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tect the mosque, others apparently gave the demonstrators an hour to demolish it,
then extended the deadline when the task proved more formidable than had first
been imagined. Several retired police officers, along with a group of civil engineers,
were involved in the demolition itself. They organized the younger volunteers,
showing them, for example, how to dismantle the mosque ’s protective railing and
use the segments as battering rams.
How could they not be involved? From their point of view, they weren’t creat-
ing rubble; they were clearing, consolidating, building! There was a definite sense
throughout Hindu Ayodhya that such workers were part of something to be proud
of—something large and unitary for a change, the wave of a coherent future, some-
thing clean and right. Something sanctified by the blood of martyrs, too. Many
pages in the ubiquitous little souvenir books about Ayodhya are taken up with gory
photographs of the six young men who died when police were ordered to repulse
the 1990 assault on the mosque. Oddly, the precedent for such books of martyrs
comes from the Sikhs, as does the term invariably used to designate Hindu activist
volunteers, kar sevak. Even more striking, the word used to name the martyrs them-
selves, shahid, comes from Islam. (See figure N at the Web site http://www.clas.
ufl.edu/users/vasu/loh.)
In the West there is a deep-seated belief that the rubble of Ayodhya and places
like it is caused by pulling the pillars out from under the temple of modern secular-
ism. This is a new version of the colonial view “If we go, they’ll kill each other.”
(That prophecy fulfilled itself all too easily in the months following independence
in 1947.) Hindus in Ayodhya see it the other way around. The mosque was a sym-
bol of desecrating foreign rule, a long colonial past. It was also tied up with the self-
proclaimedly secular Congress Party government that inherited the British mantle
in New Delhi and helped preserve its hold on power by projecting itself as the pro-
tector of Muslims in exchange for their support on election day.
So the confrontation at Ayodhya was not just Hindus versus Muslims, but Hin-
dus versus secularists as well. As one man put it, using an English word in a Hindi
sentence, it was the “unqualifieds” standing up against the English-educated “qual-
ifieds” who get all the good jobs, especially in government. Self-made men like him-
self (he owned his own taxi) were pulling down the massive rubble of a bureaucra-
tized, colonial past. A vivid wall painting showed Prime Minister Narasimha Rao
sweating bullets and crying, in Hindi, “Save my government!” My government—
not just “my” of the Congress Party, but of all those complacent, self-interested
“qualifieds.”
Marx is surely turning over in his grave to find that religion provides the language