| It
is true that the BJP has helped the VHP arouse Hindus on the
temple-mosque issue and that it owes much of its electoral success,
both in 1989 and 1991, to this arousal. Since Muslim leaders have
resisted its plea to agree to a shifting of the mosque to another
site, though it has not been in use as a Muslim place of prayer and
cannot be put back into use in view of the presence in it of Ram's
idol since 1949, the campaign has acquired an anti-Muslim bias. But
witness the fact that even the VHP has not laid claim to over 3000
sites which, on Muslim testimony itself, were once temples and are
now mosques, and that the BJP has not supported the VHP's demand for
even the two most important of them in the holy (for Hindus) cities
of Banaras and Mathura.
But however one may regard this
specific dispute in terms of its power and propriety, it is not the
core issue. Which is whether the future of India is going to be
shaped in some way in accordance with the spirit if Indian
civilization which alone, of all old civilizations, is capable of
self-renewal and self- affirmation because it alone has been able to
maintain a living contract with its pre-historic past and to retain
a measure of coherence by virtue of a faithful preservation and yet
constant reinterpretation of the enormous corpus of ancient
knowledge and practice.
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