There are two obvious ways in which last week's controversy over the Archaeological Survey of India's affidavit on the Ram Setu or Adam's Bridge can be viewed.

The secular-modernist perception is that it was perfectly legitimate for the ASI to question the historicity of Lord Ram and that the BJP's protests were governed entirely by electoral considerations. The Government, they believe, must steadfastly oppose every attempt to inject issues of faith into economic policy calculations. India's path into the global economic powerhouse, or so the argument goes, must not be cluttered with cultural and religious baggage. The Hindus, they say, have every right to worship elephant and monkey Gods and believe in the Ramayan, but covertly and behind closed doors. After all, they tell us, that Wall Street should not get to know that Hindus regard Hanuman as their answer to Isambard Brunel.

I found an example of this mindless cosmopolitanism in the Style pages of a business newspaper. According to a woman CEO, the publication projected as the personification of corporate power: "People see you as their daughter not as someone who's in charge, if you're wearing a salwar kameez" (or, presumably, a saree). Consequently, "her work wardrobe is filled with jackets, pencil skirts, formal shirts and few shirt dresses."

The philosophy behind this advocacy of a sartorial makeover for aspiring Indians is quite startling: Deny your inheritance and nationality. It is underpinned on a profound sense of inferiority. Equally reprehensible are the protestations of ignorance: "We didn't realise this would offend people."

Yet, we should be grateful to the ASI affidavit for bringing into the open the average Indian's exasperation with such misplaced manifestations of secular fundamentalism. For months on end, a small group of people has been agitating against the demolition of the Ram Setu on the ground that it is a monument to Lord Ram. Others have objected to the route of the Sethusamudram project on ecological and environmental reasons. Neither of these objections received a hearing in the court of secular modernisers for the simple reason that they were not couched in the warped idiom of secularism.

The Government's initial disregard of the protests was based on both political calculation and a mindset. It was presumed that the issue would not have a political impact because the BJP was presumed to be in disarray and, in any case, there is no such thing as a Hindu votebank. Political calculations apart, the affidavit was based on a mindset based on the assumption that Hindus, being by and large non-dogmatic and internally divided, can easily be trampled upon - a luxury that organised minorities don't accord to decision-makers. If artistic and academic freedom can be invoked to defend the portrayal of Hindu deities in very disagreeable ways, the commitment to a scientific temper could be cited as the reason for debunking the entire Ramayan tradition. LK Advani may well be right in describing this phenomenon as the logical corollary of pseudo-secularism: Sado-secularism.

The furore over the ASI affidavit has forced the secularists to take note of Hindu outrage. It has, for example, triggered an amusing one-upmanship battle between the handlers of Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh over who first directed the relevant department to withdraw the affidavit. Would such damage control measures have been initiated had the UPA's captain and non-playing captain not realised that there may be a high electoral price to be paid for being so utterly insensitive to Hindu feelings?

If the Ram Setu controversy forces the custodians of the secular order to acknowledge the importance of even-handedness, it will be a giant step forward. For too long, rootless secularism has been allowed to run riot and trample over popular sensitivities. The demolition in Ayodhya and the series of riots were a consequence of this mishandling. The time has come to bend the stick the other way, locate fraternity in a cultural context and restore the Indian component of secularism. In short, it is time to realise that mocking Hindus involves paying a political price.

Courtesy: www.dailypioneer.com, September 16, 2007