The Road to Ayodhya

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All roads lead to Rome elsewhere in the world, but in India they lead to Ayodhya. At least they have done so far in the last few years. This book is an account of the long intellectual journey that has brought some of us to Ayodhya, though the road is long and the journey is not yet over.

Ever since independence, the Congress party, led by 'secularists' like Nehru and others, had succeeded in twisting the meanings of words like nationalism, communalism, secularism, etc. The very word Hindu has become an ugly word, a word of abuse, while to be Christian or Muslim is, for some people, the height of secularism. This basic perversion has been at the root of all other perversions in the Indian political lexicon, and consequently in the mind-set of the 'modem' Indian. It is esssential to correct the distortion before moving ahead.

It is good that the Hindus have at last realised that they have been kept down all these years in the name of a phony secularism, just as the poor Russians were kept down for three quarters of a century in the name an equally phony socialism. It is not an accident that both came to grief on the same day, November 9, 1989, when the first brick of the new temple was laid in Ayodhya, and the first brick from the Berlin Wall was removed by an angry crowd in East Germany. The Berlin Wall has vanished and so has East Germany - as also the Soviet Union-but the temple at Ayodhya is yet to come up. It is only a matter of time before it does.

Most of the articles in this selection first appeared in Organiser under the author's popular’ weekly column "Thinking Aloud."

Jay Dubashi was born in Goa and brought up in Bombay, where he took his first degree before proceeding to London, where he did research in engineering and economics for seven years, and obtained his doctorate. He has combined writing and journalism with his career as economist and has been associated with a number of leading newspapers and magazines in India and abroad, including India Today, where he was an editor and columnist for several years. He has been a contributor to Sunday Times (London), Time and Tide (London) and Nikkei Weekly (Tokyo), and is a long-time columnist in Sunday Observer (Bombay and New Delhi) and Organiser (New Delhi).

Dr. Dubashi acquired a taste for politics-and political writing-while working with Krishna Menon in London but soon outgrew that Nehruist phase and is now its leading critic. He was adviser to Union Minister of Industry in 1977 and is a member of the National Executive of Bharatiya Janata Party. His books include Science, Technology and Industry and Snakes and Ladders. He is married and has. A son, Jagan-nath, who is also a wellknown journalist.