Did you expect trouble on Thursday, September 30? That was the day the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid verdict was out, and for once — and I want to repeat that — for once the country was on full alert well before any violence erupted. Usually our security forces, like the police in a Bollywood film, always rush to the troubled scene after the event, but here they were deployed in advance right across the country to meet any eventuality, especially in trouble spots and sensitive areas. In fact, in Uttar Pradesh, as many as190,000 security personnel were on duty — by any standards a massive number.Was all of this necessary? State governments and the Centre must be congratulating themselves that their pre-emptive actions prevented any trouble from erupting. But to me that’s yet another sign that politicians are so much out of touch with reality. The reality, which politicians either cannot — or do not wish to — see is that sectarian conflagrations do not happen spontaneously. They happen as planned riots, instigated by cynical public leaders. You could, in a nutshell say that communal riots are of the politicians, by the politicians and for the politicians. This time around, every politician, however self-serving, and every political party, however rabid, had agreed in advance to maintain peace. So how could there have been any trouble? The lakhs and lakhs of security personnel might as well have taken the day off and enjoyed a well deserved rest.Everyone has focused so much on the Allahabad high court judgment, that this very significant moment in our history has gone unnoticed. Hindu political entities and Muslim political organisations, Hindu fundamentalists and Muslim religious fanatics, real secularists and pseudo-secularists, blinkered Marxists and die-hard atheists, they were all united in their determination to keep people calm and the country peaceful.

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Why, even the Hindu and Muslim outfits which had fought the case in court for so many years suddenly seemed to have a change of heart and had gone to the Supreme Court earlier to get the high court to deliver its judgment.Could this be the beginning of a new unified spirit wafting across our country? Could the Babri Masjid, whose demolition caused massive riots and which threatened a religious divide, now have the opposite effect? Perhaps that is an overly optimistic reading of the situation; perhaps, in a little while we — and particularly our venal politicians — will all go back to normal, and peace shall not reign in the land.Maybe. Maybe not. For as everyone has noticed, between 1992 and 2010 there has been a huge change in the national mood. Well, almost everyone. Old fossils like LK Advani are probably too rooted in their mindsets to see anything beyond their moustaches; someone like him is probably crowing at the verdict (he seemed to do so, though in a muted way, when he addressed the press last Thursday: “The stage is now set to build a grand Ram temple at the site”). He must glory in what he sees as his moment, the crowning glory of his long and disruptive career. But the India of today doesn’t see the events of 1992 as a triumphal march of Hinduism; it only sees that the forces that people like Advani unleashed were the cause of horror and death, and that none of us want to go through that again. This isn’t a feeling restricted to just the educated urban elite. I overheard the neighbouring maids at their evening gossip session: “Good that the judges divided the land in three equal parts and asked the parties to live side by side,” said one. “We could have told them that, why did it need three judges?” said another. “I am confused,” a third one interjected. “I know Hindus are one party in the case, Muslims the second, but who is the third?” “Esai,” said the first one with authority, “They will now build a church next to the temple and the mosque.”Of course, this is anecdotal evidence; of course, there is a level of ignorance there, but it’s the sentiment that matters. This wasn’t the younger generation which wants to look at the future; this was an older generation which is now no longer interested in the past. Why and when did India change so much? No one knows. Was there an exact time and place that a New India emerged? Was there a single event that triggered the transformation? 26/11 may also have brought about a sense of unity by telling us that we are in a leaky boat, and we are in it all together. The widespread availability of modern tools of communication and information, may have accelerated the change of our country from an ancient nation to one with a modern sensibility.What the reaction to the Babri Masjid verdict tells us finally is just this: we have moved on. Now our leaders and our politicians better follow.