Column | Post-Ayodhya: Musings of a middle-aged Indian

The early 1990s was an era of contrasts for a curious adolescent. Adults told stories of significant crises and pending disasters: the plight of the Indian economy; brutal assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi; a potential escalation of the Kuwait war; and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Not that children understood what these events meant, but they felt a gloomy future looming.

Nonetheless, gripping tales about grand hopes for the future gradually unfolded. In July of 1991, India's new finance minister from Cambridge, a soft-spoken Sikh, announced a new economic policy. Learned elders proclaimed to the young ones, newspaper in hand, “We're entering a new era of LPG. Don't confuse it with cooking gas”.

Hope and Despair
Although the ‘invented’ expansion of LPG – Liberalisation, Privatisation, and Globalisation – was unintelligible for most children, the overarching message they grasped was that 'the country has opened up.’ One of the most exciting pieces of news was that incredible toys and superb chocolates, occasionally brought by 'Gulf uncles', would soon be available at the village shops.

By that time, the much-hyped machine of the century, the computer, had started arriving in schools. Teachers hinted at the Information Technology (IT) revolution in classes and discussed lucrative career options in engineering.

The air of optimism about the future changed once again all of a sudden. The political climate in the country became fluid following the Rath Yatra led by BJP hardliner L K Advani, aimed at constructing a temple at the 'Ram Janmabhoomi'.

On December 6, 1992, karsevaks stormed the disputed area and demolished Babri Masjid within a few hours.

The highly censored news regarding the extent of destruction gradually reached the people, sparking riots across India. Hindus and Muslims started killing each other and burning homes during the communal riots. The national pledge, recited daily in the school assembly –'India is my country. All Indians are my brothers and sisters' – seemed to have lost its meaning.

In 1991 and 1992, rallies aimed at promoting religious harmony were organised even in the most remote villages of Kerala, with school children as the primary participants. Kids wore outfits representing the diversity of India and were loaded onto both big and small lorries like cattle. These lorries, jam-packed with boys and girls in Indian costumes, traversed village roads, serving as a reminder to people of the soul of the nation: unity in diversity.

'Is the country closing once more, echoing the darkest days of partition from history books?' The kids were anxious, struggling to stand steadily as the vehicle moved through gutters and bumps under the open sun.

However, things didn't go as badly as feared in the coming years. As the kids grew older, the Indian economy and society also began to improve. Towards the end of adolescence, the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance government came to power under Atal Bihari Vajpayee, a Hindutva soft-liner and one of the finest parliamentarians India has ever seen.

While the Vajpayee era witnessed attempts to 'saffronise' the country's democratic institutions, there was no systematic effort to detach the secular ethos from the Indian state. The construction of a Ram temple at the disputed site largely remained a 'residual' aspect of the Ayodhya movement, limited just to the election manifestos.

Much of the youth years of that generation were spent during the 10-year Congress-led UPA regime starting from 2004, under the leadership of Manmohan Singh, the same soft-spoken Sikh who instilled hope during a childhood marked by pessimism.

Generational Drift
Many Indians who grew up in the 1990s, now in their middle age, find it challenging to accept an Indian Prime Minister playing a key role in constructing a temple and leading its consecration. They struggle to believe that religion is becoming so central in the country's affairs, with religious events turning into national events. It's not easy for them to shake off the Nehruvian mind-set that regards dams as the 'temples of modern India’.

Deeply missing for a middle-aged Indian is the legacy of Jawaharlal Nehru, who refrained from attending the inauguration of the restored Somnath Temple in 1951 and even dissuaded the then-President Dr Rajendra Prasad from participating in the event.

To a great extent, children of the Modi era grew unaware of the secular ethos that had been followed in India since independence. Unknowingly, they have become witnesses to a new normalcy that defines 'their' India, where religious priests preside over the inauguration of a new Parliament building or the Indian Prime Minister at the consecration of a temple. Today's youth, in fact, have not witnessed the tumultuous journey during which the BJP asserted itself as the 'true' secular force, prompting other political parties in India to showcase their religious credentials and adopt a pro-Hindu stance for electoral survival.

The current generation perceives the Modi government as having a reliable track record in guaranteeing social security and advancing essential infrastructure in India. Aspirations for attaining a 'developed country' status are soaring, creating the notion that India is rising as a global power. The drive toward a 'developed' nation and the religious resurgence in Modi's 'Hindu-First India' appear interconnected, as the blending of state and religion is inherently embraced by young minds.

A Dark Path
Even in relatively homogeneous Western countries with no history of inter-religious conflicts, separating religion from the state is considered an essential prerequisite for the thriving of democracy and development. In the future, democratic institutions in a heterogeneous country like India will struggle to survive if the government openly aligns exclusively with one religious majority.

As former RBI governor Raghuram Rajan aptly explained during a public lecture, “In the long run, it seems to me that internal cohesion and economic growth rather than divisive, populist majoritarianism will be India's root to national security. So all this sort of majoritarianism may certainly for a while win elections, but it is taking India down a dark and uncertain path."

Convincing a nation of an ideology like secularism, which may not serve the immediate electoral interests of any political party, takes decades of effort; shattering it does not.
(Social anthropologist and novelist Thomas Sajan and US-trained neurologist Titto Idicula, based in Norway, write on politics, culture, economy, and medicine)