[Reader-list] Holy lies - Pankaj Mishra

[Harsh Kapoor]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,3605,678320,00.html

The Guardian,  Saturday April 6, 2002

Holy lies

A holy site in the small Indian town of Ayodhya has become the focus 
of communal strife between Hindu nationalists and Muslims - hundreds 
have been killed in the past two months. At stake is the plan, backed 
by rabble-rousing politicians, to build a temple in place of a ruined 
mosque. Behind it, Pankaj Mishra uncovers a saga of falsified 
history, opportunistic abbots and a spurious legacy of the British Raj

Ayodhya is the city of Ram, the most virtuous and austere of Hindu 
gods. To travel there from Benares - across a wintry north Indian 
landscape of mustard-bright fields, hectic roadside bazaars and 
lonely columns of smoke - is to move between two very different Hindu 
myths, or visions of life. Shiva, the god of perpetual destruction 
and creation, rules Benares, where temple compounds conceal internet 
cafes and children fly kites next to open funeral pyres by the river. 
But the city's aggressive affluence and chaos feel far away in 
Ayodhya, which is small and drab, its alleys full of the dust of the 
surrounding fields. The peasants carrying unwieldy bundles bring to 
mind the pilgrims of medieval Indian miniature paintings; and, 
sitting by the Saryu river at dusk, as the devout tenderly set afloat 
tiny lamps in the slow-moving water, one feels the endurance and 
continuity of Hindu India.

After this vision of eternal Hinduism, the mosques and Moghul 
buildings of Ayodhya come as a surprise. Most are in ruins - 
especially the older ones built during the 16th and 17th centuries, 
when Ayodhya was the administrative centre of one of the Moghul 
empire's major provinces, Awadh. All but two were destroyed as 
recently as December 6 1992, the day, epochal now in India's history, 
when a crowd led by politicians from the Bharatiya Janata party 
(BJP), or Indian People's Party, demolished a mosque they claimed the 
16th-century Moghul emperor Babur had built as an act of contempt on 
the site of the god Ram's birthplace.

Memories of that demolition, and the subsequent anti-Muslim pogroms, 
have been reawakened in the past two months after a Muslim crowd in 
Gujarat burned alive 58 Hindu activists on a train. The activists 
were returning from Ayodhya, where they had participated in 
preliminary rituals for building a new Ram temple, which BJP leaders, 
who now run the government in Delhi, had vowed to build on the site 
of Babur's mosque. Hindu militants in Gujarat retaliated by killing 
more than 600 Muslims. With Hindu passions so aroused, the 
construction of the new temple seems more, not less, likely. As for 
the mosques destroyed in 1992, they are unlikely ever to be restored. 
The Muslim presence in the town seems at an end for the first time in 
eight centuries.

That was the impression I got even in January, a full month before 
the anti-Muslim rage exploded, when I visited Digambar Akhara, the 
straw-littered compound of the militant Sadhu sect presided over by 
Ramchandra Paramhans, who in 1949 initiated the legal battle to 
reclaim Babur's mosque, or Babri Masjid, for the Hindu community. The 
sect, Paramhans told me, was established four centuries ago to fight 
Muslim invaders who had ravaged India since the 10th century, and 
erected mosques over temples in the holy cities of Ayodhya, Benares 
and Mathura. It had been involved, he said, in 76 wars for possession 
of the site of the Ayodhya mosque, during which more than 200,000 
Hindus had been martyred.

Paramhans, who is now more than 90 years old, exuberantly directed 
the demolition squad in 1992, and now heads the trust in charge of 
the temple's construction. When we spoke, he expected up to a million 
Hindu volunteers to reach Ayodhya by March 15, defy a Supreme Court 
ban on construction at the site, and present a fait accompli to the 
world in the form of a semi-constructed temple.

