CULTURE, COMMUNITY, NATION: ON THE RUINS OF AYODHYA 19 Let me go back, then, and recall the very shadow under which we are here assembled, and recall also that I have elsewhere described the destruction of an obscure little mosque in Ayodhya, on 6th December 1992, as a fascist assault on the Indian Constitution. In a lecture I wrote up soon after that event and which I delivered in Calcutta last December, I had argued, alongside some reflection on Gramsci, that a potential for fascist resolutions is particularly strong in those semi-industrialised societies such as ours which have inherited powerful traditions of classicism, cultural conservatism and authoritarian religiosity, and which have failed to undertake revolutionary transformations of cultural life and radical redistribution of material resources. That was a complex argument and I need not even summarise it here since the lecture has now been published in Social Scientist. Today's talk, almost exactly a year later, is in some ways a continuation of that argument, which I hope to conclude in a third text in the near future. The question with which 1 should want to begin these reflections on community, culture and nation today is this: Can we now, after the elections of 1993, put the events of 6th December 1992 behind us; and, in what sense is it still legitimate, if at all, to speak of 'fascism*, a very loaded word indeed, in this context? As I begin to explore this question, let me say that 'community', 'culture' and 'nation' are theoretical categories, and before we get to the theoretical status of such categories, it is best to first negotiate the social terrains to which they refer, because it is in the process of producing a knowledge of those terrains that we can arrive at a practical intelligibility of the theoretical category itself. To start with, then, the question itself needs to be posed correctly. If we were to ask whether or not fascist rule is on the horizon in India, my answer would be: no, not in the immediate future. If we were to ask whether communalism as such is a fascism, I would say: no, not necessarily, not all communalism by any means. But, specifically with reference to the destruction of Babri Masjtd and the forces that carried it out, I would say that we would forget at our own peril the fundamentally fascist character of that event and those forces. This I say with reference to the nature of the event, the modes of mobilisation, the very structure of the sangh parivar, and the specific ideological form in which it practices and propagates its communalism—all of which makes it rather similar to Shiv Sena, on not only a much larger scale but also with a much more comprehensive and articulated structure, and distinguishes it from many other kinds of communalism. Let me briefly explain. First, the event. As we all know, a legally constituted government of Uttar Pradesh, sworn to uphold the Constitution, gave a binding