New India is not a stranger to majoritarian intimidation. From calls and acts of violence against Muslims to disrespecting their places of worship to demands of economic boycott against the community, India has seen such forms of condemnable behaviour from Hindutva’s proponents. Judicial scrutiny notwithstanding, this kind of bullying enjoys public and institutional complicity. Consequently, resistance to such pressure is rare. In a refreshing incident, that very rarity was witnessed recently when the minders of the Banke Bihari temple in Vrindavan stood up to the bullying tactic of a Hindutva group. The Sri Krishna Janmabhoomi Sangharsh Nyas had urged all local temples to stop buying clothes for their deities from Muslim tailors. Similar demands had been made to temples in various parts of Uttar Pradesh. Such attempts to communalise an inclusive tradition and choke the sources of economic sustenance of Muslims are not new: the targeting of Muslim-owned businesses or of Muslim-dominated trades has been witnessed, at different times, in states like Haryana, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Uttarakhand and so on, especially when the Bharatiya Janata Party have helmed their state governments.
On this occasion though, the script took an unexpected — encouraging — turn. The management of the Banke Bihari temple decided not to pander to this discriminatory sentiment and, in the process, set an important precedent. The political rise of Hindutva has been abetted by a distortion of the idea of Hinduism in the public mind, threatening to transform a pluralist faith into a sectarian one. Barring a few exceptions, Hindu religious leaders, practitioners of faith and scholars have generally stood by and watched this erosion take its toll on India’s society and polity. The damage to the nation’s fabric on account of Hindutva’s predations has been incalculable. It is time for the bona fide representatives of Hinduism to resist the faith’s weaponisation by the mutant that goes by the name of Hindutva. Vrindavan’s Banke Bihari temple has shown the way.