Politics and faith in an electoral landscape

The Ram Janmabhoomi issue was always political; it would be prudent for the Opposition to accept that

There’s been some angst expressed by Opposition parties over the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) politicising the Ram Mandir that is set to open in Ayodhya later this month. Such criticism ignores the fact that the temple in Ayodhya would not have existed if the BJP, then under LK Advani, had not made it a political issue. Controversial since the late 1800s — the first major legal challenge to the Babri mosque came in 1885 — it was the BJP’s adoption of the Ram Janmabhoomi issue that propelled the idea of a temple in Ayodhya into the national mainstream. In turn, it helped revive the fortunes of a party whose performance in the Lok Sabha elections of 1984 suggested imminent extinction.

The Ram temple at Ayodhya will be inaugurated on January 22. (AFP)

It can be argued that the Ram Mandir wasn’t one of the headline issues behind the party’s win in the 2014 national elections, becoming the first party since the Congress in 1984 to achieve a simple majority on its own. And in 2019, it was the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance government’s performance over the preceding five years, and its national security push post the Pulwama attack, that saw the party storm back to power. Still, the promise to build a Ram Mandir in Ayodhya was a constant in the BJP’s manifesto, just like the one to abrogate Article 370 of the Constitution that gave Jammu & Kashmir special privileges. Both have now been met – the first, courtesy a November 2019 Supreme Court ruling in the Ram Janmabhoomi Babri Masjid civil dispute; and the second, courtesy an August 2019 law passed by Parliament.

It is political naivete to expect a political party, especially one as astute as the BJP, to not celebrate the achievement of a long-standing, articulated, and well-publicised promise — one stamped by the highest court of the land, and which has the support, overt and silent, of many Indians.

The Opposition does not seem to have a well-thought-through strategy on how to respond to the opening of the temple. Some leaders are upset at not being invited, others do not know how to respond to their invitations, and still others have decided that criticising the temple itself is the way to go. It’s a political quandary in which you lose whichever way you go. The prudent response for the Opposition would be to accept that the temple is a reality and focus on its own political agenda ahead of the 2024 general elections.