Ramarajya: Envisioning the Future and Entrenching the Past 95counted for. The demolition gathering of the karsevaks in December 1992
was claimed to be a mela (festival), and the government sanctioned Rs.
21 lakhs to provide infrastructural support. In order to "erase memories
of national humiliation," they changed the names of places: Allahabad to
Prayag-raj, Faizabad to Saket, Lucknow to Lakshmanpuri, and Begum
Hasrat Mahal Park to Urmila Vatika. There were incessant uprisings
within the government of the upper-caste legislators against the "back-
ward" chief minister, Kalyan Singh. Singh was selected to blunt the sharp-
ness of the Mandal Commission issue, but the party leadership was under
a Brahmin, Kalraj Mishra. The health minister in the cabinet, Dinesh Jau-
hari, was dropped on charges of corruption, and the principal secretary,
Nripendra Mishra, was accused of CIA connections and dropped.^95 In MP,
the BJP government granted autonomous status to the RSS-backed Vidya
Bharati schools. As a result, one of the questions in the mathematics text-
book for primary school children was "If 15 kar sevaks demolish the Babri
Masjid in 300 days, how many kar sevaks will it take to demolish the mas-
jid in 15 days?"^96 Although the BJP governments in these states, and in
Rajasthan and HP, had a few stray and unimportant accomplishments, the
overall pattern was one of untruth and overt violence.
It is quite obvious that there is a remarkable difference between Gandhi's
understanding of Ramarajya and that of the Hindutva brigade. Unlike in
Gandhi's universal humanism, where there is no Ravana, the Hindutva
forces have effectively replaced Ravana not with just Babar or Aurang-
zeb but the whole Muslim community. Whereas Gandhi wanted to bring
about his Ramarajya through the empowerment of the weaker sections
of the society such as women, untouchables, and the poor masses, the
Hindutva Ramarajya scheme is exclusively for Men (with a capital M) and
their might, where angry adult Ram is all-pervasive with Sita to be seen
nowhere; might means both physical force and also economic flirtations
with indigenous capitalism. Above all, Gandhi's Ramarajya was a vision
leading the masses toward the future, but the Hindutva scheme is a mis-
sion taking the masses backward. The "right" Ramarajya can be summed
up in a simple phrase: "retelling history." Licking their historical wounds
and lacking all convictions about modern politics and socioeconomic poli-
cies and programs for the ills of the nation, the reactionaries reinterpret
their "glorious past" and retell it with money and manipulation, power
and pomp. Bereft of any national vision or political program, the BJP as
much as the Sangh Parivar have embarked on empty, insincere, and tran-
sient insinuations of Ramarajya.
BUILDING AND RALLYING RAMARAJYA
In both history teachings and preachings, Hindu temples have come
to form the core of Ramarajya. Indian history, for Hindu communal his-
torians, begins with Muslim invasions. Whatever happened before "is