Two bodyguards watched nervously as he told me of his plans; other 
armed men stood around the wall of the compound. The security seemed 
excessive in this exclusively Hindu environment but, as Paramhans 
said, caressing the tufts of white hair on the tip of his nose, the 
year before he'd been attacked by home-made bombs delivered by what 
he called "Muslim terrorists". "Before we take on Pakistani 
terrorists," he added, "we have to take care of the offspring Babur 
left behind in India - these 130 million Muslims of India have to be 
shown their place."

This message was briskly conveyed to the Muslims of Gujarat by 
Paramhans' associates, leaders of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), or 
World Hindu Council, a sister organisation of the BJP. According to 
reports from Gujarat, Hindu militants incited, and in some cases 
organised, the killing of more than 600 Muslims during four hectic 
days in late February and early March. The chief minister of Gujarat, 
a hardline BJP leader, quoted the English scientist Newton while 
defending his government's inability or unwillingness to stop the 
massacres: "Every action," he said, "has an equal and opposite 
reaction."

The reaction wasn't equal, though - the final tally of Muslim dead 
may exceed 1,000 - but it did display a high degree of administrative 
efficiency, as was also evident during the anti-Muslim pogroms in 
Bombay in 1992-93, when members of the Hindu extremist group, the 
Shiv Sena, went around mixed localities with electoral lists of 
Muslim homes. In Gujarat's cities last month, middle-class Hindu men 
drove up in new Japanese cars - the emblems of India's globalised 
economy - to cart off the loot from Muslim shops and businesses. 
These rich young Hindus in Benetton T-shirts and Nike sneakers seemed 
unlikely combatants in what Paramhans told me was a holy war against 
the traitorous 12% of India's population - both wealth and education 
separated them from the unemployed, listless young small-town Hindus 
I met in Ayodhya, one of whom is a local convenor of the Bajrang Dal, 
the stormtroopers of the Hindu nationalists.

What they shared, however, was a particular worldview, outlined most 
clearly by students at Saraswati Shishu Mandir, a primary school in 
Benares, one of 15,000 such institutions run by the Rashtriya 
Swyamsevak Sangh (RSS), or Association of National Volunteers, the 
parent group of Hindu nationalism from which have emerged almost all 
the leaders of the BJP, the VHP and the Bajrang Dal. The themes of 
morning assembly were manliness and patriotism. In the gloomy hall, 
portraits of militant Hindu freedom fighters mingled with such 
signboarded exhortations as, "Give me blood and I'll give you 
freedom", and "Say with pride that you are a Hindu". For an hour, 
boys and girls marched in front of a stage, where a plaster of Paris 
statue of Mother India stood astride a map of south Asia, chanting 
about the perfidy of Pakistan, of Muslim invaders and of the 
gloriousness of India's past.

Most of the students came from middle-class areas of Benares. Their 
bare, thin limbs shook with their passion and efforts to memorise 
arcane Sanskrit words. The principal watched serenely. He told me 
that Joshi-ji, the education minister, was making sure that new 
history textbooks carried to every school in the country the message 
of Hindu pride and Muslim cruelty. It is a message that resonates at 
a level of caste and class privilege, flourishing in a society where 
deprivation is always close at hand. An out of work upper-caste 
advertising executive I met in Benares seemed to be speaking of his 
own insecurities when he said, after some talk of the latest iMac, 
"Man, I am scared of these Mozzies. We are a secular, modern nation, 
but we let them run these madrasas [religious schools], we let them 
breed like rabbits and one day they are going to outstrip the Hindu 
population, and will they then treat us as well as we treat them?"

The Muslims, of course, have a different view of how they've been 
treated. In Madanpura, Benares's Muslim district, I met Najam, a 
scholar of Urdu and Persian literature. He is in his 30s, and grew up 
during some of the worst anti-Muslim violence of post-independence 
India - in the 1992 slaughter, he saw Hindu policemen beat his doctor 
to death with rifle butts. "I don't think the Muslims are angry any 
more," he said. "There is no point. The people who demolished the 
mosque at Ayodhya are now senior ministers. We know we will always be 
suspected of disloyalty, no matter what we say or do. Our madrasas 
will always be seen as producing fanatics and terrorists. There is no 
one ready to listen to us, and so we keep silent. We expect nothing 
from the government and political parties. We now depend on the 
goodwill of the Hindus we live with, and all that we hope for is 
survival with a bit of dignity."

