Over the years, my interest in my country’s politics and current affairs has steadily increased. What has not risen, however, is my inclination to pick political arguments. Therefore, I am mildly amused by myself as I write this piece, quite unexpectedly taking on a fellow liberal who wrote an article criticizing the Indian Supreme Court’s judgment over the Babri Mosque dispute in a previous issue of The Gazelle. For there is such a thing as an overly liberal outlook that can create warped perceptions of reality, and in portraying the bigots as monsters, it is imperative that we avoid turning into the very folks we love to hate.

The author has done a thorough job of explaining the conflict at hand, from both a historical perspective as well as a socio-political one, and has relevantly covered the revivalist movement led by the Bharatiya Janata Party. I encourage the reader to go back and give his piece a careful read before delving into my concerns.

To begin with, let me make a side-comment on one of the smaller issues that concerned me. Using the sexual harassment allegations against Gogoi to undermine his inputs in a judgment on a property dispute with religious undertones is simply irresponsible. It’s almost as if the author has profiled the self-righteous liberal reader and will tug at all ends of the reader’s belief system to generate a negative view of the panel. What’s next? Are we going to pick on Gogoi if he doesn’t recycle? The mantra of being “innocent until proven guilty” is nothing short of a miracle in our legal system, and if we are going to use allegations to make a value judgment that is field-agnostic, then we abandon this miracle at our extreme peril.

Now that I have that out of my system, let me engage with what the author actually had to say. The biggest issue I take with the article, and overly liberal narratives in general, is the “us versus them” idea that is frequently advocated, often subconsciously. The reason this agitates me is that by proclaiming your ideas as an objective representation of the truth and bundling together the entire opposition into one unified entity, you risk losing layers of nuance. Case in point, even as a dedicated critic of the incumbent BJP government, I was concerned by the rather fierce and unwarranted criticism of the judiciary in the original piece simply because the pragmatic approach of the Gogoi judgment happened to coincide with the Hindu nationalist interests.

Painting the judiciary as an extension of the legislature and a rental tool for legitimized persecution of minorities is, at best, a casual reflection of the truth. To suggest that the different arms of the Indian Republic are coming together to rain fire on a particular group sounds absurd when you take into consideration that the five-member Supreme Court panel included a Muslim member and that the decision of the panel was unanimous. The fact that the Supreme Court’s verdict came during BJP’s term has opened the floodgates for critics — most are justified; indeed, I am one of them — of the government to link the two things together, which is something I detest. However, the bitter truth is that even a UPA-led government could not have possibly led to a different verdict if one takes into consideration the judgment of practicality.

As journalist Harish Khare wrote for The Wire, “[t]he Gogoi judgment is not without its flaws. It is certainly not an example of impressive, leave alone wise, judicial statesmanship but it is a practical pronouncement.”

The judges of the Supreme Court chose a pragmatic approach instead of an idealistic one in a bid to end the bloodshed once and for all, and for that courage in the face of expected liberal backlash, I applaud them. Nobody except those looking to milk this issue to further their political agendas has the appetite for any more violence.

The Supreme Court of India consciously chose to appease the masses on both sides of the religious divide instead of giving the lunatic extremist fringes more fodder to chew off of. In addition, the judges noted the illegitimacy of the demolition, thereby setting up a powerful precedent to convict the accused in the parallel criminal case. That, to me, is a major win that was forgotten as radical liberals rushed to denounce the “spineless cowards of the Supreme Court” and misconstrue the judgment as the “Death of a Secular Republic”, launching an attack on the judiciary out of their hate for the Modi government. I find it amusing how much of the original piece was a criticism of the BJP — and in some form, of Hindutva and those who demolished the mosque — rather than a legal rebuttal to the judgment.

Moreover, slow-walking the case is not an effective criticism of the judiciary’s treatment of this particular dispute: that India’s judiciary can be excruciatingly slow is the great equalizer that hits everyone regardless of caste, class or religion.

One needs to ask: if the court had awarded a clear victory to the Muslims, would a mosque have even been built on the site? In fact, could it even have been built, in the face of the violence-happy majoritarian forces? And if yes, at what human cost? Yes, there will be a Hindu temple, but one should not forget the 1990s when, as Khare writes, “L.K. Advani and his cohorts used to go around the country declaiming that the “Ayodhya” was a matter of faith for the Hindus and only a dharma sansad — not the courts, not the sovereign Parliament — could lay down the law”.

The mere fact that minorities can, by and large, live lives of dignity in a country battling a radical majoritarian surge — we did just vote in an openly bigoted government with the largest mandate in memory — is a testament to the relative strength of our secular values enshrined in the constitution. Our judiciary’s independence and willingness to assert its power is the only thing standing in between the BJP government and a Hindu nation. To declare the judgment as a Hindu victory that will birth a monument to Hindutva’s fascist project is a tinted view.

The Babri Mosque issue is not binary; in fact, it never was. Criticism of the judgment that stems from an ignorance of the intent behind the decision is the exact pothole that creates misguided liberal propaganda attacking one entity out of distaste for another, just because they happen to align in one instance.