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Hindutva is prone to statues.
The installation of the Ram statue in the Babari mosque in Ayodhya in 1949 opened up the Hindutva-driven campaign to overturn India's commitment to republicanism. Free of British authoritarianism, Indian politicians were in the process of drafting a Constitution to endow each citizen with the norms of bourgeois equality, when the Ram statue appeared. It challenged their unfinished work. The statue's presence signaled Hindutva's desire for India to be a state that offered preferential citizenship to the Hindu majority, and to shun Muslims to the nation's margins. Ram's statue in a little-used mosque named after the first Mughal Emperor of India symbolically made Hindutva's case against the creation of a secular Indian citizenry.
In late 2002, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the main electoral arm of the axis of right-wing Hindutva organizations, pushed its coalition government, the National Democratic Alliance, to install a statue of its ideological hero, Veer Damodar Savarkar, into the Central Hall of the Indian Parliament. After concerted opposition to this move, the BJP reduced the demand from stone to oil and, in early 2003, hung a portrait of the man in Sansad Bhavan. The nuclear scientist turned President of India, A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, unveiled the picture to the shouts of BJP Members of Parliament; Swatantrayaveer Savarkar Amar Rahe, they yelled, "Long Live Freedom Fighter Savarkar."
Between the stories of the two images lies an enormous gulf. The first act came in the darkness, surreptitiously. Relatively unknown people snuck into the mosque and placed the idols. They bet that some might take this as the miraculous appearance of Ram to reclaim an India that had been conquered by outsiders. The only "Indians" that would count for this India had to be people willing to prostrate themselves before Ram. Whatever the actual motives of the people who put the idols into the mosque, the forces of...