Hindu devotees throng the Viswanath temple in Benares, but few, if 
any, Muslims dare negotiate a way through the armed police and 
sandbagged positions to the adjacent Gyanvapi mosque, one of two that 
the Hindu nationalists have threatened to destroy. It is not easy for 
an outsider to grasp the Muslim's sense of isolation here. There was 
little in my own background that could have prepared me to understand 
the complicated history behind it - being Brahmins with little money, 
we saw the Muslims as another threat to our aspirations for security 
and dignity. My sisters attended a RSS-run primary school, where 
pupils were indoctrinated into disfiguring images of Muslim rulers in 
their textbooks. At my English medium school, we were encouraged to 
think of ourselves as secular, modern citizens of India, and regard 
religion as something one outgrew. So when, in the 1970s and 1980s, I 
heard about Hindu-Muslim riots, or the insurgencies in Punjab and 
Kashmir, it seemed to me that religion-based identities were the 
cause of most conflict and violence in India. The word used in 
newspapers and academic analyses was "communalism", which was 
described as the antithesis of the kind of secularism advocated by 
the founding fathers of India, Gandhi and Nehru, and also of Hinduism 
itself, which was held to be innately tolerant and secular.

I spent several months in Benares in the late 1980s, unaware that 
this ancient pilgrimage centre of Hindus was also a holy city for 
Muslims - unaware, too, of the 17th-century Sufi shrine just behind 
the tea shack where I often spent my mornings. It was one of many in 
the city that both Hindus and Muslims visited, a legacy of the 
flowering of Sufi culture in medieval north India. Only this year I 
discovered from Najam that one of the great Shia philosophers of 
Persia had sought refuge at the court of a Hindu ruler of Benares in 
the 18th century. And it was after returning from my trip to Ayodhya 
that I read that Ram's primacy in this pilgrimage centre was 
relatively recent - for much of the medieval period, Ayodhya was the 
home of the much older sect of Shaivites, or Shiva-worshippers (Ram 
is one of many incarnations of Vishnu, one of the gods in the Hindu 
trinity, in which Shiva is the most important); that many of 
Ayodhya's temples and sects devoted to Ram had actually emerged under 
the patronage of the Shia Muslims who ruled Awadh in the early 18th 
century.

Paramhans had been quick to offer me a history full of 
temple-destroying Muslims and brave Hindu nationalists. But his own 
militant sect had been originally formed to fight not Muslims but 
Shiva-worshipping Hindus; and it had been favoured in that long and 
bloody conflict by the Muslim Nawabs. The Nawabs, whose 
administration and army were staffed by Hindus, kept a careful 
distance from Hindu-Muslim conflicts. One of the first such conflicts 
in Ayodhya came in 1855, when some Muslims accused Hindus of 
illegally constructing a temple over a mosque and militant Hindu 
sadhus (mendicants) massacred 75 Muslims. The then Nawab of Awadh, 
Wajid Ali Shah, a distinguished poet and composer, refused to support 
the Muslim claim, explaining, "We are devoted to love; do not know of 
religion. So what if it is Kaaba or a house of idols?"

Wajid Ali Shah, who was denounced as effeminate and inept and deposed 
a year later by British imperialists, was the last great exponent of 
the Indo-Persian culture that emerged in Awadh towards the end of the 
Moghul empire. India was then one of the great centres of the Islamic 
world, along with the Ottoman and Safavid empires. In India, Islam 
had lost some of its Arabian and Persian distinctiveness, and had 
blended with older cultures. Its legacy is still preserved - amid the 
squalor of a hundred small Indian towns, in the grace and elegance of 
Najam's Urdu, in numerous songs and dances that accompany festivals, 
in the subtle cuisines of north India - but one could continue to 
think of it, as I did, as something without a history or tradition. 
The Indo-Islamic is an embarrassment to the idea of India maintained 
by the modernising Hindu elite for the past 50 years.

