How ASI can manage places of worship better

We should strengthen the Archaeological Survey of India and lessen its burden of guarding thousands of sites. Only then can it be an effective custodian of the Places of Worship Act.

The Archaeological Survey of India’s (ASI) stand at the Qutub Minar that it cannot permit Hindus to pray there may have reinforced people’s faith in plural tolerance. But such a stand has been its traditional policy.

In 2010, there were concerted attempts by a section of Muslims to start namaz at the Qutub Minar and at other prominent Islamic monuments of India. But the ASI simply refused to budge and the culture ministry’s stand was supported by the Union cabinet. The government decided to confront the demand as a law-and-order problem. The section of fanatics gave up their tantrums in the face of such determination.

The ASI’s argument is simple — there are too many contested ‘non-worshipped’ monuments that Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists are raring to claim for their prayers and for de facto possession.

These sites do not belong to any community and are the common property of India and Indians — hence no fresh worship should be allowed so that the delicate equilibrium is maintained. Such a stand could perhaps be studied by the judiciary.

There are too many contested ‘non-worshipped’ monuments that Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists are raring to claim for their prayers and for de facto possession.

Can ASI guard all of India’s monuments?

The ASI, a 162-year-old institution, has unearthed almost the entire wealth of Buddhist architectural glory that India had long forgotten, which proved to be the first shot in the arm for the self-respect of educated Indians in the nineteenth century.

This knowledge of the lost glory of Indian civilisation helped build national pride and blossomed into the national freedom struggle in the twentieth century. Later, the ASI discovered several lost civilisations like the grand Harappan one, that had perfect city planning and sanitary latrines when people in the West defecated anywhere.

But a question that is often asked is whether the ASI is capable of guarding and taking care of all the national monuments in its charge. That is extremely difficult, as it has the unenviable task of managing some 3,700 sites, some of them situated deep within forests and some up hillsides. For the massive job of conserving and guarding so many sites, it gets just 0.00025 percent of the central budget.

Obviously, its resources are too meagre to manage with its highly stretched manpower. The moot issue is whether we really need to control so many monuments, as many of them can safely be de-notified with no great harm befalling us. We have, for instance, too many medieval Kos Minars or large milestones that flaunt neither exquisite architecture nor represent any irreplaceable history.

Strangely enough, we even have to look after the grave of Brigadier General John Nicholson, who seized Delhi from Indian troops during the first War of Independence so ruthlessly and mercilessly, that his statue there still carries a naked sword.

Heavens would not fall if we handed over many small and inconsequential ASI monuments to local communities or to the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage units, with proper memorandums, so that the ASI concentrates on the really important ones and rushes in to protect the plural culture of India, as at the Qutub.

Let the law stay strong.

The other side of the coin is seen in the present attempts to challenge the Places of Worship Act 1991, which invite peril. This bold piece of legislation has effectively frozen the “religious character of any place of worship (to) as it existed on the 15th day of August, 1947” and has been commended by all three organs of the State for this.

It has successfully prevented the conversion of sacred sites, but now faces well-planned attempts to challenge its application. Operation Kashi-Mathura constitutes attempts to open up old wounds that took centuries to settle, if not heal somewhat.

We may recall the stirring words of the court that handed over the disputed site at Ayodhya for the Ram Janambhoomi temple. It had reiterated that the Act of 1991 was a “a legislative instrument designed to protect the secular features of the Indian polity, which is one of the basic features of the Constitution”.

So one expected that the Supreme Court would swing its heavy axe at the slightest wisp of speculative communalism and enforce its own writ that the Act “imposes a non-derogable obligation towards enforcing our commitment to secularism under the Indian Constitution”. There was considerable disappointment, therefore, when its bench simply transferred the case from a civil judge to a higher district judge.

The spirit of the 1991 Act is unambiguously clear. At a juncture when the very plural character of the India’s Constitution is being corroded, splitting hairs over words and legal semantics become unaffordable luxuries.

There is no religion in the world that did not destroy the ‘temples’ of preceding religions or appropriate their sites.

How many old sites can we reopen?

Of course, Muslim rulers did what all conquistadors do. But it does appear patently unfair to expect today’s Indian Muslims, consisting largely of local converts, to pay the price for the deeds of some distant invaders.

Would the Ahom invaders of Sino-Tibeto-Burman origin, who conquered much of Assam around the same time when Islamic hordes marched over the Indo-Gangetic plains, be similarly made to pay because they inflicted severe defeats on the Hindus of the Brahmaputra valley? Or would they be exempt because they ultimately accepted Hinduism, even though they retain many elements of their pre-Hindu religion?

Besides, there is no religion in the world that did not destroy the ‘temples’ of preceding religions or appropriate their sites. We talk in hushed whispers of the ‘Buddhist past’ of Puri, Sabarimala, Tirupati, Gaya and so on. Hard elements among Buddhists, Neo-Buddhists and Jains may seriously try to prove the thousands of Shiva and Vishnu idols are, actually, icons of their deities and tirthankars.

Or that the temple of Rambhar Bhavani that stands at Kushinagar was where the Buddha entered into Mahaparinirvana. Alexander Cunningham, who founded the ASI, discovered the site in 1860-61 and said as much.