Incident at Ayodhya.

Surrounded by the unforgiving red dust of Kipling's northern India lies the unremarkable town of Ayodhya, a site of recent violence which triggered riots nationwide. Ayodhya's problem, which predates British entry into the subcontinent, stems from the fact that it is thought to contain the birthplace of Rama, one of the most important avatars of the god Vishnu and the subject of the Ramayana, one of the two great epics of Hinduism. Yet, until last December's riots destroyed it, a Muslim mosque dominated the location.

Many Hindus believe that Ayodhya's problematic mosque was erected by order of a sixteenth-century Moghul emperor over the ruins of a temple to Rama which the Muslim leader had deliberately demolished. The mosque remained active until Hindu chauvinists seized it in 1949, shortly after Indian independence. It ended up in court, like everything in India, which is even more lawyer-sodden than the U.S.; the Hindu takeover was more or less ratified by a series of bizarre judicial rulings in the 1950s which left the mosque abandoned as a place of active worship for the past half century. The passage of decades somehow should make a difference but doesn't: fifty years is a minuscule slice of time in this memory-cursed country.

In recent years Hindu fundamentalists began to demand the demolition of the mosque and the restoration in its place of a temple to Rama. The issue had political aspects since the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) and its militant wing the VHP (Vishwa Hindu Parishad) made the cause their own (though some argue that they were behind the agitation in the first place). The BJP holds the balance of power in several of the Indian states and increasingly in the central government.

From October 1990 until last December 6, Ayodhya simmered away, injecting a steady stream of toxic bacilli into the bloodstream of India's always labile body politic. Then Hindu militants forced the issue by destroying the mosque, and the government has had a mess on its hands since.

It is easy for Westerners to dismiss this incident as an oddity from an exotic country most Americans rarely think of. I can hear it now: What do you expect from a country whose erstwhile prime minister once touted, on the eve of an official state visit to the U.S., the benefits of drinking his own urine each day? Could Jimmy Carter possibly have let a little thing like that get in the way of deeper understanding of the problems of the subcontinent? The thing cannot be imagined.

What is Ayodhya about? To begin with, it is a Hindu fundamentalist response to Islamic fundamentalism. It ill behooves an Indian Muslim minority of some 10 per cent to become too carried away with Islamic fundamentalism, but extremism begets extremism. It is also lamentably true that Muslims have not always been delicate about certain matters repellent to Hindus. M.A. Jinnah, the father of Pakistan, liked to say: "The Hindu worships the cow; we Muslims eat the cow." (Jinnah, the British said, could devise a problem for every solution.)

When India became independent in 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru was determined that it should be a secular state: there would be no state religion; every minority, the Muslim primus inter pares, was to be tolerated, protected, encouraged. No conviction mattered more to Nehru, even the non-alignment policy he made so much of.

A fine idea, secular India, but it could never have been--not in the way Nehru envisioned. India is a Hindu country that happens to have many minorities. What is truly extraordinary is that everyone coexists so well on a day-to-day basis. The average Indian tolerates more diversity in his everyday life than anything dreamt of in America--in dress, religion, language, eating habits, clothing. Even Times Square, which always reminds me of that frontier barroom scene in Star Wars, cannot begin to compare with the diversity of your average garden-variety Indian street scene. "We must love one another or die," said W. H. Auden, and while he didn't have India in mind, India could not exist any other way. Tolerance is possibly Hinduism's greatest legacy to the country (though you have to know India well to appreciate the truth of that). BJP leaders insist they don't hate Muslims; they just don't want an abandoned mosque standing over Rama's birthplace.

India is what I choose to call a "secular Hindu nation," after Irving Kristol's definition of America as a "secular Christian nation," an articulation that captures neatly a working conception of our country that is perfectly understandable and perfectly correct for the average American of whatever religious or ethnic heritage. The majority culture of India is Hindu; the forms and usages of public and private Indian life are Hindu; the symbols of Indian culture are Hindu. There is only so much insult to these symbols, e.g., to Rama's putative birth site, that a majority Hindu culture is prepared to endure. That's basically what Ayodhya is about: the failure of India as a secular state. But there's more.

