The destruction of the Babari Masjid was only the beginning. Politicians fiddled and Bombay burned to find a communal hatred wholly alien to that great city. In 1998, an unrepentent Shiv Sena-BJP Government refused to accept the Srikrishna Commission's objective verdict on its divisive politics.

The horror stories have enlarged the canvas on which they are written ... The method behind this madness is now well-known. It lies in creating a controversy over whatever is going on; and take it to a pitch. The issue could be the national song, flag-hoisting in Hubli, the personal law of the Muslims, a uniform civil code, the status of Jammu and Kashmir or cricket matches. These things are no longer debated, still less discussed. They are excited to ignite the people to gain kudos for oppressing the helpless minorities into submission.

Who would have believed that all this is taking place in the late 20th century? The venom in these attacks has intoxicated its perpetrators ... There is no let-up. Over the past few months, another calculated and relentless attack is starting against the Christian community ...

Prime Minister Vajpayee has declared an ingenious solution to secure his political survival. His mild message against the hoodlums is that people should not take the law into their own hands. His strong message against the victims is that they are guilty and a national debate should take place on proselytising faiths seeking converts to their cause. This diversionary tactic is transparently dishonest and unjust. It exalts the transgressor and blames the innocent victim. The Constitution wisely allowed the adherents of all faiths the freedom of speech and the freedom to propagate their beliefs ... In a distressingly limited interpretation in 1977, the Supreme Court declared that the right to propagate did not include the right to convert. The strange illogicalities of that decision need not detain us. Coercive conversions can never be permitted. Nor is it anyone's case ... that they should be. Vajpayee's call for a national debate is clearly an act of political cowardice - an escape route to avoid an outright condemnation of the atrocities against Christians ... But it also has a more sinister edge to it. In Mr. Vajpayee's dispensation, India is to be divided into two kinds of faiths: those which propagate this message and those which do not. ...

... Vajpayce's call for a national debate is no more than a ploy to silence the prominent non-Hindu faiths and permit the BJP to distort Hinduism and force all other faiths into retreat ... Vajpayee's call for a national debate seeks to re-write the religious freedom clauses and deprive them of their intrinsic vibrancy.

India has to decide not just whether it is a secular state, but whether we are a secular people. The problem solving declarations of courts on Hindutva, the Masjid or secularism cannot help us. Civil society must protect itself from this political onslaught. A nation driven to madness by hate cannot survive ...

The celebration of difference is written into the fabric of India's history and imbricated into the daily lives of its people. No melting pot, India is a unique collage ... of a kind that has no parallel. Over thousands of years, India has added, and keeps on adding, to the splendour of its diversity ...  (Source: The Hindu, 15 January, 1999)