Ayodhya as a Text: Playing Difference and Dismantling Secularism

Abstract

The narrative of a nation is the narrative of its people and the narrative flux in India provides a spectacle of a theatrical kind that exhibits a nation torn in conflict between two dominant communities of India "• the Hindus and the Muslims. Whence, on the one hand, India is unequivocally hailed for being a secular country on the other growing, communal conflicts are effectively catalyzing the dismantling of that secularism. The disputed structure of Ayodhya is one such highly dramatized issue fuelled time and again by the politician actors who govern the nation or those who desire to govern the nation. The communal conflicts in Ayodhya is an outcome of the powerful installation of hatred exercised through difference within the conscience of the plural Indians by the one who have a fetish for the power of governance. Ayodhya, taken this way symbolizes a text that plays the communal difference between the Hindus and the Muslims through the mechanization of violence based on the economy of subordination and exclusion, strategically plotted for individual interests.