What Happened In Ayodhya: Mehta's Heroics, Varshney's Warning And Palshikar's 'Guilt'

In this part, I look at columns in the Indian Express on the Ayodhya event authored by three respected Indian intellectuals. Before that, some preliminary thoughts are in order.

First, even though there is talk about the Ayodhya event in these reports, they confuse us by sheer vagueness: they claim to have witnessed a consecration but the focus and the scope of the event are up for grabs.

Second, if we read what they say, the puzzlement increases because it is impossible that they could have seen what they describe.

Third, the columns express a double ignorance: one about the nature of the phenomena they vouchsafe seeing and the other regarding the intellectual resources used to describe the same.

Fourth, they draw the same conclusion despite describing the situation very differently.

Normally, if there is no clarity about the nature of an object, no consensual structure is found in different descriptions. If an object is a cute little puppy to an observer but is a supernova or a quantum computer to the other, it would be surprising to find these descriptions arriving at the same conclusion. Yet, that is the case here.

They all see the cementing of a tie between politics and religion. This bond appears to undercut the enunciated ideals of the Indian constitution. The current political party is held responsible for this. Surely, they could not possibly see these in either the act or the ceremony of the pran prathishta. Nor can these be seen in the constructed temple, incomplete or otherwise.

As a result, a gulf opens between what they could have seen in Ayodhya and what they say about the event. Furthermore, there is another problem: their descriptions are not internally coherent. I explore these issues as they are present in the three columns.

PB Mehta’s Heroics

In the Indian Express piece of 22 January, Pratap Bhanu Mehta claims that the Ayodhya event was an unprecedented “watershed moment in history”. What is crucial is the “pran pratishtha following the foundation stone of Ayodhya (that) marks the consecration of Hinduism as a political religion pure and simple.”

What makes this thought cognitively impenetrable also lies in how it goes further. Here, Mehta picks up the 17th chapter from the Gita where, in the process of answering Arjuna’s question, Krishna uses three classificatory categories. One such is Rajas (the other two are Satvik and Tamas). In the 18th verse, a tapas evincing rajas is spoken of; in the previous verse, it was about the satvik tapas. 

Not only does Mehta quilt, but he also distorts and mangles what he quotes. If at all this verse can do anything in our context, it is to classify pran pratishtha as a tapas expressive of rajas. The correctness of this characterisation is not at issue; what Mehta does with the verse is. He makes the word ‘tapas’ in this verse into a translational equivalent of “penance and austerity”. The problem with this equivalent is that penance is an act of self-abasement, and/or an act of devotion expressing sorrow and repentance for sin, and/or is offered as a compensation for an offence committed.

If one insists that pran pratishtha is rajo tapas in Mehta’s description, it becomes (i) a mode of worship and (ii) a name for a spectacle. It (iii) originates from pride and produces (iv) passions and emotional resonances. Finally, (v) its performance is intended to obtain non-transient benefits to the performer. Here, Mehta shows no understanding either of the borrowed words like ‘penance’, ‘consecration’, ‘worship’, etc., or of his culture’s understanding of ‘tapas’, ‘rajas’, ‘pran pratishtha’, and so on. This double ignorance is built into his description of the Ayodhya event.

Mehta says that Hinduism was consecrated as a political religion. This is impossible: a religion cannot be consecrated. His claim is this: the “pran pratishtha following the foundation stone of Ayodhya, marks the consecration of Hinduism as a political religion pure and simple”.

Even a ‘political’ religion remains a religion but the pran pratishtha, says Mehta, marks the moment “where Hinduism ceases to be religious”. How could an entity that ceases to be religious continue to be a religion, whether political or not? What was consecrated and by whom? What exactly does it mean to say that pran pratishtha consecrated a religion (Hinduism) into another entity (a political religion)? Did Ram Lalla perform the consecration? This absurdity becomes painful when we ask what a ‘political’ religion is.

Some political theorists use ‘political religion’ to indicate phenomena like Authoritarianism, Fascism and Nazism, Communism, Islamism, etc. Mehta could have had this in mind. Even then, the use of this word is problematic in our case: except for ‘Islamism’, the other phenomena mentioned above did not have prior existence as religions. Thus, it follows that the ‘Hinduism’ after Ayodhya is to Hinduism before Ayodhya in the same way what Islamism of today is to Islam of yesterday. 