Current Hindu discontent with the ruling Congress party has been fueled not only by the concessions made to Muslims to secure their votes but by a draconian affirmative-action policy on behalf of the untouchables and lower castes. Thomas Sowell has written eloquently of how affirmative action is governed by the law of unintended consequences, and what starts out a good thing so frequently in the end becomes a bad thing. India provides some of his best evidence.

The British started down this slippery slope by granting separate electorates to Muslims, and the Congress Party embraced affirmative action with a vengeance. The result is an Indian variant of "white males need not apply": upper-caste Hindus need not apply. There are "reservations" for favored minorities in almost every school, ministry, university, hospital, agency, and grog shop the Delhi bureaucrats can get their hooks into. In some of the southern states reservations guarantee as many as 60 per cent of the places at universities for the "scheduled castes" (lower castes and untouchables). This causes resentment, as it does in the U.S. How much--if any--affirmative action we should have in our country is open to question; whatever those limits are, in India they've been blown sky high.

Understandably, most friends I talked to on this visit are deeply disturbed. They earnestly pose the question whether India may become a Hindu theocracy. That is unlikely. Hinduism isn't a religion, has no credo or single sacred text, has by Western standards an eccentric notion of "priesthood," doesn't proselytize, and no one actually agrees how you become a Hindu" (if in fact you can) except to be born one. A Hindu theocracy, no, that isn't in the cards; but I rather imagine that future Indian governments will become more attentive to the feelings and needs of their large constituencies, which are not all Muslim or lower-caste.

Whom do intellectuals blame for the current malaise? (Indian intellectuals are no different from Western intellectuals in finding implausible but ideologically convenient scapegoats for social ills.) The British: colonialism in a word. (And when that's just altogether too far-fetched, the CIA will do.) "The British did it, the British with their divida et impera, their setting of Muslim against Hindu." (As if Hindus and Muslims weren't bashing each other around before the British could even tell which side was which.) But Indian intellectuals are even more monolithically leftist than their American counterparts, and it's easier to blame poor perfidious Albion for embarrassments like Ayodhya than it is to come to honest grips with human nature and one's own insufficiencies.

An interesting sidelight is that intellectuals and politicians are far more worked up over Ayodhya than are ordinary people. A Hindu-speaking American academic conducting research among the latter told me that their attitude is: big deal, so they tore down a mosque, so what? Secularism doesn't play in the mofussil, the great sprawling outback of village India where life takes little notice of the political fevers of Delhi and Bombay.

So, what will come of all this? The government wants to rebuild the mosque and construct a temple on the site. While laudable and high-minded, this "Jerusalem solution" will fail. There will never be peace as long as a mosque sits on the site where many Hindus think Rama was born. The best accommodation would be for the Muslim imams in India to renounce their claim to the location in the interest of greater India. The land is after all not holy to Islam; unlike Mecca or Medina, it isn't a pilgrimage destination for Muslims. It's just a place where someone once decided to erect a mosque, and probably for the wrong reasons. So generous an act of renunciation might reap generations of good will from even the more communal of the Hindu groups. But let no one hold his breath waiting for this to happen: compromise, generosity, decency, give-and-take, and fair play are not part of the political culture of the subcontinent (or Yugoslavia or the Middle East or Northern Ireland or the Anglican clergy or a university faculty, for that matter).

The current strategy is to refer the matter to the Supreme Court, the kind of evasion we're totally familiar with here in America. Weak executives and legislatures eventually spawn meddlesome judiciaries. The trouble is that India's Supreme Court is even less above politics than ours (though mercifully less activist), and whatever the court rules will satisfy no one.

The probable scenario goes something like this. No government that votes to resurrect a mosque on the site can remain in power. No government in view has the will to grant sole rights over the property to the Hindus. So the thing will boil and fester, a government or two will fall, and eventually amidst inattention and muddle a temple will be built. The mosque will not be restored, an outrage the Muslim leadership will protest, but nobody much will notice, especially the Muslim masses who have much else to worry about. Things will settle back to "normal" again in this wounded land, this malgoverned land, this land I have so much affection for. There will be "peace" in India. For a time.

Mr. King is dean of liberal arts at the University of Texas at Austin.