That idea first emerged in the early 19th century, as the British 
consolidated their hold over India and found new allies among 
upper-caste Hindus. As elsewhere in their empire, the British 
encountered the stiffest resistance from Muslim rulers. So they 
tended to demonise the Muslims as fanatics and tyrants, and presented 
the British conquest as at least partly a humanitarian intervention 
on behalf of a once-great Hindu nation. Most of these British views 
of India were useful fictions at best - the Turks, Afghans, central 
Asians and Persians, who together with upper-caste Hindu elites had 
ruled a variety of Indian states for more than eight centuries, were 
more than plunderers and zealots. The bewildering diversity of people 
who inhabited India before the arrival of the Muslims in the 11th 
century hardly formed a community, much less a nation; and the word 
"Hinduism" barely hinted at the almost infinite number of folk and 
elite cultures, religious sects and philosophical traditions found in 
India.

But these novel British ideas were received well by upper-caste 
Hindus, who had previously worked with Muslim rulers and began to see 
opportunities in the new imperial order. British discoveries of 
India's classical sculpture, painting and literature had given them a 
fresh, invigorating sense of the pre-Islamic past; they found 
flattering and useful British Orientalist notions of India that 
identified Brahmanical scriptures and principles of tolerance as the 
core of Hinduism. In this view, practices such as widow-burning 
became proof of the degradation Hinduism had suffered under Muslim 
rule, and the cruelties of caste became an unfortunate consequence of 
their tyranny.

A wide range of Hindu thinkers, social reformers and politicians 
began to see imperial rule, with all its social reforms and 
scientific advances, as a preparation for self-rule. Some denounced 
British imperialism as exploitative, but even they welcomed the 
redeeming modernity it brought and, above all, the European idea of 
nation - of a cohesive community with a common history, culture, 
values and sense of purpose - that for many other colonised peoples 
appeared a way of duplicating the success of the all-conquering west. 
Muslim leaders, on the other hand, were slow to participate in the 
civilising mission of imperialism; they saw little place for 
themselves in the nation envisaged by the Hindu elite. British 
imperialists followed their own strategies of divide and rule: the 
decision to partition Bengal in 1905 and to have separate electorates 
for Muslims reinforced the sense among upwardly mobile Indians that 
they belonged to distinct communities defined by religion.

It is true that Gandhi and Nehru worked hard to attract low-caste 
Hindus and Muslims - they wanted to give a mass base and wider 
legitimacy to the political movement for self-rule under the 
leadership of the Congress party - but Gandhi's use of popular Hindu 
symbols, which made him a Mahatma, or sage, among Hindu masses, 
caused many Muslims to distrust him. Also, many Congress leaders 
shared the views of such upper-caste ideologues as Veer Savarkar and 
Guru Golwalkar. These men saw India as essentially the sacred 
indigenous nation of Hindus which had been divided and emasculated by 
Muslim invaders, and that could only be revived by uniting its 
diverse population, recovering ancient Hindu traditions, and weeding 
out corrupting influences from central Asia and Arabia. This meant 
forcing Muslims to give up their traditional allegiances and embrace 
the so-called "Hindu ethos", or Hindutva, of India - an ethos that 
was, ironically, imagined into being with the help of British 
Orientalist discoveries of India's past.

The idea of Hindutva included an admiration for Mussolini's fascism 
and Hitler's Germany, which, as Guru Golwalkar wrote in the Hindu 
nationalist bible, We or Our Nationhood Defined (1938), expressed 
"race pride at its highest" by purging the Jews. It inspired the 
Brahmin founders of the RSS in 1925, and comforted many upper-caste 
Hindus who felt threatened by Gandhi's emphasis on a federal, 
socially egalitarian India. It was the rise of the Hindu dominated 
nation that Gandhi was accused of obstructing by his assassin, a 
Brahmin member of the RSS.

