Today will mark the beginning of the 20th year since the demolition of the Babri Masjid. On Monday,as Parliament is deadlocked over foreign direct investment in retail,inflation,corruption and black money with both the BJP and the Left together on the other side of the divide from the Congress,no ones losing any sleep over the Babri demolition anniversary. Even in UP,as the poll campaign begins to kick up dust,speeches of leaders of the BJP,now reduced to fighting the Congress for the third slot,mention Mayawati far more often than Ram the urgency drained from the temple agenda long before the High Court acknowledged the Hindu claim over the janmasthan. Faith remains,profound and unshakeable,says senior BJP leader Jaswant Singh but adds that the politics of that faith is considerably diluted. It (the temple) is an eternal quest,not an electoral issue, says Ravi Shankar Prasad,the BJP leader introduced to crowds as Ram Lallas lawyer during L K Advanis recent Jan Chetna Yatra. For the rest,the yatra spoke neither of Ayodhya nor Ram and was more Advanis bid to reclaim the opposition space for himself and his party from non-political actors like Anna Hazare on the issue of corruption. Did secularism win,after all? Has India moved on from that terrible December 6 of 1992? It is not that we resolved Ayodhya,says Pratap Bhanu Mehta,president,Centre for Policy Research,and columnist for The Indian Express. We changed the subject. The question was displaced,he says,and economic liberalisation took the wind out of the sails of Hindu nationalism. In fact,justice is still denied for the crime at Ayodhya. No one has been punished yet for the criminal conspiracy of the destruction of the mosque. Delay deepens the sense of alienation,says CPMs Nilotpal Basu. Even Basu,who sees economic liberalisation and Hindu communalism as two sides of the same coin, admits that one lost its sting as the other advanced: Since communal issues have receded to the background,the faultline is on economic issues more often than not. In other words,for all its noise and spectacle,Ayodhya-in-1992 was more a conjuncture than a standalone event. Over the years,it has been overtaken by several large changes triggered simultaneously. Jay Panda,whose party,the BJD,was among the first secular allies of the BJP in December 1997,not so long after the BJPs 13-day government had collapsed in 1996 for lack of willing partners,recalls the BJDs prime concern at that time as overcoming the effects of the atrocious Congress policies against Orissa. Again,when the BJD walked out of the NDA in early 2009,the provocation was not the ethnic-communal violence at Kandhamal alone. The BJD was also developing other differences with the BJP,says Panda: Naveen (Patnaik) was cracking down on corruption but his hands were tied by the alliance. there was the fact of the BJP stagnating and Naveen growing. anomalies in seat-sharing. The BJDs calculus in 2007 and 2009 also points to the fact that Ayodhya was not quite the nationwide narrative it is often portrayed to be. It affected different parts of the country,especially in the east and the south,differently. But it is not just that Ayodhya was bypassed and overtaken by issues and processes gaining ground in the same period. The cataclysm of the demolition itself also had a sobering effect. It was a terrible price to pay but especially post-Babri,we could bring critical scrutiny to secularism that had become formulaic,says Rajeev Bhargava,director of CSDS. Today,we are the world leaders in the secularism debate. In the West,secularism is related to atheism,anti-religion. Here,we have learnt to make the distinction between Hindu and Hindutva,says Bhargava. Secondly,while in the West,it is possible to claim to be secular and be against minorities,we dont think of the discussion on secularism as being separate from minority issues,he says. New spaces have opened up to articulate the backwardness of Muslims. Even at the height of the Babri negotiations,Shahabuddin had organised a conference on reservations for Muslims,points out Hilal Ahmed,also of CSDS,but at that time,it did not draw attention. What has changed is this: Post-Babri,a new language of affirmative action became available to Muslims to articulate an older issue. The social justice politics of the 1990s provided the context,he says. Whatever the reasons,however,for the first time in the history of post-colonial India,the gates would appear to have been opened for a more normal Muslim politics. The Sachar report is a landmark. The Sachar report said nothing new yet it made it possible for the Indian state to utter the M word. Talking of Muslims as a disadvantaged political community became acceptable across the political spectrum, says psephologist Yogendra Yadav. This has been accompanied by the disintegration of the Muslim politics of old and the relative marginalisation of leaders like the Shahi Imam. The decline of the Congress and the emergence of coalitions in a more fractured polity have arguably proved beneficial to the Muslims who now had several parties to woo and bat for them,like the SP and RJD. A new,more local Muslim leadership emerged,which is taking up issues like that of the Pasmanda Muslim or the backward classes among Muslims,unheard of before the mid-90s. Nineteen years after Babri,then,Hindutva is no more seen as a potent political project. Having expanded its social base while in power in the NDA,the BJP is searching for ways to enlarge its issue space. Though the state instruments to reach out to her remain blunt and unimaginative,the Indian Muslim has more political options and is freer to articulate her disadvantage. Other challenges remain. As Mehta points out,Post-Babri,Hindutva politics infiltrated readings of the state. We are still living in that shadow. He points to the difficulty,even today,of finding independent,authoritative adjudication on a Hindu-Muslim question that everyone accepts. The Srikrishna Commission was perhaps the last such authority that was deemed non-partisan. The competing descriptions of the more recent Batla House encounter illustrate the problem.
