FAITH FURY: Sadhus marching towards Ayodhya

India is one of those most browsed-through coffee-table books in history. Page after more lavish page of oversized exotica: the many astonishments of Hindoostan. Travellers in pursuit of the antique enchantments of the Orient added their own discoveries-awesome and awful-to the swelling opus. Gods with funny physiology in a permanent costume drama. The Hindu as an overbearing character in karmic vaudeville. Crazy rituals and divine circus, not to speak of the snakecharmer's roadshow and the naked sadhu's nirvana rites. The India of eastern esoterica was the civilisational voyeur's favoured pornography.

India has survived that image in prehistoric sepia. The millennial India is part of the brash new world of globalisation, where the highest temple is the market and the abiding religion is aspiration. Where the new travellers from distant lands are not civilisation junkies but Marco Polos of the supermarket. Where mythology is a computer game and the language of power is not Sanskrit but English. Where scriptures of the Vedic age are less influential than the country report in The Economist. Where for a whole new generation the technology of enlightenment is not religion but information. We are on the march, stereotypes are requested to step aside.

Suddenly there is blood on the highway: India has been ambushed by those crazy stereotypes. Godhra. Ahmedabad. Ayodhya. An inferno of a train in which death has a religious identity. A murderous riot on the street where victimhood has a religious identity. An unrealised temple on a disputed-or non-disputed-land where history has a religious identity. And a doddering Government in half-control that has a religious identity, though the Government itself may be too dishonest to admit it. The new India has become the oldest India, inhabited by crazy Hindus in frightening fancy dress. Truth, suddenly, has the shape of a trident. The new Hindu, the prime-time, page-one Hindu, is worse than Alberuni's Hindu: "We can only say, folly is an illness for which there is no medicine, and the Hindus believe that there is no country but theirs, no kings like theirs, no religion like theirs, no science like theirs. They are haughty, foolishly vain, self-conceited, and stolid." They are, says the commentariat pained by Gujarat and Ayodhya, warriors with medieval fury, not so remote from the mad mullahs of Islam or the ethnic cleansers of Christendom.

Hang on. Passion plays of religion cannot be explained by stereotypes alone. Religion with a capital R is the most defining-and destabilising-force in a world that has emerged out of the wreckage of ideology. Ideology, essentially, is an imposition. Its promises may be as ambitious as the promises of religion: a kingdom of justice, of love, of eternal brotherhood. It is an enforced idyll under which the basic instincts of humanity are supposed to die away. It is a dream, and dreams demand permanent deactivation of conscience. In the evening of the last century, history intervened to expose the pretence-the lie. Familiar ghosts in religious robes staged a comeback and what followed was an intimate, violent assertion of identity-reaching out to the nation in memory. As it was in the Balkans. And parallel to the post-communist eruption of religious urge, there was the rage of the crescent. The neo-Hegelian prophecies of the End of History were mocked by history itself, a history made furious by faith. That bloody progression from Ayatollah Khomeini to Osama bin Laden. There is no escape from the politics of faith.

PAST PERFECT: The resurgent Hindu is swayed by an overwhelming sense of injustice

There is no escape from the mad mahant, who is very much a man of the zeitgeist. The resurgent Hindu, as his counterparts in other religions, is swayed by an overwhelming sense of injustice-maybe of persecution. The kingdom lost, the kingdom ransacked-memory for the angry man of religion is a stretch of dispossession. For the streetfighter of radical Islam, the past is perfumed glory on a magic carpet. For the radical Hindu, it is a Vedic republic of permanent bliss. He has lost his kingdom-first to the invader, then to the elected ruler. Ayodhya, after all, is much more than a real-estate dispute steeped in mythology. It is a civilisational dispute as well: Islam's culture demolition. The politics of post-Independence refused to acknowledge that, and the refusal, in the view of the radical Hindu, was equal to the negation of the nation. He was let down by politics, so he sought mythology.

That politics, in retrospect, was rooted in a false ideology. Secularism, like communalism, is essentially an Indian ism, and like every other ism, it is a conceit. The political conceit of the Congress century. The much celebrated secular mind of Nehru was a repudiation of everything that was religious. It was almost Marxian in its view of religion: the masses addicted to this particular drug can't progress. The alternative was the concoction of secularism. Take it in regulated doses and march on, and be happy-so went the pretence. In Nehruvian socialism too there was that fantasy of the New Man, whose temper was thought to be scientific, and whose religion was supposed to be, well, modernity. Nehru laid a false foundation.

And his legatees, from Indira Gandhi to Rajiv Gandhi to Narasimha Rao, played out the worst religious politics on that secular foundation.They wanted the Hindu, they wanted the Muslim, and they wanted communities to be segregated by-no, not barbed wire-ballot boxes. It was the secular version of divide and rule. The end of the Congress century, like the end of ideology elsewhere in the world, coincided with the return of the nation dressed in religion. And the Bharatiya Janata Party was always translated in the foreign media as the Hindu Nationalist Party. Maybe it was a Freudian synonym for the Indian People's Party. Still the one man who was not rejoicing was the radical Hindu, for even the privilege of power couldn't redeem his religion-or his exiled God. Today he is out there on the street, enraged and unforgiving. Once again, he is arguing with history as well as mythology, and arguments in religion have always been violent. The enemy has to earn his tolerance.

When faith is furious, the state can hardly play God, certainly not a state governed by a party that had the blessings of an aggrieved God.