Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

How the World Works: Globalization, Globalization Blogs - Salon.com, September 14, 2007

To this day, as indicated by NASA satellites, there is a detectable ridge running across the Palk strait that separates Sri Lanka from the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Known colloquially as Adam’s Bridge, the ridge is held by some faithful Hindus to be Ram Sethu, the actual structure built by Lord Rama’s mighty monkey army. Lord Rama, the epitome of a just and righteous king, an avatar of Vishnu, the Hindu Supreme Being, is one of the most cherished figures in Hindu culture. And his legacy is not to be trifled with. In 1992, Hindu nationalist activists destroyed a 500-year-old Muslim temple originally erected by the Muslim conquerer Babur, on the grounds that it had been sacrilegiously built on the site of an earlier temple to Rama that commemorated his birthplace in the north Indian city of Ayodhya.

But to more secularly-minded fellows, Adam’s Bridge is a barrier composed of sand and coral that must be cleared away in order to create a shipping lane through the Palk Strait that would shorten shipping times between the east and west coasts of India. The Sethusamudram Shipping Canal Project, which may have been conceived of as early as 1860 by the British, finally received a go-ahead in June 2005 from the United Progressive Alliance government led by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. But criticism of the project on a number of fronts has continued, and several petitions have been filed with the Supreme Court of India asking that the barrier be kept intact.

There are significant non-religious reasons to oppose the project. Environmentalists believe the massive dredging involved will cause significant damage to marine life, while others are skeptical that saving just the few hours required to circumnavigate Sri Lanka is worth all the trouble. The strait is also considered to be something of a cyclone magnet.

On Wednesday, the long simmering controversy turned into a full-fledged uproar. In a joint filing with the central government, the Archaeological Survey of India filed an affidavit with India’s Supreme Court declaring that there was no historical evidence proving the existence of Lord Rama, and no archeological basis to consider Adam’s Bridge to be the mythological Ram Sethu.