The Lucknow bench of the Allahabad high court has paradoxically perturbed an entire generation for the same reason as it has relieved the others. It seems to have placed faith over fact, mythological epic over documentary evidence, legend over law, unsettling those brought up on the denial of religion. It has embarrassed the young urban middle-class Hindus who had built up an entire mental edifice of negation of faith as a secret apology for the act of aggression that had visited Ayodhya on December 6,1992. These upwardly mobile Indians are aghast that the honourable judges should deem it fit to legitimise the acts of not just that shameful day in December but also of another December 43 years earlier when idols of Ram and Sita were smuggled inside the masjid.

Their response is perfectly natural for those who had spontaneously forsaken faith for secular faithlessness 18 years ago. Secular distancing held a greater allure in a globalising economy; it was more humane, certainly more civilised, as it did not demand destruction of a dome or association with those who had stormed Ayodhya in 1992. Faith was an embarrassment, ritual downright medieval, even if this set subsequently flocked to Ganesha in droves for divine intervention at the slightest hint of individual insecurities. Ram, the maryada purushottam, became strictly unfashionable. Little does this generation appreciate that their secularism was as fuzzy as their denial of faith was mistaken in the first place. Little does this section of our society realise that their abhorrence of the aggression of 1992 was born of the same faith that they had forsaken.

Faith is an end in itself. It is its own reward. It calls for submission, which, in turn, calls for an essential humility as much as the fear of the unknown. This separates faith from any expression of power on any pretext. Faith can also serve as a pretext but the expression of power does not spring from faith itself. The expression of power and aggression springs from the collective power of a mob, any mob, for which any pretext will do. The faithful who knowingly decry the desecration of 1992 grasp this essential difference. The young urban middle-class Hindus have however lived in shame because they have mistaken their faith for the aggressor of 1992, even as they take care to draw a distinction between Islam and the perpetrators of terrorism in the name of Islam for example. Little do they appreciate that this faith with its underpinnings in a sublime philosophy has sustained their ancestors for millennia in perfect harmony with nature and its pluralism. Faith has sustained people who often had little else to look up to in their lives. It was often just their faith that gave them the courage and forbearance to accept their lot in life without much ado.

The disbelief at the verdict straddles the entire political spectrum as well though -- the left, because it does not approve of it; the centre, because it had no role in it and therefore cannot hope to capitalise on it; and the right, because it failed to anticipate it. This obvious disbelief, and discomfort in some quarters, has only added to the misery of the young urban Hindus.

The honourable judges have therefore delivered a verdict that strikes at the heart of some of our modern-day assumptions. They have only formally acknowledged faith as a fact of life in our society. That faith remains a living force is evident in the equanimity with which the verdict has been received by the silent majority, which lives far from the complexities and, indeed, complexes of the young urban Hindus.