Seventy-five years after the idols of Lord Ram appeared out of nowhere in the sanctum sanctorum of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya, and 32 years after the mosque was razed to the ground by a mob of Hindutva apologists, a grand consecration ceremony is being organised on Monday, January 22, to mark a so-called homecoming of the lord of the Treta Yug. Thousands of invitations have been sent to the mighty and famous of cricket, cinema, business, and politics to attend the ceremony, hundreds of private jets have been booked by the wealthy and powerful to reach Ayodhya, and shops in Ayodhya and various cities of the country have run out of gold-plated idols of Lord Ram. And there is just one person hogging the limelight more than Lord Ram himself, and that is Narendra Damodardas Modi, the Prime Minister of the secular democratic republic of India.

As Prime Minister Modi presides over the consecration ceremony, India will shed the garb of secularism once and for all, finally fulfilling the 99-year-old dream of KB Hedgewar, the physician from Nagpur who established the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh in 1925 with the aim of, among other things, consolidating Indian Hindus under the political umbrella of Hindutva. One will have to wait until Modi secures enough parliamentary seats to change the constitution to name the country a Hindu Rashtra, which doesn’t seem to be too distant a dream anymore anyway. But the project of unifying people in line with the “idea of fascism”—as envisioned by the Sangh co-founder BS Moonje in 1927—is all but complete.

One must acknowledge Modi’s prowess to organise the gargantuan political machinery of the Sangh Parivar and manipulate millions of Indians towards the desecularisation of India. What until 10 years ago sounded like a pipedream of a small minority of radicalised Hindutva organisers today stands on the verge of turning into reality, with Modi reshaping the very foundations of India. Looking back, even Modi must be surprised by how far he has come since he took the helm in 2014—he had set out to dislodge Sonia and Rahul Gandhi of the Indian National Congress from national politics, but he ended up banishing Mahatma Gandhi from the Indian public discourse today.

Not that the Mahatma was ever a venerated figure for the Sangh Parivar—after all, a member of the Sangh, Nathuram Godse, had killed the father of the nation in 1948. But Godse’s killing of Gandhi was a corporeal crime at best, for the Gandhian ideas would continue to thrive in post-Independence India as the nation, having suffered from a deadly partition, batted for the unity of all religious communities. Gandhi’s vision of interfaith harmony found space in the Indian constitution written by none other than Gandhi’s staunch critic, BR Ambedkar, just as Nehruvian secularism formed the bedrock of the newly independent India. The idea of India—an amalgamation of the secular patriotism of Gandhi, Nehru and Ambedkar—is all but dead as Modi’s Hindutva nationalism rules the mood of the nation today.

The desecularisation of India has moved so far ahead that there seems to be no point trying to stop it anymore. If there is one community that has internalised it best, it is the Muslim minority. If anyone has any doubt about how the Muslims would react to the Ram Mandir consecration ceremony or the final leg of the desecularisation of the nation, they will be indifferent to it, if not terrified. (Although the Sangh Parivar can be trusted to come up with ever more imaginative ways to tear the last remnants of secularism, which we will come to shortly.)

But if there is one community that is more enraged by the hastily organised consecration in an unfinished temple, with Modi as the jajman, it is the Hindus. These Hindus are of two kinds: The secular Hindus who see the consecration as a politico-religious version of Pulwama, which will garner a landslide victory for Modi in the parliamentary elections expected to be held in the next few months; and the devout Hindus who loathe the misuse of their faith to bolster Modi’s image as the Hindu hriday samrat. The exception taken by the four Shankaracharyas, the most revered spiritual gurus of Hinduism, for consecrating an incomplete temple and politicising the consecration, shows how it is the Hindus whose sentiments have been hurt in Lord Ram’s name. But we won’t get to hear these differing voices, as much of the Indian media today is more Hindu than the devoutest of Hindus.

As for other minorities, they have been pushed to the corner enough for them to remain silent. The harassment of three Muslim teenagers from Ujjain, in Madhya Pradesh, tells the larger story of the cornering of Muslims through “bulldozer justice” in several Indian states ruled by Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party. In July last year, a video claiming that boys spat on the procession of Hindu devotees during the ride of Baba Mahakal in the city on the second Monday of Shrawan made the rounds on social media, after which a case was registered against the accused.

Of the three boys, the elder one, an adult, was sent to jail while the other two, minors, were sent to juvenile custody. After 151 days, the court released the accused on bail after it found no evidence to prove the accusation, and the complainant and the witnesses said the police had fabricated the accusation. But the Kafkaesque legal process is not the only punishment in India today—in July itself, the Ujjain Municipal Corporation demolished the ancestral house of one of the accused with the use of a bulldozer, drumbeats of dhol and nagada accompanying the demolition drive.

The crackling of the secular foundations of India continues to be deafened by the drumbeats of nationalism and Hindutva, and the consecration of the unfinished Ram Temple in Ayodhya is a testimony of the same. Even more deafening is the cacophony of the news media that have been running akhanda live reporting of preparations for the consecration. Had the media not offered its ethics at the altar of Hindutva while singing the hymns of Modi-Modi, the desecularisation of India wouldn't have been so blatant and smooth. Had the opposition parties not been so clueless even after 10 years of Modi rule, India would continue to retain the paraphernalia of secularism, if not more. And finally, had the Hindus not been so complacent when their compatriots were being bullied, cornered, incarcerated and lynched for belonging to and practising a different religion, the fabric of Indian secularism would still remain intact. India, that is Bharat, as a secular republic, is today a lost cause.