Mehta does not make the bold claims that Islam is dead as a religion and Muslims have all become Islamists. He only says that ‘Hinduism’ is dead as a religion today. Thus, if Hindus continue to practice Hinduism after Ayodhya, it entails that all Hindus now practice a political religion. Mehta does not draw this logical conclusion explicitly; he merely notes that there is no ideological counterpoint to this. This can only mean that this new political religion is an ideology. But what precisely is the ideological element here: Hinduism or politics? Politics is different from ‘ideology’, is it not? In which case, Hinduism is the ideology, which is why or how this new political religion gets its ideological element. This claim is both inconsistent and totally disingenuous. Mehta should at least know that “bearing witness”, if that is what he wants to do, requires that one truthfully says what one sees.

In any case, according to Mehta, this event further marks the emergence of “collective narcissism”, an entity made in “the image of God”, an image which we now worship. Thus, it follows, we do not worship God but an entity bearing His image, an entity of our creation. Such an act must make us into “idol worshippers”. Mehta agrees: he says that Hindus do worship idols. But this putative claim creates a new problem: if human beings can create entities “in the image of God”, do they not become equal to God?

Until now, people believed that God created Man in “His Own image”. If we can also do so, have the Hindus attained full Godhood post-Ayodhya? Is Mehta saying that prana prathishta of Ram Lalla marks the self-deification of the Hindus?

He also claims that worshipping idols is central to Hinduism and that idol worship gave a playful intimacy to Hinduism. This is odd. Idol worship (‘Idolatry’) is wrongly practiced or wrongly directed worship. Is Mehta saying that this wrongness is central to Hinduism or even its core? Besides, how can idolatry make a religion playfully intimate? With whom or with what is such a religion playful and intimate? From where does idol worship get its demonic power to change religion itself? 

Worship, theologically and philosophically speaking, is a very serious affair. To many people, it was and still is the most serious activity for human beings. These people think that the sole purpose of human existence consists of the proper worship of God. As a result, we cannot worship playfully as though it is just a game. One might seek intimacy with the object of worship, namely, God. However, such a human quest is neither ‘playful’ nor a ‘game’, even if the world is a game that God plays.

Be it as that may, why would Hinduism prescribe (or recommend) idol worship? To Mehta, this has to do with the fact that “concentration on the idol was a path to self-consciousness”. This too is odd. If it is implied that self-consciousness is the goal of human existence, why would Hinduism recommend that we worship either God or the Devil? If the desire is to attain self-consciousness, why bother concentrating on idols, whatever they are? If the ‘I’ (a reflexive pronoun) indicates self-consciousness, is it not advisable to concentrate on this ‘I’ to realise self-consciousness rather than on something else? Upanishadic thinkers thought so. No, says Mehta, the focus on ‘I’ reeks too much of “I-doll”, a possible American spin on the etymology of idolatria, as Mehta would have Arindam Chakrabarti say.

In any case, these issues are short circuited when Hindus exchanged ‘new’ idols for the ‘old’ ones in Ayodhya. This is even odder. If Hinduism ceases to be religious, should worship not follow the same route, even if it is idol worship? Should this religious act not disappear as well? If it does not, is it because Hindus are born idolaters? No sensus divinitatis in us then?

On the one hand, religion cannot be consecrated yet Hinduism as a religion is; religions cannot have a punarjanma yet Hinduism dies as religion only to be ‘born again’ as a political religion; the earlier Hindu idols die too only to be reborn as “mega showpieces”; Hindus not only engender “collective narcissism” but also consecrate it since they have hewed it in “the image of God”. 

On the other hand, tapas becomes ‘penance’ only to end up as a mode of worship. Even this is not the case because this tapas is a mere “spectacle”. Accepted by the gullible as a “mega-showpiece”, it is choreographed by those who “make a show of their worship in what is a sign of lack of real faith” because they “care about the flag more than they care about dharma”. But who can provide the required ideological counterpoint when the political universe is governed by the duplicitous and the disingenuous, the Dharma Dwajis as they are named?

Here is the double ignorance I spoke about. Mehta’s impenetrable thoughts are neither western nor Indian; nor are the two intelligibly or intelligently mixed. At the end of his column, despite the virtuoso, we remain as ignorant about idols, what their worship entails, what consecration is, what religion is, and what happened in Ayodhya…as we were before reading it.

