Thread. Ajudhya Nagari aka Hindu Zion (Jeruselum). In 1903, the sixth Zionist Congress in Basel rejected the British offer of 5000 square miles in Uganda for a Jewish homeland. The Jewish state, they decided, could only be in Palestine.

Their president Theodor Herzl had then bellowed his own impassioned refrain: Im eshkachech yerushalayim tishkach yemini (If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand wither).

Zion it was not: Uganda would be a waste of Jewishness. It wasn’t the Promised Land. It wasn’t in the prophecy.

Mandir Wahin Banaengey, the most ferrous chant to come out of Lal Krishna Advani was confected as a rallying call for a Hindu Zion.

It was a call to rise by the Sangh and its allies for the construction of the Hindu national consciousness; it made the city of Ram, Ayodhya, like the city of David, Zion (Jerusalem), a proxy for the longing of the Hindu nation.

The Ram janmabhoomi project was to take the feeble, effeminate, unconsoled Hindu and make a strapping kar sevak out of him, spoiling for a fight, obliged to complete the task of the Ram madir, prepared and willing to pay a soldier’s debt in the cause of his religion.

Kar seva was what was required of the tough and able new Hindu to make him whole. Bachcha bachcha Ram ka Janmabhoomi ke kaam ka. Jis Hindu ka khoon na khaule, khoon nahin woh paani hain.

Like what Avishai Margalit, the Israeli philosopher, had said about the Zionist project: to make the luftmensch (man of air), the self-effacing, weightless, inconsequential Jew, the watchmaker from Moravia, the cabinetmaker from Warsaw, into a hardy soldier & farmer in Palestine.

No more whimpering for the Jewish fate, the demand was for action to change it. Whether that project was a good one or not, he said, it necessitated a quarrel over the ownership of that land, a quarrel that will go on for generations.

In 1990, the beleaguered Ram Lalla under the dome of the Babri mosque had become political kitsch: an image to wrench the Hindu heart, quite like the limestone wall in the old city of Jerusalem called the Western Wall

The Western wall has been venerated as the only remnant of the Holy Temple: the only place near Temple Mount where Jews are permitted to pray, though their holiest place lies behind it. Jews all over the world pray towards the Foundation Stone on Temple Mount.

Jews all over the world pray towards the Foundation Stone on Temple Mount. But, in Jerusalem, no Jew is allowed to go to the Temple Mount and pray or even make a religious display on it.

On the holiest site in all of Judaism lies the third holiest site in Islam, which is controlled by the Jordanian Waqf board. Muslims call it Haram Al-Sharif.

In Islamic mythology, the Foundation Stone (in the floor of the Dome of the Rock on Haram Al-Sharif) was the place from where the Prophet Mohammad ascended to the heavens on the back of a winged horse.

Jews believe the Foundation Stone to be the hiding place of the Ark of the Covenant. The Ark (a gilded wooden chest) is believed to contain, amongst other things, the original tablets of the Ten Commandments.

Mandir wahin banaenge has been the central and longest abiding pledge in Judaism - the construction of the third temple, on Temple Mount, around the Foundation Stone, exactly where the first (Solomon’s) and the second (Herod’s) temples stood.

Thrice a day, in their Amidah prayers, observant Jews, facing Jerusalem, pray for the temple to be rebuilt. It’s more than just a sacred Jewish yearning; in Jewish theology, it’s regarded that the Messiah (who hasn’t arrived yet) will not show up till the temple is rebuilt.

And that’s only possible after liquidation of the Dome of the Rock from Haram Al-Sharif. Well, the Messiah, as Maimonides had written, is likely to tarry.

In the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri masjid dispute, there was no messianic slant or divine warrant about destiny and prophecy being the solvent to an insolvable real estate problem.

So, after years of mobilization and recovered masochism and bourgeois nationalism and hostilities and bloodletting, what seems to have delivered the promise of Hindu Zion, rather anti-climactically, has been pedantry in matters of land ownership and adverse possession.

Perpetual minor Bhagwan Ram Lalla Virajman, it has been established, has indefeasible rights. @PragyaTiwari @YayathiPuru