DEC 6 marks the day the Babri masjid was destroyed 33 years ago. Before the 1992 outrage, the day was observed by India’s Dalits and their supporters solemnly as the death anniversary of their hero Bhimrao Ambedkar who left the Hindu fold on Oct 14, 1956, converted to Buddhism and passed away on Dec 6. The choice of the date to stage the mosque’s destruction served Hindutva’s bid to shift the focus from a politically inconvenient centuries-old caste strife to an electorally expedient, vote-rich Hindu-Muslim binary. The binary was spawned by British administrators after the close call of 1857, and led to Partition in 1947. It still works as an ideological template for Indian and Pakistani politicians and analysts 70-plus years after independence.
Field Marshal Asim Munir, for example, recently used the binary to explain the coming about of Pakistan, which he said he would protect with every sinew of the militarised state. It is another matter that today the threat to Pakistan comes not from a predominantly Hindu neighbour alone but also from an avowedly Muslim one. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has used the binary routinely to advance his quest to turn a culturally diverse country into a monolithic Hindu rashtra, which he goes about doing with a mix of street power, media control and bureaucratic subterfuge.
Unwittingly, liberal ideologues on both sides of the border subscribe to the binary, albeit to support their essentially agreeable belief that Hindus and Muslims can and did live in harmony together. The endless liberal praise for ‘Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb’, for instance, flows from this understanding. They rightly claim that Hindus and Muslims together did once make an alluring cultural blend.
Seen closely, however, the idea shows up as inexorably elitist, borrowing from the assertions of the Ishtehaarnama, an official gazette, published by the last queen of Awadh as she waged a valiant battle against British troops in 1857. Begum Hazrat Mahal encouraged Hindus and Muslims to unitedly defeat the foreign enemy. Her 1858 exhortation had rudiments of the Ganga-Jamuni appeal, which it undid in the same breath: “Everyone follows their own religion (in my domain). And enjoys respect according to their worth and status. Men of high extraction, be they Syed, Sheikh, Mughal or Pathan among the Mohammedans, or Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaish or Kayasth among the Hindus, all these retain the respectability according to their respective ranks.” In the Ishtehaarnama, Hazrat Mahal revealed another view about Indians who did not qualify for Awadh’s favours. “And all persons of a lower order such as a Sweeper, Chamar, Dhanook, or Pasi cannot claim equality with them.”
Modi in his own view thus became India’s answer to Lorenzo de Medici, Michelangelo and Copernicus rolled into one.
The lament didn’t end there. “The honour and respectability of every person of high extraction are considered by (the British) equal to the honour and respectability of the lower orders. Nay, compared with the latter, they treat the former with contempt and disrespect. Wherever they go, they hang the respectable persons to death, and at the instance of the Chamar, force the attendance of a Nawab or a Rajah, and subject him to indignity.”
The charming Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb, harking to a cultural mingling of Hindus and Muslims, fettered itself by appealing exclusively to the elites of the two main religious communities. The pointed exclusion of the lower caste Hindus as well as Muslims from its purview was the secular appeal’s undoing. Going deeper into the breach, a “Muslim Dalit” — mehtar or halalkhor, for instance — is denied the benefits of affirmative action available to the “Hindu Dalit”, thus driving a readily exploitable wedge between members of the most abused layer of the caste pyramid.
Riding the crest of a major electoral victory in Bihar in November, Modi returned to Ayodhya last week in the company of RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat where they unfurled a traditional saffron flag atop the Ram temple to the applause of an assembly of tycoons, movie stars and cricketers. The prime minister had inaugurated the Ram temple hastily in January 2024 ahead of the May elections, which his party lost, leaving coalition partners to keep him in power. To rub salt in the wound, the BJP candidate was trounced in Lord Ram’s Ayodhya by a Dalit opponent.
The journey to the Hindu rashtra thus began to seem as uphill as it was uncertain and distant. Its votaries needed to help themselves to prayer and pretence to protect the morale of their teeming cadres. Thus in Goa last week, Modi declared that India under his watch was witnessing a cultural renaissance. Modi in his own view thus became India’s answer to Lorenzo de Medici, Michelangelo and Copernicus rolled into one. The claim though conflated state-backed pummelling of India’s cultural mix and scientific timbre to launch into orbit a deliberately anti-intellectual and therefore politically convenient majoritarian polity.
There was something else being targeted here, and these were what can be called India’s truer heart-warming renaissance moments. The Bengal Renaissance, for instance, was destined to be the 19th-century critique of many regressive ideas and practices the BJP would embrace to undermine Nehru’s liberal promise. The 19th-century cultural, intellectual, and social reform movement saw path-breaking progress in areas like literature, science, and education. Key figures like Rabindranath Tagore and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain contributed to the intellectual and social landscape. Kerala had its own renaissance as did other regions of an India that was not yet a nation state. A common theme in the social reforms movements was rationalism and included renunciation of idol worship.
And here was Modi, inaugurating a 77-foot statue of Lord Ram in Goa to announce India’s renaissance. How could idols sans Vedic endorsement become a symbol of any renaissance particularly when the art of carving statues arrived with Alexander in fourth century BC? Idol worship was not a practice in early Vedic times; instead, worship focused on personified natural forces through elaborate rituals and hymns. The concept of idols and temples gained currency by the post-Mauryan eras. To Modi and Hindutva, however, that’s not the point.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
Published in Dawn, December 2nd, 2025