Ashutosh Varshney’s warning

Of all the op-ed pieces and the newspaper reports I have read, Ashutosh Varshney’s piece (27 January, The Indian Express) is the only one to explicitly appeal to a dictionary. Though laudable, there is an issue here: when we look up a word in a language dictionary, what does this act indicate? It indicates our assumption that the word has its home in a natural language and that it is not a technical term. Were it to be a technical term (‘mRNA vaccines’ or ‘quantum entanglement’), we would not search the Merriam-Webster to find out either its meaning or its use but would look elsewhere. There are other resources, including multiple encyclopedias.

Thus, if Varshney had used other resources, he would have discovered that ‘consecration’ is a heavy-duty technical word at home in Hebrew, the Ancient Greek and in the Church Latin; that it has come into the English language carrying an enormous religious load from the Testaments, both Old and New. He would have known that the consecration, in theologies and in practice, has a rich past. Some of the practices have even been legally codified for a millennium or more (The Canon Law of the Catholic Church, for instance). These tell us of the word’s specialised uses; its use in English does not and cannot violate its technical meanings. ‘Was the Ayodhya ceremony a consecration?’ is a question requiring theoretical, theological, scriptural, and empirical investigations. One cannot answer it by consulting the Webster’s or the OED.

However, it is not always possible to know whether some or another term is technical or not before looking it up in a dictionary. Here is where the dictionary look-up helps. If a word is a term of the art, it would be difficult to understand the dictionary ‘meaning’ properly. Varshney’s  “simple question” tells us why this is the case:

“Can a Prime Minister lead a ceremony of religious consecration? To consecrate, according to the dictionary, means “to make or declare sacred”. That is typically done by a “holy” or religious figure.” 

To begin with, Varshney speaks of ‘religious’ consecration as though there are others: political, psychological, social, economic, cultural, etc. If there are other kinds of ‘consecrations’ whose special instance is a religious one, this qualification makes sense. Not otherwise.

Further, we discover many difficult words in this definition: ‘sacred’, ‘holy’ and ‘religious’; that ‘consecration’ can make and/or declare; and that the ‘holy’ does or can consecrate. These words have an ineluctable reference to human actions, which have causal consequences in the world. The presence of these words as a cluster and what they refer to are sufficient to indicate that ‘consecration’ is a term of the art and that we should know something about the discipline whose technical term it is.

This is not all there is to it. Both Varshney and his readers who accept this definition must also assume that these are phenomena existing in the world. If they did not exist, they could not ‘make’, ‘declare’ or ‘do’. The definition traces causal consequences of these phenomena in the world: an act makes something sacred; it is done by a person who has properties of being holy or religious. Thus, understanding this dictionary definition demands knowing what are ‘sacred’, ‘holy’ or ‘religion’; what they do; and assuming their existence in the world we live in.

Since a good encyclopedia would say that both the word-meanings and their existence as phenomena in the world have been (and continue to be) matters for disagreements and discussions, taking a dictionary definition does not settle the case of knowing what they are. It teaches us word-meanings and about their use. The dictionary does not give us knowledge of the phenomena. Thus, to those who know what a dictionary is and what it does, this definition says that consecration is an object of study in specialised literature and requires domain-specific knowledge.

There is something more. We see ‘consecration’ is defined using words whose meanings are not present on the surface. This tells us that ‘consecration’ involves other words that are also a part of this domain-specific knowledge. As a result, we see that our problem is not to find a suitable Indian equivalent for ‘consecration’. An interrelated cluster of Indian words and concepts are needed to make sense of this English word. Thus, we do not face either a ‘translation’ problem or a disguised cultural problem. It cannot be called ‘cultural’ without explaining how and why ‘holiness’, “religious’ and ‘sacred’ are cultural but not sociological or psychological or political.

Varshney claims that a holy or a religious figure typically makes or declares the ‘sacred’. Here, the qualification guards by immunising it from counter-examples. One can protect oneself while confronting cases where ‘unholy’ or even ‘a-religious’ figures consecrate an entity by labelling them ‘atypical’. This academic tendency to ‘hedge’ fails here because the phenomenon of consecration allows us to ask: “do such atypical cases exist or are they impossible?”

To make his “simple question” (about a Prime Minister leading consecration) into a weighty objection, Varshney needs some heavy artillery that includes answers to the following: (a) why are some figures religious or holy? (b) how does this property enable making or declaring the sacred? (c) what kind of an ability is it: genetic, political, cultural, psychological, social, religious…? (d) Is authority attached to this position? (e) If yes, what kind of authority is it? (f) Why cannot it be a political authority? That is, Varshney’s question returns: why cannot “a Prime Minister lead a ceremony of religious consecration”?

