Idols make me anxious

Ramayana , its stories and their morals were never religion for me. I grew up in a Sikh household and heard these wonderful stories in school and from my friend’s parents and grandparents who would narrate them to us. And in the Northern Indian small towns I stayed, Ram Lila was always a fun outing as was Dusshera, when people would congregate upon a central maidan to see the Ravana effigies burn at dusk.
And I was never different from my Hindu friends even if we did follow different religions and had dissimilar customs.
The 1984 riot shifted that perception a bit, when the fury of the Hindu populace was unleashed on the Sikh community because ‘a tree (indira) had been felled’. Over time,the disenchantment with the Indian law and government remained because many of the perpetrators of those crimes are still strutting around. Still, India is my country and I am fiercely patriotic about it.
So the High Court judgement makes me anxious. Sure I do believe that in the hope for peace and secularism, the Court took the best course of action by dividing the property into three parts. And there is no reason why, in a country like ours, we can’t have a Hindu temple and a Muslim mosque co-exist peacefully next to each other.We have a legacy of religious tolerance.
But building the temple to display a ‘resurgent, strong India’ is not my idea of secularism. That’s why this business of idols makes me anxious. Is it so easy to encroach upon any land merely by placing idols there? And what legal wrongs can be set right when backed by the faith of a billion people (give or take a few million)? And can that happen to me too? Or my religion? What if someone decided that the site of the Golden Temple at Amritsar is actually an ancient Ram site? Or that my house could also have a legend attached to it?
And should this intransigence extend to Nankana Sahib, Guru Nanak’s birthplace now in Pakistan? Should Sikhs not have it in their state? Or will we keep steering towards a Hindu State because of the majority is Hindu? Or continue being a pseudo-secular state?
No body needs to be apologetic in our country about their religion, faith and beliefs, but I absolutely dislike the way religion is used for political gains. And how, despite knowing better, political compulsions will once more ensure that there will be riots and more bad blood - after the CWG and Obama visit.
That’s why the idols make me anxious.