22 January, 2024 — the day of the Ayodhya Ram temple consecration — will also be 25 years since the Graham Staines murder.
Graham Staines and his family.
The chant of god is powerful. It determines life and death, depending on how fiercely one believes in the chant.
On 22 January, 2024, millions of Hindus will chant the name of their God, Ram, as his idol is consecrated in a brand new temple in Ayodhya.
Twenty-five years ago, on 22 January, 1999, a Hindutva vigilante mob chanted the name of another god, Hanuman — who features closely in Ram’s life — as they intentionally burnt an Australian Christian preacher, Graham Staines, and his two minor sons, to death in the remote Odisha village of Manoharpur.
How weird that one was celebrated — another will be celebrated — as a majoritarian religious victory over evil represented by a minority religion.
Twenty-five years ago, Hindu vigilantes decided Staines was preaching hatred and forcibly converting Hindus to Christianity and was also involved in cattle theft for slaughter.
Yes, he was converting. Converting into healthy human beings, lepers whom society and majoritarian fringe vigilantes shunned and would not spare a look at and would not allow into their streets.
Staines lived among them for decades, intent on erasing leprosy from his work area in Odisha.
All this did not matter to the vigilantes. They believed the facts they manufactured as purposefully as they believed in their gods.
They also believed in swift and dangerous justice.
Long after he was in jail for life, the leading accused killer, Dara Singh, a confirmed conservative and violent majoritarian Hindutva vigilante, told a news magazine in 2011: “Whatever has happened is right. Whatever will happen will also be right.”
That was hardly an exhibition of remorse. It was a celebration. 22 January, 1999, is the day of remembrance only for the family of Staines.
Now, political Hindutva practitioners see electoral currency in steering believing Hindus towards Ayodhya for the 22 January, 2024, event.
At one level, it is about Ram’s birthplace being restored to him.
On another, it is a celebration of the intentional destruction in 1992 of the Babri Masjid that stood at that spot, constructed centuries ago at the orders of the first Mughal Emperor, Babur, by destroying the venerable birthplace where an avatara purusha the faithful believe was born.
The destruction of the masjid was no act of remorse. It was a celebration. 22 January is the day of recollection of Ram’s glorious birth and era for the Hindus.
That’s where things stand.
For all you know, the two events joined by the exact date is really a coincidence and nothing else.
In which case, it signifies a trend we need to watch out for.
It tells us that the majoritarian religion in India has always had active fringes periodically intent on protecting it from assumed and imagined assaults and onslaughts.
The so-called attacks were never internecine; the threats always came (and come) from minority religions. Like national security, protecting the faith is unchallengeable, even in the courts.
The area of operations of the fringe expanded since 1990 (it was established by the time of the Staines’ murder in 1999) to stain the Hindi heartland and anywhere else militating majoritarian politics and hyper-nationalism settled down to introduce a new form of governance India was alien to.
Secularism, a sullied word today, began to cower in the growing absence of patrons.
Its current address is said to be:
Word No 16,
Line No 3,
Paragraph No 1,
Constitution,
India.
On 22 January, 2024, Indians need to visit this address. To celebrate secularism. In the same way, lakhs of Hindus will celebrate Ayodhya. Both are natural rights in their spaces.
Remember, a Staines doesn’t have to die for a religion to live. That’s why the two events, sharing the exact date and a quarter century apart, are not a coincidence.