Because, Varshney suggests, “the very idea of a politician leading a consecration ceremony in modern times would be abhorrent to most religious leaders and theologians”. Whether such an action generates abhorrence or not depends on whether ‘consecration’ is an event that: (a) is neutral towards all religions; (b) occurs outside religions; (c) is universally present across cultures; and (c) has the same structure and typology across the globe. Not otherwise. 

There were ‘religious figures’ from some Indian sampradyas present at Ayodhya, others followed it closely, but none expressed any abhorrence at a politician leading the ceremony. If the “four Shankaracharyas…had led the consecration”, Varshney might be prepared to call it “a purely religious event”. While that could be granted for the sake of the argument, the issue is: did they find it abhorrent that the Indian PM led the event? This could not have been the case because these four acharyas believed that an incomplete temple cannot ground a pran pratishtha. Whether they are right or wrong, the point here is that they did not formulate any ‘theological’ objection to the PM leading the event. 

So, whose abhorrence is Varshney talking about? In whose theology is it abhorrent that a politician leads consecration? Christian and Jewish theologies? Islamic religious leaders? While these possibilities could be true, what do they have to do with an Indian cultural event, the pran pratishtha, which appears not even remotely connected to consecration, ‘religious’ or otherwise? Varshney’s “simple question” does not get solved; it comes back once again.

Varshney begins his column with an ominous warning: the consecration of a temple has “dealt a monumental blow to India’s constitutional republic”. This blow, however, is “symbolic and discursive”.

In the world we live in, symbols do not go around dealing blows for the simple reason that they cannot causally interact. No symbol of a Hero can ever kill the symbol for a villain: even if Rama ‘killed’ Ravana in a discursive universe, neither of the two did or could do anything in Lanka as ‘symbols’. Words cannot deal blows either to human actions or to physical structures. Nor can such blows ever land. Thus, if ‘consecration’, a symbol, deals a symbolic blow (even a symbolically monumental one) to another symbol, namely, India’s constitutional republic, then these symbols must also exist in the reader’s symbolic universe. If they do not? Well, nothing happens, really.

Anyway, in his world, Varshney also detects “a paradox” between “symbolic and discursive” objects and “political and legal” entities. What exactly is the paradox? On the one hand, ‘consecration’ (an entity in one discursive universe) has “fully invalidated the principle of the state’s religious neutrality” (an entity in another universe). How does an entity in one universe “invalidate” the principle existing in another universe? If in some universe (“a possible world”, as they are called) the sum of three angles of a triangle more than 180°, this does not and cannot “invalidate” the principle in another universe (that is, in another possible world) that such a sum is exactly 180°.

Knowledgeable people would merely assume that this difference tells us about space in these two universes: one is in n-dimensional space (with more than two dimensions) and the other, perhaps, is only two dimensional. So, how does Varshney perform his magic? I do not know.

In any case, since this invalidation is “complete”, we must assume that the secular state is severely damaged even if incompletely. I suppose further that the consecration is complete; but the envisaged ‘Hindu state’ is incomplete. As we further learn, it might never even be completed. A pity, perhaps, but where is the paradox? Is it generated by the difference between “incomplete construction” and “finished consecration”, or because one is “finished” (the consecration) and the other is “unfinished” (the Hindu state, the temple)? In both cases, it is a nonsensical claim.

For the most part, paradoxes are linguistic or logical or semantic in nature. There is no paradox of any kind between ‘finished’ and ‘unfinished’, ‘complete’ and ‘incomplete’, or between ‘construction’ and ‘consecration’. When this is the case with respect to independent entities in the same linguistic universe, it is even more so when the entities populate different universes. There is no logical or semantic or linguistic paradox between the symbol of consecration in one universe and an incomplete secular state in another. 

Hence, there can be no paradox between consecration in Ayodhya and an incomplete Hindu state in India, in so far as ‘paradox’ has any meaning at all. In the symbolic, discursive world constructed by Varshney, a paradox could nevertheless exist. However, in that case, it is invisible to mere mortals. How then can we either see the blow or assess its monumental impact in a “non-binary” fashion? After all, Varshney insists that “political practice is normally not analysed in binary terms (“yes or no”). It is appraised on a scale (“more or less”)”. How? Again, I do not know.

