I cannot help but recall December 6, 1992; it was a Sunday. I had invited the founder editor of this journal, the late Fr. John Vallamattom, to be the chief guest at the annual day celebration of St. Thomas Mar Thoma Church, Karol Bagh, New Delhi, where I was the elected secretary.

In his speech, he hoped that the BJP government in Uttar Pradesh, led by Kalyan Singh, would honour the promise made to the Supreme Court not to allow the demolition of the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya. He envisioned it standing as a symbol of Indian secularism.

None of us in the church knew that the karsevaks assembled at Ayodhya under the leadership of LK Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi were using pickaxes, ropes, and other implements to raze down the four centuries-old mosque, as mobile phones existed only in the realm of imagination.

After a quick, spartan lunch, I accompanied the priest, who exemplified humility and simplicity, to the bus stop. On the way, we heard the startling news that the mosque was being demolished brick by brick. Later, Kalyan Singh was punished by the apex court for not honouring his promise.

I rushed home, where I received a call from Editor HK Dua asking me to reach the office. The plan was to replace the three edits appearing the next day with the fresh edits he would write. After it was written, Mr Dua decided to let the edit page appear as was planned initially. Finally, his full-length editorial was published on the Front Page. His headline, "National Shame," said it all. It cost him the friendship of many, including Advani.

I read the editorials on the subject in almost all the English-language newspapers. Some were wishy-washy, but none said that the demolition marked the beginning of a new dawn in Indian history. They were all critical of the Sangh Parivar for its devilry.

A few days later, I attended a prayer at the residence of the late Y. Yohannankutty Mathai. After the meeting, he took me to his neighbour's house on the first floor. He was bedridden and was groaning in pain. He had suffered a fracture in the vertebra while hitting the ground from the Babri Masjid, which he and hundreds of others were destroying.

I felt sympathy for him, as none from the VHP and other sundry organisations took him there to mitigate his hardship or apply balm to his back. He did not live long. I wonder whether he regretted the abominable act in which he took part. Immediately after the demolition, there were riots in many places in the country in which nearly 2000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed.

Much water has flowed down the Sarayu since that dark day in 1992. Even Advani, who should have said it was the proudest day of his life, preferred to describe it as the saddest day. His explanations have only confused me.

The star of the day was Uma Bharti, who, in her ochre dress, exhorted the karsevaks to give one more push to bring down the mosque. Where is she now? I had to check the Internet to find out whether she was alive.

She was discarded like the idol of Ram Lalla, which is claimed to have appeared on its own in the Babri Masjid. Some of my readers may not know this story. An idol of Ram was placed surreptitiously in the Babri Masjid at the suggestion of the then-district magistrate of Faizabad, KK Nair.

He refused to obey the orders of the Chief Minister to have the idol removed from there. He later resigned from the IAS and became an MP. I understand that the man who planted the idol in the mosque, Abhiram Das, is still alive. I do not know whether he has been invited to the Pran Prathishta ceremony on January 22.

All along, the Sangh Parivar has been claiming that the idol placed in the mosque was not man-made. It appeared on its own. In other words, it appeared miraculously in the mosque. If they were true to their words, the idol was celestial in origin. How could it be discarded?

But that is exactly what has been done. The presiding deity of the new temple is a 51-inch statue of Ram, which was installed on a lotus-shaped pedestal on January 18. I have seen a picture of the statue covered with a white cloth.

I understand that it depicts Ram, who is only five years old. However, he holds a bow and arrow. So, there is no question of having Sita beside Ram, whom he married when he came of age. There was no child marriage at that time!

However, in popular perception, Ram has never been separate from Sita. I am sure you know a CPM leader, Ram Yechuri, but his correct name is Sitaram Yechury. In popular parlance, it is Siyaram, Siya, or Sita preceding Ram. It was the Sangh Parivar which separated Sita from Ram. Until the advent of the Ayodhya agitation, Ram was always depicted with a beatific smile. Aggression was not his characteristic.

That is why he is considered Maryada Purushottaman. He could have avoided going for the 14-year vanvas claiming that his father was not in his senses, guided as he was by a cunning consort. After he defeated Ravan, he could have annexed Lanka. Instead, he asked Vibhishana, the brother of Ravan, to go and learn statecraft from Ravan before he died. To know how rich Ravan's palace was, one should read Tulsidas' Ramacharitamanas, which describes what Hanuman saw there.

When Ram was in exile, his brother Bharat went to make one last request to return to Ayodhya. The first thing that Ram asks him is about the welfare of a minority community in Ayodhya. Had Ram lived in the 21st century, he would have asked Bharat about the condition of Muslims and Christians in Uttar Pradesh. That is why he is called a model ruler.

