Today, 10 years after the demolition, when the symbol no longer works, the people who raised it have virtually abandoned it. It did not figure in the recent Gujarat campaign, for instance, or in the election campaign in Uttar Pradesh earlier this year. If it was an issue so central to the Hindu faith it should have been possible to revive it again and again. But look at the damage it did while it dominated the national scene: the bloodbaths it caused, the polarisation between Hindus and Muslims it brought about. It is a legacy we will always have to live with.

It must also be said that the members of the Babri Masjid Action Committee, who appointed themselves custodians of Babri Masjid, did much the same. It was a remarkable convergence between communalists among both Hindus and Muslims, because they share a common goal, which is to polarise society. That's how they earn their bread!

Why did Ayodhya capture the Hindu imagination even temporarily? It was because the Indian middle class has an inflated sense of its own importance. It expected our country to progress rapidly once it became independent. It probably feels we should have been even ahead of the United States by now! And since this has not happened, it needs reasons to explain why the Indian project has somehow been derailed. The scapegoats it has been finding lately are many: the Nehruvian worldview, which obviously includes secularism, the planned economy, the proximity to the erstwhile Soviet Union instead of the United States.

One of the inputs into this feeling of being a great people is history. So it likes to think that during Ram Rajya, we had everything from rockets to landmines. All the brilliant ideas the world has thought of since were already there in ancient India. But we lost out thereafter because of Muslim invasions and Muslim rule. [Some highly exaggerated propaganda of erstwhile Indian civilization seems to state that had it not been for the Mughal perpetrated genocide of a million Hindus and equal amount of forced conversions to Islam for over a period of thousand years, we might have already landed on the moon. Interestingly, while the Muslim invasion is stigmatised by the re-written history of Koenraad Elst and patronised by Joshi and the likes, there is no such stigma attached to the subsequent colonial presence, even though there is tangible evidence of the exploitation of India by the British. The genocide that accompanied Aryan invasion is instead disregarded as mythology. *]

In India, the democratic and secular experiment survived four and a half decades. In no other third world society has any such arrangement survived beyond five or ten years. When I look back on my student and early teaching days in the early seventies, I feel I was living in a different world. I don't understand the world I live in now. In those days I was hardly aware of my Muslim identity. As a historian, I was sensitive to Hindu-Muslim issues, but as a young Muslim in India, in my day-to-day life, I wasn't aware of being any different from those around me.

There was an undercurrent of Hindu-Muslim tension even in those days, but the political vocabulary was completely secular. Even the Jana Sangh's electoral propaganda was quite different from that of Narendra Modi's today. And Ayodhya, after the events of December 1949 when the Ram Lalla idol made its appearance in Babri Masjid, had been forgotten.

Why was Ayodhya such a major issue for Muslims when the structure was being used as a temple anyway? Precisely because when something is sought to be snatched away from a community, and snatched by a political party which is obviously no friend of the Muslims, the latter's fears are heightened. Today Ayodhya, tomorrow what else? It is much the same when Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh sarsangchalak K. Sudarshan asks Muslims to accept the uniform civil code. The overriding principle amongst Muslims is simple: What is the guarantee that no demands will be made in future? What is the surety that such demands will stop with Ayodhya, or maximum, Varanasi and Mathura? Does the VHP speak for its future, that 50 years later it won't voice a demand for another Muslim shrine or structure? Does the VHP (and its paternal organisation, the RSS) speak on behalf of all Hindutva supporters? Muslims, knowing the mindsets of the BJP-RSS, and the constituencies they cater to, are not going to listen even if the latter put forward sensible ideas. Also, future demands may not even be on grounds of religion: What if someone decides that the Qutub Minar is a shameful symbol for Hindus as it depicts the beginning of Muslim rule over Delhi? Jama Masjid finds a conspicuously hidden idol from around it's outerwalls?

Where would it end? Would it ever end, or will future generations see India become a land of revanchist movements, where sections claiming historical grievances tear down various structures? [Today it is Muslim sites; tomorrow it could be Christian sites; but dangerously, what if day after tomorrow, one section of Hindus turns against another?]

By Prof. Mushirul Hasan (The author is professor of history at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi.)
As told to Debashish Mukerji - First appeared on: the-week.com

A Hole In The Rupee - by Raja Menon

   In early 2001, Gen Pervez Musharraf, in an attempt to pull Pakistan back from the brink of economic disaster, decided to take some bold steps to increase the government's tax revenues. Acknowledging that the tax-paying population of Pakistan is minute—dramatically smaller than India's—he brought the army into the business of surveying Lahore's mandis. It was no secret that the traders there give no bills and pay no taxes. The traders downed shutters, which by itself was a suicidal step in the long-term, but reinforcements were arriving. The next day, the clerics, the jehadis and the fundamentalist parties threatened street agitations in support of people who were plainly un-Islamic profiteers, black marketeers and usurers. These incidents didn't go unnoticed among Indian analysts whose business it is to predict Pakistan's future.

India has just completed a cabinet reshuffle, the central shift being the swap between the finance and foreign ministers. Economic analysts have been unanimous in their prescription that Jaswant Singh's first priority should be to revive the stock market, restoring to Indians their long lost 'feelgood' factor. The rest will apparently take care of itself. But, figuring inconspicuously in Indian news last week is a comedy to replicate Musharraf's lost battle against the Lahore traders. There are apparently 12 lakh registered commercial enterprises in Delhi state. Not all have bothered to register, so at a rough guess they probably actually number 18-20 lakh. Now Delhi may not be Switzerland, but it is presumably better administered than Bihar or Orissa. Yet, the number of commercial enterprises that pay excise is just 1.5 lakh or roughly ten per cent. The mind boggles to imagine what percentage of enterprises pay excise in Bihar. So an attempt to register all commercial enterprises in Delhi brought about the same traders' strike as in Lahore. But India is not Pakistan, or is it? The next day the Delhi politician 'intervened' on behalf of the traders and the drive by the excise officials was called off. Certainly the excise department are no angels, and like the other three departments under the finance ministry are adept at converting what would have been public income into private profit. This is an old game, invented and refined by the East India Company officials who retired to vast country estates in England while the company closed after 1857 with only a few pounds in favour of Balance Creditor.

But why is this important to our security? The answer can be found in a study by an American NGO on 'Policing in India'. The study looked at the responsibilities of the Indian police, their motivation, their training and finally the salaries they are paid. While the conclusions are fairly lengthy, the critical bit was that if a man can be trusted with a gun to shoot people and he could also be relied upon to discriminate between an honest citizen and a crook, then paying him Rs 4,000 a month is ridiculous. But that is what the government can afford, since the four departments that collect revenue, collect so little. Hence the deficit is large and there is no money to pay government servants an honest wage, hence they fiddle the accounts and that's the reason most police carry only a bamboo stick. The NGO went on to say that an Indian sub-inspector is probably the equivalent of an average American cop. The country might as well do without those below him.

Jaswant Singh has apparently gone beyond the advice of the economists in recognising that the country is being looted by a number of people—some in government, some outside.