Babri Masjid was erected as a monument to Mughal hubris. It embodied Babur's contempt for Indians and their dominant religion. By obfuscating and falsifying this history, republican India's secular establishment denied Indians the opening to reconcile themselves to their past.

History was subordinated to a nation-building exercise. But the longterm prospects of that project were compromised by the paranoia and parochialism of its own guardians. Excavating, distilling, and disseminating the past became the exclusive preserve of an intolerant priesthood.

The scholars patronised by the post-colonial establishment, steeped in Congress ethos, deluged Indians with infantile fables of interfaith harmony in pre-colonial India, sanitised medieval history, and blamed the British—the most convenient punching bag—for all of India's ills.

By the late 1980s, India had a vast market for a crude alternative history because the official version propagated by the establishment, papering over Indians' unresolved memories of their tragic past, had failed to inoculate Indians against the temptations to undo the past.

History is not therapy. But knowledge supplies the most potent protection against distortions of the past for political ends. This Indians did not have. And when India descended into turmoil, the party that had made a virtue of secularism raced fastest to pander to the new mood.

Campaigning for the general elections in 1989, Rajiv Gandhi attempted cravenly to out-Hindu the Hindu nationalists. He launched his campaign from Faizabad, the district headquarters of Ayodhya, and promised to inaugurate the Kingdom of Rama if he was returned to office.

The Hindu temple that will eventually rise on the site of the erstwhile Babri mosque will be a tombstone for the secular Indian republic founded by Nehru. This tragedy could perhaps have been avoided had we only been, as VS Naipaul begged us to be, honest with ourselves.