Hindutva triumph
Uh oh.
Frenzied construction work provided the backdrop in the northern Indian city of Ayodhya – a vast centre to welcome pilgrims, arched sandstone gates, a broad corridor leading to a grand new $217m (£170m) temple for the Hindu deity. A multi-billion dollar makeover has seen swathes of the city bulldozed to turn it into what some Hindu nationalist leaders are calling a “Hindu Vatican“.
And that’s a bad thing. “Holy” cities are bad things. Rome, Salt Lake City, Mecca, Jerusalem – all bad ideas, all lead to trouble. Theocracy is not a good political system.
Next week, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will fulfil a decades-long Hindu nationalist pledge by opening the temple, which replaces a 16th-Century mosque that once stood here, on one of India’s most controversial religious sites. In 1992, Hindu mobs tore down the Babri mosque, claiming it was built by Muslim invaders on the ruins of a Ram temple, sparking nationwide riots that took nearly 2,000 lives.
See? That’s why it’s such a bad idea.
Mr Modi opens the Ayodhya temple months before general elections, with his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) eyeing a record third consecutive term. He says the new temple will “unify the nation”. Senior minister Rajnath Singh believes the shrine would mark “the beginning of India’s cultural revival and restore national pride”.
By singling out one religion and conflating it with India itself.
Critics say the timing of the opening leans more towards political strategy than religious significance, building a Hindu nationalist momentum ahead of the polls. After all, they argue, the movement to build a temple was a major factor in propelling the BJP to a prominent position in Indian politics.
And the BJP is an avowedly theocratic party.
A “Hindu Vatican?” Do they have a Pope? I suppose someone has to keep those 33,000,000 gods in line.
It is really sad that it has come to this. It is certainly true that Islamic rule in India has been extremely brutal (even though there were some enlightened rulers) and that thousands of temples have been destroyed in the seven or centuries that India was under Muslim rule. The correct thing to do would be to document everything that happened but not go about avenging past wrongs. Unfortunately, revenge is in the air and it is not going to stop here. The next two targets are the Gyanvapi Mosque in Varanasi and the Shahi Idgah in Mathura. Legal proceedings have already started. Given how slow the Indian legal system works, it will probably be a decade or two before anything is decided. In the meantime, the BJP will milk this for all it’s worth and if they end up winning the legal cases, I’m sure they will set their sights on another mosque or two – given the scale of temple destruction in medieval India, there is no shortage of potential targets.