What were you doing on December 6, 1992?

We remember with a great sadness that winter’s day on which the unthinkable came to pass…

In the 15 years since then, there have been greater horrors, smaller defeats, and many lives lost, many many lives lost. But there has also been continued defiance to the Hindutva agenda, and new ways of resisting, new ways of thinking, celebrating what we do have along with mourning what we have lost. And after all, 15 years after the demolition of the Babri Masjid, and notwithstanding six unbroken years of being in power at the centre, something has prevented the BJP from building its temple there…

It is as political actors, not as believers, that many Hindus are mobilized for the politics of Hindutva. But there is also determined resistance both from within the ranks of ‘Hindus’, for varying reasons, to being mobilized in this way, and from all sorts of people who would call themselves different kinds of things – Dalits voting with their feet as mass conversions to Buddhism continue to be staged publicly; feminists supporting both Tasleem and Husain; the emerging movements of gay and lesbian people (remember a banner at one of the protests against the Hindu right’s violent attacks on Fire that read defiantly, ‘Indian and Lesbian’?); from ‘India Inc.’ fearing insecurity that will affect investments; from the thousands of ordinary Indians of all communities and walks of life who poured into Gujarat to do something, anything at all, to reach out to say – Not in My Name.

When the Babri Masjid was demolished in 1992 the shock in the secular ranks was matched by the confidence that this was only a matter of a short sharp battle. Fifteen years down the line, with Gujarat behind us, secular India looks back on that shock as well as that optimism with disbelief – why were we taken so off-guard? And why did it appear to be such an easy battle to win? Why, to begin with, had the battle raging beneath the polished surfaces of Nehruvian secularism been invisible?

Locating secularism as it has developed in the Indian context, perhaps we need to make a distinction between secularism as a value (of non-discrimination, acceptance of difference, mutual respect) and secularism as a principle of state-craft. Recognising the latter’s implication in statist and authoritarian discourses, we need to unhinge secularism from the state, to rework it into our everyday practices. That reworking will have to confront the uncertainties of democratic functioning in political society, and not depend on the state to impose secularism from above. It is possible to continue to call ourselves secular in the first sense while mounting a critique of the practice of secularism by the Indian state. Perhaps the greatest gain of the last decade and a half for democracy in India is the recognition that ‘secularism’, sixty years down the line, is and will always be, in the process of becoming.