Talk:Ram Rath Yatra

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• When today Muslim goondas create a riot in Bhagalpur or in Gonda, the secularist press will obscure this beginning (in both cases bombs thrown from Muslim establishments at Hindu processions) and highlight the ensuing Hindu part of the violence. Some M.J. Akbar will poignantly describe the suffering of some Muslim villagers, and then blame the atmosphere created by the Rathyatra in some distant town, without even mentioning that the riot started with a pre-planned armed attack on a Hindu procession. (...) Not only do you gain on the propaganda front, the press may even come out in support of your demands. For some time, Muslim communalists have demanded a ban on processions. More than 95% of religious processions are Hindu processions anyway, for processions are a thoroughly Pagan practice which in Islam can only be a heterodox oddity. (...) A very good illustration is the next and very important demand of the Muslim communalists : a larger than proportionate reservation for Muslims in the army and the police...
  • Koenraad Elst, Ayodhya and After: Issues Before Hindu Society (1991)

• The support base for the Mandir is larger than the BJP electorate. It is a fact that Advani's Rathyatra brought out far more people than Mulayam's rallies for secularism, even when all the communist and Muslim fundamentalist organizations systematically attended the latter, and even while the state machinery had been used to mobilize for them. There is simply no honest doubt that the Ram Janmabhoomi movement had become a genuine mass movement, the biggest in Indian history, and not just an artificial creation for the BJP's political gain. The reason why most of the common Hindus could be mobilized for the Ram Janmabhoomi cause, is not that the Hindus have become so fanatical. On the contrary, it is because they perceive that the building of the Mandir and the relocating of the existing structure is a very reasonable and justifiable project. They all know that Muslim rulers have brought immense suffering over the Hindu population,... no fanatic needs to tell them that. And they have heard that the disputed place is in use as a temple since 1949, that it is functionally not a mosque at all, so the rule that any other community's place of worship should be respected just doesn't apply. They do not see why anyone should object to their replacing the existing structure with proper Hindu temple architecture. They consider it an entirely internal affair of the Hindu community, and they perceive the attempts to stop them as yet another aggression against Hinduism by its enemies.
  • Koenraad Elst, Ayodhya and After: Issues Before Hindu Society (1991), ch. 6.

• "Secularists" are unnerved by the reaction Advani's rath has evoked among Hindus. But it is not the rath which evoked it. The "victories" in having Shah Bano reversed, in having Rushdie banned - "victories" which were loudly applauded by the "secularists"; the success in convincing political parties - which maps and lists - that Muslims would decide their fate in hundreds of constituencies; to say nothing of the "victories" of the violence in Punjab and Kashmir - the reaction is the cumulative result of these distortions in our polity.
  • Fomenting Reaction by Arun Shourie, also in Goel, S.R. (ed.) : Freedom of Expression - Secular Theocracy Versus Liberal Democracy [1]