Politicians are supposed to be smart and savvy. How is it then that the Congress-led UPA government goofed up so badly over the affidavit it submitted to the Supreme Court in the Ramar Sethu litigation? It first let pass the Archeological Society's wholly unnecessary obiter dictum about Sri Rama not being a historical personage who ordered his Vanara Sena to build a bridge on the Palk Strait for him to march over to fight Ravana and rescue Sita.

Have the Archeological Survey or the wise men in the Government heard of the Occam's razor, the logical dictum that requires us to jettison every argument not strictly relevant to the case being made ? If the case was that the Sethu was a natural formation, was it not enough to provide the necessary scientific evidence for it and be done with it? Worse was to follow. Faced with a storm of protest by the believers, the Government undertook a clumsy damage containment exercise by withdrawing the affidavit and presenting another with the offending references removed. Having declared its reverence for Rama, it prayed to the court for three months time to examine the possibility of a new route.

Then began the hilarious sequence of a blame game:

The Archeological Society was ostentatiously put on the mat, and the minister in charge was hauled over the coals by fellow ministers Jairam Ramesh and R K Dhavan who indignantly demanded her resignation.This was quickly followed by abject retractions,no doubt after reprimands from Sonia Gandhi.Meanwhile, Ambika, who rushed back from Thailand, met the PM and explained to him that she was guiltless of the indiscretion. She had in fact marked the offending references but did not insist on their deletion. and there, holding the can is a discomfited government,a ready-made target for the BJP, pawing the air for a winning issue in the not too distant Lok Sabha elections. The Ramar Sethu imbroglio is an unexpected electoral windfall that it is determined to exploit to the hilt. With the Ayodhya issue in cold storage for the moment because of the unending inconclusive litigation over it, the Sethu issue on the boil is a Rama-sent winning ticket.

Adding to the agonies of the beleaguered Congress is the provocative behaviour of its coalition partner, DMK. Its leader, Karunanidhi has been deliberately stoking the fires by ostentatiously flaunting his atheistic credentials with gratuitous insults of the Hindu faithful. Mixing irony with denunciation, he has asked mockingly whether Rama was a certified civil engineer to have built the bridge across the sea and so on.

Karunanidhi is not a thoughtless hot-headed politician and these acts must be driven by deeper motives. However, these tactics may backfire,as indeed has happened in provocative violence and counter-violence in Tamil Nadu and elsewhere. One aspect of these deliberate insults to the believers is that it is one way of getting at his political bete noire, Jayalalitha, who is a believer, visiting temples and otherwise asserting her faith.But such tactics may well turn out to be counter-productive in the forthcoming elections, which may well happen sooner than he expects.While the committed cadres and other sympathetic sections of the electorate may loyally vote for the DMK, other substantial groups such as the Brahmins and believing upper caste non-Brahmins may well vote against the DMK in the coming elections. This will help the AIADMK come back to power. It should not be forgotten that the DMK government has not got an absolute majority in the legislature, as the ministry is formed with the help of coalition partners. Some of them,like the PMK, are currently visibly out of love with their senior partner's ways. yesre is then the famous "incumbency factor" adversely operating on the minds of the voters,sections of which have some grievance or other against the current government.Returning to the Ramar Sethu imbroglio in which faith is pitted against agnosticism and, in some instances, positive "scientific" fundamentalism, there may well never be a meeting point.


As Kierkegaard once said:

"The Act of faith is often a leap in the void and we believe by virtue of the absurd." Most scientists, except those like Richard Dawkins, an ostentatious and combative unbeliever, would call themselves agnostics rather than atheists. They subscribe to a variation of the "uncertainty principle", saying in addition that God is not necessary for their conclusions.To my mind, the only questions to ask about the Sethu Samudram project as currently in operation are, first, whether it is ecologically acceptable and second whether there is a way of executing it by alignments that will do no or least damage to the Sethu. This is a matter for competent scientists to investigate and give unequivocal findings, which should be accepted by believers and non-believers alike.
 
The real question therefore is not whether Sri Rama built it or Ravana or someone else, but whether we should at all tamper with a natural formation.Incidentally,it is significant that everybody involved in the public disputation over this has expressed himself as ready to accept alternative scientific solutions. This is the one ray of hope in an otherwise murky situation.Finally,if no such sensible outcome is possible, we should go back to theone relatively unsullied estate of the realm, namely the judiciary.Despite bitter complaints from discomfited politicians, the court has repeatedly proved itself as not only a vigilant guardian of our liberties but also a wise arbiter in complicated issues. The fact that it sdecisions, right or wrong, are binding on all of us is a positive factor in the situation, particularly since the matter is already before them.If Sri Rama is willing, we should soon see the light at the end of the tunnel.