Thirty years ago, when Berlin Wall fell, my German aunt (who was visiting Pakistan) pointed toward the east while trying to say something. Her allusion had deeply offended my family, that had lost everything in India before migration in 1947. Two years following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Babri Masjid incident had happened in 1992; as a result of which, the only temple in our city in Pakistan was razed to the ground.
In response to the demolition of the Babri Mosque, my mother with teary eyes had said,
“The Mosque is gone forever. They have decided to build a temple.”
Babri Masjid incident was the fresh beginning of another wave of intolerance in India.
The people illegally occupied the abandoned and partially submerged temples in stagnant waters without shame and scruples. Their demolition had awakened a shared sense of guilt.
Perhaps, this shared guilt paved the way for opening the Kartarpur corridor this week. Some critics even say that it is Pakistan’s conspiracy to instigate the Khalistan movement in India by emotionally moving the Sikh community.
For those critics, I must point out that Pakistani politicians are too naïve to think such sophistication. Because while India was slicing Kashmir, the Pakistani government was dabbling with Maulana Fazl ur Rehman’s sit-in protests.
Pakistanis would stand by Kashmiris before supporting the Sikhs’ movement. They would bring to a logical conclusion the matters they had started on its western borders (in Afghanistan). Why would the leaders of Pakistan, who are incapable of coping with these domestic problems, open new fronts of adventurism?
Today, an average Pakistani is too badly affected by unemployment, inflation, and pollution, that he did not take to the street on Kashmir issue. There were massive protests, and also violent, in Pakistan over the demolition of Babri Mosque in 1992. On the recent revocation of Kashmir, only a faint trace of protests was observed in Pakistan, only to die down soon.
It is the irony of different times, between expectations and realities, and between promises of secularism to politics of communalism. Most of the time, time plays unsacred games with humans.
You can see the religious places around the world. Whenever the invaders came, they turned churches into mosques and mosques into churches. Spain’s abandoned mosques and Turkey’s existing mosques tell similar stories.
After the medieval ages, it was considered as an unwritten agreement that the religious places would exclude the effects of conquests. But the recent Babri Mosque’s verdict is strange. However, it is as strange as the judicial decisions are usually supposed to be. It is even more bizarre that it coincided the day of the Kartarpur opening.
Today, Indian Muslims are already reduced to a downgraded minority, and the Indian government’s recent act of converting Babri Mosque into Ram Mandir seems to be the beginning of a new phase. A tragic phase of extremism in a country that cherishes its secular nature.
Something similar could be observed in Palestine, where, by recognizing Jerusalem, Israel’s capital, the US has indicated its partiality.
Mankind has tired of fighting incessant battles, Babri Masjid incident is one such example. Now it wants salvation from those matters that are not caused by nature, by the man himself.
(This is a translated article from Amna Mufti’s article published on BBC Urdu on November 09, 2019)
