85310 - Transcription: Strategic choice and Reconstruction

N. Lygeros

It’s very interesting to study the legal and strategic choices of India especially after the G-20 to imagine and to consider them as a solution to many other problems. So, I would like in this podcast to use one specific example. They are going to build in fact an Indian Hindu temple which will be  open on old mosque site. So there is a problem since many years ago, the problem started in fact in 1992 because there was at this site a very big construction of mosque and we want to see if it is relevant. The problem is the following. We had a Hindu Temple before, in the 16th century Muslims built a mosque at the same period and in 1992, as I said before, the mosque was destroyed by mobilization and after that for the prime minister it was a promise to build at the same place again an Indian Hindu temple. So now it’s a decision and now we can see their plans, we can see the architectural technique that they are going to use and we have specific pictures from the forecast inside. And for me it’s very important because since 1947 we had a problem about regions and we know the problem of the independence and at the end of the process the separation of India and Pakistan. And now we have something which is clear and after the legal position at the Court we know that it’s possible. So we see that even for something which had been built many centuries before but on the same place where there was the Hindu temple, now we have a prosthesis of reconstruction and rebuilding of this temple at the same place. So we can see that in fact it’s not only a restoration of the history, it’s also a political decision, a political promise. And in this country where everything is difficult we see also this kind of resolution. So we have to imagine that we have something in the past, in the deep past, after in the past, now in the present and in the future we will have a bridge between the deep past and the future. So they will do this and I think that it’s in fact a paradigm of reconstruction and rebuilding structure of the past when you want a continuity and at the same time it’s also a liberation.