If what happened in Ayodhya was not consecration, it is false to claim that a Prime Minster led a religious consecration there. Modi could have neither participated in, nor led an event that did not occur. We would not learn much about the blow and its monumental impact by entering the “symbolic and discursive” or the “political and legal” worlds of Varshney.

Palshikar’s Guilt

Much like his colleagues, Suhas Palshikar is tripping even before he begins. We are “witnessing a transition”, he says, without recognising that “its nature and consequences are deeply controversial”. Really? When we witness a transition, we do recognise that there is a transition (that is its nature, after all), which aims at an end-state. (This is its consequence.) The end-state could generate consequences, but the transition itself is not the cause here. In that case, what exactly is controversial?

Palshikar identifies the “building” of a new temple” as the focal event in Ayodhya. Here, he zeroes in on “the moment (that) represents our collective entry into an era of erasures”. He lists three of them: plurality, coexistence and guilt.

Let me begin with what erasure is: it obliterates. This could be writing, a painting, a carving, a society, or even life. Normally, erasure removes all traces: we cannot discern what was there earlier or whether anything ever was. However, if we can count them (Palshikar counts three) and identify and differentiate them from each other (plurality, coexistence, and guilt), then, strictly speaking, we have ‘palimpsests’ on our hands. Used in archaeology, architecture, art, cultural studies, etc., the word suggests that something is altered in an object, which continues to bear traces of its earlier form.

The issue is not about choosing an appropriate label. If we admit that we are talking about palimpsests but not erasures, we must also admit that any controversies we might have will be about the past we want to retain. Altering a past would then not be identical to erasure or writing Stalinist historiography. However, if the goal is to induce righteous indignation in a people to morally condemn building a temple, we require erasures not palimpsests. Thus, the need of the hour is guilt, the third erasure.

Palshikar calls this the “most tragic erasure”. Even in 1992, he notices “among Hindus, there was a sense of guilt, an admission that something wrong was done”. What on earth does this mean? Surely, recognising a wrongdoing is not tantamount to an admission of guilt: recognition that Hitler or Pol Pot did wrong is not an admission evidencing our guilt. Hindu’s might have felt that a wrong was done. But this cannot generate a sense of guilt in them unless they were the actual perpetrators. Sensing a wrongdoing is not the same as admitting to a crime.

This sloppiness is not a one-off or a casual mistake. It is systematic: “huge resources were generated by a community to avenge the past” and it happened apparently without guilt. This defies all reason: as an individual, my resources are limited but it can grow into a huge sum if many more people contribute. Assume this happens. Should I feel guilty of wanting to see a temple built? Am I guilty because others support this project? What is my guilt: to financially contribute to an unbuilt temple that could possibly possess the intent to avenge ‘the’ past? In our world, temples have no intentions and when we speak of ‘avenging the past’, we use it ‘figuratively’ only when speaking of human beings.

We are guilty of more, apparently. “Unimaginable political investment was made into an exercise that should have been a matter of spiritual pursuit and religious learning” and this too occurred without guilt. Who is guilty of what precisely? We cannot answer the question because we cannot even begin to make sense of this sentence. However, “what does the new temple mean?” elicits the answer, “it is the erasure of guilt”.

How does a temple, any temple, do this?

Palshikar claims that the Ayodhya temple “not just absolves the society or any group or party… it simply erases that fact from history.”  If a temple gives absolution, it also formally releases the accused from guilt and punishment. Absolution is an ecclesiastical declaration (i.e., a declaration given by the religious or the Church hierarchy) of forgiveness: what is forgiven can be a sin, a debt, or a punishment. This is not done by inducing amnesia.

There is a huge difference between forgetting an act and forgiving it. This difference is not about what the two words mean but is about two different kinds of actions: forgetting occurs in memory and its nature depends on the nature and structure of memory. (Memories are of different types that include the ‘episodic memory’.) Psychology, cognitive science, and brain sciences study this aspect.

Forgiving, by contrast, is moral or religious in nature aimed at a very specific act: trespasses or violations committed only by human beings. Ethics, theologies, and moral psychologies study this phenomenon.

Absolution is not forgiveness alone; it further presupposes that the absolver has the religious, moral or the legal authority to do so. Since the temple itself is guilty and must be “made guilt-free”, it needs an “effective instrument” to do this, which Palshikar finds “in the SC ruling”. Without warning, the guilt shifts from a people to a physical structure. Now, the court has the authority to absolve.

