The violence in Sambhal town of Uttar Pradesh has re-energised one of the most contentious issues of our public life — the desecration of ancient Hindu temples by Muslims. There is a set pattern that is followed by the key players in copybook style; this holds true for this case as well. A petition is filed in the local court claiming that a temple was demolished to build a mosque (in Sambhal’s case, the Shahi Jama Masjid); the court accepts the claim without any legal scrutiny and orders a quick scientific survey of the mosque; the Archaeological Survey of India, which is the competent authority to ‘protect’ the built heritage of the country, conducts an official investigation to find out the ‘exact’ religious character of the protected yet functional monument; and, finally, a historic mosque becomes a legally disputed edifice. This deliberate production of a legal-communal conflict helps the political class maintain a wait-and-watch policy based entirely on possible electoral calculations. Is this simply an effect of what is called communal-divisive politics? Or does this symbolise structural flaws in our institutional set-up?

It is a well-known fact that the debate on the desecration of Hindu temples was a direct outcome of the colonial classification of the Indian past into neatly divided historical time frames — ancient (meaning purely Hindu) and medieval (meaning purely Muslim-dominated) — to legitimise the civilisational conflict between Hinduism and Islam. However, the postcolonial story of this debate is slightly different. The demolition of Hindu temples by Muslims is posed not entirely as a subject of history; instead, it has been transformed into a political question. Precisely for this reason, we must look at three overlapping components of contemporary temple politics — the rigid view of history, unprincipled practice of archaeology, and mechanical interpretation of law —which are used strategically to convert imagined, ancient Hindu temples into powerful political symbols.

The popular debate on temple destruction relies heavily on a rigid understanding of India’s past. There are two widespread, yet paradoxical, conclusions, which are often emphasised to substantiate politically-correct arguments and positions. The Hindutva groups want us to believe that only Muslim rulers demolished Hindu places of worship to demoralise Hindus (as if the Hindu rulers were living a harmonious life before the so-called Islamic invasion!). The opponents of Hindutva, on the other hand, rule out any historical possibility of temple destruction. They create an ideal picture of medieval India where Hinduism and Islam co-existed without any religious struggle.

We must remember that the desecration of religious places of worship had a very different political meaning in the pre-modern world. The book, Power, Memory, Architecture: Contested Sites on India’s Deccan Plateau, 1300-1600, by the historians, Richard M. Eaton and Phillip B. Wagoner, shows that the demolition of the main temple of defeated ruling powers (along with other places and buildings) was a symbolic act that was essentially linked to the accepted political norms and conventions of the 13th century. They cite a Chalukya text, Manasollasa, attributed to Someshvara III in this regard, which says, “the enemy’s capital city should be burned — the palace of the king, beautiful buildings, palaces of princes, ministers and high-ranking officers, temples, streets with shops, horse, and elephant stables.” This description makes it clear that the desecration of temples (or, for that matter, any place of worship) could be understood as a war strategy to destroy the symbolic presence of the enemy kingdom’s power and prestige. Most importantly, it was not the exclusive outcome of what is known as ‘Islamic iconoclasm’.

Archaeology is the second important component, which is evoked as a scientific tool to solve mosque-temple conflicts. An impression has been created that an ‘excavation’ of a disputed mosque will help in discovering the final truth about religious wars between Hindus and Muslims. This so-called ‘scientific’ representation of archaeology is problematic. Archaeological management in India is based on two fundamental principles. First, the ASI has been given the responsibility to examine material objects and built environment as independent resources to explore the socio-cultural universe of historical communities. Second, the ASI is also responsible for the conservation of already discovered material objects, including historical monuments, for better upkeep and protection. The ASI, in other words, is expected to excavate archaeologically relevant sites for discovering new material and, at the same time, it would have to conserve the existing archaeological discoveries and monuments of national importance. The ASI’s active involvement in temple-mosque debates goes against the official mandate given to it by the Constitution. After all, the protection of historical monuments and heritage is one of the Directive Principles of State Policy in our country (Article 49).

This brings us to the question of law. The Places of Worship (Special Provisions) Act 1991, which was passed just before the demolition of the Babri masjid, is an important legislation concerning temple-mosque disputes. Section 2 of this Act clarifies that “the religious character of a place of worship existing on the 15th day of August, 1947 shall continue to be the same as it existed on that day.” A preliminary reading of this section would suggest that the recent legal cases involving the Gyanvapi mosque in Benaras and the Shahi Jama Masjid in Sambhal are completely inappropriate. However, this simple interpretation of the 1991 law is slightly incomplete in two senses. First, the 1991 Act does not apply to mosques, temples and other religious sites protected by the ASI as historical monuments. This provision has empowered the ASI to play an active role as the custodian of historic buildings in recent legal cases. Second, this Act, like any other law, is open to multiple interpretations. This is exactly what happened in the Gyanvapi case when the court allowed the ASI to conduct a survey inside the mosque. This legal precedent has been actively supported by Hindutva groups and a section of the media to create a favourable environment for a new, more radical, temple politics.

The contemporary debate on the desecration of Hindu temples, no doubt, is an obvious form of divisive communal politics. Its specificity, however, cannot be understood without carefully examining the modes by which Indian history is transformed into a saga of religious wars, the conversion of Indian archaeology into a mechanism to detect the religion of stones, and the separation of laws to maintain harmony from the ethical-moral principles enshrined in the Constitution.

Hilal Ahmed is Associate Professor, CSDS, New Delhi