By the 1940s, the feudal and professional Muslim elite had grown 
extremely wary of the Hindu nationalist strain within the Congress. 
After many failed attempts at political rapprochement, they finally 
arrived at the demand for a separate homeland for Indian Muslims. The 
demand expressed the Muslim fear of being reduced to a perpetual 
minority in a Hindu majority state, and was, initially, a desire for 
a more federal polity for post-colonial India. But the Congress 
leaders chose to partition off the Muslim-majority provinces in the 
west and east, rather than share the centralised power of the 
colonial state that was their great inheritance from the British.

This led to the violent transfer of millions of Hindus, Sikhs and 
Muslims across hastily-drawn, artificial borders. Massacres, rapes 
and kidnappings further hardened sectarian feelings: the RSS, which 
was temporarily banned after Gandhi's assassination, found its most 
dedicated workers among middle-class Hindu refugees from Pakistan, 
among them the current home minister, Lal Krishna Advani, who was 
born in Karachi and joined the RSS as early as 1942. The RSS floated 
a new party and entered electoral politics in independent India in 
1951 with the renewed promise of a Hindu nation; and although it 
worked for much of the next three decades under the gigantic shadow 
of the Congress party, its sudden popularity in the 1980s now seems 
part of the great disaster of the Partition, which locked the new 
nation states of India and Pakistan into stances of mutual hostility.

In Pakistan, a shared faith failed to reconfigure the diverse 
regional and linguistic communities into a new nation. This was 
proved when the Bengali-speaking population of East Pakistan seceded, 
with Indian help, to form Bangladesh in 1971. The ideology of 
secularism, backed by the prestige and example of Nehru, seems to 
have had a more successful run in India, which after Partition had, 
among its vast population, almost as many Muslims as Pakistan. In 
reality, India's Muslims lost much of their educated elite to 
Pakistan, and since 1947 they have been a depressed minority. They 
continue to lack effective spokespersons, despite, or perhaps because 
of, a tokenist presence at the highest levels of government. 
Politically, they are significant only at election time, when they 
form a solid vote for Hindu politicians who promise to protect them 
from discrimination and violence. Urdu, the language the Muslim 
presence in India had created - which is barely distinguishable from 
spoken Hindi - was an early victim of attempts to institute a 
Sanskritised Hindi as the national language.

Secularism, the separation of religion from politics, was always 
going to be difficult to impose on a country where religion has long 
shaped political and cultural identities. But it was a useful basis 
upon which the Delhi government could, in the name of modernity and 
progress, establish its authority over a poor, chaotically fractious 
country. However, when Sikh and Muslim minorities in Punjab and 
Kashmir challenged the great arbitrary power of the government, 
Nehru's heirs - his daughter, Indira, and grandson, Rajiv - were 
quick to discard even the rhetoric of secularism and to turn Hindu 
majoritarianism into the official ideology of the Congress-run 
administration.

The uprisings in Punjab and then in Kashmir were represented by the 
government and the middle-class media as fundamentalist and terrorist 
assaults on a secular, democratic state. In fact, although tainted by 
association with Pakistan and religious fanaticism, the Sikhs and 
Kashmiri Muslims were expressing a long-simmering discontent with an 
anti-federalist state: a state that had retained most of the power of 
the old colonial dispensation, and often used it more brutally than 
the British ever had. The uprisings were part of a larger crisis 
common in post-colonial states: the failure of a corrupt, 
self-serving political and bureaucratic elite to ensure social and 
economic justice for those it had claimed to represent in its 
anti-colonial battles.

