already existent manifestation of Hindu nationalism. This process was helped,
indirectly and largely unwittingly, by the simplistically refashioned but enor-
mously successful television serialization of the Ramayanaby the state broad-
casting corporation.
This process of creating a political focus on a religious symbol would not have
worked without a specific means of relating the ideal of a Hindu nation to the
threatening reality of Islam; for the stigmatizing of Muslims was, as we have
seen, the obverse of the Hindu nationalist conception of a Hindu polity. To a
certain extent, the present was potent enough – as the agitation over Muslim
immigrants from Bangladesh showed. But, despite militancy amongst some
Muslim groups, especially those ideologically (and sometimes financially) linked
to transnational Islamic fundamentalism, the inescapable reality was of a largely
depressed community usually socially integrated into Indian society. So, the
revivification of Hindu India had to come from history.
Turning to an old concern going back to the 1940s, Hindu nationalists began
agitating for the reclamation of Hindu holy sites taken over by Islam in the past.
Undoubtedly, it was the practice of some Muslim rulers to build mosques on the
site of destroyed Hindu temples; in Benares and elsewhere, this was the case.
There was, in any case, the fundamental question of what significance to attach
to these historical events in today’s multireligious and secular polity; but the
Hindu nationalists chose as their main target a more problematic site, a mosque
in a small and nondescript village that bore the same name as Rama’s traditional
capital, Ayodhya. That there had been a temple at all there was uncertain; that
there was any local tradition associating the village with a traditional sacred site
was uncertain; that Hinduism reads literal meaning into sacred geography is
questionable. But the connection between a mosque, a place-name resonant
with meaning to many Hindus, and a divinity with pan-Hindu appeal was irre-
sistible. The start of the re-creation of a Hindu nation, then, was the liberation
of Hindu holy places, and the first place, the most important, because common
to all Hindus, was to be Ayodhya. For this, the mosque had to be destroyed and
a temple (re)built in its place.
By 1990, an unsustainable division was emerging between the Janata Dal,
led by Vishwanath Pratap Singh, and the BJP. The Janata Dal’s own populism
was targeted, in conventional Leftist fashion, at the economically weak sections
of society – in India, those castes specified by the Constitution as either “Back-
ward” or “Scheduled.” The proposal was to increase massively the reservation
of educational seats for these castes. While the BJP was concerned not to an-
tagonize potential voters amongst them, its own targeting was of different sec-
tions of society, as we have seen. As agitation and counter-agitation over the
proposed reservation policy spread across India, the BJP decisively swung
towards the Hindu nationalism propagated by the rest of the Parivar. The Pres-
ident of the BJP, Lal Krishna Advani, who had been trained in the RSS, threw
himself into a plan of mobilization. He began a “pilgrimage of the chariot” (rath
yathra) across the country. Ayodhya became the focus of Hindu nationalist
mobilization. To destroy the mosque was to destroy the deleterious consequence
540 c. ram-prasad