Ram Mandir: The Return of the Civilizational Nation-State

Supreme Court on the 9th of November 2019, passed a historic judgment paving the way for Lord Ram's homecoming after an arduous 500 years. The Ram temple consecration thus marks the formal return and a significant milestone in reclaiming India's civilizational legacy.

The Ram Temple was not just a question of faith or religion, but it was a symbol of the injustice and tyranny that Hindus were subjected to. Even history was made to turn a blind eye, with many terming all this as some sort of concocted mythology. Far from a closure, there was not even an acknowledgment of the wrongdoing. But the collective consciousness carried this burden all through history to the present, and that is what has manifested as the Ram Temple that we see today.

Imagine if you are driving a car and someone is chasing after you, you are likely to crash at some point if you keep ignoring what the rearview mirror shows you. The above scenario is the relationship that India has had with the past, instead of stopping and having a reconciliation with it, we have tried to outrun it always, until now. The building of the temple addresses this chronic ailment by paving the way for a permanent reconciliation. It also in a way addresses the long-standing conundrum of the Indian left and the present opposition, that acknowledging the legacy and the past wrongdoing does not mean taking an anti-Muslim stand. Thus, for them building the Ram Temple doesn't make sense and it sounds doomsday alarm for Indian secularism. Atal Bihari Vajpayee once said, "India is secular not because of the BJP or RSS, but because India is majority a Hindu country. It is the way of life for the Hindus." This idea is what the Ram Temple tries to preserve and was never about rewriting history and Hindu triumphalism.

The degree of euphoria around the temple consecration also marks the beginning of a new era, where we Indians have started to be comfortable in our skin and have stopped being defensive and apologetic about who we are. A nation cannot have the ambition of becoming a Vishwaguru if it is itself confused about its own identity. This marks an inflection point in the journey of our modern-day republic, with its soul uniting with its body and reigniting the life of civilizational legacy into the nation-state. Jai Shri Ram!

Image Credits: Hindu Post