By the 1980s, the Congress party was in decline. It kept raising the 
bogey of national unity and external enemies, but the disturbances in 
Kashmir and Punjab only gave more substance to the Hindu nationalist 
allegation that the Congress had turned India into a "soft state" 
where Kashmiri Muslims could blithely conspire with Pakistan against 
Mother India. And, with the pseudo-socialist economy close to 
bankruptcy, the nationalists saw a chance to find new voters among 
upper-caste Hindus. Like the National Socialists in Germany in the 
early 1930s, they offered not so much clear economic policies as 
fantasies of national rebirth and power. In 1984, the VHP announced a 
national campaign to rebuild the grand temple at Ayodhya that they 
claimed the first Moghul emperor Babur had destroyed. The mosque that 
replaced it, they said, was a symbol of national shame; removing it 
and rebuilding the temple was a matter of national honour.

Both history and archaeology were travestied in this account of the 
fall and rise of the eternal Hindu nation. There was no evidence that 
Babur had ever been to Ayodhya, or that this restless, melancholic 
conqueror from Samarkand, a connoisseur of architecture, could have 
built an ugly mosque over an existing Ram temple. Ram himself isn't 
known to recorded history - the cult of Ram-worship arrived in north 
India as late as the 10th century AD, and no persuasive evidence 
exists that a Ram temple ever stood on the site. But the myths were 
useful in shoring up the narrative of Muslim cruelty and contempt. 
They found their keenest audience at first among wealthy expatriate 
Hindus in the UK and US, who bankrolled a movement that, in upholding 
a strong, self-assertive Hinduism, seemed to allay their sense of 
inferiority induced by western images of India as miserably poor. In 
India itself, deeper anxieties made many upper-caste Hindus turn to 
the BJP.

In 1990, the government, which was then headed by defectors from the 
Congress party, decided to implement a longstanding proposal to 
reserve government jobs for poor, "backward-caste" Hindus. 
Upper-caste Hindus were enraged. The BJP saw the plan for affirmative 
action as potentially destructive of its old plan of persuading 
lower-caste groups to accept a paternalistic, upper-caste leadership 
in a united Hindu front against Muslims. Later that year, the leader 
of the BJP, LK Advani, decided to lead a ritual procession on a 
faux-chariot - actually a Chevrolet - from Gujarat to Ayodhya, where 
he intended to start the construction of the Ram temple.

The previous year, the BJP had passed an official resolution 
demanding that the temple be built on the exact spot where Babur's 
mosque now stood. Advani had then said, "I am sure it will translate 
into votes." Appropriately, he began his journey to Ayodhya from the 
temple in Somnath, Gujarat, which was looted by a Turk conqueror in 
the 11th century AD and which had been lavishly rebuilt in the early 
1950s. Rapturous Hindu activists waited by the roadside to apply 
ritual marks of blood on his forehead. This was not just play-acting: 
more than 500 people, most of them Muslims, were killed in the 
rioting that accompanied Advani's progress across India. Hindu 
policemen were indifferent, as they were last month in Gujarat, and 
sometimes even joined in.

It is strange to look back now and see how little known the 
controversy in Ayodhya was only two decades ago. Local Hindus first 
staked a claim on the mosque in the mid-19th century, and were 
allowed by British officials to worship on a platform outside the 
building. In 1949, two years after independence, a Hindu civil 
servant working together with local abbots surreptitiously placed 
idols of Ram inside the mosque. The story that Lord Ram himself had 
appeared to install the idols inside the mosque quickly spread. Local 
Muslims protested. Nehru sensed that nothing less than India's 
secular identity was threatened. He ordered the mosque to be locked 
and sacked the district official, who promptly joined the Hindu 
nationalists. But the idols were not removed, and Muslims gradually 
gave up offering namaz, or prayers, at the mosque. In the following 
three decades, the courts were clogged with Hindu and Muslim claims 
on the site. In 1984, the VHP began a campaign to unlock the mosque. 
In 1986, a local judge allowed the Hindus to worship inside. A year 
later, Muslims held their largest protest demonstration since 
independence in Delhi.

