I
One of my most soothing childhood memories is of my mother reading aloud the Ram Katha (the story of the ancient, mythical or not, King of Ayodhya).
A woman of the most extraordinarily acute practical intelligence, never easily
fibbed or taken in, and always watchful of the disingenuous or scheming charlatan, I recall how that act of reading melted the sharp and mistrusting edges of her intellect, brought tears to her eyes, and transformed her into the semblance of an all-forgiving saint. The radiance from those readings was often such that those in the room that included our Muslim helpers along the periphery forgot we were Hindus or Muslims and were rendered naked human beings struggling for love and understanding.
As I look back, my own socialization in Hinduism resides in those early contexts in which, after all, stories about gods and deities had but one object-to disable hatred and selfishness, and engender a warm empathy towards all things animate and inanimate. The gods seemed mere instruments to furnish enlightened human purposes.
And I believe this would go for most people in India who call themselves Hindus.
All that was sought to be changed in 1990 as India’s party of the Hindu right set out to make of Ram a political icon around whom a new State was to be forged-informed not by love or understanding or accommodation, but hatred, exclusivity and physical force. Leading within two years of Advani’s abrasively menacing Rath Yatra (travels atop a warlike chariot, with cut-outs of Ram not as my mother saw him but now as a Shatriya warrior with an arrow stretched in the bow) to the water-shed desecration and demolition of a more than four hundred year old mosque. And leading, let it be remembered, to the gratuitous killing of some two thousand Indians who were no part of that politics.
Peace and Justice Post 
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