DEMOCRACY AND RIGHTS IN INDIA IN THE WAKE OF AYODHYA 61 salutation as is evident in the order banning a certain dress by the principal of a Calcutta school or the silly controversy over Shabana Azmi exchanging a kiss with the great Nelson Mandela. It is in order of things that we be careful in saying that it is mandatory to defend difference. We also ought to be critically conscious, thirdly, that in none of the traditions of the communities in Indian society there is any place for the value of egalitarianism and the worst on this score is the abysmal position of the women. It is not logically, perhaps even morally, tenable to say that all of difference claimed by a community is defensible if the gender concern is kept out of the domain of difference. My question is: how much of the difference is to be pushed or defended as the votaries of community rights do today? My fear is: if the difference is to count for too much then the power of the dominant in the communities who uphold difference becomes the arbiter in the life of the people—Hindutva or the Jat khap or the Muslim Law Board. So post-modernists in the Third World or Ashish NandhyS beware! IV My argument here is sideways linked to the recent developments in electoral politics in India. The defeat of organised communal forces as represented in Hindutva is something that should not be taken as more than a holding operations. The coalition of social forces that defeated Hindutva is internally fragile. There are elements within it which are very mobile in terms of political and ideological preferences. Once empowered these can easily shift allegiances as is happening with Jats in western Uttar Pradesh. With the liberalisation underway and the acceptance of the Dunkal proposals the differentiation within the peasantry may become more pronounced and with that the stratum among the OBCs having sizeable holdings will enrich and empower itself and ditch the ranks and a good part of propertied oppressed may also slip down into the queue of the exploited. The implications of this for the anti-communal front as it exists today cannot be set out in the form of a geometrical theorem but the risks implicit are, in broad terms, evident. This does not mean we do not recognise the needs or even aspirations of the various backward communities as legitimate. Towards this some minimal mutual recognition of needs and aspirations will then confer a justification to their entitlement to the resources and goods in society. Tills may be possible to some extent if the left gets into the forefront of struggle for a widest possible consensus in the society on the principal that: if social discriminations or oppression is historically built and structurally located in the life of people in such a way it entails ineradicable disabilities if left to a normal process of change, thg