CULTURE/ COMMUNITY, NATION: ON THE RUINS OF AYODHYA 47 majority at the expense of the rights and liberties of a minority; but the idea of socialism is also already there in the idea of democracy because, as Rousseau puts it, citizens who are unequal in the property-relation cannot be equals as subjects of and as subjects to the law. The Citizen-Subject—that is to say, the democratic individual—cannot be born without the abolition of private property. Rousseau did not quite resolve the problem, even on the level of thought, but in pointing to the incompatibility between property and equality he introduced an irreparable fissure within the body of Enlightenment thought. For, if the conformist strands of the Enlightenment jubilantly appointed the bourgeois male individual as the rational Subject of meaning and experience, strands in the Radical Enlightenment were already pronouncing the impossibility of the birth of the Citizen-Subject in a class-divided society. Hence the political slogan of the Radical Enlightenment: 'Liberty, Fraternity, Equality*—which could be translated for our own time, word for word, as 'Democracy, Secularism, Socialism1. It was this particular strand in Radical Enlightenment that Marxism picked up, giving to it politically and theoretically a vastly revolutionised meaning, and thereby earning the rebuke of poststructuralists and subalternists alike, to the effect that we are mere children of the Enlightenment. All I can say in response is that, yes, you are damned right, we are—but not merely; not of the whole of the Enlightenment; and not of the Enlightenment only. We are also the spectre that is going to haunt this land for a long, long time. Let me summarise, then, the main points in this part of my argument. The idea of religious liberty and of the peaceful coexistence of religious difference has been central, historically speaking, in the formation of the twin ideas of liberty and equality as such; the idea of democratic dissent was posed initially as the idea of religious ^difference, It gradually became the premise for the liberties of the individual in general, and, in raising the question of equality and equal rights for all, the idea of secularism became the chief motor behind the subsequent idea of political democracy. Democracy, in other words, presumes a secularist compact, and it is not liberal democracy that produces the secularist idea; it is the issue of secularism—not just religious tolerance but the civil equality of denominationally different individuals and communities within a given society—that produces the idea of equality in general, and therefore the idea of political democracy. Democracy, in other words, presumes a prior social consensus on the issue of secular sociality and secular governance. But, what is also implicit in my argument is that the idea of one kind of equality leads, necessarily and logically to other ideas of equality: the idea of secularism leads to ideas of political democracy, the idea of political equality leads to the idea of economic equality; the idea of socio-economic equality among men leads to similar ideas about equality