Shankaracharya Swaroopanand recently claimed that the Taj Mahal was a Shiva temple. Gujarat’s Somnath temple, according to historian Romila Thapar, has been destroyed and rebuilt several times by Islamic and Hindu kings respectively. Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia was once an Eastern Orthodox cathedral. It was converted to a Roman Catholic cathedral in 1204 and back to an Eastern Orthodox cathedral in 1261. In 1453, it was converted to a mosque and in 1931, a museum. Likewise, after the Arab conquest of Damascus in 634 CE, the Great Mosque of Damascus was built on the site of a Christian basilica dedicated to John the Baptist. With every successive invasion and migration, something was brought down, for a structure to be built over it, or modified. There are ample instances of such repurposing.

In 1992, a mob of Hindu kar sevaks destroyed the 16th century Babri mosque in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh, in an attempt to retrieve the land known as Ram Janmabhoomi . This was followed by communal rioting. Driven by the ‘we-came-here-first’ propaganda, blood had been shed in the name of reclaiming the past, which is often explained away as myth, memory or history, each with its own persuasive claim. The jury will always be divided, but bickering over it does more harm than good. And the politics of retribution shows us just that. On the heels of the Shankaracharya’s statement, litigants to the Ram Mandir-Babri Masjid dispute have decided to initiate a series of fresh talks to resolve it. And, along the lines of the Allahabad High Court verdict, they now plan to build both a temple and a masjid at the disputed site. Like them, it’s time our public figures adopted a larger worldview.

Reporter/Sub-editor

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