Proof adds little to the veracity of the story. Do we think of Babri as folk legend or history Do we say, "Once there was a temple and a mosque " or do we say, "On so and so date, a structure was built" History demands specific dates.K. Advani or Uma Bharti scream with victory, one realises that such a view of politics has burnt deep into our psyche.Babri Masjid is today a photo-montage of images, with each image capturing one angle of a strange and kaleidoscopic event. Healing demands that both sides recover from the travails of history. Place evokes meaning, empty capsules market emotion; space can be mapped differently. Healing is not a zero-sum game.Let us not deny there are wounds and that the wounds were salted by politicians. Babri thus gives us three options — create fences between religions by dividing the space; create priority or precedence between structures so that one dominates or displaces the other; or do what sociologist Richard Sennett called "the uses of disorder". The minute we talk of priority, precedence and proof, we go beyond belief to talk about belief.Let us begin at the level of the locality.

Instead of adjustment and syncretism, which seek solutions that demand demolishing a mosque. I remember when Babri happened, a student at an IIT-Delhi meeting screamed, "At last 500 years of Mughal rule has ended. The day Babri became either/or, we lost a bit of tradition, damaged a part of our memory. Babri is a space for living with differences, and making sense of them. History pins you like a butterfly in terms of proof.The scrapbook of photographs reveals the picture of kar sevaks standing on the site as if a battle had been won. Indian civilisation allowed for plurality. One then talks of priority and precedence. Babri is also a failure of storytelling because each separate story demands a different sense of ending, and a different idea of consequences. It is a kaleidoscope which cannot be treated as a lens. What we need is patience, the ability to listen, the art of living with ambiguity, the tradition of Indian syncretism, which does not deny that conflict might offer a better compost heap for democratic solutions than experts’ views of history, architecture and society. But myth and folklore are easy.Babri is not a story of a temple and a mosque, of which came first, of whether Ram was a historical character. Healing, as a wise man said, demands a mutuality of memory of shared legends and folk tales. It does not allow a society to heal or, worse, find its own ways of healing. Sennett argued that confusion, chaos and debate can actually add to the richness of order. There is a difference between truth and facts. A story is what you lived out, told, enacted, but history was external; it existed outside you and coerced you. Healing is a conversation, not a talking past each other.. However, nation states need boundaries, territory, fences, history, but civilisations can do with other less constraining narratives.

It is a choice of frames; it is a choice of pluralism, of space versus place.Babri is not just about belief and faith.Just think of the narrative. A civilisation is a more complex entity. Space is secular, often empty of memory." Oddly, history itself acquires a vindictive quality, a pseudo-mythical power to it. Localities can accommodate contradictions, use the sociological to trump the logical and exclusive. History demands victors and that is the sadness of history. Temple and mosque can easily coexist, not just as structures but as part of the syncretism called India. Babri is cognitive space for handling different beliefs, differing stories. I feel the local cannot be reconstructed through majoritarian histories of the nation state and electoralism. Flip the page and we see Uma Bharti gloating over the victory. Shift to a newspaper and one reads that Prime Minister Narasimha Rao watched quietly as Babri happened.Babri is a wound that won’t heal if Babri is constructed as history and proof, because it is then contested as law, possession, property and fact. Babri Masjid cannot deal only with feelings, communities and differences.

Facts have a cold existence. Babri gets enacted at Charminar in Hyderabad. Babri is about a commons of pain and the faith of two communities, communities which have hurt each other and grown together.The writer is a social science nomad. A truth is a warm shell you live inside. The question we should ask is whether Babri is place or space, myth or history, property or commons. The real choice is elsewhere. Healing leads to a belief that recognises other beliefs and other forms of storytelling. Healing is therapeutic; it needs a different form of storytelling. The idea of Babri as truth and Babri as fact leads to different consequences. We summon the archaeological survey and the department of history to play "proof". When one watched L. Does the problem of Babri exist at the local level How has the society lived so amicably with controversy The question is important for if a locality is at home with the controversy and sees difference as something liveable then whose Babri are we talking about Is Babri then a projection beyond locality Is it a Rorschach, a psychological projection of fears and fantasies, of a wider image of politics being forced on a locality The question one is asking is whether a civilisation looks differently at Babri from the nation state. Demolishment turns a wound into a scar, a stigma.", could be empirical, wishful, accurate and fantastic. In a fable the beginning "once there was. Next to the mosque is posited a temple. Folklore and memory can be better sources for solving Babri than the conflict resolution of social scientists.. Babri then gets enacted and repeated elsewhere.

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