First, the Babri Masjid was not an ordinary mosque. It was a historic monument and a symbol of Hindu-Muslim syncretic tradition till the orchestration of the Ramjanambhumi movement, which sought to prove that the site of the mosque was the place of birth of the mythical Hindu figure of Rama. Accordingly its organised demolition at the behest of a political party which had assumed office in Uttar Pradesh by proclaiming a constitutional oath to uphold the secular credentials of the country's constitution came as a rude shock to India's democratic tradition. The BJP government in Lucknow not only betrayed its promise to the Supreme Court for ensuring a peaceful karseva but also directly connived at the unfortunate incident. In the aftermath of the Babri incident not only India's leadership within the Third World was at stake, but her relation with the Muslim world was severely strained.

The question, however, remains why was the politics of religious fundamentalism able to create a situation that made the Babri episode possible. To a large extent this was the result of the policy of compromise with religious fundamentalism that the post-1947 government in Delhi had traditionally followed. The Indian ruling class rules the country neither through plain coercion nor through, what Gramsci had called, `moral cultural hegemony', but by a coalition strategy involving the big bourgeoisie, the big landlords and rich peasants and the middle-class intellectuals. To keep together this coalition the ruling party - even during Nehru's days - opted not to strike decisive blows for making ideals of secularism and democracy living realities. Hindu rituals and practices crept into official functions and ceremonies; communal organisations had been allowed to function; such practices with a religious tine as prohibition of cow slaughter became a part of the Directive Principles of State Policy; while equality before law was enshrined in the Constitution, the Muslim women were deliberately left out of the civil code; casteist and communalist vote-banks had been patronised. In other words, the Indian State failed to create an effective civil society without which no form of democracy can flourish. It was also an irony that Mrs. Indira Gandhi inserted the word `secularism' in the Preamble to the Indian Constitution, but herself used the Hindu card to fight the 1983 election in Jammu and Kashmir. The next Congress Prime Minister - Rajiv Gandhi - too lost an important opportunity to confront Islamic fundamentalism during the Shah Bano case when he succumbed to pressures from conservative Muslim politicians and religious leaders. In fact, the Ayodhya crisis was also the result of the Indian State's compromising gesture to the politics of fundamentalism. The unlocking of the doors of the disputed monument and the permission for shilanyas of the Ram temple are shocking examples of the inability of the Congress government in Delhi to deal firmly with fundamentalist forces. It need not be forgotten that during the prelude to the Babri Masjid demolition the then Congress Prime Minister Narasimha Rao disregarded the National Integration Council's unanimous advice to deal firmly with kar seva and opted to engage himself with useless parleys with sadhus and sants who had declared themselves above the rule of law. This failure to strike the secular blow at the right moment certainly facilitated the tragic event of the 6th December. The communal hysteria that followed prepared the ground for the rise of the Sangh-Parivar orchestrated fundamentalist politics that enabled the BJP to first sit on the Delhi masnad for 18 months and then win the recent parliamentary elections.

The success of the aggressive Hindu sectarian politics is also connected with a distorted nation-building strategy adopted in the aftermath of independence. The Indian State took recourse to integrationist liberalism of the Nehruvian variety that accorded a lower status to regional, local, religious, ethnic and linguistic specificity in the interest of creating nation unity form the top, primarily to develop an integrated national market for the indigenous bourgeoisie. This distorted Centre-State relations and caused regional economic imbalances and a growing gap between the rich and poor. The Indian government's adoption of the policy of economic liberalistion in the early 1990s and the subsequent withdrawal of the Indian State from social welfare activities, have further accentuated the frustration of the Indian people. The private capital was even granted an access to the electronic media. An upshot of this was the dissemination of individualistic consumerist culture and screening of programmes with Hindu revivalist tinge. After all, the screening of the Ramayana and Mahabharata serials coincided with the Ramjanambhumi movement. Again, it is not a mere coincidence that the lady who played the role of Sita in Ramayana was elected to the parliament on a BJP ticket.

Recent studies have identified certain socioeconomic factors behind the current Hinduised communal conflagration. For instance, it has been argued that the recent communal imbroglio is largely urban based. This is believed to be connected with the `small town development' in North India. This pattern of urbanisation had centred on small-scale industrial units, which again was accompanied with the emergence of two new social groups - a new urban middle class and a small working class. The middle class was primarily Hindu and came to be guided by local interests and considerations since they could not develop cross-local networks which established capitalists like Birla, Tata, Dalmia or Goenka had fostered. On the other hand, the size of the working class was too small to be organised along trade union lines. By the end of the 1980s both these social groups were in search of a `shard anchorage' which the BJP provided. Surely, this implied of the failure of left and secular politics.

At the same time the material conditions of the Muslims in general terms have deteriorated over the years. Today the Muslims constitute about 13% of the Indian populace, although their share in central government employment, high school education and access to financial institutions are respectively 4.41%, 4% and 5.06%. This material degradation strengthened among the Muslims a sense of insecurity, which made them easy victims of fundamentalist politics. I am, however, not for a moment asserting that all Muslims in India are poor. On the contrary, some sections of Muslims attained considerable prosperity from retail business and the Gulf connection, particularly during the 1980s. But this too generated communal animosities since the Hindu neighbours of these Muslims felt economically threatened. Thus, during the Kota riots of 1989, the Madras riot of 1990 and Bhagalpur carnage of 1990 the primary targets of the Hindu crowd were those Muslims who had been once poor but had currently gained in prosperity.

Besides, the 1980s witnessed a challenge to upper caste domination within the Hindu society. Such a challenge first came in Meenakshipuram in Tamil Nadu when a large number of Dalits converted themselves to Islam. This represented a double threat perception for the upper caste Hindus. First, it symbolised the an effective lower caste challenge to the upper caste. Secondly, the lower castes registered their challenge by adopting a faith, which had never been viewed kindly by the upper-caste Hindus. What was more important, this threat to the upper caste hegemony was contemporaneous with two other processes: the oil revolution in the Arab world causing a flow of petro-dollars into India for the financing of Muslim institutions, and V.P.Singh's acceptance of the Mandal Commission recommendation for the reservation of some official jobs for the backward castes. These developments along with the Dalit challenge convinced the upper caste Hindus how vulnerable their traditional socio-economic position was due to the threat from the lower castes and Muslims. A shaky upper caste Hindu community now became ready victims of the mobilising campaign of Hindu communalist forces. This certainly helped the creation of a political space for the BJP-led communal formation within the Indian polity.