Resource sharing is a major advantage of distributed computing. However, a distributed computing system may have some physical or virtual resource that may be accessible by a single process at a time. The mutual exclusion issue is to ensure that no more than one process at a time is allowed to access some shared resource. The article proposes a token-based mutual exclusion algorithm for the clustered mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). The mechanism that is adapted to handle token passing at the inter-cluster level is different from that at the intra-cluster level. It makes our algorithm message efficient and thus suitable for MANETs. In the interest of efficiency, we implemented a centralized token passing scheme at the intra-cluster level. The centralized schemes are inherently failure prone. Thus, we have presented an intra-cluster token passing scheme that is able to tolerate a failure. In order to enhance reliability, we applied a distributed token circulation scheme at the inter-cluster level. More importantly, the message complexity of the proposed algorithm is independent of N, which is the total number of nodes in the system. Also, under a heavy load, it turns out to be inversely proportional to n, which is the (average) number of nodes per each cluster. We substantiated our claim with the correctness proof, complexity analysis, and simulation results. In the end, we present a simple approach to make our protocol fault tolerant.