Mahatma Gandhi wanted Ram Rajya to be established in India. Instead of providing Ram Rajya, Modi is providing a Ram temple! By the way, there are very few Rama and Brahma temples while there are tens of thousands of those dedicated to Lord Shiva, Vishnu, and Hanuman.

This may be because Ram is an avatar of Vishnu. Matsya; Kurma; Varaha; Narasimha; Vamana; Parashurama; Rama; Krishna or Balarama; Buddha or Krishna; and Kalki are the ten incarnations. I visited a large Ram temple in Jammu, built by the Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir.

I also understand that three idols were made by three sculptors for installation at Ayodhya. A selection was made from among the three. Why was the original celestial one discarded? This question will haunt the Sangh Parivar forever.

During the agitation for constructing a temple at Ayodhya, the Sangh Parivar claimed that the Babri Masjid stood exactly on a temple that originally stood there. They even claimed that the Sanctum Sanctorum of the original temple was inside the mosque.

Is the brand-new deity placed right on the spot where Ram was born to Kaushalya and Dasharatha in Ayodhya, the capital of the Kingdom of Kosala? Or, did they choose some other spot in the sprawling plot allotted to them under the orders of the Supreme Court?

This will help ascertain the hollowness or otherwise of the claims regarding the temple. I understand that a time capsule on the history of the temple would be buried deep in the ground there. This is to help excavators know that there once stood a temple that was built on a spot where a mosque stood. And it was consecrated by Modi.

The people have a right to know what is written in the time capsule. During the Emergency, such a time capsule was buried somewhere in the Qutub Minar area in New Delhi. The Opposition claimed that it extolled the Nehru dynasty. Arun Shourie, who was with the Indian Express, made some fanciful claims, which were proved wrong.

Finally, when the Janata Party came to power in 1977, the capsule was excavated, and the contents were published. It was Indian history, written in Sarkari Babu-style, nothing extolling the Gandhi family. The temple authorities will do well to publish what is contained in the capsule before demands grow that it be excavated and published.

For the first time in the history of India, that is Bharat, the Government of India has declared a half-day holiday on January 22. How does India's secularism square with this holiday? A hype has been created that a "magnificent" temple has been built.

It is a modern structure built with cement and mortar. However, it gives the impression that it is built with rock. There are greater temples in this country of 6.8 lakh temples. In terms of architectural value, it comes nowhere near the Madurai Meenakshi temple, whose pillars make melodious music when touched, the Sun temple at Konark, which has a single, gigantic piece of rock as its beam, and the Thanjavur temple, known for its extraordinary beauty, not to forget the beautiful temples at Khajuraho in Madhya Pradesh and the Shani temple near Tirupati, all architectural marvels.

The heavens would not have fallen if Prime Minister Narendra Modi had shown a little patience for the completion of the temple, i.e., about one more year. When a poor man like me built a house, I began staying there even before the walls could be plastered. That is not the case with this temple on which Rs 1800 crore has allegedly been spent.

Nobody in India has been dying to worship at this temple, though many would be dying for want of two square meals a day. It is Modi's sense of insecurity that forced him to do the Pran Prathishta. He knows he cannot win an election on his own. He has no track record as an administrator. He was at his imaginative best when he asked the people to make all kinds of metallic sounds to scare away the COVID virus and asked them not to move from wherever they were when he ordered a national lockdown. So he wants to cash in on the temple.

That is why he wants to inaugurate the temple when the work on construction is still going on. Pran Prathishta means instilling life into an idol. What right does Modi, a street-smart politician, have to do this sacred duty? If it is a government function, as he thinks, the honour should have gone to the President and the Vice-President, who are in the order of precedence above the Prime Minister.

Small wonder that the Shankaracharyas thought it wise to remain absent from the function. They are the ones who know the scriptures and can interpret them, not Modi, whose eye is on the elections a few months away, if not on the teleprompter.

In order to elevate Modi to the spiritual level, it is said that he would sleep on the floor and won't eat any food or drink any liquid, except coconut water, for 24 hours before the sacred ceremony on January 22. Sacredness has nothing to do with food. Alas, UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath does not think so, as he has ordered the closure of all meat shops in the state on that day.

This gentleman would have been eating snake if he were born in China, where, in any case, Lord Shiva's Mount Kailash is situated. All the BJP-ruled states have declared January 22 as a holiday even for schools. I began this column, narrating an incident that happened at a church. Let me conclude with another incident that happened there.

As secretary, my job included taking a count of the people who took the Holy Communion. One Sunday, I found Nagaland Governor MM Thomas among them. When I noticed that he was leaving the church, I ran after him so that we could felicitate him. He was in a hurry. He hailed a black and yellow taxi to return to Rashtrapati Bhavan where he stayed. "Why did you not come in a government car?" I asked him. "I came to the church in my personal capacity," he said, as he boarded the taxi. He knew what is spiritual and what is secular. I wish Narendra Modi also knew!