Shri Ram is coming back to Ayodhya. People are born and people die. Generations come and generations go. Rarely does it happen that we have moments where the life of an entire generation is infused with meaning? This is one such moment. And we are living it. Congratulations to all.
We are alive. Here and now.
The struggle for Ram Mandir will remain forever one of the high points of Hindu civilization. How lucky we are to be witnessing the final chapter in that history.
The first thing to do today would be to remember the five centuries of Hindu lives that were denied the right to worship at Ram Janmabhoomi in Ayodhya. Today, they live through us.
Then, there are the people who helped raise the struggle for Ram Mandir to a crescendo.
They inspired a whole generation of young Indians who discovered that it was okay to be a Hindu: LK Advani, Kalyan Singh, Ashok Singhal, Uma Bharti, Sadhvi Rithambhara.
Working in the background at the time was a young swayamsevak, mostly unknown to the public at the time. He is now Prime Minister of India and his government will have the good fortune of building the Ram Mandir.
Around the same time, India was becoming independent from a Communist-style economy. Young India realized that we neither had to be poor nor ashamed of ourselves. The barriers existed only in our imagination.
Then came the Vajpayee government, which ordered the Archaeological Survey of India to excavate the land on which the Babri Masjid had once stood. For decades, Hindu beliefs about the Ram Janmabhoomi and the temple that had stood there had been dismissed by “historians” on the glamour roll of the Congress establishment. The ASI excavation left no room for doubt that a temple did once exist there. This remains the single most important step towards the judgement that we have today.
The most ironic moment in the Ram Mandir movement is September 2010, when the Allahabad High Court handed down its verdict. The High Court opted for a compromise: two-thirds of the Ram Janmabhoomi site to Hindu parties (including compulsorily the space under the central dome of the Babri Masjid) and the remaining one-third to Muslim parties. It could have marked the end of the movement and the beginning of Ram Mandir construction.
But one side welcomed the verdict, while the other refused to accept the settlement. If not for the intransigence of the latter and their insistence to drag the matter to the Supreme Court, we would not have seen this day.
What happens is always for the best. You will find this line in “Gita Saar,” displayed prominently in numerous Hindu homes.
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The judgement also leaves us with a great and historic challenge, one that is an honour for our generation to accept. We have to conceptualize, design and realize a grand Ram Temple that will do justice to the five hundred years of Ram Mandir movement. An epitome of Hindu civilization that the whole world will come to see for thousands of years.
And it all began on November 9, 2019.
On this day, let us remember the people who lived and died for this temple. From the ones who lost their lives to police bullets to the ones who perished in S-6 compartment of Sabarmati Express at Signal Falia near Godhra on Feb 27, 2002.
They did their best to wipe these people out of our memory. To defame them. To stamp them as villains. The truth won.
