A spectre haunts dominant sections of India's political and intellectual elite - the spectre of a growing Hindu self-awareness and self-assertion. ...This elite had used the bogey of Hindu 'communalism' and revivalism as a convenient device to keep themselves in power and to 'legitimize' their slavish imitation of the West... The ghost has now materialised.
Millions of Hindus have stood up. It will not be easy to trick them back into acquiescing in an order which has been characterised not so much by its 'appeasement of Muslims' as by its alienness, rootlessness and contempt for the land's unique cultural past. Secularism is a euphemism for irreligion and repudiation of the Hindu ethos; a euphemism for denigration and humiliation of the business community to the benefit of ever expanding and rapacious bureaucracy and politocracy, have been major planks of this order. Both have lost much of their old glitter and... capacity of dazzle and mislead.
By the same token, reHinduisation of the country's political domain has begun. On a surface view, it may be a sheer 'accident that the battle between aroused Hindus and the... Indian State... has been joined on the question of the Ram Janambhoomi temple in Rama's city of Ayodhya... But historic significance of this 'accident' should be evident...
...In historic terms, therefore, the proposed temple can be the first step towards that goal...
The concept of nation itself is, in fact, alien to the Hindu temperament and genius...
...Hindus are not a community; they are not meant to be a community; and they cannot become a community. This fact has less to do with the caste system... than with the essential spirit of Hinduism which is inclusivist and not exclusivist by definition... Hindus cannot sustain an anti-Muslim feeling except temporarily and that too under provocation... The provocation may not come directly from Muslims...
Hindus have been compelled to recognise boundaries as towards the end of the tenth century when East Afghanistan fell to Muslim Arabs... They are obliged to recognise frontiers now even within the subcontinent which has been the heartland of their civilisation. But that limitation cannot make them into a nation.
Hindus are not a nation in being or becoming. They cannot be... because of... the deep and profound truth that they have been and are meant to be a civilisation. A civilisation must, by definition, seek to be universal...
... As such I find it painful that even well-meaning Hindus should make a distinction between Hindu culture-civilisation and Hindu religion, little realising that Hinduism is not a religion, and say that Rama was both a cultural hero and a religious figure as if he can be so split. No, he epitomises our civilisation in its totality...
The Hindu fight is not at all with Muslims; the fight is between Hindus anxious to renew themselves in the spirit of their civilisation, and the state, Indian in name and not in spirit and the political and intellectual class... The proponents of the Western ideology are using Muslims as auxiliaries and it is a pity Muslim 'leaders' are allowing themselves to be so used...
In the past up to the sixteenth century, great temples have been built in our country by rulers to mark the rise of a new dynasty and/ or to mark a triumph... In the present case, the proposal... has also to help produce an 'army' which can in the first instance achieve the victory the construction can proclaim.
The raising of such an 'army' in our democracy... involves not only a body of disciplined cadres, which is available in the ... RSS, a political organisation... in the Bharatiya Janata Party, but also an aroused citizenry. That had so far been missing. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad and its allies have fulfilled this need...
So long as this task of mobilising support continues, delay in the actual construction... need not be a cause of concern. That can well await the arrival of a Hindu government in New Delhi. Indeed it would be in order to build the temple then (to) herald the dawn of a new order...
The BJP-VHP-RSS leaders have rendered the country another great service. They have brought Hindu interests, if not the Hindu ethos, into the public domain where they legitimately belong. But... they have not fully grasped the implications of their action... The fight is not against what they call pseudo-secularism; it is against secularism in its proper definition...
It is time they recognise that defensiveness can cripple them, as it did... when they sought respectability in claims of adherence to Gandhian socialism...
(Source: Sunday Mail, New Delhi, 9 December, 1990)