Tuesday's terror attack on the temple of Sri Rama at Ayodhya was waiting to happen. The temple is a place of high reverence for Hindus. Any disturbance to it or the idols would have invited serious retaliation. Islamic terrorists had never concealed their irreverence for places of Hindu worship.

They were, in fact, their soft targets. The Raghunath Temple in Jammu was attacked twice in 2002 in which 17 people died. The Akshardham temple was attacked the same year in which 30 people died. Year after year, the terrorists threaten to attack Hindu devotees trekking to Amarnath and Vaishnodevi temples.

Fortunately, security forces have done well to thwart the Ayodhya attack. Had the terrorists succeeded in their design the consequences would have been unthinkable.

It is a security lapse, also an Intelligence failure. But to reduce it to just these would be foolhardy. It is a larger and deeper issue. The Ayodhya issue has been boiling and calming from time to time since 1989. The Ayodhya movement was the greatest mass movement in Indian history.

It called the bluff of pseudo-secular polity, redefined secularism. But it hit a roadblock with the demolition in 1992. Yet the demolition led to unprecedented changes in polity. Shahi Imams and Shahabuddins who were misleading the Muslim community were de-legitimised by the community itself. The community began to rethink on its position, its relationship with the Hindus.

Even before the demolition, many responsible Muslims had realised the futility of insisting on the disputed site and were keen to solve the issue. When Chandrashekhar was the Prime Minister, he had almost solved it. He made the VHP (Vishwa Hindu Parishad) and the Babri groups to talk to each other.

He co-opted Bhairon Singh Shekhawat from the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) and Sharad Pawar from the Congress and made them mediate between them. But the Congress intervened, withdrew support to the Chandrashekhar Government, snuffed out the efforts and thwarted the settlement that was perceived to be against its interests.

Coalition politics made solution difficult

Later, the Narasimha Rao Government ensured that Ayodhya issue, an intensely political one, was turned into a legal and constitutional issue. This suited the short-term imperatives of a disturbed polity. The repeatedly fractured verdict in elections which forced coalition politics and Governments at the Centre also made solution to the Ram Mandir issue difficult.

The polity was actually keen to avoid, not solve, the issue. The NDA (national Democratic Alliance) partners unintelligently kept the Ayodhya issue out of the common manifesto, even insisted that the BJP suspend the issue. But it could only remove the Ayodhya issue from its manifesto, not from the public domain, or from the Hindu mind.

If political parties close their eyes to a serious issue will it cease to exist? All parties sang the same tune, ''Judiciary will find a solution'', meaning they weren't responsible for solving this eminently political issue. Thus, polity threw the ball on to the judiciary and sat back.

But a few weeks ago the Chief Justice of India said that the Ayodhya issue needed a political solution, implying that it could not be resolved judicially. In his historic judgment on the Ayodhya case, Justice J S Verma also said that the issue was not suitable for judicial determination. So the issue, tossed between polity and judiciary, is orphaned in the process.

But the terrorist attack seems to have revived what constitutional India had managed to sleep over for over a decade - the Ayodhya issue. The RSS has reacted to the attack with great restraint, appealed for peaceful protests. Yet, inevitably, the attack has brought the Ram Mandir back on the agenda of Hindutva movement, and necessarily into political domain again.

So what all parties found convenient, even comfortable, to keep under wraps has now bounced back. The polity is in trouble again. This time it cannot evade finding a solution.

Tail piece: The Congress party said in 1992 that the mosque was demolished, but now says that the temple has been saved. So it is temple, not mosque any more?