Ramachandra Guha: What will the inauguration of the Ram temple portend for India’s future?

“If Hindu Raj does become a fact, it will, no doubt, be the greatest calamity for this country.” – BR Ambedkar

In a recent talk in Bengaluru, the writer, Parakala Prabhakar, made a perceptive observation about the changing language of political discourse. In the late 1980s, when the Bharatiya Janata Party was first becoming a significant force in Indian politics, the BJP leader, Lal Krishna Advani, said he stood for “positive secularism”. The Congress, argued Advani, had practised a spurious form of secularism, but his would be the genuine article, a secularism which promised “justice for all and appeasement of none”.

Forty years after Independence, secularism was thus an ideal to be upheld and cherished, so much so that a BJP leader, no less, was putting himself forward as the true torchbearer of an authentic secu­larism. Now, however, no major politician of either the BJP or the Congress wishes to publicly avow secularism. Rather, they want to be known as the truest of Hindus. Thus, in opposing the politics of the ruling regime today, Rahul Gandhi claims that his is the real Hinduism, as opposed to the spurious Hindutva of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. This public affirmation of loyalty to the Hindu faith is eagerly...

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