The Muslim reaction to the revival of the Ram Mandir movement is one of suppressed discontent. The community seems to have accepted the repeated revival of the festering tangle with a helpless trepidation coupled with an unexpected forbearance. For them, there is little option left but to take things with a stoic fortitude. This is the impression I have got in course of my recent interaction with some Muslim people-all youngsters-settled in Dehradun, Tehri and Haridwar districts of Uttarakhand.

A few days ago, I went to some places located in these three districts of the State. I, thus, chanced to talk to some Muslim youngsters as the car I hired was driven by a Muslim, now studying in a college in Dehradun.

“The confidence the community had in the executive was shattered long back when the Babri structure was razed to the ground with the Congress-led Narashima Rao Government having done nothing to protect it on the fateful December 6 1992,” the young driver told me. I was surprised by his knowledge of the trail of things though it was certain he was not even born when the structure was demolished. He murmured in a sombre tone, “The Congress left no stone unturned since then to regain the confidence of our community. Yet, the community would never be the same again vis-à-vis the Congress, post-demolition. It might vote for it if there is no better option, but the era of confidence is over.” When I asked him about the judiciary, he turned to me a beaming face and muttered, “Yes. We have confidence in the judiciary. We are sure that the judiciary would never betray the secular majesty of the Constitution. Let us see.”

It was clear to me that they are feeling helpless, if not insecure, before the fast-moving Mandir trajectory. “Are we to be regarded as the second class citizens with no dignity left in the country we have been living since the country came up? We did not come from outside,” said another Muslim youngster, apparently the driver’s friend, when we had a tea break for half an hour at Rishikesh on our way back. 

This reminded me of what Maulana Abul Kalam Azad foresaw long back when the country, undivided then, was on the throes of the partition on the basis of the Two-Nation Theory. He predicted accurately that the greatest losers if the country was vivisected would be the Muslims to be left in the ‘Hindu India’. They would have to be left perforce at the mercy of the majority community, marginalised as they would be, given the numerical superiority of the Hindus in a truncated India.

Taking cue from what the Maulana said, the 90-year old plaintiff for the Sunni Central Waqf Board, Haji Mohammad Hashim Ansari had said in Ayodhya after the Lucknow Bench of the Allahabad High Court ordered division of the disputed land into three parts in September 2010 that any further confrontation against the High Court verdict legally and politically would be suicidal. “Partition was the biggest blunder.

The Muslims have been paying the price since. When I say such things, a section of the Muslims calls me a coward. But look at the reality. The Muslims are nowhere. A negotiated settlement of the tangle is the only honorable issue left to us in the wake of the September 30 verdict,” he said. He died in 2016 and his burial was attended by many saffron leaders who were fighting the case in the court.

The fact is that the Ayodhya issue, brought to the forefront by the saffronite constellation in the late 1980s, helped the Muslim community get consolidated on the communal lines perhaps for the first time on such a scale in independent India. However, having lost faith in the Congress in view of the premier party’s tacit hobnobbing with the Hindu cause, beginning with the Rajiv Gandhi Government’s decision to open the lock of the long-shut temple gate following a court judgment, the community remained confused what to do. The voting pattern was fractured, varying from region to region, though the principal objective was to defeat the BJP at the hustings.

Using the confused electoral demeanour, several regional parties reaped advantages at the expense of the Congress. The string of riots that rocked several parts of the country from the ones in Mumbai to the infamous pogrom in Gujarat following the Godhra burning case in 2002 reinforced its resolve to have the BJP kept out of the portals of power.

The strategy succeeded. For the Hindu votes, though somehow consolidated behind the saffronite brigade particularly in the Hindi heartland for some time when the issue was alive, deflected again in different directions after the emotive sway of the matter waned. But the Muslims remained united in the single-minded objective of keeping BJP out in the cold.

Things are the same now when BJP along with other saffron-hued outfits are set to resuscitate the communally emotive issue and the non-BJP, non-NDA parties are uniting to fissure the Hindu vote bank while the Muslims are steeling their resolve to throw full weight behind the party that is best capable of humbling the saffronites. 

I asked my new-found Muslim friends whether there was a possibility of a compromise on the part of their community to resolve the long-festering inter-faith tangle. They said it was unlikely, given the fossilized identity-pride in both the communities. And by way of a queer paradox, those in the saffronite brigade would be disappointed if such a compromise comes into being by any chance, runs the opinion.

As a matter of fact, there are few people who genuinely want a respectable solution to end the tangle once and for all and thereby, to break grounds for heralding a new era in the inter-community relation. Save for those who are being directly affected by the bouts of violence, the majority in both the communities want the problem to linger on.

It is vain to blame the political class for the seeming perpetuation of the tangle. They might want it to linger for electoral gains. But the intelligentsia which sounds most vociferous against the communalization of collective life might not be happy either if the inter-community unrest is resolved one and for all. For then they would be left with nothing to pontificate on. The common people keep on savouring the see-saw of the unfolding drama as long as they are not directly affected.

The communal problem is, in fact, one, which remains associated with the elite classes. The rural life remained unmoved for long. On the contrary, the process of inter-community assimilation was most prominently visible in the villages where the two communities kept remaining influenced by each other. The rural Muslims, mostly Hindu converts, retained much of the Hindu customs for long. Several movements arose in the community asking them to purge their life of the beliefs and customs, which they shared with the Hindus. But they hardly yielded the result of communal segregation.

Significantly, the Muslim League took long to make dent into the Muslim psyche and only in the final years before the independence did the Muslim League succeed in its strategy to bring about the polarisation. And this they did through unleashing mayhem and massacre.