As someone who could not care less whether a temple to Ram was built in Ayodhya or not, I find it hard to understand why Hindus should consider it important. Or do they? Is it the Hindus whose passions are aroused by the temple or Hindu fanatics as represented by the VHP, the Bajrang Dal and an increasingly irrelevant caboodle of Hindutva politicians? I cannot understand either why Muslims should have any problems giving up the idea of building another mosque in Ayodhya. In view of what happened to the Babri Masjid, do we need another mosque there? Again, though, do Muslims really care or is it only a bunch of fanatics represented in a dubious grouping called the All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB)? It is interesting that none of the groups speaking for Hindus and Muslims on the Ayodhya issue has been elected to speak for them, just as Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale had no right to speak for the Sikhs but did anyway.

Fanatics need no permission to do what they do because they believe that God-or some sectarian version of Him-gives them the right. The problem is that when you begin discourse from that premise there is little room for discussion or debate. Since we have fanatics-both Hindu and Muslim-making the most noise on the temple, there has been little scope for the sort of rational discourse that the Shankaracharya of Kanchi was sincerely trying to urge upon both sides. In a situation fraught with ugly possibilities and frightening tensions he succeeded in coming up with what seemed like an acceptable compromise. But no sooner had the Hindus accepted than we had the AIMPLB announcing that it could not accept because the solution was "incomplete and inchoate", whatever that means. The Delhi grapevine has it that this was a deliberate move to force a political crisis on the A.B. Vajpayee Government. Rumour also has it that the VHP too is displeased with Vajpayee and would like to see him publicly humiliated-but in the process what it has achieved is the public humiliation of India.

In the world that changed so dramatically on 9/11, we were beginning to look like the best of all countries. We had not bred a generation of young men who hijacked aeroplanes and crashed them into buildings, killing thousands of innocent people because of some imagined grievance. Nor had we bred, as Pakistan has, a generation of young men who believed that this kind of terrorism was an honourable activity because it was done in the name of Allah. The streets of India's towns and cities did not fill with angry young fanatics waving pictures of Osama bin Laden as we saw happen in many foreign cities and, except for one small incident, communal harmony was maintained throughout the country. This, coming on top of the fact that there have been no major incidents of sectarian violence in India for nearly 10 years, lulled us into a sense of false security. We had beaten it, we thought, we had grown up as a country and as far as anyone could tell there was little interest left in that temple in Ayodhya, despite the occasional small band of kar sevaks travelling there now and then.

Godhra changed all that and, clearly, somebody intended that it should. We need to know who was responsible and we need to know urgently. If the home minister wants to make up for his shameful failure to prevent the killings in Gujarat, he needs to tell us as soon as possible who exactly instigated the massacre of Hindus at Godhra. And we need to know it next week, not in the usual 10 years it takes for inquiry commissions to submit their reports. Understanding why Godhra happened and who was behind it is crucial to understanding the sudden resurgence of religious fanaticism in India. But because the Indian media prides itself on what we like to think is a "secular" tradition, we have not had any hint of investigative journalism into that incident so far-although there has been much investigation into the killings of Muslims that followed. This is a pretty twisted idea of secularism but that is how it has always been, specially when reporting Ayodhya.

The Babri Masjid Action Committee and organisations like the AIMPLB should be held as responsible for the mosque coming down as the Hindu fanatics who physically demolished it, but they never have been. We like turning a blind eye to Islamic fundamentalism without realising that it is the fuel that feeds Hindu fanaticism. Neither is acceptable and we need to be clear about this. Meanwhile, to return to that temple in Ayodhya, is there no way of settling the matter once and for all? Why have the courts taken so long to decide? Why has a BJP prime minister found a solution so intractable? Personally, let me repeat, I cannot understand why we need another temple in a country which already has too many. But if it brings a closure in Ayodhya, let us get on with it so that the fanatics can go back into the holes they crept out of.