Apparently, even this authority is spurious. Over the years, “our politics made sure that the guilt was softened and then pardoned. …the Court put a stamp of formal approval”. So, this court does not make the temple guilt-free, that is, it does not really absolve. It approves formally. What does it so approve? The court approves the fact that politics not only manages and softens but also makes sure that the guilt is pardoned. Does the court merely approve this fact or also approve of the fact?

To keep Palshikar consistent, we are forced to read him as saying that politics made sure that the court obeyed its dictates and that is why the Supreme Court ruling is a stamp of formal approval.

Whether true or false, where does this bring us? To confusion. We neither know who absolves nor who the guilty is or why. We do not even know what guilt is. Who or what is erased then?

Apparently, Hindus are guilty of just about everything because they recognise wrongdoing and admit guilt thereby. They are also guilty of wasting unimaginable political investment in trivial pursuits and collecting huge resources to build temples. The temple can absolve, free a society or its members from guilt, yet is itself guilty of seeking vengeance against the past.

Formally, it can declare and forgive the sins of a people but to effectively free itself from guilt, the supreme court is required. In turn, the court can do this only because it is politically managed. Until politics, the true absolver, enters the picture, all of us are guilty of any and every trespass that someone else commits.

Finally, every act can become a trespass because of the absence of the requirement that it should be an ethical or legal violation. Any which way, the Hindus are guilty until absolved by politics. Between the lines one could read that the ‘absolving politics’ is not a generic entity to Palshikar. It is the ‘abhorrent’ Hindutva politics, I suspect.

Here, we confront the same problem that we saw before: borrowing from elsewhere without a clue about what is borrowed or what debt is thereby incurred. It is unclear what ‘guilt’ is: now it is “a sense”, then it is “an awareness”. It is a violation of law once (“criminal vandalisation”), a search subsequently (“seeking”) to become something forbidden (“seeking vengeance”). We are forbidden since “vengeance is mine”, sayeth the Lord. Apparently, guilt cannot do without absolution but can be managed without. Politics softened guilt, apparently, but it is not obvious what hardens it. Clearly, guilt envelops Hindus from birth though whether only Hindu temples succumb to guilt or all temples do (the Jewish ones, for instance) is unknown. And so on.

It would be illuminating to go into the history, ontology, and psychology of guilt but space forbids such an exercise here. But this much can be said: even though Palshikar seems to think that guilt has something to do with violating the law, he does not seem to realise that this insight, even when vague, hides a deeper and more profound question: why should any violation of law generate guilt überhaupt? Surely, Palshikar knows too that another derivative question is central to western political thinking and is known there as the problem of political obligation.

A Conclusion

Where are we after reading these two pieces? The easiest answer: nowhere. This would be wrong because much is seen by our thinkers, even if what they say about their sightings might disappoint. In a way, their failure is our failure as well. We have inherited languages and vocabularies from elsewhere, another culture, without understanding the talk and, therefore, fail in walking the walk. Nothing in our languages or experiences allows us to sensibly speak of the sacred and the profane, the holy and the consecration, the penance and the austerities, sin and absolution, forgiveness and guilt, confession and contrition, reconciliation and salvation, etc. We think we know what religion is, how they die and whether they are reborn, and what idol worship is all about. Even though we know that the British talked this way, these notions are not original to them. We genuinely believe that we too can talk the talk by virtue of being able to speak English. In domains where we believe to possess specialised knowledge, realising the extent of our ignorance depends on whether we have knowledge of our ignorance. One of the preconditions for knowledge is an awareness of our ignorance. A denial here is not conducive to knowledge; instead, it hinders. Forgiveness of ignorance, by God or Man, is not an option here.

‘What happened in Ayodhya?’ remains unanswered, it appears. In the final and concluding next part, I will answer this question in an unorthodox manner: I will endeavour to show that these respected thinkers have indeed seen ‘something’ and that they are not blind. Even if what they say is unintelligible, they are not unintelligent people. The unintelligibility has an outside source, and it has little to do with their personal capabilities. I have partially identified it but have not taken up the question of what we can do about it. Ayodhya makes an answer to this more urgent than before.

This is the second part of a three-part series on how the Ram Temple event of 22 January was referred to in the media by Prof SN Balagangadhara. Part 1 is here, and part 3 here.