogan sab ka vishwas (everybody’s trust), and Nehruvian and Patel’s secularism.
AEIMEN JAAVED MALIK,
Rawalpindi.