Before then, Babur's mosque had primarily been of concern to a small 
circle of litigious, property-hungry abbots in Ayodhya. Religion was 
always a fiercely competitive business here: the abbots fought hard 
for a share of the donations from the millions of poor pilgrims, and, 
more recently, from wealthy Indians in the US and UK; they were also 
notorious for murder and pillage - the bomb attack on Paramhans, 
which he blamed on Muslim terrorists, was probably the work of rival 
abbots. But as the movement to build the temple intensified, 
entrepreneurs of religiosity such as Paramhans were repackaged by 
nationalist politicians as sages and saints, while Ram himself 
evolved from the benign, almost feminine, calendar-art divinity of my 
childhood to the vengeful Rambo of Hindu nationalist posters.

The myths multiplied when, in October 1990, Advani's procession was 
stopped and police in Ayodhya fired upon a crowd of Hindus attempting 
to assault the mosque. The largest circulation Hindi paper in north 
India spoke of "indiscriminate police firing" and "hundreds of dead 
devotees", and then reduced the death toll the next day to 32. These 
rumours and exaggerations, part of a slick propaganda campaign, 
helped the BJP win the elections in four north Indian states in 1991. 
The mosque seemed doomed - then, in December 1992, a crowd of mostly 
upper-caste Hindus armed with shovels, crowbars, pickaxes, sometimes 
only bare hands, demolished Babur's mosque, and the police simply 
watched from a distance. One of the more vocal Hindu nationalist 
politicians, Uma Bharati, who is now a senior minister in the central 
Indian government, urged on the crowd, shouting, "Give one more push 
and break the Babri Masjid." The president of the VHP announced the 
dawn of a "Hindu rebellion".

That evening, a crowd rampaged through the town, killing 13 Muslims, 
including children, and destroying scores of mosques, shrines and 
Muslim-owned shops and homes. Protests and riots erupted across 
India. Altogether 2,000 people, most of them Muslim, were killed. 
Three months after the massacres, Muslim gangsters retaliated with 
bomb attacks that killed more than 300 civilians.

In Delhi, the elderly Congress prime minister, Narasimha Rao, napped 
through the demolition. The next day he dismissed the BJP 
governments, banned the RSS and its sister organisations, and 
promised to rebuild the mosque. The leaders of the BJP tried to 
distance themselves from the demolition, saying it was a spontaneous 
act of frustration, provoked by the government's anti-Hindu policies. 
But the Central Bureau of Investigation concluded that senior BJP 
leaders had planned the demolition well in advance. As for the 
anti-Muslim violence, Advani claimed in an article in The Times of 
India that it would not have taken place had Muslims identified 
themselves with Hindutva: a sentiment echoed after the recent riots 
in Gujarat.

Six years after the demolition, the BJP, benefiting from India's 
first-past-the-post electoral system, became the dominant party in 
the ruling National Democratic Alliance in Delhi. Despite being 
forced to share power with more secular parties, BJP's ideological 
fervour seems undiminished, if as yet unfulfilled. Responding to a 
question about the Ram temple two years ago, Prime Minister Atal 
Bihari Vajpayee told expatriate Indians in New York that he needed a 
clear two-thirds majority in parliament in order to "build the India 
of our dreams". Certainly, the Hindu nationalists have tried hard to 
whip up Hindu passions. In their first few months in power, they 
conducted nuclear tests, explicitly aiming them against Pakistan, 
which responded with its own tests.

The VHP and Bajrang Dal, which distributed radioactive earth from the 
nuclear tests site as sacred offerings, were responsible for an 
unprecedented series of mob attacks on Christians across India. About 
half of these occurred in Gujarat, but Advani claimed that there was 
"no law and order problem in Gujarat", and shared the dais at a 
meeting of Hindu nationalists with the new chief of the RSS, KS 
Sudarshan, who asked Christians and Muslims to return to their "Hindu 
roots". Sudarshan also attacked secular intellectuals as "that class 
of bastards which tries to implant an alien culture in their land" 
and spoke of "an epic war between Hindus and anti-Hindus". Barely a 
week after the VHP's plans to start construction of the Ram temple 
caused some of the worst violence in India since independence, the 
BJP-led government asked the Supreme Court to allow VHP leaders to 
perform rituals at the site of the mosque on March 15 - an appeal 
wisely rejected.

