violence and death, however, a more abstract if extremely grave issue was at
stake: the status of the Indian polity as one in which religions were treated with
equal respect and religion itself was not a legitimate concern of the political
process.
In the event, the issue has proved irresolvable. On the one hand, the immedi-
ate political fallout revealed a striking resistance amongst Hindus to the process
of communalization, i.e., the process of recasting politics as a struggle over reli-
gious identity and between religious communities. Geographically, there was a
strong rejection of the strategy in most of south India, removed from the events
in Ayodhya and with a different history of intercommunal relations. Demo-
graphically, there was an immediate ebbing away of support for the BJP from
the urban elite groups, who saw in the destruction of the mosque nothing but
a loss of political credibility. On the other hand, the question still remained as to
whether a suitably modulated version of this strategy could, in future, remobi-
lize sufficient numbers of Hindus. This was because the very possibility of large-
scale and violent communalization had now become conceivable within the
political system.
Hindu nationalism’s options
The subsequent history of Hindu nationalism over the decade revealed the fun-
damental differences of conception, goal and strategy that had long existed in
India, but which emerged starkly after Ayodhya. Two factors made the choices
facing Hindu nationalists ever clearer after Ayodhya. Firstly, the destruction of
the mosque itself was such an extreme event in the context of India that, even
if any ambivalence about its value and effect remained, it could not form the
basis of a unified and sustained Sangh Parivar strategy such as had character-
ized the brief period between 1989 and 1992. Differences in the assessment of
the value and effect of the destruction became a matter of sharp debate within
the Parivar. Secondly, the BJP itself moved ever closer to national power (after
having gained some power at the state level), and the electoral calculation did
not add up to a simple endorsement of the mobilizatory strategy that had led to
Ayodhya. There was a Hindu vote-bank, and that had helped the BJP in state
elections, especially in Uttar Pradesh itself; but that vote-bank did not extend in
any simply manner either to Uttar Pradesh or to the country as a whole.
These two considerations, one conceptual (and, perhaps, ethical), the other
instrumental, led to the same outcome, which was a diversification of Hindutva
strategy directed at different points of an ideological continuum. At one end of
the Hindu nationalist continuum were those who thought that the realization
of a Hindu nation – in which there was either no other religion or only suitably
subordinated religions – was only just beginning, and its achievement through
continued mobilization would come regardless of political cost and lack of demo-
cratically accredited power. At the end were those who thought that the most
and the best achievement possible was a political manifesto that included some
542 c. ram-prasad