DEMOCRACY AND RIGHTS IN INDIA IN THE< WAKE OF AYODHYA 51 distorted sense. For instance, democracy no more has to do with the contestation of ideas and ideologies and a struggle to bring people around these but is simply associated with ascriptive permanance or Rights have less to do with individuals but more to do with a community which claims, as we will see later, unconditional priority over the person as the individual. In propagating the debashed language full of distortions and lies the forces represented in Hindutva have created a whole new infrastructure of communications. It is spread right across the country and has a high mobility between the different fronts and organizational levels of the so-called 'Sangh Parivar'. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) while apparently pleading autonomy is deeply entangled in it, in a chain of lateral relationships. It still remains to be investigated what does this do to the actual contents of communications in society and the extent to which it engages the other modem media of communications and the political and social (say, schools) institutions in the discourse that it generates. It should be pretty obvious that quite a bit of it must have seeped into the commonsense of society although it is difficult to assess its precise impact.1 In close alignment with the development noted above, the militant Hindu right-wing has displayed a rare caliber in bypassing and overruling the institutions of the state and the modern society. It has set up and energized the hitherto politically dormant institutions of the traditional Hindu religious order like the temples and ashrams and mutts and a host of such other religious establishments. And the persons who have the mandate to run these orders like the pujaries and sadhus-sants and mahants have been mobilized and sent into every nook and corner of the country "With bricks and lamps and sandals associated with the person of Ram to seek a vow of reverence for the God. I do not want to imply that these institutions or persons were of no importance for people earlier. They were always there for as long as one can think of but they never enjoyed any kind of political significance earlier. Now for the first time they have acquired a political potency which was not with them ever before. Out of the working of these, a new basis of legitimacy is being created in the political life of society. An act of political importance is now being validated in a transcendental manner. The BJP may go on insisting that it does not want a theocratic state. But one important side of theocratic politics is to seek sanctions in a domain outside of human reasoning. Priority is accorded to beliefs and institutions over which the presiding power is that of Gods or some other super-natural force. The political platform created by the militant Hindu right wing for the construction of the Ram temple, even before it vandalized a place revered by another community, has been doing exactly this. (n fact the Hindutva forces have created a number of new institutions like