Even so, the temple in Ayodhya seems inevitable. You reach 
Ramjanmabhoomi (Ram's birthplace), as it is now called, through a 
maze of narrow, barricaded paths. Armed men loom up abruptly with 
metal detectors and perform brisk body-searches. These are members of 
the Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC), notorious for its pogroms of 
Muslims in north Indian towns. The men look mean for the cameras. 
Pictures of the site have not been allowed by the government for the 
past decade.

A canvas canopy protects a platform built above the rubble of the 
mosque, on which stand the idols draped in garlands and sequinned 
cloth. A priest sits below the platform, briskly dispensing prasad - 
tiny sugary balls - and squirreling away the soiled and wrinkled 
rupee notes tentatively offered by peasant pilgrims.

As I groped for small change, a PAC inspector wandered over, asked if 
I was a journalist from Delhi, and attempted a little history. He 
told me that Lord Ram had placed the idols inside the mosque in 1949; 
it was his wish that a temple be built on his birthplace. My 
companion, a resident of Benares, challenged this account, saying 
that the idols had been placed there by the then district official. 
The inspector did not defend his story; he only smiled and replied 
that this proved that the official was a true Hindu.

Many such "true Hindus" looked the other way while the temple was 
slowly prefabricated. In a vast shed near the Ramjanmabhoomi lie 
stacks of carved stone pillars. Here, you can buy promotional 
liter-ature - The Blood-Soaked History Of Ayodhya and Ayodhya: An 
Answer To Terrorism And Fundamentalism are the bestselling titles - 
and admire a miniature glass-cased model of the temple.

The labour is cheap - £2 a day for craftsmen - but the temple, whose 
architect previously designed the Swaminarayan temple in Neasden, 
north London, seems to have come out of a garish fantasy of marble 
and gold.

The impatience of abbots such as Paramhans is understandable. 
Offerings at the temple are likely to run into millions of dollars 
annually; much has already arrived from donors in India and abroad. 
No one knows where most of it has gone - rumours point to new 
buildings in Ayodhya and elsewhere, including some owned by 
Paramhans, who is moved to rage if you raise the possibility of 
Muslim opposition to the temple. "There are only two places Muslims 
can go to," he shouted, echoing a popular slogan of the early 1990s, 
"Pakistan or Kabristan [graveyard]."

As for the mosque - which appears now in memory as a melancholy 
symbol of a besieged secularism - there seems little doubt that it 
will never be rebuilt. It has fallen victim not just to the 
ideologues but to less perceptible changes in India's general mood in 
the past decade. The talk of social justice, the official culture of 
frugality, the appeal, however rhetorical, to traditions of tolerance 
and dialogue - all these seem to belong to the past, to the early 
decades of idealism and delusion. A decade of pro-globalisation 
policies has created a new, aggressive middle class whose concerns 
now dominate public life. This aspiring class replaced expatriate 
Indians as the BJP's primary constituency - referring to them in a 
recent cover story, India Today spoke of the "return of the militant 
Hindu".

This powerful Hindu minority supports the insidious campaign against 
madrasas, and the more brutal assertion of state power in Kashmir. It 
demands a nuclear attack on Pakistan; aspires to superpower status, 
and fervently courts the US as a political, economic and military 
ally. It is of this new India that Gujarat provided a glimpse last 
month, as young Hindus carted off looted digital cameras and DVD 
players in their new Japanese cars. It is of this India that Ayodhya 
presents both a miniature image and a sinister portent, with its 
syncretic past now irrevocably falsified, its mosques destroyed, its 
minorities suppressed: an Ayodhya where well-placed local abbots 
helped by politicians wait for lucrative connections to the global 
economy, and prove, along with much else, the profound modernity of 
religious nationalism.

· Pankaj Mishra is author of The Romantics (Picador).


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