Rendezvous with Ram

Having kept the Ram Mandir promise, hindutva now needs fresh ballast from the youth in Ayodhya to sustain its momentum

- PUJA AWASTHI/Ayodhya

Part resilient, part frail—faith is a strange being. It is also a magical being, and it must be poured into the foundation of the proposed Ram Mandir, for it to be the embodiment of the many symbols that would lie beneath its promised grandeur. These symbols have shaped politics, society and culture in myriad ways. To burnish them, the temple needs to be invested with the faith of a generation that was not born when the mandir movement began gaining momentum.

In Uttar Pradesh, one in four voters is aged between 18 and 29 years. It is a generation that does not have tangible memories of the most visible flashpoints of the movement—the firing on kar sevaks in 1990 and the demolition of Babri Masjid in 1992. It is a generation that did not gape at television screens as the domes came down. It did not hear the bloodied calls that exhorted the faithful to step out in service of Lord Ram. It did not weep over the deaths that followed, and it did not live through the dark fear of those days.

This generation will only grow bigger. For those who belong to it, the movement and its symbols are stories bequeathed—often embellished or toned down depending on the narrator’s convictions.

Deepa Singh Raghuvanshi, 28, heard her stories from those who were intimately involved in the movement. A folk artiste in Ayodhya, Raghuvanshi was six months old when the masjid was demolished. Her home is close to the Ram Janambhoomi Nyas Karyashala, the workshop where columns for the temple are carved. The workshop was set up the year she was born. So for her whole life, Raghuvanshi has had a ringside view of the tasks that went on quietly and persistently even when the mandir seemed a mirage.